Podcasts about Pirsig

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. It's a peculiar book, especially for a bestseller. Not a lot of it is actually about zen or motorcycle maintenance, it combines a travelogue, a father/son story, and philosophical musings, and the structure of its narration makes it hard to follow. Thus, it's the kind of book people often buy, start, and then put down without finishing.That's initially what happened to Mark Richardson, an author and automotive journalist who was born in the UK but has lived most of his life in Canada. But when the book finally clicked for Mark, he was so inspired by it that he actually undertook Pirsig's motorcycle pilgrimage himself. Mark shares that story in Zen and Now, which intersperses stories from his own road trip with an exploration of Pirsig's life and famous book.If you've wanted to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but haven't been able to get into it, today Mark will offer an introduction to what it's all about. We discuss Pirsig's ideas on the metaphysics of quality and our relationship to technology, and how he tried to combine the ethos of Eastern and Western thought into a unified philosophy of living. We also get into why Mark wanted to recreate Pirsig's road trip, the joys of traveling by motorcycle, and what Mark learned along the way.Resources Related to the PodcastZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. PirsigZen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Mark RichardsonLila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. PirsigGuidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Ron Di Santo and Tom SteeleShop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew CrawfordHonda CB77/Super HawkThe Robert Pirsig Association Connect With Mark RichardsonMark's website

Marco Ciriello"Sulla qualità"Robert M. PirsigA cura di Wendy K. PirsigTraduzione di Svevo D'OnofrioAdelphiwww.adelphi.itIn Lo Zen e l'arte della manutenzione della motocicletta, il protagonista-narratore si chiedeva: «qual è la differenza fra chi viaggia in motocicletta sapendo come la moto funziona e chi non lo sa?». E varrà la pena ricordare la sua risposta: «Il Buddha, il Divino, dimora nel circuito di un calcolatore o negli ingranaggi del cambio di una moto con lo stesso agio che in cima a una montagna o nei petali di un fiore». A quel pensiero sarebbero seguite altre domande e altre risposte, che avrebbero trasformato quella grande avventura on the road in un libro-simbolo, un «itinerario della mente» in cui si sarebbe riconosciuto, e ancora oggi si riconosce, un numero altissimo di lettori. Questa antologia, che per la prima volta raduna lettere, conferenze, saggi, aforismi, appunti personali, coprendo un arco temporale di quasi cinquant'anni, illustra con chiarezza e incisività il tema centrale dell'opera di Pirsig e l'evoluzione del suo pensiero, dai sommessi esordi sino alla formulazione di una vera e propria Metafisica della Qualità. Ma che cos'è la Qualità? Ognuno di noi sa che esiste, e istintivamente sappiamo riconoscerla, eppure non riusciamo a definirla. Questo perché, secondo Pirsig, la Qualità non è una «cosa» ma un «evento». Per avvicinarsi a comprendere di quale evento si tratti, non resta che leggere questo piccolo libro – taccuino privato di una vita trascorsa in un'incessante riflessione filosofica. Una lettura obbligata per chi ama Pirsig e la perfetta introduzione per chi ancora non lo conosce.IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarewww.ilpostodelleparole.itDiventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/il-posto-delle-parole--1487855/support.

Robert and Joe run through the business books that have made the most impact on their lives and careers. They include: Marketing Management – Philip Kotler Discovery Driven Growth  – Rita Gunther McGrath Different – Youngme Moon How Will You Measure Your Life – Clayton Christensen Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig Think & Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein IMC: Integrated Marketing Communication - Don Schultz David & Goliath - Malcolm Gladwell This week's sponsor: Get the 2024 State of Marketing Report from Hubspot --> https://clickhubspot.com/psg ------ Liked this show? SUBSCRIBE to this podcast on Spotify, Apple, Google and more. Catch past episodes and show notes at ThisOldMarketing.com. Catch and subscribe to our NEW show on YouTube. Subscribe to Joe Pulizzi's Orangeletter and get two free downloads direct from Joe. Subscribe to Robert Rose's newsletter at Experience Advisors.  

“Quality...you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist.” Welcome back to another episode of Made You Think! In this episode, we're discussing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. Join us as we ride through the intersections of philosophy, a father and son motorcycle trip across America, and the pursuit of Quality.  We cover a wide range of topics including: Different learning styles and the value of hands-on experience Exploring the elusive concept of Quality Reflections on the narrative and philosophy of the book Overcoming gumption traps and staying enthusiastic  How the journey is just as important as the destination And much more. Please enjoy, and make sure to follow Nat, Neil, and Adil on Twitter and share your thoughts on the episode. Links from the Episode: Mentioned in the Show: Apple Podcasts (0:46) Spotify (1:07) Steve Jobs Presents to the Cupertino City Council (6:30) Chris Langan: The Bouncer (30:24) 24 (58:01)  Books Mentioned: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (15:40) The Animate and the Inanimate (30:49) Outliers (31:39) Tao Te Ching (40:50) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) Gödel, Escher, Bach (47:37) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) Infinite Jest (47:58) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) The Three-Body Problem (57:29) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) People Mentioned: Robert M. Pirsig Michel Thomas (13:07) William James Sidis (30:32) Christopher Langan (31:22) Jack Bauer (58:00) Liu Cixin (58:37) Show Topics: (0:00) We open the episode with our take on podcast analytics. Though people can choose where they want to listen, it's hard to get a sense of overall listening numbers across platforms as a whole. (2:49) Today's episode is centered around Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Neil connects his college experience to the book, describing the contrast between theoretical vs. applied learning. (5:35) Different learning styles, emphasizing hands-on experience, and the importance of practical understanding over theory.  (9:43) Why is it that not every great athlete can go on to become a great coach? It all comes down to being able to apply and share your knowledge in a given setting. (12:59) Sharing our thoughts on how the story was written, the narrative of the motorcycle trip, and how the sequel compares to this story. (18:43)The author opens the door to a variety of ideas such as learning to be in the present moment and how to focus on one thing at a time. Though Pirsig is intuitive across several domains, we find that he struggles to put these concepts into words.  (23:12) While on a trip with his son and another couple, the author reflects on flashbacks in his life, including the treatment of his past insanity. Through fixing the bike and traveling across the country, he learns many valuable lessons and philosophies along the way. (28:23) We briefly discuss the sequel where Pirsig highlights William James Sidis, known for his incredibly high IQ and profound ideas on the origin of life.  (32:43) Comparing bike riding to a full-body meditation. Each limb has a specific task to operate the bike, and you have to be focused on the road in front of you, truly bringing yourself to the present moment. (34:10) Nat, Neil, and Adil ponder the concept of Quality, its connection to science, spirituality, and the importance of peace of mind. Quality is all about applying yourself and your senses in the present moment, and being one with what you are doing. (40:54) Nat shares his perspective on the book's cognitive challenges and the reconciliation of theory and practice within the book. (45:18) One unique factor about this book is that it doesn't necessarily mean to give you a conclusive solution at the end. It's all about enjoying the journey, and being okay with the fact that you may not have arrived anywhere by the end of the book.  (48:53) Appreciating the book's humor, comical dialogues, and character depth, with a desire for more insight into the minds of the minor characters. (52:05) It can be very difficult to get started on any project, especially when you think of the whole scope of what you're about to do. If you can start with just one part, it becomes more manageable. We relate this idea to the book writing process. (1:04:37) What are gumption traps, and how can you avoid falling into them? Plus, we give some examples of common gumption traps that you may fall into that diminish your enthusiasm.  (1:11:47) That concludes this episode! If this episode intrigued you, make sure to pick up a copy of  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Next up, we'll be reading Straw Dogs by John Gray. Plus, we have an exciting announcement coming soon. Stay tuned for future episodes to stay in the know! If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by leaving a review on iTunes and tell a friend. As always, let us know if you have any book recommendations! You can say hi to us on Twitter @TheRealNeilS, @adilmajid, @nateliason and share your thoughts on this episode. You can now support Made You Think using the Value-for-Value feature of Podcasting 2.0. This means you can directly tip the co-hosts in BTC with minimal transaction fees. To get started, simply download a podcast app (like Fountain or Breez) that supports Value-for-Value and send some BTC to your in-app wallet. You can then use that to support shows who have opted-in, including Made You Think! We'll be going with this direct support model moving forward, rather than ads. Thanks for listening. See you next time!

“Quality...you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist.” Welcome back to another episode of Made You Think! In this episode, we're discussing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. Join us as we ride through the intersections of philosophy, a father and son motorcycle trip across America, and the pursuit of Quality.  We cover a wide range of topics including: Different learning styles and the value of hands-on experience Exploring the elusive concept of Quality Reflections on the narrative and philosophy of the book Overcoming gumption traps and staying enthusiastic  How the journey is just as important as the destination And much more. Please enjoy, and make sure to follow Nat, Neil, and Adil on Twitter and share your thoughts on the episode. Links from the Episode: Mentioned in the Show: Apple Podcasts (0:46) Spotify (1:07) Steve Jobs Presents to the Cupertino City Council (6:30) Chris Langan: The Bouncer (30:24) 24 (58:01)  Books Mentioned: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (15:40) The Animate and the Inanimate (30:49) Outliers (31:39) Tao Te Ching (40:50) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) Gödel, Escher, Bach (47:37) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) Infinite Jest (47:58) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) The Three-Body Problem (57:29) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) People Mentioned: Robert M. Pirsig Michel Thomas (13:07) William James Sidis (30:32) Christopher Langan (31:22) Jack Bauer (58:00) Liu Cixin (58:37) Show Topics: (0:00) We open the episode with our take on podcast analytics. Though people can choose where they want to listen, it's hard to get a sense of overall listening numbers across platforms as a whole. (2:49) Today's episode is centered around Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Neil connects his college experience to the book, describing the contrast between theoretical vs. applied learning. (5:35) Different learning styles, emphasizing hands-on experience, and the importance of practical understanding over theory.  (10:34) Why is it that not every great athlete can go on to become a great coach? It all comes down to being able to apply and share your knowledge in a given setting. (13:50) Sharing our thoughts on how the story was written, the narrative of the motorcycle trip, and how the sequel compares to this story. (19:34)The author opens the door to a variety of ideas such as learning to be in the present moment and how to focus on one thing at a time. Though Pirsig is intuitive across several domains, we find that he struggles to put these concepts into words.  (24:03) While on a trip with his son and another couple, the author reflects on flashbacks in his life, including the treatment of his past insanity. Through fixing the bike and traveling across the country, he learns many valuable lessons and philosophies along the way. (29:14) We briefly discuss the sequel where Pirsig highlights William James Sidis, known for his incredibly high IQ and profound ideas on the origin of life.  (33:34) Comparing bike riding to a full-body meditation. Each limb has a specific task to operate the bike, and you have to be focused on the road in front of you, truly bringing yourself to the present moment. (35:01) Nat, Neil, and Adil ponder the concept of Quality, its connection to science, spirituality, and the importance of peace of mind. Quality is all about applying yourself and your senses in the present moment, and being one with what you are doing. (41:45) Nat shares his perspective on the book's cognitive challenges and the reconciliation of theory and practice within the book. (46:09) One unique factor about this book is that it doesn't necessarily mean to give you a conclusive solution at the end. It's all about enjoying the journey, and being okay with the fact that you may not have arrived anywhere by the end of the book.  (49:44) Appreciating the book's humor, comical dialogues, and character depth, with a desire for more insight into the minds of the minor characters. (52:56) It can be very difficult to get started on any project, especially when you think of the whole scope of what you're about to do. If you can start with just one part, it becomes more manageable. We relate this idea to the book writing process. (1:05:28) What are gumption traps, and how can you avoid falling into them? Plus, we give some examples of common gumption traps that you may fall into that diminish your enthusiasm.  (1:12:37) That concludes this episode! If this episode intrigued you, make sure to pick up a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Next up, we'll be reading Straw Dogs by John Gray. Plus, we have an exciting announcement coming soon. Stay tuned for future episodes to stay in the know! If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by leaving a review on iTunes and tell a friend. As always, let us know if you have any book recommendations! You can say hi to us on Twitter @TheRealNeilS, @adilmajid, @nateliason and share your thoughts on this episode. You can now support Made You Think using the Value-for-Value feature of Podcasting 2.0. This means you can directly tip the co-hosts in BTC with minimal transaction fees. To get started, simply download a podcast app (like Fountain or Breez) that supports Value-for-Value and send some BTC to your in-app wallet. You can then use that to support shows who have opted-in, including Made You Think! We'll be going with this direct support model moving forward, rather than ads. Thanks for listening. See you next time!

Today we continue with our inquiry into rhetoric and dialectic, with Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig, like Nietzsche, saw himself as a modern-day Sophist, and part of his work was the rescue of the Sophistic school from the ill repute visited upon them by the Socratics. Perhaps more expansively, Pirsig devotes his philosophical work to the question, “What is quality?”, drawing on the Greek concept of arete, or excellence. His philosophical ideas do not come to us through a dispassionate treatise, however, but through an autobiographical novel. Pirsig was treated with electroshock therapy, leaving him with a new personality, and the feeling that the person he once was is dead: he merely happens to carry the blurry memories of another man. While on a motorcycle trip with his son, Pirsig struggles to unify the dichotomy between classical and romantic, between substance and form, between the two personalities within himself, and between himself and his son. This work remains one of the most important philosophical contributions to American literature in the 20th century, and hopefully today I can show all of you why this work of “pop philosophy” is one of my favorite books, and one to which I regularly return.

Hey Mere Mortalites! Juan here. I've just journeyed through 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,' where road trips meet deep philosophical dives. Let's unravel the adventure, the metaphysics of Quality, and see why this classic might just redefine your understanding of life. Join me as we ride through Pirsig's masterpiece!

When Scott Pirsig's close friend Bob Sturtz suffered a stroke deep in Minnesota's Boundary Waters, Pirsig had no choice but to leave him in the wilderness and make a desperate sprint to get help. The two men had been on an early-spring canoeing adventure when Sturtz started acting strangely: it started with a headache, then he became disoriented, lost control of his hands, and stopped speaking. Pirsig's only choice was zip him into a sleeping bag and beg him to stay put while he raced off into the fog to contact first responders. In this replay from our Science of Survival series, we hear the story of a harrowing scenario in the woods wild and an enduring friendship.

In this episode, Eric picks up examination of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with Chapter Four. In this Chapter, Pirsig touches on lists and caring. Do you have thoughts to share? Leave a voice message for the Zensylvania Podcast and we may include it in this or a future episode: https://anchor.fm/zensylvania/message Thank you for visiting Zensylvania: It's a State of Mind You can support the Zensylvania podcast at https://www.patreon.com/zensylvaniapodcast --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/zensylvania/message

In this episode, Eric picks up examination of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with Chapters Three and Five. In these chapters, Pirsig firmly established ZAMM's position as a twentieth-century gothic story while beginning to undermine a few alternate perspectives. Do you have thoughts to share? Leave a voice message for the Zensylvania Podcast and we may include it in this or a future episode: https://anchor.fm/zensylvania/message Thank you for visiting Zensylvania: It's a State of Mind You can support the Zensylvania podcast at https://www.patreon.com/zensylvaniapodcast --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/zensylvania/message

In this episode, Eric reads a translation of Plato's Phaedrus. Essential to an appreciation of Robert's Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality as displayed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila, Phaedrus provides not only the alter-ego name of Pirsig's narrator, it explores several themes that permeate those books. Do you have thoughts to share? Leave a voice message for the Zensylvania Podcast and we may include it in this or a future episode: https://anchor.fm/zensylvania/messageThank you for visiting Zensylvania: It's a State of Mind --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/zensylvania/message --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/zensylvania/message

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm talking to Wendy K Pirsig – widow of Robert M Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the bestselling book of philosophy of all time. Wendy tells me about her late husband's big idea – the "Metaphysics of Quality", as set out in a new collection of his writings, On Quality, which she has edited – how fame (and bereavement) changed him, and how he sought to undo years of dualism in the Western philosophical tradition by recourse to Eastern teachings and, of course, the odd monkey-wrench.

As we get into the warmer weather of spring, many of us On the Dogwatch will start to think of road trips. One of the many great things about these trips is that they can afford us time to think about our lives. There is no more iconic North American road trip than Robert Pirsig's travels inZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. On this Dogwatch, we have the pleasure to be joined by Mark Richardson, a longtime motorcycle and automotive writer, now writing for the Globe and Mail in Canada, who retraced Pirsig's footsteps in Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In our conversation with Mark, we discuss how he decided to write his book on Pirsig, what he learned along the way, and how he thinks about Pirsig and the book now.Our feature today is the pump at the Wayside Rest Area where Pirsig stopped on the first leg of his journey on Highway 55 out of Minneapolis. Mark stopped at what seems certain to be the same stop around 2004 and pumped the pump himself. Just several days ago, I made my own trip to this small rest stop. Although the pavilion is still there, the pump has disappeared. So where is Pirsig's pump? If you have any information about this let us know, as we are on the trail of this important historical object.

Mike Hill joins for me for a multi-episode exploration of the masterful book “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” written by best-selling author Robert Pirsig. This book may be one of the most undervalued ever written, as it proposes an alternative interpretation of reality that Pirsig calls “The Metaphysics of Quality” (MOQ). According to MOQ, reality is not made up of substance, but rather it is composed of distinct patterns of value. In a Copernican-like revolution of perspective, MOQ sheds new light on age-old debates such as moral relativism, the nature of subject-object duality, good vs. evil, science vs. religion, the importance of freedom, and the primacy of action.Be sure to check out NYDIG, one of the most important companies in Bitcoin: https://nydig.com/GUESTMike's Website: https://www.mikehill.design/PODCASTPodcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsE?si=wgVuY16XR0io4NLNo0A11A&nd=1RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYITranscript:OUTLINE00:00:00 “What is Money?” Intro00:00:08 How the Stacked Layers of Static Value Interoperate00:01:38 The Philosopher's Stone and the Value of Archetypes00:05:50 Metaphysics of Quality and the Jungian Archetypes00:09:04 Emergence of the King Archetype and Human Consciousness00:11:44 The Necessity of Physical and Mimetic Exchange to Childhood Development00:14:39 Etymology of King and Kingdom: The Organizing Principle00:16:49 What is Light is the “Shadow” of Dynamic Quality?00:21:21 Why Pathologies are Born in Darkness00:24:14 NYDIG00:25:23 Metaphors We Live By00:28:51 Flatland and the Other Dimensions of Reality00:31:04 Plato's Cave and the Shadows of Metaphysical Principles00:33:36 “The Return” and its Relationship to “Resolution”00:36:35 Linguistic Relativity: Language Shapes Thoughts00:39:16 Categorizing Metaphors00:41:40 “What is Money?” IntroSOCIALBreedlove Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22WiM? Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhatisMoneyShowLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22?lang=enAll My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/breedlove22​WRITTEN WORKMedium: https://breedlove22.medium.com/Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/WAYS TO CONTRIBUTEBitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22Sats via Tippin.me: https://tippin.me/@Breedlove22Dollars via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedloveDollars via Venmo: https://venmo.com/code?user_id=1784359925317632528The "What is Money?" Show Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32843101&fan_landing=trueRECOMMENDED BUSINESSESWorldclass Bitcoin Financial Services: https://nydig.com/Join Me At Bitcoin 2022 (10% off if paying with fiat, or discount code BREEDLOVE for Bitcoin): https://www.tixr.com/groups/bitcoinconference/events/bitcoin-2022-26217Automatic Recurring Bitcoin Buying: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/breedlove/Buy Bitcoin in a Tax-Advantaged Account: https://www.daim.io/robert-breedlove/Buy Your Dream Home without Selling Your Bitcoin with Ledn: https://ledn.io/en/?utm_source=breedlove&utm_medium=email+&utm_campaign=substack

Mike Hill joins for me for a multi-episode exploration of the masterful book “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” written by best-selling author Robert Pirsig. This book may be one of the most undervalued ever written, as it proposes an alternative interpretation of reality that Pirsig calls “The Metaphysics of Quality” (MOQ). According to MOQ, reality is not made up of substance, but rather it is composed of distinct patterns of value. In a Copernican-like revolution of perspective, MOQ sheds new light on age-old debates such as moral relativism, the nature of subject-object duality, good vs. evil, science vs. religion, the importance of freedom, and the primacy of action.Be sure to check out NYDIG, one of the most important companies in Bitcoin: https://nydig.com/GUESTMike's Website: https://www.mikehill.design/PODCASTPodcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsE?si=wgVuY16XR0io4NLNo0A11A&nd=1RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYITranscript:OUTLINE00:00:00 “What is Money?” Intro00:00:08 A Purpose of Evil is to Test the Integrity of the Good00:06:09 Christ on the Cross as Emblematic of the Dynamic Tension of Being Human00:07:37 Society Frees Individuals from the Biological Chains of Necessity00:10:28 The Dynamic Tension Between The Individual and Society00:14:35 Authoritarian Government as a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing00:16:54 Evaluating the Sovereign Individual through the Lens of MoQ00:19:55 “Every Consciousness is a Center of the Universe”00:22:16 A High Quality Socioeconomic System Assimilates a Maximal Quantity of Perspectives00:25:25 A Human Being is a Collection of Ideas…00:27:07 NYDIG00:28:15 The Dynamic Tension Between the Biological and Social Layers00:32:30 The Role of Totalitarianism in the Bootstrapping of Societies00:36:22 Conditions of Oppression as a Precursor to Liberation00:39:09 Nietzsche's Three Metamorphoses: The Camel, The Lion, and The Child00:43:17 “The Moral Equivalent of War” and Life as Disobedience to Gravity00:46:35 The Dynamic Tension Between Central Banking and Bitcoin00:51:57 What Happens after The Lion Becomes The Child?00:53:31 “What is Money?” OutroSOCIALBreedlove Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22WiM? Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhatisMoneyShowLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22?lang=enAll My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/breedlove22​WRITTEN WORKMedium: https://breedlove22.medium.com/Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/WAYS TO CONTRIBUTEBitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22Sats via Tippin.me: https://tippin.me/@Breedlove22Dollars via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedloveDollars via Venmo: https://venmo.com/code?user_id=1784359925317632528The "What is Money?" Show Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32843101&fan_landing=trueRECOMMENDED BUSINESSESWorldclass Bitcoin Financial Services: https://nydig.com/Join Me At Bitcoin 2022 (10% off if paying with fiat, or discount code BREEDLOVE for Bitcoin): https://www.tixr.com/groups/bitcoinconference/events/bitcoin-2022-26217Automatic Recurring Bitcoin Buying: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/breedlove/Buy Bitcoin in a Tax-Advantaged Account: https://www.daim.io/robert-breedlove/Buy Your Dream Home without Selling Your Bitcoin with Ledn: https://ledn.io/en/?utm_source=breedlove&utm_medium=email+&utm_campaign=substack

Mike Hill joins for me for a multi-episode exploration of the masterful book “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” written by best-selling author Robert Pirsig. This book may be one of the most undervalued ever written, as it proposes an alternative interpretation of reality that Pirsig calls “The Metaphysics of Quality” (MOQ). According to MOQ, reality is not made up of substance, but rather it is composed of distinct patterns of value. In a Copernican-like revolution of perspective, MOQ sheds new light on age-old debates such as moral relativism, the nature of subject-object duality, good vs. evil, science vs. religion, the importance of freedom, and the primacy of action.Be sure to check out NYDIG, one of the most important companies in Bitcoin: https://nydig.com/GUESTMike's Website: https://www.mikehill.design/PODCASTPodcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsE?si=wgVuY16XR0io4NLNo0A11A&nd=1RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYITranscript:OUTLINE00:00:00 “What is Money?” Intro00:00:08 Seeing Quality or Excellence as the Ultimate Reality00:06:07 Human Egotism and Our Failure to Understand the Universe…00:09:01 The Connection Between Quality and Resolution00:12:52 Money as the Most Dynamic Static Representation of Value00:14:59 An Excellent Performance Exists as the Bleeding Edge of Order and Chaos00:17:23 The Pioneers Taking Arrows in the Back in Pursuit of Excellence00:20:02 NYDIG00:21:10 Analogizing Metaphysical Perspective to Selecting the Right Map for the Job00:24:55 Metaphysics of Quality and its Role in the Destruction of Moral Relativism00:28:59 Introducing Pirsig's Platypus Paradox…00:32:12 The Platypus Blew Out Biological Categories and Led to a Procrustean Bed00:35:51 Light as a Phenomenological Representation of Pure Dynamic Quality00:38:03 “The Whole World as a Marketplace of Kingdoms within Kingdoms within Kingdoms…”00:40:19 Life as a Strategy Stack with an Overarching Aim of Territoriality00:43:37 Property as an Abstract Expression of the Extended Human PhenotypeSOCIALBreedlove Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22WiM? Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhatisMoneyShowLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22?lang=enAll My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/breedlove22​WRITTEN WORKMedium: https://breedlove22.medium.com/Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/WAYS TO CONTRIBUTEBitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22Sats via Tippin.me: https://tippin.me/@Breedlove22Dollars via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedloveDollars via Venmo: https://venmo.com/code?user_id=1784359925317632528The "What is Money?" Show Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32843101&fan_landing=trueRECOMMENDED BUSINESSESWorldclass Bitcoin Financial Services: https://nydig.com/Join Me At Bitcoin 2022 (10% off if paying with fiat, or discount code BREEDLOVE for Bitcoin): https://www.tixr.com/groups/bitcoinconference/events/bitcoin-2022-26217Automatic Recurring Bitcoin Buying: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/breedlove/Buy Bitcoin in a Tax-Advantaged Account: https://www.daim.io/robert-breedlove/Buy Your Dream Home without Selling Your Bitcoin with Ledn: https://ledn.io/en/?utm_source=breedlove&utm_medium=email+&utm_campaign=substack

Mike Hill joins for me for a multi-episode exploration of the masterful book “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” written by best-selling author Robert Pirsig. This book may be one of the most undervalued ever written, as it proposes an alternative interpretation of reality that Pirsig calls “The Metaphysics of Quality” (MOQ). According to MOQ, reality is not made up of substance, but rather it is composed of distinct patterns of value. In a Copernican-like revolution of perspective, MOQ sheds new light on age-old debates such as moral relativism, the nature of subject-object duality, good vs. evil, science vs. religion, the importance of freedom, and the primacy of action.Be sure to check out NYDIG, one of the most important companies in Bitcoin: https://nydig.com/GUESTMike's Website: https://www.mikehill.design/PODCASTPodcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsE?si=wgVuY16XR0io4NLNo0A11A&nd=1RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYITranscript:OUTLINE00:00:00 “What is Money?” Intro00:00:08 Metaphysical Combat and Moralistic Camouflage00:06:31 Individuals as the Cells of Metaphysical Combatants00:10:35 Microbiology: The Scapegoat for Modern Global Tyranny00:16:40 The Adaptation of the Metaphysical Moral Parasite…00:19:00 Sun Tzu and Geopolitical Mergers and Acquisitions00:20:30 What Forces are at Work in the Battle Between Good and Evil?00:25:51 The Mythological Struggle Between Ego and Spirit00:28:14 The Parallel Between Film Directors and Serial Killers00:33:47 “It's Better to be a Warrior in a Garden than a Gardener in a War”00:35:50 NYDIG00:33:23 The Search for the Source of Evil…00:40:08 Evil as the Cost of Creation00:45:50 Evil as “Working Backward”: Valuing Lower Level Layers Above Higher00:50:26 Eros, Filia, and Agape: The Three Types of Love Seen Through the MoQ Stack00:54:20 Those Pursuing the Highest Ideal Run the Risks of Great Personal Loss00:59:05 The Three Creative Principles: Freedom, Truth, and Love01:02:00 An MoQ Mapping of Archetypes, The Brain, and the Three Types of Love01:08:43 Money, Metaphysics, and MetaphorsSOCIALBreedlove Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22WiM? Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhatisMoneyShowLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22?lang=enAll My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/breedlove22​WRITTEN WORKMedium: https://breedlove22.medium.com/Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/WAYS TO CONTRIBUTEBitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22Sats via Tippin.me: https://tippin.me/@Breedlove22Dollars via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedloveDollars via Venmo: https://venmo.com/code?user_id=1784359925317632528The "What is Money?" Show Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32843101&fan_landing=trueRECOMMENDED BUSINESSESWorldclass Bitcoin Financial Services: https://nydig.com/Join Me At Bitcoin 2022 (10% off if paying with fiat, or discount code BREEDLOVE for Bitcoin): https://www.tixr.com/groups/bitcoinconference/events/bitcoin-2022-26217Automatic Recurring Bitcoin Buying: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/breedlove/Buy Bitcoin in a Tax-Advantaged Account: https://www.daim.io/robert-breedlove/Buy Your Dream Home without Selling Your Bitcoin with Ledn: https://ledn.io/en/?utm_source=breedlove&utm_medium=email+&utm_campaign=substack

Mike Hill joins for me for a multi-episode exploration of the masterful book “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” written by best-selling author Robert Pirsig. This book may be one of the most undervalued ever written, as it proposes an alternative interpretation of reality that Pirsig calls “The Metaphysics of Quality” (MOQ). According to MOQ, reality is not made up of substance, but rather it is composed of distinct patterns of value. In a Copernican-like revolution of perspective, MOQ sheds new light on age-old debates such as moral relativism, the nature of subject-object duality, good vs. evil, science vs. religion, the importance of freedom, and the primacy of action.Be sure to check out NYDIG, one of the most important companies in Bitcoin: https://nydig.com/GUESTMike's Website: https://www.mikehill.design/PODCASTPodcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsE?si=wgVuY16XR0io4NLNo0A11A&nd=1RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYITranscript:OUTLINE00:00:00 “What is Money?” Intro00:00:08 DMT and Transcendental Experience00:05:06 Self-Love and Responsible Self-Leadership00:08:19 “The Master and His Emissary”: Duality of Mind and State00:13:07 Reflexivity and the Personal Transformations Inspired by Bitcoin00:16:48 Bitcoin and the Morphing of Modern Mythology00:21:17 The Protocols of Selfhood00:23:14 The Wisdom of the Body00:27:03 Connections Between the Static Layers of Value00:30:07 NYDIG00:31:16 An Analogy for Static Layers of Value: The Computer Tech Stack00:35:08 Mapping Subject-Object Onto the Static Layers of Value00:37:22 The Necessity of Layers00:42:28 Plant Medicines as a Human System Checkup00:51:21 Ignoring the Cost of Creation: A Dangerous Self-Deception00:55:36 Suffering as the Experiential Quality of Being Sacrificed00:59:49 Victims of the Residue from Creating Western CivilizationSOCIALBreedlove Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22WiM? Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhatisMoneyShowLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22?lang=enAll My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/breedlove22​WRITTEN WORKMedium: https://breedlove22.medium.com/Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/WAYS TO CONTRIBUTEBitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22Sats via Tippin.me: https://tippin.me/@Breedlove22Dollars via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedloveDollars via Venmo: https://venmo.com/code?user_id=1784359925317632528The "What is Money?" Show Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32843101&fan_landing=trueRECOMMENDED BUSINESSESWorldclass Bitcoin Financial Services: https://nydig.com/Join Me At Bitcoin 2022 (10% off if paying with fiat, or discount code BREEDLOVE for Bitcoin): https://www.tixr.com/groups/bitcoinconference/events/bitcoin-2022-26217Automatic Recurring Bitcoin Buying: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/breedlove/Buy Bitcoin in a Tax-Advantaged Account: https://www.daim.io/robert-breedlove/Buy Your Dream Home without Selling Your Bitcoin with Ledn: https://ledn.io/en/?utm_source=breedlove&utm_medium=email+&utm_campaign=substack

Mike Hill joins for me for a multi-episode exploration of the masterful book “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” written by best-selling author Robert Pirsig. This book may be one of the most undervalued ever written, as it proposes an alternative interpretation of reality that Pirsig calls “The Metaphysics of Quality” (MOQ). According to MOQ, reality is not made up of substance, but rather it is composed of distinct patterns of value. In a Copernican-like revolution of perspective, MOQ sheds new light on age-old debates such as moral relativism, the nature of subject-object duality, good vs. evil, science vs. religion, the importance of freedom, and the primacy of action.Be sure to check out NYDIG, one of the most important companies in Bitcoin: https://nydig.com/GUESTMike's Website: https://www.mikehill.design/PODCASTPodcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsE?si=wgVuY16XR0io4NLNo0A11A&nd=1RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYITranscript:OUTLINE00:00:00 “What is Money?” Intro00:00:08 How Inorganic Reality Influences Social Morality00:03:47 Native Americans Viewed the Universe as a Conscious Actor00:08:00 Static Patterns of Value as “Shadows” of Dynamic Quality00:12:05 The Limited Arises From and Returns to The Limitless00:14:07 Evolutionary Complexity as the Proper Spectrum of Morality00:17:50 Paradox Occurs When Different Levels of Value Disagree?00:19:41 Rationality: What Ratio of Value Systems are Weighted in Any Given Decision00:25:02 Production Designs Involve Subliminal Messaging from the Environment00:27:07 An Analogy of Pedestrians in New York and Two Red Blood Cells…00:33:47 Native Americans Conceived of Reality as a Participatory Phenomenon00:35:57 American Values as a Synthesis of European and Native American Values00:40:05 The Westward Manifestation of American Values in Architecture00:45:28 Native Americans are Plainspoken: “The Voice of the Plains”00:47:28 American Cowboys Appropriated Native American Values00:50:43 NYDIG00:51:52 Notable Native American Traits00:54:48 Conditions of Scarcity as an Evolutionary Driver of Value Systems00:58:00 Franz Boas and The Scientism of Cultural Anthropology01:02:02 Bicoastal US Value Systems Reflected in Socioeconomic Institutions01:06:04 Dynamic Quality is the Pursuit of Metaphysical Freedom01:07:58 Visualizing the Fields of Value We All Live Within01:09:53 The Eye of God, Material Engagement, and Civilizational Bootstrapping01:12:58 Poetic and Pragmatic: God and Free ExchangeSOCIALBreedlove Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22WiM? Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhatisMoneyShowLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22?lang=enAll My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/breedlove22​WRITTEN WORKMedium: https://breedlove22.medium.com/Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/WAYS TO CONTRIBUTEBitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22Sats via Tippin.me: https://tippin.me/@Breedlove22Dollars via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedloveDollars via Venmo: https://venmo.com/code?user_id=1784359925317632528The "What is Money?" Show Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32843101&fan_landing=trueRECOMMENDED BUSINESSESWorldclass Bitcoin Financial Services: https://nydig.com/Join Me At Bitcoin 2022 (10% off if paying with fiat, or discount code BREEDLOVE for Bitcoin): https://www.tixr.com/groups/bitcoinconference/events/bitcoin-2022-26217Automatic Recurring Bitcoin Buying: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/breedlove/Buy Bitcoin in a Tax-Advantaged Account: https://www.daim.io/robert-breedlove/Home Delivered Organic Grass-Fed Beef (Spend $159+ for 4 lbs. free): https://truorganicbeef.com/discount/BREEDLOVE22Buy Your Dream Home without Selling Your Bitcoin with Ledn: https://ledn.io/en/?utm_source=breedlove&utm_medium=email+&utm_campaign=substack

Mike Hill joins for me for a multi-episode exploration of the masterful book “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” written by best-selling author Robert Pirsig. This book may be one of the most undervalued ever written, as it proposes an alternative interpretation of reality that Pirsig calls “The Metaphysics of Quality” (MOQ). According to MOQ, reality is not made up of substance, but rather it is composed of distinct patterns of value. In a Copernican-like revolution of perspective, MOQ sheds new light on age-old debates such as moral relativism, the nature of subject-object duality, good vs. evil, science vs. religion, the importance of freedom, and the primacy of action.Be sure to check out NYDIG, one of the most important companies in Bitcoin: https://nydig.com/GUESTMike's Website: https://www.mikehill.design/PODCASTPodcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsE?si=wgVuY16XR0io4NLNo0A11A&nd=1RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYITranscript:OUTLINE00:00:00 “What is Money?” Intro00:00:08 The Ambiguity of Insanity00:02:52 The Example of the Zuni Cultural Immune System00:06:36 The Totalitarian Impulse of Left-Hemispheric Dominance00:10:16 Totalitarianism Rigidifies Due to Lacking Liquidity of Information00:13:18 The Autophagy of Capitalism and the Cancer of Central Banking00:17:40 Suffering as Attachment, Attachment as Static00:21:13 The Compass of Morality Up and Down the Stack of Static Value Patterns00:26:46 Demand as Dynamic Quality Generating the Static Quality of Supply00:32:16 NYDIG00:33:26 The Brujo and the Adaptivity of Ancient Zuni Culture00:39:19 Cultural Patterns of Static and Dynamic Good00:42:05 The Brujo as a Cultural Bridge Between Value Systems00:46:41 Action as the Purposive Exchange of Value to Create The Good00:48:14 Atonement as the Harmonization of Competing Intrapsychic Value Systems00:52:41 Viewing Value as Primary Calls into Question Every Prior Perception00:54:51 Hornevian Triads of Human Action in Respect to Volition00:57:23 The Emergence of American Values00:58:50 Incentive as the Ratio of Value Received to Value GivenSOCIALBreedlove Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22WiM? Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhatisMoneyShowLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22?lang=enAll My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/breedlove22​WRITTEN WORKMedium: https://breedlove22.medium.com/Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/WAYS TO CONTRIBUTEBitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22Sats via Tippin.me: https://tippin.me/@Breedlove22Dollars via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedloveDollars via Venmo: https://venmo.com/code?user_id=1784359925317632528The "What is Money?" Show Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32843101&fan_landing=trueRECOMMENDED BUSINESSESWorldclass Bitcoin Financial Services: https://nydig.com/Join Me At Bitcoin 2022 (10% off if paying with fiat, or discount code BREEDLOVE for Bitcoin): https://www.tixr.com/groups/bitcoinconference/events/bitcoin-2022-26217Automatic Recurring Bitcoin Buying: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/breedlove/Buy Bitcoin in a Tax-Advantaged Account: https://www.daim.io/robert-breedlove/Home Delivered Organic Grass-Fed Beef (Spend $159+ for 4 lbs. free): https://truorganicbeef.com/discount/BREEDLOVE22Buy Your Dream Home without Selling Your Bitcoin with Ledn: https://ledn.io/en/?utm_source=breedlove&utm_medium=email+&utm_campaign=substack

Mike Hill joins for me for a multi-episode exploration of the masterful book “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” written by best-selling author Robert Pirsig. This book may be one of the most undervalued ever written, as it proposes an alternative interpretation of reality that Pirsig calls “The Metaphysics of Quality” (MOQ). According to MOQ, reality is not made up of substance, but rather it is composed of distinct patterns of value. In a Copernican-like revolution of perspective, MOQ sheds new light on age-old debates such as moral relativism, the nature of subject-object duality, good vs. evil, science vs. religion, the importance of freedom, and the primacy of action.Be sure to check out NYDIG, one of the most important companies in Bitcoin: https://nydig.com/GUESTMike's Website: https://www.mikehill.design/PODCASTPodcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsE?si=wgVuY16XR0io4NLNo0A11A&nd=1RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYITranscript:OUTLINE00:00:00 “What is Money?” Intro00:00:08 Symbolic and Metaphysical Descriptors of Value00:03:01 The Logos: Gathering Things Together Under a Common Name00:03:48 The Fractal Structure of (Static and Dynamic) Value00:07:10 Defining “Fractal”00:08:50 Inorganic and Intellectual Mass: “Matter” and “What Matters”00:11:00 Etymology as Walking Backwards Through the Fractal Tree of Language00:12:30 Unpacking the Meta-Narrative of Lila00:16:45 Static Quality as a Ledger Written by Dynamic Quality00:21:24 Returning to the Lila Meta-Narrative…00:29:41 The Duality of Lila00:32:24 NYDIG00:33:31 Polysemic Storytelling00:37:39 The Middle Way of Truth00:39:48 The Philosophy of American Pragmatism on Truth00:42:06 The Middle Way of Transjectivity00:43:15 Pirsig's Indexing System for Constructing his Metaphysics00:47:41 Random Access Memory (RAM), Freedom, and Dynamic Quality00:51:53 The Intensity of Exchange and the Etymology of God00:54:54 Morality is Born from Play and Play is Born from Freedom00:58:00 Humans Create Stories that Support, but Later Cripple, Further ExplorationSOCIALBreedlove Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22WiM? Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhatisMoneyShowLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22?lang=enAll My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/breedlove22​WRITTEN WORKMedium: https://breedlove22.medium.com/Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/WAYS TO CONTRIBUTEBitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22Sats via Tippin.me: https://tippin.me/@Breedlove22Dollars via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedloveDollars via Venmo: https://venmo.com/code?user_id=1784359925317632528The "What is Money?" Show Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32843101&fan_landing=trueRECOMMENDED BUSINESSESWorldclass Bitcoin Financial Services: https://nydig.com/Join Me At Bitcoin 2022 (10% off if paying with fiat, or discount code BREEDLOVE for Bitcoin): https://www.tixr.com/groups/bitcoinconference/events/bitcoin-2022-26217Automatic Recurring Bitcoin Buying: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/breedlove/Buy Bitcoin in a Tax-Advantaged Account: https://www.daim.io/robert-breedlove/Home Delivered Organic Grass-Fed Beef (Spend $159+ for 4 lbs. free): https://truorganicbeef.com/discount/BREEDLOVE22Buy Your Dream Home without Selling Your Bitcoin with Ledn: https://ledn.io/en/?utm_source=breedlove&utm_medium=email+&utm_campaign=substack

Mike Hill joins for me for a multi-episode exploration of the masterful book “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” written by best-selling author Robert Pirsig. This book may be one of the most undervalued ever written, as it proposes an alternative interpretation of reality that Pirsig calls “The Metaphysics of Quality” (MOQ). According to MOQ, reality is not made up of substance, but rather it is composed of distinct patterns of value. In a Copernican-like revolution of perspective, MOQ sheds new light on age-old debates such as moral relativism, the nature of subject-object duality, good vs. evil, science vs. religion, the importance of freedom, and the primacy of action.Be sure to check out NYDIG, one of the most important companies in Bitcoin: https://nydig.com/GUESTMike's Website: https://www.mikehill.design/PODCASTPodcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsE?si=wgVuY16XR0io4NLNo0A11A&nd=1RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYITranscript:OUTLINE00:00:00 “What is Money?” Intro00:00:08 The Metaphysical Lens of Subject-Object Duality00:02:08 Quality: The Pre-Intellectual Cutting Edge of Reality00:04:30 Western Rationalism and Eastern Mysticism00:07:36 “The Master and His Emissary”00:08:57 Totalitarianism: Left Hemispheric Dominance Writ Large00:10:20 Systemic Change Requires A New Rationality00:12:57 Dynamic Quality and the Four Levels of Static Quality00:16:56 The Co-Determination of Agent and Arena Identities00:19:12 The Etymology of “God”00:20:17 Subject-Object Duality as Lower Resolution Static Quality00:24:13 Dynamic Quality: Awareness, The Flow State, and Observation00:27:09 Iconoclasm and The Overton Window00:29:26 The Emergence of Static Patterns of Value00:33:17 Purposeful Action vs. Reflexive Behavior00:36:28 The Phase Transitions through Four Levels of Static Quality00:40:09 The Teleological Goal of Evolution?00:41:54 NYDIG00:43:03 The Dynamic Quality Perspective on Good vs. Evil00:47:34 Pain: “The Inarguable Basis of Being” and “Information”00:51:07 Transjectivity: The Transcendence of Subject-Object Duality00:57:21 Quality, Value, Excellence, and Values: All Transjective Terms01:02:45 “All Language is a Lie”: The Importance of Useful Fictions01:05:01 Fractal Truth, Archetypal Mythologies, and Data Compression01:10:07 “The Laws of Nature are Moral Laws”SOCIALBreedlove Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22WiM? Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhatisMoneyShowLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22?lang=enAll My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/breedlove22​WRITTEN WORKMedium: https://breedlove22.medium.com/Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/WAYS TO CONTRIBUTEBitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22Sats via Tippin.me: https://tippin.me/@Breedlove22Dollars via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedloveDollars via Venmo: https://venmo.com/code?user_id=1784359925317632528The "What is Money?" Show Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32843101&fan_landing=trueRECOMMENDED BUSINESSESWorldclass Bitcoin Financial Services: https://nydig.com/Join Me At Bitcoin 2022 (10% off if paying with fiat, or discount code BREEDLOVE for Bitcoin): https://www.tixr.com/groups/bitcoinconference/events/bitcoin-2022-26217Automatic Recurring Bitcoin Buying: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/breedlove/Buy Bitcoin in a Tax-Advantaged Account: https://www.daim.io/robert-breedlove/Home Delivered Organic Grass-Fed Beef (Spend $159+ for 4 lbs. free): https://truorganicbeef.com/discount/BREEDLOVE22Buy Your Dream Home without Selling Your Bitcoin with Ledn: https://ledn.io/en/?utm_source=breedlove&utm_medium=email+&utm_campaign=substack

Mike Hill joins for me for a multi-episode exploration of the masterful book “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” written by best-selling author Robert Pirsig. This book may be one of the most undervalued ever written, as it proposes an alternative interpretation of reality that Pirsig calls “The Metaphysics of Quality” (MOQ). According to MOQ, reality is not made up of substance, but rather it is composed of distinct patterns of value. In a Copernican-like revolution of perspective, MOQ sheds new light on age-old debates such as moral relativism, the nature of subject-object duality, good vs. evil, science vs. religion, the importance of freedom, and the primacy of action.Be sure to check out NYDIG, one of the most important companies in Bitcoin: https://nydig.com/GUESTMike's Website: https://www.mikehill.design/PODCASTPodcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsE?si=wgVuY16XR0io4NLNo0A11A&nd=1RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYITranscript:OUTLINE00:00:00 “What is Money?” Intro00:00:08 Introduction to “Lila: An Inquiry into Morals”00:04:47 A Background Pirsig's Old Book: “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”00:06:20 “What is Quality?”: The Problem of Subject-Object Duality00:07:45 Metaphysics: The High-Country of the Mind00:09:41 The Many Dimensions of Value00:10:57 The Participatory Anthropic Principle00:13:29 Background on the Author: Robert Pirsig00:17:59 The Paradoxical Pursuit of “Value-Free Science”00:24:34 The Possibilities of a Metaphysical Revolution00:28:25 NYDIG00:29:33 The Consequences of Aristotelian Subject-Object Metaphysics00:33:56 Nihilism Arises from Both Zero and Infinite Interpretations of Truth00:36:26 The Catch-22 of Subject-Object Metaphysics00:41:20 Causation and Substance: Aristotle's Grand Metaphysical Illusion00:46:15 Empiricism Saws Off the Branch On Which it Sits00:50:53 Causality as a Useful Psychotechnology00:52:04 The Illusion of Substance00:55:11 Substance as a “Stable Inorganic Pattern of Value”00:57:35 Swapping Out “A Causes B” for “B Values Precondition A”SOCIALBreedlove Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22WiM? Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhatisMoneyShowLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22?lang=enAll My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/breedlove22​WRITTEN WORKMedium: https://breedlove22.medium.com/Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/WAYS TO CONTRIBUTEBitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22Sats via Tippin.me: https://tippin.me/@Breedlove22Dollars via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedloveDollars via Venmo: https://venmo.com/code?user_id=1784359925317632528The "What is Money?" Show Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32843101&fan_landing=trueRECOMMENDED BUSINESSESWorldclass Bitcoin Financial Services: https://nydig.com/Join Me At Bitcoin 2022 (10% off if paying with fiat, or discount code BREEDLOVE for Bitcoin): https://www.tixr.com/groups/bitcoinconference/events/bitcoin-2022-26217Automatic Recurring Bitcoin Buying: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/breedlove/Buy Bitcoin in a Tax-Advantaged Account: https://www.daim.io/robert-breedlove/Home Delivered Organic Grass-Fed Beef (Spend $159+ for 4 lbs. free): https://truorganicbeef.com/discount/BREEDLOVE22

In this episode, Eric talks about the first few paragraphs of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and a wide variety of sources, meanings and intentions that the author may have had. The motorcycle as metaphor for the self, riding as a metaphor for living, weather as a metaphor for the conditions and events of our lives, the road as a metaphor for the ideological paths we may choose. Did Eric really compare Pirsig's introduction to Tolstoy and Dickens? And more... Do you have thoughts to share? Leave a voice message for the Zensylvania Podcast and we may include it in this or a future episode: https://anchor.fm/zensylvania/message Thank you for visiting Zensylvania: It's a State of Mind --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/zensylvania/message

https://www.evolvemoveplay.com/opt-podcast/?utm_medium=organic_social&utm_source=youtube&utm_campaign=podcast_promotion Once a month, we'll be holding live conversations that YOU can be a part of! With EMP Podcast Plus, you'll get a members-only “backstage pass” and exclusive access to:

Looking to add a little more calm to your life? Join Jeff and Amy as they discuss ways to be more Zen, or perhaps just more Jeff-like. Keep Calm and Carry On Listening!

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: The benefits of madness: A positive account of arationality , published by Skatche on the AI Alignment Forum. This post originated in a comment I posted about a strange and unpleasant experience I had when pushing myself too hard mentally. People seemed interested in hearing about it, so I sat down to write. In the process, however, it became something rather different (and a great deal longer) than what I originally intended. The incident referred to in the above comment was a case of manic focus gone wrong; but the truth is, often in my life it's gone incredibly right. I've gotten myself into some pretty strange headspaces, but through discipline and quick thinking I have often been able to turn them to my advantage and put them to good use. Part 1, then, lays out a sort of cognitive history, focusing on the more extreme states I've been in. Part 2 continues the narrative; this is where I began to learn to ride them out and make them work for me. Part 3 is the incident in question: where I overstepped myself and suffered the consequences. Some of you, however, may want to skip ahead to part 4 (unless you find my autobiographical writings interesting as a case study). There, I've written a proposal for a series of posts about how to effectively use the full spectrum of somatic and cognitive states to one's advantage. I have vacillated for a long time about this, for reasons that will be discussed below, but I decided that if I was already laying this much on the line, I might as well take it a step further. Read if you will; and if you're interested, please say so. Part 1: My cognitive background Let's start with full disclosure: there is madness in my family. My father was an alcoholic; it was clear to all of us that he also had some other psychological issues, but I never fully learned the details. My sister has been variously diagnosed with depression, bipolar, borderline personality disorder, etc, and has a breakdown about three or four times a year. My brother is also bipolar. He's had two manic episodes so far; he became psychotic during the first one, and both times he's been hospitalized. And then there's me: the sane, dependable one. That's what I thought, anyway, until my brother had his first episode and I started to look back on my own history. I'd always regarded myself as rather unusual, certainly, but basically stable. But seeing full-blown psychosis for the first time, and within my own family at that, gave new definition and clarity to some of the experiences I had had. My first episode happened when I was in my senior year of high school. I had been getting into New Age for about six months, reading rather credulously the work of one Dr. Joshua David Stone, author of the Ascension Manual and a number of other books inspired primarily by theosophy. I had not thought much about spirituality since renouncing God at the age of twelve, yet a vague unease had led me to begin seeking. Once I got started, I just ate it up; yet the vague unease persisted. I did my best to believe and to perform the meditative exercises, and for the most part I did, but it just wasn't sitting quite right. During winter break of that year, I began reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig. Now, here was something new: Pirsig rejected the analytic method as the sole arbiter of truth, yet he was also clearly uncomfortable with holism and spirituality. In fact, he seemed uncomfortable with all his ideas: they had come to him during a period of degenerating mental illness, culminating in a nervous breakdown and subsequent electroshock therapy. Yet rather than dismiss these ideas, he seemed determined to confront them and grapple with them, to sift for genuine insights among the delusions. Even more interesting was his rhetorical style: rather than simply...

John Vervaeke joins me for a deep conversation exploring his work as a cognitive scientist and his YouTube lecture series "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis."Be sure to check out NYDIG, one of the most important companies in Bitcoin: https://nydig.com/GUESTJohn's twitter: https://twitter.com/vervaeke_johnJohn's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/johnvervaekeJohn's Lecture Series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY PODCASTPodcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsE?si=wgVuY16XR0io4NLNo0A11A&nd=1RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYITranscript:OUTLINE00:00:00 “What is Money?” Intro00:00:05 NYDIG00:01:23 Technology vs. Psychotechnology00:07:00 Digital Technology Blurs the Distinction00:08:22 Accelerating the Proliferation of Psychotechnologies00:10:21 Literacy and the Flynn Effect00:12:32 Psychotechnology: A Gateway into Distributed Cognition00:15:10 Distributed Cognition Inherent to the Free Market00:16:39 The Printing Press Drives the Protestant Reformation00:18:23 Literacy and Coinage Enable Standardization00:20:44 Psychotechnologies, Protocols, and Cognitive Prosthetics00:22:32 The Weakness of Monocultures and Centralization00:24:33 Cognitive Flux Between Resiliency and Efficiency00:26:08 Debt and Equity; Space and Time00:27:45 The Difference Between Risk and Uncertainty00:30:24 Agent and Arena: The Co-Determination of Identity00:33:59 The Extent of Teleology in Reality00:35:55 The Deep Continuity Hypothesis00:38:28 Spinoza and Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality00:41:51 Whitehead's Bifurcation of Nature00:43:27 Buddhist and Taoist PerspectivesSOCIALBreedlove Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22WiM? Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhatisMoneyShowLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22?lang=enAll My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/breedlove22​WRITTEN WORKMedium: https://breedlove22.medium.com/Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/WAYS TO CONTRIBUTEBitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22Sats via Tippin.me: https://tippin.me/@Breedlove22Dollars via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedloveDollars via Venmo: https://venmo.com/code?user_id=1784359925317632528The "What is Money?" Show Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32843101&fan_landing=trueRECOMMENDED BUSINESSESWorldclass Bitcoin Financial Services: https://nydig.com/Join Me At Bitcoin 2022 (10% off if paying with fiat, or discount code BREEDLOVE for Bitcoin): https://www.tixr.com/groups/bitcoinconference/events/bitcoin-2022-26217Put your Bitcoin to work. Earn up to 12% interest back on Bitcoin with Tantra: https://bit.ly/3h3lL0jIBAC assists central banks and sovereign wealth funds succeed in their digital asset investments: https://www.ibac.io/Automatic Recurring Bitcoin Buying: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/breedlove/

In this 93rd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we discuss school. Beginning with a discussion of our individual experiences in school, we then share an excerpt from chapter 10 (School) of our forthcoming book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. What is school for, and what does it help make us become? Is genius common, or rare? What is the purpose of the scientific method? How is fear used to corral students (and others)? How does a relationship with risk help young people become more adept adults? Are our bodies necessary to our education, or can we be educated as if we were just brains in jars?Get your Goliath shirts right here: store.darkhorsepodcast.orgHeather's newsletter, Natural Selections (subscribe to get free weekly essays in your inbox): https://naturalselections.substack.comSupport the sponsors of this show:MUDWTR: is a coffee alternative with mushrooms and herbs (and cacao!) and is delicious, with 1/7 the caffeine as coffee. Visit mudwtr.com/darkhorse and use DARKHORSE at check out for $5 off.  Public Goods: Get $15 off your first order at Public Goods, your new everything store, at https://www.publicgoods.com/darkhorse or with code DARKHORSE at checkout.Our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, is now available for pre-sale at amazon. Publication date: 9-14-21: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593086880/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_5BDTABYFKRJKZBT5GSQAhttp://huntergatherersguide.com/DarkHorse merchandise now available at: store.darkhorsepodcast.orgFind more from us on Bret's website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather's website (http://heatherheying.com).Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Patreon.Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, like this video, follow us on twitter (@BretWeinstein, @HeatherEHeying), and consider helping us out by contributing to either of our Patreons or Bret's Paypal.Looking for clips from #DarkHorseLivestreams? Here are some, updated frequently: @DarkHorse Podcast ClipsTheme Music: Thank you to Martin Molin of Wintergatan for providing us the rights to use their excellent music.Q&A Link: https://youtu.be/KhWapUeBMz0Mentioned in this episode:A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: https://huntergatherersguide.comGatto, John Taylor. 1992 (2017 2nd ed). Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. New Society Publishers.Pirsig, R.M., 1974. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: An inquiry into values. Random House. Held, R. and A. Hein. 1963. Movement-Produced Stimulation in the Development of Visually Guided Behavior. J. Comparative and Physiological Psychology 56(5): 872–876. Spiekermann, S., 2018. Carousel kittens: The case for a value-based IoT. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 17(2): 62-65.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bretweinstein)

Dr. Dre health updates, 12-word books, and detailed instructions on how to make a sharp knife. Swann's Way by Marcel Proust (1913) vs Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (1974)

Pirsig collected 121 rejections before an editor basically took pity on him.

Sevilla uses her YouTube channel in a way similar to mine in that she's for a few years now been thinking out loud looking to digest the philosophy of Robert Pirsig. She's been a close follower of  @Jordan B Peterson  ,  @John Vervaeke  and  @Jonathan Pageau  . She sometimes does commentary on my work but she was interested in some more direct conversation over some of my recent videos.  @A Quality Existence  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6vg0HkKKlgsWk-3HfV-vnw  My first Conversation with Sevilla https://youtu.be/pVooVYjas2g for more of her story.  Her Conversation with Jonathan Pageau https://youtu.be/nBl9P2ByMrQ  Her Conversation with John Vervaeke https://youtu.be/8d2vlpieEH8  Her Conversation with Mary Kochan https://youtu.be/dAu5zh_iRlo  Her Conversation on The Meaning Code https://youtu.be/vorY1OETpFk  Discord link. Good for just a few days. Check with more recent videos for a fresh link. https://discord.gg/WfjxHQTP Vanderklips channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX0jIcadtoxELSwehCh5QTg My Substack https://paulvanderklay.substack.com/ If you want to schedule a one-on-one conversation check here. https://paulvanderklay.me/2019/08/06/converzations-with-pvk/ For the audio podcast mirror on Podbean http://paulvanderklay.podbean.com/ To listen to this on ITunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/paul-vanderklays-podcast/id1394314333  If you need the RSS feed for your podcast player https://paulvanderklay.podbean.com/feed/  All Amazon links here are part of the Amazon Affiliate Program. Amazon pays a small commission at no additional cost to you if you buy through one of the product links here.  https://paypal.me/paulvanderklay To support this channel/podcast with Bitcoin (BTC): 37TSN79RXewX8Js7CDMDRzvgMrFftutbPo  To support this channel/podcast with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) qr3amdmj3n2u83eqefsdft9vatnj9na0dqlzhnx80h  To support this channel/podcast with Ethereum (ETH): 0xd3F649C3403a4789466c246F32430036DADf6c62 Powerpoints of Monologue videos are available for Patrons at https://www.patreon.com/paulvanderklay Also on Lbry: https://odysee.com/@paulvanderklay Paul's Church Content at Living Stones Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh7bdktIALZ9Nq41oVCvW-A To support Paul's work by supporting his church give here. https://tithe.ly/give?c=2160640

In this episode we have Stobbsyy on as a guest to talk about his music as well as religion, politics, philosophy, and personal growth. We bring up the works of Jordan B. Peterson, Marcus Aurelius, Ekhart Tolle, Ayn Rand, Robert M. Pirsig and Led Zeppelin. Stobbsyy on Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC6KV2nR7x8vUHYXn-XgwTLw Stobbsyy on Soundcloud: https://m.soundcloud.com/stobbsyy/ Stobbsyy on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7uASCkTXeYn26lmU954phE?si=n3bamXKlQBC9CeSvjJ53Kg OUR WEBSITE: http://bookwave.club/ SUPPORT B O O K W A V E : https://anchor.fm/bookwave/support Official BOOKWAVE Discord Server: https://discord.gg/ebU4UVSBGj --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bookwave/support

In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with Rynthia Rost, former GEICO  Vice-President for Public Affairs, and the current executive advisor to IBM International Foundation. Rynthia Rost talks about the importance of finding your voice and using it to impact positive change. Some Highlights:● How Adler’s management was changed because of young Rynthia Rost’s confidence to speak up.● The importance of finding your voice and speaking up to advance progress in communities and organizations.● Rynthia Rost on representing women and people of color in leadership.● How leaders can find their voice and why they should take more risks. Also mentioned in this episode:Delano LewisAnthony (Tony) Williams, former Mayor of Washington DCElbert Hubbard’s A Message to GarciaRobert M. Pirsig’s Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Connect with Rynthia Rost:Rynthia Rost on LinkedInRynthia Rost on Twitter  Connect with Mahan Tavakoli:MahanTavakoli.comMore information and resources available at the Partnering Leadership Podcast website: PartneringLeadership.com

Pirsig on motorcycles --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/johnb/message

More of Pirsig on motorcycles --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/johnb/message

Another perspective on the metaphor of the mountaintop.

We're currently taking a break for the holidays.  We'll be back with new episodes starting on Wednesday, January 13, 2021.  This episode originally aired on July 31, 2020.   “Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.”    - Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.   With today’s hustle culture, we’re told we’ve got to be constantly moving.  We’ve got to be striving to reach a goal (the promotion, the raise, a new house, etc) or someone else will get it.  We also feel this in tasks with work.  “If I just stay up late tonight and tomorrow night I’ll bang this project out and then I’ll have some time to breathe.”     This gives us the impression that we’ll be happy, or better off, as soon as we get to that destination.  The fallacy with this mindset is that we’ll never be satisfied and work will always be there.  There will always be something more to accomplish and more work to complete.  What is driving the hustle culture?  What is attractive about it?     On this week’s episode of 33 Tangents, Jim and Jason talk about what it means to “enjoy the journey” with work.   THANK YOU We know your time is limited, so it means a lot to us that you would spend some of your time with us. If you have found this episode to be valuable, we would appreciate if you would share using one of the social media buttons bellow.   And if we are getting you hooked, don’t forget to subscribe, like, and recommend on your favorite podcast platform.   WHERE TO LISTEN The 33 Tangents video simulcast is now available on YouTube Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on Google Podcasts Listen on TuneIn Listen on Amazon Music   WHERE TO FIND US Website: www.33sticks.com Email: Podcast@33sticks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/33Sticks Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33sticks/      

TRACK 1:  Introductions; How did Dennis get involved in this documentary; Manola explaining the search for the word “Quality”; Setting up the rest of the show. Start Track 2: 21:13 TRACK 2:  Introducing Stephen Hinshaw, Ph.D.; the Face of Mental Illness; “LETS” Lets End The Stigma; Story about Hinshaw’s father; Bi-Polar and Schizophrenia; Misdiagnosing in mental illness. Start Track 3: 43:50 TRACK 3:  (with Stephen Hinshaw, Ph.D.) Too much mis-diagnosing and over-diagnosing of different disorders; People don’t want to get labeled; Stephen Hinshaw’s father’s mental illness; Bi-Polar and high suicide rates. Start Track 4: 1:00:52 TRACK 4:  (with Stephen Hinshaw, Ph.D.) Electro-Convulsive Treatments (ECT’s) or Electro-Shock Treatments (EST’s); How did it affect Robert Pirsig? Is it inherited? Psychotherapy; Suicides amongst young people are on the rise. Start Track 5: 1:21:03 TRACK 5:  (with Lee Glover) How Manola got a hold of Lee; Who is Tina DeWeese? Dennis’ and Manola’s Podcast about Robert Pirsig; Lee Glover’s story of how he met Dennis and Manola; What is Lee’s story with Pirsig’s Journey? Start Track 6: 1:39:57 TRACK 6:  (with Lee Glover) Show summary and numbers; Lee’s explanation about the personal journey, and observations of his youth; “Quality equals Reality”; Quake Lake story; 1964 Honda story; Who should be involved in this documentary?

Si parla del libro Lo zen e l'arte della manutenzione della motocicletta di Robert M. Pirsig. Libri Oltre, nuova puntata con Paolo Bizzarri e Michele Boldrin.. _____________________________

An Inquiry Into Values. You may be asking yourself, “What do Zen and motorcycle maintenance have in common?” Well, you’d be surprised! While Zen typically deals with meditative and spiritual practices, motorcycle maintenance deals with nuts, bolts, and greasy parts. However, if you want to live a balanced life, you’ll need to embrace both. Motorcycle maintenance describes those who are classically minded, those who enjoy science and look at the world more rationally. On the other hand, Zen describes those who think romantically, those who enjoy the arts and experience the world through emotions. They see the world as a whole while ignoring the details. You may find that you already identify yourself as one or the other, right? According to Pirsig, however, balance and quality come from balancing the two mindsets. In fact, many problems and conflicts arise when classically minded people can’t understand the romantic mode of thought and vice versa. So how can we combine the two and learn from one another? Well, you can begin by following Pirsig on a motorcycle as he tells the story of how a single road trip led to enlightenment. As you read, you’ll learn why romantics avoid fixing things, you’ll become introduced to Phaedrus and his search for Quality, and how Quality can lead to a balanced, harmonious life. *** Do you want more free audiobook summaries like this? Download our app for free at QuickRead.com/App and get access to hundreds of free book and audiobook summaries.

Get left behind with Bookclub and special guests Alex Byrd and Dereck Alred as we discuss Left Behind: A Novel of Earth's Last Days by Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, our experiences with Xianity, and all things rapture. Next book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Earlier this summer, the Mellon Foundation — the largest humanities philanthropy in the United States — announced it was shifting its mission to focus more on social justice. It backed up that announcement with a $5.3 million grant to fund a collection of books to be placed in 1,000 prisons and juvenile detention centers across all 50 states. The Million Book Project was dreamed up by poet and legal scholar Reginald Dwayne Betts. It intends to curate a capsule collection of 500 books — Betts calls them “freedom libraries” — that will include literature, history, poetry and social thought, with an emphasis on books by Black writers and thinkers. Thursday morning, MPR News host Kerri Miller spoke with Betts and Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander about the project and what they hope to accomplish. Here’s a list of books and authors suggested by Miller, listeners and our guests: Fiction: “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood; “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison; “The Round House” by Louise Erdrich; “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” (The Dark Star Trilogy) by Marlon James; “The Ox-Bow Incident” by Walter Van Tilburg Clark; “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown; “The Luminaries” by Eleanor Catton;  “On the Road” by Cormac McCarthy; “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez; “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel García Márquez; “Hopscotch” by Julio Cortázar; “Peace From Broken Pieces” by Iyanla Vanzant; “My Ántonia” by Willa Cather; “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values” by Robert M. Pirsig; “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” by the Brothers Grimm; “The Redwall” series by Brian Jacques; "News of the World" by Paulette Jiles; “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel; “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway; “The All Souls Trilogy” by Deborah Harkness; “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston; “The Ranger’s Apprentice” series by John Flanagan;; “A Door Into Ocean” by Joan Slonczewski; “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas; “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” by Neil Gaiman; The works of Octavia E. Butler; The works of JD Robb; The works of Ilona Andrews; The works of N.K. Jemisin; The works of Franz Kafka; The works of Rick Riordan; The works of Ivan Doig; The works of J.R. Ward. Nonfiction: “Not by the Sword: How a Cantor and His Family Transformed a Klansman” by Kathryn Watterson; “March” series by Congressman John Lewis; “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking; “Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions” by Johann Hari; “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction” by Gabor Maté; “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg; “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” by Bessel van der Kolk; “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B DuBois; “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson; “The Fifth Agreement” by don Jose Ruiz, don Miguel Ruiz and Janet Mills. Poetry: The works of Langston Hughes; The works of Emily Dickinson;  The works of Layli Long Soldier;  The works of Robert Frost The works of William Faulkner;  The works of Etheridge Knight; The works of Lucille Clifton. Guests: Elizabeth Alexander, poet and president of Mellon Foundation  Reginald Dwyane Betts, formerly incarcerated poet and legal scholar To listen to the full conversation you can use the audio player above. Correction (Aug. 8, 2020): “The Fifth Agreement” was originally listed under the fiction section. However, it is a work of nonfiction and has been moved to the correct section of the list.

“Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.”    - Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.   With today’s hustle culture, we’re told we’ve got to be constantly moving.  We’ve got to be striving to reach a goal (the promotion, the raise, a new house, etc) or someone else will get it.  We also feel this in tasks with work.  “If I just stay up late tonight and tomorrow night I’ll bang this project out and then I’ll have some time to breathe.”     This gives us the impression that we’ll be happy, or better off, as soon as we get to that destination.  The fallacy with this mindset is that we’ll never be satisfied and work will always be there.  There will always be something more to accomplish and more work to complete.  What is driving the hustle culture?  What is attractive about it?     On this week’s episode of 33 Tangents, Jim and Jason talk about what it means to “enjoy the journey” with work.   THANK YOU We know your time is limited, so it means a lot to us that you would spend some of your time with us. If you have found this episode to be valuable, we would appreciate if you would share using one of the social media buttons bellow    And if we are getting you hooked, don’t forget to subscribe, like, and recommend on your favorite podcast platform.     The 33 Tangents video simulcast is now available on YouTube Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/33-tangents/id1384329330 Listen on TuneIn: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Technology-Podcasts/33-Tangents-p1129251/     WHERE TO FIND US Website: www.33sticks.com Email: Podcast@33sticks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/33Sticks Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33sticks/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8KUpp_LygXotCrKgR9ZoBg

Knight Reader shares wonderful music and an inspirational piece about mental health. We hear from Steph and John of the GetLit Podcast, and hear from readers around the world about books that inspired them towards physical action, or impacted their life in a positive manner. Books included in the episode include The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn, The Diary of Anne Frank, Night by Elie Wiesel, Harry Potter Franchise by J.K. Rowling, Knowledge is power-A logical meaning of Life by Sei Lebese, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho, Cherry Ames series by julie cambpell and helen wells, The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay, The Whitest Flower by Brendan Graham, and A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.

An Inquiry Into Values. You may be asking yourself, “What do Zen and motorcycle maintenance have in common?” Well, you’d be surprised! While Zen typically deals with meditative and spiritual practices, motorcycle maintenance deals with nuts, bolts, and greasy parts. However, if you want to live a balanced life, you’ll need to embrace both. Motorcycle maintenance describes those who are classically minded, those who enjoy science and look at the world more rationally. On the other hand, Zen describes those who think romantically, those who enjoy the arts and experience the world through emotions. They see the world as a whole while ignoring the details. You may find that you already identify yourself as one or the other, right? According to Pirsig, however, balance and quality come from balancing the two mindsets. In fact, many problems and conflicts arise when classically minded people can’t understand the romantic mode of thought and vice versa. So how can we combine the two and learn from one another? Well, you can begin by following Pirsig on a motorcycle as he tells the story of how a single road trip led to enlightenment. As you read, you’ll learn why romantics avoid fixing things, you’ll become introduced to Phaedrus and his search for Quality, and how Quality can lead to a balanced, harmonious life. *** Do you want more free audiobook summaries like this? Download our app for free at QuickRead.com/App and get access to hundreds of free book and audiobook summaries.

Finding an opening quote from my conversation with Ayse Birsel – One of Fast Company magazine's ‘World's Top 15 Designers' and author of Design the Life You Love was a challenge, mostly because I delighted in re-listening to each moment of it. In this opening quote, Ayse is talking about the joys of having a process that guides her in her design journey.    Her wonderful book, Design the Life you Love is not self-help BS...it's a visual thinking masterpiece and a guide to one of the most powerful and simply stated design processes I've ever seen….and I've seen and made a lot of them.   The double diamond of design thinking was my first design process, the first map to creativity that I followed, and it helped me design entire work engagements, hour-long meetings and multi-day workshops.   But underneath that framework is a deeper one: Ayse's De:Re map. De:Re stands for deconstruction and reconstruction, and this idea is essential if you're going to design anything well.   In the context of designing conversations, meetings and workshops, the key question is: What are the parts that you can see? If you can't see the parts, you can't shape them.   That's why we love frameworks...they help us know what to look for!   The idea of deconstruction is controversial in some spaces. It made me think of one of my favorite quotes from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:   When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts... Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts—something is always created too.   -Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance   What is created through deconstruction is the opportunity to reconstruct something new.   Ayse asks us to apply this framework, methodically, to our lives, so that we can build our biggest design project, our lives, according to principles we can (literally) live with.   What's truly delightful about Ayse's perspective is that many people still assume that design is for the few - designers. And that designers are akin to artists, disheveled and mysterious and creative. And that creativity is more magic than method. Watch Ayse's TEDx talk, read her book, and you'll see...design is for everyone.   The question is...when you look at a problem, what do you see? A messy mass? Or do you start to deconstruct the challenge into its parts?   This is true of a workshop or meeting or a conversation...what are the parts? Who are the players? What are the goals and constraints? Once you start deconstructing...you can start reconstructing a new configuration and a process to get there.   I could go on, but I don't want to keep you from enjoying this conversation any longer! Full Transcript here Links and Resources   Ayse on the web   Design the life you love: The book   Ayshe's Inc Column  About Ayshe   Ayse (pronounced Eye-Shay) Birsel is one of Fast Company's Most Creative People 2017. She is the author of Design the Life You Love, A Step-By-Step Guide to Building A Meaningful Future. On the Thinkers50 shortlist for talent, she gives lectures on Design the Organization You Love to corporations. Ayse writes a weekly post on innovation for Inc.com. Ayse designs award-winning products and systems with Fortune 100 and 500 companies, including Amazon, Colgate-Palmolive, Herman Miller, GE, IKEA, The Scan Foundation, Staples and Toyota. She is the recipient of numerous awards including Interior Design Best of Year Award in 2018 for Overlay, a new Herman Miller system, multiple IDEA (Industrial Design Excellence Awards) and Best of NeoCon Gold Awards, Young Designers Award from the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Athena Award for Excellence in Furniture Design from Rhode Island School of Design. Ayse is one of only 100 people worldwide to be named as one of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches—a program Goldsmith conceived during Ayse's Design the Life You Love program—along with the President of the World Bank, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation and the President of Singularity University. She is a TEDx speaker. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the MoMA, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art. Born in Izmir, Turkey, Ayse came to the US on a Fulbright Scholarship and got her masters degree at Pratt Institute, New York.

On today's Defence Deconstructed Podcast, we feature a discussion with Mark Norman, Jeff Tasseron, and Sam Michaud about the crash of the Canadian Armed Forces Cyclone helicopter off the coast of Greece on Wednesday. Defence Deconstructed is part of the CGAI Podcast Network and today's episode is brought to you by the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI). Subscribe to and rate the CGAI Podcast Network on your podcast app! Bios: 

- Dave Perry (host): Senior Analyst and Vice President with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

 - VAdm (ret'd) Mark Norman: Previous Deputy Commander and Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy. - Col (ret'd) Jeff Tasseron: Director, Business Development, Information and Communication Technologies from the Public Safety Canadian Commercial Corporation. Former Commander of 423 Squadron. - Col (ret'd) Sam Michaud: Managing Director at Marshall Canada. Former Commander of 423 Squadron. Recommended Readings:
 - "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World" by David J. Epstein (https://www.amazon.ca/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized-World-ebook/dp/B07H1ZYWTM) - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig (https://www.amazon.ca/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Inquiry-ebook/dp/B0026772N) - "At the Centre of Government: The Prime Minister and the Limits" by Ian Brodie (https://www.amazon.ca/At-Centre-Government-Minister-Political-ebook/dp/B07CVQSJBG) - "Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?" by Graham Allison(https://www.amazon.ca/Destined-War-America-Escape-Thucydidess-ebook/dp/B01IAS9FZY) Related Links: 

- Recording Date: May 1, 2020 Follow the Canadian Global Affairs Institute on Facebook, Twitter (@CAGlobalAffairs), or on Linkedin. Head over to our website at www.cgai.ca for more commentary. Produced by Jay Rankin. Music credits to Drew Phillips.

Lily Hansen has built her career around her passion for conversation. As an author, writer and speaker, she has interviewed more than 1,000 people all over the world, and she’s an advocate for better conversation and deeper connection in an increasingly digital age.  After working as a freelance music journalist, Lily found herself at a crossroads in her career and decided to pursue a new creative project. She started compiling interviews and portrait photography into a book, called Word of Mouth: Nashville Conversations.  Since then, Lily has written two more books under the Word of Mouth umbrella, including one to celebrate the 50th anniversary of HCA Healthcare. She also gave a TedX Talk in December, called “Talking to Strangers is My Self-Care,” which was all about the wisdom she’s gained from her interviews. Lily is an inspiration not only because of the work she does, but also because of her ability to find success in the pursuit of her own passions and happiness. She joins Leah on Her Story of Success to talk about some of the lessons she’s learned in her career, how she’s redefined hustle culture for herself, and the importance of developing strong relationships with people in your community. Lily also describes the practical process of finding work and knowing how much to charge as a freelancer. In This Episode: Lily shares her unique story of building a career that’s all about connecting with and getting to know people. She talks about some of the inspiring lessons she’s learned along the way, including the common threads of humanity she finds across all the interviews she does.   Here are some of the highlights: Lily’s life story and the process of deciding to write a book after she found herself lacking inspiration (1:49) What it’s like to work as a freelancer, knowing how much to charge and managing your expectations about finances (9:14) Connecting with people all over the world and seeing common humanity in everyone (15:51) How we can redefine hustle culture to prioritize building relationships and living a full life outside of work (20:59) The process of becoming a public speaker (33:10) Finding success in being happy and proud of who you are (40:13) The Books and Brands Lily and Leah Mentioned Are:   Word of Mouth: Nashville Conversations by Lily Hansen Word of Mouth: More Conversations by Lily Hansen   The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger   Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig   Judith Bright Jewelry Sponsored By: This episode is sponsored by Insperity, an HR company that makes a difference. Insperity combines first class service and robust technology so you can focus on your people.  Non-Profit Spotlight: My Bag My Story provides backpacks and duffle bags for kids in foster care so they don’t have to carry their belongings around in trash bags. They provide dignity and something that kids can call their own. 

Un brano tratto da Lo Zen E L'Arte Della Manutenzione Della Motocicletta di Robert M. Pirsig interpretato da Giuseppe Govinda per il progetto "Voglio Solo che mi Ascolti". Ti piacciono i libri? Iscriviti a IsoladelleroseTV o ascolta gli altri brani della serie.

Today we’re joined by Jeff Evans, host of the Throttle Grotto YouTube channel, an automotive repair channel. Jeff has been a YouTuber for 3 years and has amassed over 121k views and 900+ subscribers. Jeff initially started his YouTube channel with the intention of it eventually becoming an additional revenue stream and side project that he could take up full-time. In this episode, we hear what it’s like to be in the trenches of striving for traction and growth as Throttle Grotto approaches the 1k subscriber mark, and Jeff’s insight on how he got the channel off the ground and what he feels worked best for him thus far.   How to Connect with Jeff: YouTube Instagram Twitter How to Support Jeff: Patreon Teespring My book Recommendation: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig Learn More: If you would like to help raise money for causes, or yourself, check out Stagepass at https://yourstagepass.com. If you would like to create experiences, let me know and I’ll get in touch!  If you would like weekly summaries with TGI hacks from each episode, sign up here. Connect with TGI: Facebook Twitter Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Stitcher Spotify We’re also available anywhere podcasts are!

We are joined the co-founders of a start-up called daydreamers—a gym for creativity. Links and timestamps appear at the bottom. These two are a real power couple. Both began in the finance world in New York. Katina did data analytics at Goldman Sachs before moving on to a philanthropic venture fund. Dupi worked in investment banking before moving on to private equity. But that’s where the conventional path ended for these two. Katina started On Adulting, blog and online community focused on lifestyle and wellness for millennial women. Katina’s work has been featured in outlets like Fast Company, Teen Vogue, Mindbodygreen, HuffPost, Elite Daily, and Thrive Global, and her message quickly caught fire. On Adulting has gone viral with a large, highly-engaged audience, and Katina has a thriving consulting practice. Now Katina and Dupi are working together—backed by VICE Media Worldwide’s Chief Creative Officer, Eddy Moretti—to launch daydreamers in Summer 2020. Topics-Genuine connections -The importance of time as a nonrenewable resource -Risk -The epidemic of loneliness -The impact of play and recovery on performance -Fundraising and finding the right equity partners as a startup Guest Links https://www.onadulting.com/ https://www.daydreamerspace.com/ https://www.instagram.com/onadulting/?hl=en https://linktr.ee/onadulting Strategy Chain LinksAmazon affiliate links at http://strategychainpodcast.com/support Send me questions at http://strategychainpodcast.com/contact Sign up for the email list at http://strategychainpodcast.com/ Strategy Chain on Social Media https://www.facebook.com/strategychain/ https://twitter.com/StrategyChain https://www.instagram.com/strategychain/ https://medium.com/@strategychain https://linktr.ee/admin Timestamps0:03:00|Backgrounds 0:04:10|Dupi (NYU to investment banking to private equity) 0:05:14|Katina (NYU to Goldman Sachs to philanthropic venture fund to On Adulting) 0:09:50|Connection to The Education of a Value Investor by Guy Spier https://amzn.to/2QGPMWT 0:14:10|Moving from “networking” to “connecting” 0:17:53|True connections and the first time one of Katina’s posts went viral 0:20:10|Genuine connections with people 0:27:30|Dupi’s thought process behind leaving private equity for Daydreamers 0:28:45|How they came up with Daydreamers 0:30:15|Risk 0:33:30|Time is the ultimate currency of life 0:34:30|How Dupi and Katina approach risk 0:37:10|What is Daydreamers? How did they de-risk it? 0:40:05|Product Development and Market Research 0:45:55|Lack of and importance of community 0:47:15|Daydreamers’ vision for strong community 0:48:45|Loneliness is an epidemic 0:53:45|Olivia Roberson on how progress isn’t linear 0:54:55|Relaxation can be a productivity tool 0:54:45|Beginner’s mind lets you learn from everyone 0:55:55|Play is connected to performance (Google, Patagonia) 0:56:50|Connection to Penn State wrestling 0:59:00|Play to preserve beginner’s mind 0:60:30|High performers focusing on recovery 0:60:55|Risk mitigation and the need to prevent burnout 1:01:30|Craving a place to be a stress-free beginner 1:05:00|Brands often forget about older consumers 1:08:00|Older Americans being isolated 1:08:40|High-tech concepts (marketplaces, networks, subscriptions, etc.) don’t need to be digital 1:10:12|“Physical first, digital second” approach for fundraising 1:10:50|The fundraising process and finding the ideal equity partner 1:12:30|Eddy Moretti, Chief Creative Officer of VICE Media, Co-Founder of VICELAND, Co-Founder of Epiphany 1:15:45|What they wanted in an equity partner 1:17:55|Finding genuine relationships and connections during the fundraising process 1:20:00|People with checklists and people who really like you 1:20:15|How their romantic relationship has affected their business 1:25:45|“Year of Adventure” 1:28:45|Elle Luna’s perspective on “Should versus Must” 1:29:55|Their podcast: (un)Productive 1:31:45|Short questions 1:32:00|Book recommendations 1:32:05|Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard https://amzn.to/37WhfJM 1:33:00|The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz https://amzn.to/2QHoM9D 1:34:10|Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig https://amzn.to/39XpjMw 1:35:00|What they would whisper in their ears 1:35:05|Katina: Listen to your “fire” and disregard the practical 1:36:00|Dupi: Don’t take advice as a book of rules 1:36:20|Dupi: Seek happiness rather than success 1:38:15|Best questions they’ve asked or heard 1:38:50|Katina: “But how did you really feel about that?” 1:40:30|Dupi: “Why did you think that?” 1:43:00|Where we can find Katina and Dupi 1:44:30|Shout out to Marcelo Garcia Jiu Jitsu in New York 1:45:10|Support & Closing Gratitude

Robert M. Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Book Summary --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bestbookbits/support

Virgil Elliott is one of only 24 artists worldwide to be certified by the American Portrait Society. He is a highly sought fine artist, portraitist, teacher, lecturer, art show judge, and writer. Virgil has spent his career at the forefront of the revival of representational art. His atelier is located in Penngrove, California. Virgil’s education in the arts began at a very early age under the guidance of his mother – a school teacher and an amateur artist. His training continued with the now sadly defunct Famous Artists School correspondence course that featured art instruction by famed illustrators such as Robert Fawcett, Albert Dorne, Austin Briggs, Steven Dohanos, Harold Von Schmidt and others. By his late teens, he was an accomplished draftsman and competent oil painter. Unfortunately his training in the fine arts at the colleges and universities he attended led to disappointment and disillusionment. The art education program at these institutions centered on modern art styles that did not embody the style and craftsmanship of traditional representational art that Virgil was keenly interested in. Resolved to become a better artist following the traditions of the Old Masters, he endeavored to teach himself from that point onward. He sought out old manuscripts to study and traveled to view Old Master paintings in museums around the world. He applied himself to constant practicing his drawing and painting skills. Eventually, the lessons Virgil learned over the years were distilled, refined, clarified and compiled into his authoritative book: Traditional Oil Painting: Advanced Techniques and Concepts from the Renaissance to the Present. It was a project that spanned over twenty years. His book was finally published in 2007 by publisher Watson–Guptill. Earlier this year, an updated version of Traditional Oil Painting was released and published by Echo Point Books. It’s an honor to have the opportunity to share this in-depth conversation with Virgil Elliott. His firm conviction and devotion to the pursuit of quality in creating art is evident from the very start of this impassioned conversation. Mentioned in the show: Virgil Elliott’s Website: https://virgilelliott.com Traditional Oil Painting Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/959891544070003/ Book: Traditional Oil Painting: Advanced Techniques and Concepts from the Renaissance to the Present: https://amzn.to/2XObLNu Book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, by Robert M. Pirsig: https://amzn.to/2KX3aTr Andrew Tischler’s Creative Endeavor podcast episode featuring Virgil Elliott: https://andrewtischler.podbean.com/e/episode-2-virgil-elliott/ About the Artful Painter: Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIo1YmQXnMm21b-Slkr69Tg Send me an email: https://carlolson.tv/contact Artful Painter website: https://theartfulpainter.com Carl Olson on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artful.creative/ Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

In this episode, Michael from Germany (@SostheRope on Twitter) discusses Robert M. Pirsig's 1974 book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:  An Inquiry Into Values.  Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described the book as an "intellectual entertainment of the highest order" in his New York Times review.  Enjoy the episode, and feel free to send your comments to 143podcasts@gmail.com or the Bibliophile Advenventures twitter.You can support this show by visiting our merch store, or by leaving us an Apple Podcasts review.

Listen to the episode Boyd Varty Interview Synopsis In today's episode, I speak with Boyd Varty about tracking big game in South Africa, creating a purposeful life through self discovery, and his new book A Lion Tracker's Guide to Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2019). "Boyd Varty is a certified Master Life Coach, author, and TED speaker. He runs retreats that merge tracking, coaching, and storytelling into experiential learning events at Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa, the sanctuary where he was born and raised." - HMH Press Release Reminiscent of Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Boyd's new book uses the story of tracking lions with two friends in the South African bushveld to communicate lessons on how to find one's path in life. We talk about some of those lessons in this episode. He previously published another book called Cathedral of the Wild. To learn about it and his other work, track down Boyd Varty on Twitter or on his personal website. Enjoy! More Episodes & Support I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Travel Writing World podcast! Please consider supporting the show with a few dollars a month, less than a cup of coffee, to help keep our show alive and advertisement-free. You can also support the show by leaving a positive review on Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcasting app, subscribing to the show, and following us on Twitter & Instagram. Finally, join the Travel Writing World newsletter to receive your free copy of The Travel Writer’s Guidebook. You will also receive monthly dispatches & reports with podcast interviews, travel writing resources, & book recommendations. Thanks for your support! Intro Music Peach by Daantai (Daantai's Instagram) .ugb-9fb25e1 .ugb-block-content{justify-content:center}.ugb-9fb25e1 .ugb-button1{background-color:#0693e3;border-radius:4px !important}.ugb-9fb25e1 .ugb-button1 .ugb-button--inner,.ugb-9fb25e1 .ugb-button1 svg{color:#ffffff}.ugb-9fb25e1 .ugb-button1:before{border-radius:4px !important}.ugb-9fb25e1 .ugb-inner-block{text-align:center}SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST

27/04/2019: Mohammed N. Al Khan joined us in the studio today for his fiction round-up. Man Booker Winner Marlon James is famous for A Brief History of Seven Killings - how does his latest book Black Leopard, Red Wolf, compare? The author mentioned that it’s an African Game of Thrones but is this actually true? If you’re looking for something different Mo also thinks you might like The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox by Barry Hughhart and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

When I was in college, I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM), the 1974 philosophical classic novel by Robert M. Pirsig. I didn’t have enough life experience at that time to fully appreciate it and my only take-away was “how cool would it be to ride across America on a motorcycle. On my Instagram page, Leadership Aficionado, you can view several one minute video clips depicting a middle aged man riding his Indian Motorcycles across America with my words of wisdom as background audio. You can say that this is my modern version of ZAMM. Check it out and let’s take the journey with him.

Guest: Philip Poots: GitHub | ClubCollect Previous Episode: 056: Ember vs. Elm: The Showdown with Philip Poots In this episode, Philip Poots joins the show again to talk about the beauty of simplicity, the simplicity and similarities between Elm and Ruby programming languages, whether Elixir is a distant cousin of the two, the complexity of Ember and JavaScript ecosystems (Ember helps, but is fighting a losing battle), static vs. dynamic, the ease of Rails (productivity), and the promise of Ember (productivity, convention). The panel also talks about the definition of "quality", making code long-term maintainable, and determining what is good vs. what is bad for your codebase. Resources: Michel Martens mote Learn the Elm Programming Language and Build Error-Free Apps with Richard Feldman Worse is Better: Richard P. Gabriel Gary Bernhardt's Destroy All Software Screencasts Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values The Calm Company It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: CHARLES:: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 113. My name is Charles Lowell. I'm a developer here at the Frontside and with me today are Taras Mankovski and David Keathley. Hello? DAVID:: Hey, guys. TARAS: Hello, hello. CHARLES:: And we're going to be talking with a serial guest on our serial podcast, Mr Philip Poots, who is the VP of engineering at ClubCollect. Welcome, Philip. PHILIP: Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. CHARLES:: Yeah. I'm actually excited to have you on. We've had you on a couple of times before. We've been trying to get you on the podcast, I think for about a year, to talk about I think what has kind of a unique story in programming these days. The prevailing narrative is that folks start off with some language that's dynamically typed and object oriented and then at some point, they discover functional programming and then at some point, they discover static programming and they march off into a promised land of Nirvana and no bugs ever, ever happening again. It seems like it's pretty much a straight line from that point to the next point and passing through those way stations. When I talk to you, I guess... Gosh, I think you were the first person that really introduced me to Elm back at Wicked Good Ember in 2016 and it seemed like you were kind of following that arc but actually, that was a bit deceptive because then the next time I talked to you, you were saying, "No, man. I'm really into Ruby and kind of diving in and trying to get into Ruby again," and I was kind of like, "Record scratch." You're kind of jumping around the points. You're not following the preordained story arc. What is going on here? I just kind of wanted to have a conversation about that and find out what the deal was and then, what's kind have guided your journey. PHILIP: There was one event and that was ElmConf Europe, which was a fantastic conference. Really, one of the best conferences I've been to, just because I guess with the nature of early language, small conference environment. There's just a lot of things happening. There's a lot of people. Evan was there, Richard Feldman was there, the leading lights of the Elm community were there and it was fantastic. But I guess, one thing that people have always said to me is the whole way track is the best track of the conference and it's not something I really appreciated before and during the breaks, I ended up talking to a guy called Michel Martens. He is the finder of a Redis sourcing company and I guess, this was just a revelation to me. He was interested in Elm. He was friends with the guys that organized the conference and we got talking and he was like, "I do this in Ruby. I do this in Ruby. I did this in Ruby," and I was like, "What?" and he was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." He's a really, really humble guy but as soon as I got home, I checked him out. His GitHub is 'soveran' and it turns out he's written... I don't know, how many gems in Ruby, all with really well-chosen names, very short, very clear, very detailed. The best thing about his libraries is you can print them out on paper. What I mean by that is they were tiny. They were so small and I guess, I just never seen that before. I go into Ruby on Rails -- that was my first exposure to programming, that was my first exposure to everything -- unlike with Rails, often when you hit problems, you'd start to dive a bit deeper and ultimately, you dive so deep that you sunk essentially and you just accepted, "Okay, I'm not going to bend the framework that way this time. Let's figure out how everyone else goes with the framework and do that." Then with Ember when I moved into frontend, that was a similar thing. There were so many layers of complexity that I never felt like had a real handle on it. I kind of just thought this was the way things were. I thought it's always going to be complex. That's just the nature of the problem. That's just the problem they're trying to solve. It's a complex problem and therefore, that complexity is necessary. But it was Elm that taught me, I think that choosing the right primitives and thinking very carefully about the problem can actually give you something that's quite simple but incredibly powerful. Not only something quite simple but something so simple that it can fit inside your head, like this concept of a program fitting inside your head and Rails, I don't know how many heads I need to fit Rails in or Ember for that matter and believe me, I tried it but with Elm, there was that simplicity. When I came across this Ruby, a language I was very familiar with but this Ruby that I had never seen before, a clear example was a templating library and he calls it 'mote' and it's including comments. It's under a hundred lines of code and it does everything you would need to. Sure, there were one or two edge cases that it doesn't cover but it's like, "Let's use the trade off." It almost feels like [inaudible] because he was always a big believer in "You ain't going to need it. Let's go for that 80% win with 20% effort," and this was like that taken to the extreme. CHARLES:: I'm just curious, just to kind of put a fine point on it, it sounds like there might be more in common, like a deeper camaraderie between this style of Ruby and the style encouraged by Elm, even though that on the surface, one is a dynamically typed object oriented language and the other is a statically typed functional language and yet, there's a deeper philosophical alignment that seems like it's invisible to 99% of the discussion that happens around these languages. PHILIP: Yeah, I think so. I think the categories we and this is something Richard Feldman talks. He's a member of the Elm community. He does a lot of talks and has a course also in Frontend Masters, which I highly recommend. But he often talks about the frame of the conversation is wrong because you have good statically typed languages and you have bad statically typed languages. You have good dynamic languages and you have bad dynamic languages. For all interpretations of good and bad, right? I don't want to start any wars here. I think one of the things that Elm and Ruby have in common is the creator. Matz designed Ruby because he wanted programming to be a joy, you know? And Evan created Elm because he wanted programming to be a delight. I think if you experience both of those, like developing in both of those languages, you gain a certain appreciation for what that means. It is almost undefinable, indistinguishable, although you can see the effects of it everywhere. In Ruby, everything is an object, including nil. In Elm, it's almost he's taken everything away. Evan's taken everything away that could potentially cause you to stumble. There's a lot to learn with Elm in terms of getting your head around functional mindset and also, working with types but as far as that goes, people often call it like the Haskell Light, which I think those are a disservice to Elm because it's got different goals. CHARLES:: Yeah, you can tell that. You know, my explorations with Elm, the personality of Elm is 100% different than the personality of Haskell, if that is even a programming term that you can apply. For example, the compiler has an identity. It always talks to you in the first person, "I saw that you did this, perhaps you meant this. You should look here or I couldn't understand what you were trying to tell me." Literally that's how the Elm compiler talks to you. It actually talks to you like a person and so, it's very... Sorry, go ahead. PHILIP: No, no, I think the corollary to that is the principle of the surprise in Ruby. You know, is there going to be a method that does this? You type it out and you're like, "Oh, yes it is," which is why things like inject and reduce are both methods in enumerable. You didn't choose one over the other. It was just like, "Let's make it easy for the person who's programming to use what they know best." I think as well, maybe people don't think about this as deeply but the level of thought that Evan has put into designing Elm is crazy, like he's thought this through. I'm not sure if I said this the last time but I went to a workshop in the early days in London, which is my kind of first real exposure to Elm and Evan was giving the workshop. Someone asked him, "Why didn't you do this?" and he was like, "Well, that might be okay for now but I'm not sure that would make so much sense in 10 years," and I was kind of like, "What?" Because JavaScript and that ecosystem is something which is changing like practically hourly and this is a guy that's thinking 10 years into the future. TARAS: You might have answered it already but I'm curious of what you think is the difference, maybe it just comes down to that long term thinking but we see this in JavaScript world a lot, which is this kind of almost indifference to APIs. It almost doesn't really matter what the API is for whatever reason, there seems to be a big correlation between the API that's exposed with the popularity of the tool. I think there are some patterns, like something that's really simple, like jQuery and React have become popular because of the simplicity of their APIs. What the flip side to that? What other ways can APIs be created that we see in JavaScript world. Because we're talking about this beautiful APIs and I can relate to some of the work that Charles has been doing and I've been doing microstates but I wonder like what would be just a brief alternative to that API, so it's kind of a beautiful API. PHILIP: I don't know if anyone is familiar with the series of essays 'Worse is Better' like East Coast versus West Coast, from Richard Gabriel. The problem is, I guess and maybe this is just my understanding over my paraphrase of it, I'm not too familiar with it but I think that good APIs take time and people don't have time. If someone launches a V1 at first and it kind of does the job, people will use that over nothing and then whenever they're happy with that, they'll continue to use it and develop it and ultimately, if she's market share and then that's just the thing everyone uses and the other guy's kind of left behind like, "This is so much better." I guess this is a question, I think it was after Wicked Good Ember, I happened to be on the same trend as Tom Dale on the way back to New York and we started talking about this. I think that's his big question. I think it's also a question that still has to be answered, which is, "Will Elm ever be mainstream? Will it be the most popular thing?" aside from the question of whether it has to be or not. For me, a good APIs good design comes from understanding the problem fully -- CHARLES:: And you can understand the problem fully without time. PHILIP: Exactly and often, what happens -- at least this is what happens in my experience with the production software that I've written -- is that you don't actually understand the problem until you've developed a solution for it. Then when you've developed a solution for it, often the pressures or the commercial pressures or an open source is [inaudible] the pressures of backwards compatibility, mean that you can never refactor your way to what you think the best solution is and often, you start from scratch and the reality is people are too far away with the stuff you wrote in the past about the thing you're writing now. Those are always kind of at odds. I think there are a lot of people that are annoyed with Elm because the updates are too slow, it relies on Evan and we want to have a pool request accepted. All of the things that they don't necessarily recognize like the absence of which make Elm an Elm, if you know what I mean. The very fact that Evan does set such a high standard and does want everything to go through his personal filters because otherwise, you wouldn't gain the benefits that Elm gives you. The attention is very real in terms of I want to shift my software now and it becomes easier then. I think to go to a language like JavaScript, which has all of the escape hatches that you need, to be able to chop and change, to edit, to do what you need to do to get the job done and let's be quite honest, I think, also with Elm, that's the challenge for someone who's not an expert level like me. Once you hit a roadblock, you'll say, "Where do I go from here?" I know if I was using JavaScript, I could just like hack it and then clients are happy and everything's fine and you know there's a bit of stuff in your code that you would rather wasn't but at the end of the day, you go home and the job's done. DAVID:: Have you had to teach Elm to other people? You and I did some work like I've seen you pair with someone and guide them through the work that they needs to get done. If you had a chance to do something like that with Elm and see how that actually happens, like how do developer's mind develops as they're working through in using the tool? PHILIP: Unfortunately not. I would actually love to go through that experience. I hope none of my developers are listening to this podcast but secretly, I want to push them in the direction of Elm on the frontend. But no, but I can at least make from my own perspective. I find it very challenging at first because for me, being a Ruby developer and also, I would never say that I understood JavaScript as much as I would have liked. Coming from dynamic language, no functional experience to functional language with types, it's almost like learning a couple of different things at the same time and that was challenging. I think if I were to take someone through it, I would maybe start with a functional aspects and then move on to the type aspects or vice versa, like try and clearly breakdown and it's difficult because those two are so intertwined at some level. Gary Bernhardt of Destroy All Software Screencast, I watch quite a bit of his stuff and I had sent him an email to ask him some questions about one of the episodes that he did and he told me that he done the programming languages course, I think it's on Coursera from Daniel Grossman, so [inaudible] ML which is kind of the father of all MLs like Haskell and also Elm. I find that really helpful because he broke it down on a very basic level and his goal wasn't to teach you ML. It was to teach you functional programming. It would be a very interesting exercise, I think. I think the benefit that Elm gave you is you get to experience that delight very quickly with, "Oh, it's broken. Here's a nice message. I fix the message. It compiles. Wow, it works," and then there's a very big jump whenever you start talking about the effects. Whenever you want to actually do something like HTTP calls or dealing with the time or I guess, the impure stuff you would call in the Haskell-land and that was also kind of a bit weird. CHARLES:: Also, there's been some churn around that, right? PHILIP: That's right. When I started learning, they had signals, then they kind of pushed that all behind the scenes and made it a lot more straightforward. Then I just mastered it and I was like, "Yes, I know it," and then I was like, "All right. I don't need to know it anymore." This is the interesting thing for me because at work, most of our work now is in Elixir and Phoenix. I'm kind of picking a little bit up as I work with them. I think Elm's architecture behind the scenes is kind of based, I believe on Erlang's process model, so the idea of a mailbox and sending messages and dealing with immutable state. CHARLES:: Which is kind of ironically is very object oriented in a way, right? It's functional but also the concept of mailboxes and sending messages and essentially, if you substitute object for process, you have these thousands and thousands of processes that are sending messages back and forth to each other. PHILIP: Yeah, that's right. It's like on a grand scale, on a distributed scale. Although I wouldn't say that I'm that far with Erlang, Elixir to appreciate the reality of that yet but that's what they say absolutely. CHARLES:: Now, Phoenix and Elixir is a dynamically typed functional language. does it share the simplicity? One of the criticisms you had of Rails was that you couldn't fit it in your head. It was very difficult. Is there anything different about Elixir that kind of makes it a spirit cousin of Elm and the simple Ruby? PHILIP: I think so, yes. Absolutely. I don't think it gets to the same level but I think it's in the right direction and specifically on the framework front, it was designed specifically... I mean, in a sense it's like the anti-type to Rails because it was born out of people's frustrations with Rails. José Valim was pretty much one of Rails top core committers. Basically, every Rails application I wrote at one period, at 80% of the code written by José Valim, if you included all the gems, the device and the resourceful and all the rest of it. Elixir in many ways was born out of the kind of limitations of Ruby with Rails and Phoenix was also born out of frustrations with the complexity of Rails. While it's not as simple as say, Michel Martens' Syro which is like his web framework, which is a successor to Cuba if people have heard of that, it is a step in the right direction. I don't understand it but I certainly feel like I could. They have plug which is kind of analogous but not identical to Rack but then the whole thing is built out of plugs. I remember Yehuda Katz give a presentation like 'The Next Five Years' and essentially about Rails 3.0. This is going way back and Phoenix is in some ways the manifestation of his desire to have like the Russian doll pattern, where you could nest applications inside applications and you could have them side by side and put them inside each other and things like that. Phoenix has this concept called umbrella applications which tells that, like Ecto is a really, really nice obstruction for working with the database. CHARLES:: I see. It feels like, as opposed to being functional or static versus dynamic, the question is how do you generate your complexity? How do you cope with complexity? Because I think you touched on it at the beginning of the conversation where you thought that my problems are complex so the systems that I work with to solve those problems must necessarily also be complex. I think one of the things that I've certainly realized, kind of in the later stages of my career is that first part is true. The problems that we encounter are extremely complex but you're much better served if you actually achieve that complexity by composing radically simple systems and recombining them. To the commonality of your system is going to determine how easy it's going to work with and how well it can cope with complexity. What really drives a good system is the quality of its primitives. PHILIP: Absolutely. After ElmConf, I actually invited Michel to come to my place in the Netherlands. He live in Paris but I think he grew up Buenos Aires in Argentina. To my amazement, he said, "Yes, okay," and we spent a couple of days together and there he talked to me about Christopher Alexander and the patterns book, where patterns and design patterns actually grew out of. One of his biggest things was the code is the easiest part, like you've got to spend 80% of your time thinking deeply about the problem, like literally go outside, take long looks. I'm not sure if this is what Rich Hickey means with Hammock Driven Development. I've never actually got around to watching the talk. CHARLES:: I think it's exactly what he means. PHILIP: And he said like once you get at, the code just comes. I think Michel's work, you should really check it out. I'll send you a link to put in the show notes but everything is built out of really small libraries that do one thing and do it really well. For example, he has a library like a Redis client but the Redis client also has something called Nest, which is a way to generate the keys for nested hashes. Because that's a well-designed, the Redis client is literally just a layer on top. If you understand the primitive then, you can use the library on top really well. You can embed Syro applications within Syro applications. I guess, there you also need the luxury of time and I think this is where maybe my role as VP of engineering, which is kind of my first role of that kind, comes in here which is when you're working on the commercial pressure, try to turn around to a business guy and say, "Yes, we'll solve this problem but can we take three weeks to think about it?" It's never going to happen -- CHARLES:: No. PHILIP: Absolutely, it will never going to happen. Although the small things that I tried to do day to day now is get away from the computer, write on paper, write out the problem as you understand it, attack it from different angles, think about different viewpoints, etcetera. CHARLES:: I think if you are able to quantify the cost of not thinking about it for three weeks, then the business person that you're going to talk to is their ears are going to perk up, right? But that's so hard to do. You know, I try and make like when we're saying like, "What technologies are you going to choose? What are the long term ramifications in terms of dollars or euros or whatever currency you happen to be in for making this decision?" I wish we had more support in thinking about that but it is kind of like a one-off every time. Anyway, I'm getting a little bit off track. PHILIP: No, not at all. This is a subject I love to talk about because we kind of had a few a bit of turbulence because we thought, maybe we should get product people in, maybe we should get them a product team going and what I find was -- and this is maybe unique to the size of the company -- that actually made things a lot more difficult because you got too many heads in many ways. Sometimes, it's better to give the developer all of the context so that he can think about it and come up with the best solution because ultimately, he's the only one who can understand. I wouldn't say understands the dollars and cents but he understands the cost implications of doing it in efficient ways, which often happens when you're working in larger teams. TARAS: One thing I find really interesting about this conversation is the definition of good is really complicated here. I've observed Charles work on microstates and I work with him, like I wrote a lot of the code and we got through like five or six iterations and at every point, he got better but it is so difficult to define that. Then when you start to that conversations outside of that code context and you start to introduce business into the mix, the definition of good becomes extremely complicated. What do you think about that? How do we define it in a way? Are there cultures or engineering cultures or societal cultures that have a better definition for good that is relevant to doing quality work of this? CHARLES:: That's a deep question. PHILIP: Wow. Yeah, a really, really deep question. I think often for business, like purely commercially-driven, money-oriented good is the cheapest thing that gets the job done and often that's very short term, I think. As you alluded to Charles, that people don't think about the cost of not doing the right things, so to speak in our eyes and also, there's a huge philosophical discussion whether our definition of good as programmers and people who care about our craft is even analogous to or equal to a good in a commercial context. CHARLES:: Yes, because ultimately and this is if you have read Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, one of the things that Pirsig talks about is what is the definition of quality. How do we define something that's good or something that's bad? One of the definitions that gets put forward is how well something is fit to purpose. Unless you understand the purpose, then you can't determine quality because the purpose defines a very rich texture, a very rich surface and so, quality is going to be the object that maps very evenly and cleanly over that surface. When it comes to what people want in a program, they're going to want very different thing. A developer might need stimulation for this is something that's very new, this is something that's going to keep my interest or it's going to be keeping my CPU max and I'm going to be learning a whole lot. A solution that actually solves for that purpose is going to be a high quality solution. Also, this is going to be fast. We're going to be able to get to market very quickly. It might be one of the purposes and so, a solution that is fast and the purpose fits so it's going to be good. Also, I think developers are just self-indulgent and looking for the next best thing in something that's going to keep their interest, although we're all guilty of that. But at the same time, we're going to be the ones maintaining software, both in our current projects and collectively when we move to a new job and we're going to be responsible for someone else's code, then we're going to be paying the cost of those decisions. We both want to minimize the pain for ourselves and minimize the pain for others who are going to be coming and working in our code to make things long term maintainable. That's one axis of purpose and therefore, an axis of quality. I think in order to measure good and bad, you really have to have a good definition of what is the purpose of that surface is so rich but the more you can map it and find out where the contours lie, the more you're going to be able to determine what's good and what's bad. TARAS: It makes me think of like what is a good hammer. A sledgehammer is a really good hammer but it's not the right hammer for every job. CHARLES:: Right. TARAS: I think what you're saying is understanding what is it that you're actually doing and then matching your solution to what you're actually trying to accomplish. PHILIP: Yeah, absolutely and in my experience, we have a Ruby team building a Rails application. That's our monolith and then, we have a couple of Elixir teams with services that have been spun out of that. This isn't proven. This is just kind of gut feel right now and it is that Elixir is sometimes slower to develop the same feature or ship it but in the long term it's more maintainable. I haven't actually gotten dived into to React and all of the amazing frameworks that it has in terms of getting things up and running quickly but in terms of the full scale application, I still think 10, 11 years on, Rails has no equal in terms of proving a business case in the shortest time possible. CHARLES:: Yeah. I feel very similarly too but the question is does your development team approach the problem as proving a business case or do they approach the problem as I want to solve the set of features? PHILIP: Yes. Where I'm working at the moment, I started out just as a software developer. I guess, we would qualify for 37 signals or sorry... base camps definition of a calm company -- CHARLES:: Of a what company? PHILIP: A calm company. Sorry. They just released a new book and called 'The Calm Company' and 'It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work.' I was given in my first couple of months, a problem. It was business oriented, it had to be solved but it had to be solved well from a technical perspective because we didn't want to have to return to it every time. It was standardizing the way that we exported data from the database to Excel. You know, I was amazed because it was literally, the first time that I'd been given the space to actually dive in on a technical level to do that kind of stuff. But I think even per feature, that varies and that sometimes challenging when handing the work on because you've got to say, "This fit. Literally, we're just trying to prove, whether if we have this feature, the people will use it?" versus, "This is a feature that's going to be used every day and therefore, needs to be at good, technical quality." Those are the tradeoffs that I guess, keep you in a job. Because if it was easy, then you would need anyone to figure it out but it's always a challenge. What I like is that our tools are actually getting better and I think, with Elm for example, it's kind of major selling point is maintainability and yet, with Elm, there haven't been that many companies with Elm over a period of years that exists, that can live to tell the tale. Whereas, we certainly know with Rails applications have done well like Basecamp and GitHub. For sure, they can be super maintainable but the fact that it took GitHub to just moved Elm to Rails 5.0, I belief, the fact that it took them years and years and they were running off at fork of Rails 2.3, I think it shows the scale of the problem in that way. You know, Phoenix also went through a few issues, kind of moving architectures from the classic Rails to a more demand driven design model. I think we're getting there slowly, zig-zagging towards a place where we better understand how to write software to solve business problems. I guess, I was really interested in microstates when you shared it at Wicked Good Ember because that to me was attacking the problem from the right perspective. It's like given the fact that the ecosystem is always changing. How can we extract the business logic such that these changes don't affect the logic of our application? CHARLES:: Man, we got a lot to show you. It has changed quite a bit in the last two years. Hopefully, for the better. TARAS: It's been reduced and it's almost a quarter of its size while maintaining the same feature set and it's faster, it's lazier, it's better in every respect. It's just the ideas have actually been fairly consistent. It's just the implementation that's evolved. CHARLES:: Yeah, it's been quite a journey. It parallels kind of the story that we're talking about here in the sense that it really has been a search for primitives and a search for simplification. One of the things that we've been talking about, having these Ruby gems that do one thing and do it very, very, very well or the way that Elixir being architected has some very, very good primitives or Elm, the same kind of thing being spiritually aligned, even though on the surface, it might share more in common with Haskell. There's actually a deep alignment with a thing like Ruby and that's a very surprising result. I think one of the things that appeals to me about the type of functional programming that is ironically, I guess not present in Elm, where you have the concept of these type classes but I actually think, I love them for their simplicity. I've kind of become disenchanted with things like Lodash, even though they're nominally functional. The fact that you don't have things like monoid and functors and stuff is kind of first class participants in the ecosystems, means you have to have a bunch of throwaway functions. Those API surface area is very large, whereas if you do account for those things, these kind of ways of combining data and that's how you achieve your complexity, is not by a bunch of one-off methods that are like in Lodash, they're all provided for you so you don't have or have to write them yourself. That is one level of convenience but having access to five primitives, I think that's the power of the kind of the deeper functional programming types. PHILIP: And Charles, do you think that that gives you the ability to think at a higher level, about the problems that you're solving? Would you make that link? CHARLES:: Absolutely. PHILIP: So, if we're not doing that, then we're actually doing ourselves a disservice? CHARLES:: I would say so. PHILIP: Because we're actually creating complexity, where it shouldn't exist? CHARLES:: Yeah, I think if you have a more powerful primitive, you can think of things like async functions and generator functions, there's a common thread between async functions, generator functions, promises arrays and they're all functors. For me, that's a very profound realization and there might be a deeper spiritual link between say, an async function and an array in the same way that there's a deep spiritual link between Ruby and Elm, that if you don't see that, then you're doing yourself a disservice and you're able to think at a higher level. Also, you have a smaller tool set where each tool is more powerful. PHILIP: You did a grit, I think it was a repository with a ReadMe, where you boiled down what people would term what I would term, the scary functional language down to a very simple JavaScript. Did you ever finish that? Did you get to the monads? CHARLES:: I did get to the monads, yeah. PHILIP: Okay. I need to check that out again. I find that really, really helpful because I think one of Evan's big things with Elm is he doesn't use those terms ever and he avoids them like the plague because I think he believes they come tinged with the negative experiences of people trying Haskell and essentially getting laughed at, right? CHARLES:: Yes. I think there's something to that. TARAS: But we're doing that in microstates as well, right? In microstates documentation, even though microstates are written completely with these functional primitives, on the outside, there's almost no mention of it. It's just that when you actually go to use it, if you have an idea, one of the thing that's really powerful with microstates is that this idea that you can return another microstate from a transition and what that will do is what you kind of like what a flat map would do, which is replace that particular node with the thing that you returned it with. For a lot of people, they might not know that that's like a flat map would do but a microstate will do exactly what they wanted to do when it didn't realize that's actually should just work like that. I think, a lot of the work that we've done recently is to package all things and it make it powerful and to access the concepts that it is very familiar, something you don't need to learn. You just use it and it just works for you. CHARLES:: Right but it is something that I feel like there's unharvested value for every programmer out there in these type classes: monads and monoids and functors and co-functors or covariant functors, contravariant functors, blah-blah-blah, that entire canon. I wish there was some way to reconcile the negative connotations and baggage that that has because we feel kind of the same way and I think that Evan's absolutely right. You do want to hide that or make it so that the technology is accessible without having to know those things. But in the same way, these concepts are so powerful, both in terms of just having to think less and having to write less code but also, as a tool to say, "I've got this process. Is there any way that could it be a functor? If I can find a way that this thing is a functor, I can just save myself so much time and take so many shortcuts with it." PHILIP: And in order to be able to communicate that, or at least communicate about that, you need to have terms to call these things, right? Because you can't always just refer to the code or the pattern. It's always good to have a name. I'm with you. I see value in both, like making it approachable, so the people who don't know the terms are not frightened away. But I also see value in using the terms that have always existed to refer to those things, so that things are clear and we can communicate about them. CHARLES:: Right. definitely, there's a tradeoff there. I don't know where exactly the line is but it would be nice to be able to have our cake and eat that one too. We didn't get really to talk about the type versus dynamic in the greater context of this whole conversation. We can explore that topic a little bit. PHILIP: Well, I can finish with, I think the future is typed Erlang. Maybe, that's Elm running on BEAM. CHARLES:: Whoa. What a take? Right there, folks. I love it. I love it but what makes you say that? Typed Erlang doesn't exist right now, right? PHILIP: Exactly. CHARLES:: And Elm definitely doesn't run on BEAM. PHILIP: I don't know if I'm allowed to say this. When I was at this workshop with Evan, he mentioned that and I'm not sure whether he mentioned it just as a throwaway comment or whether this is part of his 20-year plan but I think the very fact that Elm is designed around like Erlang, the signal stuff was designed around the way Erlang does communication and processes, it means I know at least he appreciates that model. From my point of view, with my experience with Elixir and Erlang in production usage, it's not huge scale but it's scale enough to need to start doing performance work on Rails and just to see how effortless things are with Elixir and with Erlang. I think Elm in the backend would be amazing but it would have to be a slightly different language, I think because the problems are different. We began this by saying that my story was a little different to the norm because I went back to the dynamic, at the dark side but for example in Elixir, I do miss types hugely. They kind of have a little bit of a hack with Erlang because they return a lot of tuples with OK and then the object. You know, it's almost like wrapping it up in a [inaudible]. There are little things and there's Dialyzer to kind of type check and I think there are a few projects which do add types to Erlang, etcetera. But I think something that works would need to be designed from the ground up to be typed and also run in the BEAM, rather than be like a squashed version of something else to fit somewhere else, if that makes sense. CHARLES:: It makes total sense. PHILIP: I think so. I recently read a book, just to finish which was 'FSharpForFunAndProfit' is his website, Scott Wlaschin, I think. It's written up with F# but it's about designing your program in a type functional language. Using the book, you could probably then just design your programs on paper and only commit to code at the end because you're thinking right down to the level of the types and the process and the pipelines, which to me sounds amazing because I could work outside. CHARLES:: Right. All right-y. I will go ahead and wrap it up. I would just like to say thank you so much, Philip for coming on and talking about your story, as unorthodox as it might be. PHILIP: Thank you. CHARLES:: Thank you, Taras. Thank you, David. TARAS: Thank you for having us. CHARLES:: That's it for Episode 113. We are the Frontside. This is The Frontside Podcast. We build applications that you can stake your future on. If that's something that you're interested in, please get in touch with us. If you have any ideas for a future podcast, things that you'd like to hear us discuss or any feedback on the things that you did here, please just let us know. Once again, thank you Mandy for putting together this wonderful podcast and now we will see you all next time.

"The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away. Puzzling." - Robert M. Pirsig

Zen und die Kunst, ein Motorrad zu warten bzw. im Originaltitel: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance war eine philosophische Abhandlung von Robert M. Pirsig aus dem Jahr 1974. Vor kurzem waren Lydia und ich in Klagenfurt am Wörthersee … Der Beitrag Sonntag: Tag der Entspannung oder Selbstoptimierung? | Quickie erschien zuerst auf #Onlinegeister.

Aaron of the Embrace the Void Podcast, a philosophy lecturer talks about some of his insights into contemporary philosophy culture. After that, he helps Jeremiah understand concepts from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig, and how to use those concepts in everyday life.

Kniha mimo komfortnú zónu mnohých z nás, napriek tomu niečo, čo s čím sa oplatí začať. Ani nie o motocykloch, ani nie o zene, ale z každého rožku trošku a niečo navyše. Príbeh otca a syna, ceste na motorke, hĺbavého premýšľania a psychickej choroby.

Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | PlayerFM Keep up with the North Star Podcast. My guest today is Michael Nielsen a scientist, writer and computer programmer who works as a research fellow at Y Combinator Research. Michael has written on various topics from quantum teleportation, geometric complexity and the future of science. Michael is the most original thinker I have discovered in a long time when it comes to artificial intelligence, augmenting human intelligence, reinventing explanation and using new media to enable new ways of thinking. Michael has pushed my mind towards new and unexpected places. This conversation gets a little wonky at times, but as you know, the best conversations are difficult. They are challenging because they venture into new, unexplored territory and that's exactly what we did here today.  Michael and I explored the history of tools and jump back to the invention of language, the defining feature of human collaboration and communication. We explore the future of data visualization and talk about the history of the spreadsheet as a tool for human thought.  “Before writing and mathematics, you have the invention of language which is the most significant event in some ways. That’s probably the defining feature of the human species as compared to other species.” LINKS Find Michael Online Michael’s Website Michael’s Twitter Michael’s Free Ebook: Neural Networks and Deep Learning Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science Quantum Computation and Quantum Information Mentioned In the Show 2:12 Michael’s Essay Extreme Thinking 21:48 Photoshop 21:49 Microsoft Word 24:02 The David Bowie Exhibit 28:08 Google AI’s Deep Dream Images 29:26 Alpha Go 30:26 Brian Eno’s Infamous Airport Music 33:41 Listen to Speed of Life by Dirty South Books Mentioned 46:06 Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig 54:12 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut People Mentioned 13:27 Rembrandt Van Rijn’s Artwork 15:01 Monet’s Gallery 15:02 Pierre Auguste Renoir’s Impressionist Art 15:05 Picasso’s Paintings 15:18 Paul Cezanne’s Post-Impressionist Art 25:40 David Brooke’s NYT Column 35:19 Franco of Cologne 56:58 Alan Kay’s Ted Talk on the future of education 57:04 Doug Engelbart 58:35 Karl Schroeder 01:02:06 Elon Musk’s Mars-bound company, SpaceX 01:04:25 Alex Tabarrok Show Topics 4:01 Michael’s North Star, which drives the direction of his research 5:32 Michael talks about how he sets his long-term goals and how he’s propelled by ideas he’s excited to see in the world. 7:13 The invention of language. Michael discusses human biology and how it’s easier to learn a language than writing or mathematics.  9:28 Michael talks about humanity’s ability to bootstrap itself. Examples include maps, planes, and photography  17:33 Limitations in media due to consolidation and the small number of communication platforms available to us  18:30 How self-driving cars and smartphones highlight the strange intersection where artificial intelligence meets human interaction and the possibilities that exist as technology improves 21:45 Why does Photoshop improve your editing skills, while Microsoft Word doesn’t improve your writing skills? 27:07 Michael’s opinion on how Artificial Intelligence can help people be more creative “Really good AI systems are going to depend upon building and currently depend on building very good models of different parts of the world, to the extent that we can then build tools to actually look in and see what those models are telling us about the world.”  30:22 The intersection of algorithms and creativity. Are algorithms the musicians of the future? 36:51 The emerging ability to create interactive visual representations of spreadsheets that are used in media, internally in companies, elections and more. “I’m interested in the shift from having media be predominantly static to dynamic, which the New York Times is a perfect example of. They can tell stories on newyorktimes.com that they can’t tell in the newspaper that gets delivered to your doorstep.” 45:42 The strategies Michael uses to successfully trail blaze uncharted territory and how they emulate building a sculpture   53:30 Michael’s learning and information consumption process, inspired by the idea that you are what you pretend to be 56:44 The foundation of Michael’s worldview. The people and ideas that have shaped and inspired Michael.  01:02:26 Michael’s hypothesis for the 21st century project involving blockchain and cryptocurrencies and their ability to make implementing marketplaces easier than ever before “The key point is that some of these cryptocurrencies actually, potentially, make it very easy to implement marketplaces. It’s plausible to me that the 21st century [project] turns out to be about [marketplaces]. It’s about inventing new types of markets, which really means inventing new types of collective action.” Host David Perell and Guest Michael Nielsen TRANSCRIPT Hello and welcome to the North Star. I'm your host, David Perell, the founder of North Star Media, and this is the North Star podcast. This show is a deep dive into the stories, habits, ideas, strategies, and rituals that guide fulfilled people and create enormous success for them, and while the guests are diverse, they share profound similarities. They're guided by purpose, live with intense joy, learn passionately, and see the world with a unique lens. With each episode, we get to jump into their minds, soak up their hard-earned wisdom and apply it to our lives. My guest today is Michael Nielson, a scientist, writer, and computer programmer, who works as a research fellow at Y Combinator Research. Michael's written on various topics from quantum teleportation to geometric complexity to the future of science, and now Michael is the most original thinker I've discovered in a long time. When it comes to artificial intelligence to augmenting human intelligence, reinventing explanation, or using new media to enable new ways of thinking, Michael has pushed my mind towards new and unexpected places. Now, this conversation gets a little wonky at times, but as you know, the best conversations are difficult. They're challenging because they venture into new, unexplored territory and that's exactly what we did here today. Michael and I explored the history of tools. This is an extension of human thought and we jump back to the invention of language, the defining feature of human collaboration and communication. We explore the future of data visualization and talk about the history of this spreadsheet as a tool for human thought. Here's my conversation with Michael Nielson. DAVID: Michael Nielson, welcome to the North Star Podcast. MICHAEL: Thank you, David. DAVID: So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. MICHAEL: So day to day, I'm a researcher at Y Combinator Research. I'm basically a reformed theoretical physicist. My original background is doing quantum computing work. And then I've moved around a bit over the years. I've worked on open science, I've worked on artificial intelligence and most of my current work is around tools for thought. DAVID: So you wrote an essay which I really enjoyed called Extreme Thinking. And in it, you said that one of the single most important principle of learning is having a strong sense of purpose and a strong sense of meaning. So let's be in there. What is that for you? MICHAEL: Okay. You've done your background. Haven't thought about that essay in years. God knows how long ago I wrote it. Having a strong sense of purpose. What did I actually mean? Let me kind of reboot my own thinking. It's, it's kind of the banal point of view. How much you want something really matters. There's this lovely interview with the physicist Richard Feynman, where he's asked about this Indian mathematical prodigy Ramanujan. A movie was made about Ramanujan’s mathematical prowess a couple of years ago. He was kind of this great genius. And a Feynman was asked what made Ramanujan so good. And the interview was expecting him to say something about how bright this guy was or whatever. And Feynman said instead, that it was desire. It was just that love of mathematics was at the heart of it. And he couldn't stop thinking about it and he was thinking about it. He was doing in many ways, I guess the hard things. It's very difficult to do the hard things that actually block you unless you have such a strong desire that you're willing to go through those things. Of course, I think you see that in all people who get really good at something, whether it be sort of a, just a skill like playing the violin or something, which is much more complicated. DAVID: So what is it for you? What is that sort of, I hate to say I want to just throw that out here, that North Star, so to speak, of what drives you in your research? MICHAEL: Research is funny. You go through these sort of down periods in which you don't necessarily have something driving you on. That used to really bother me early in my career. That was sort of a need to always be moving. But now I think that it's actually important to allow yourself to do that. That's actually how you find the problems, which really get, get you excited. If you don't sort of take those pauses, then you're not gonna find something that's really worth working on. I haven't actually answered your question. I think I know I've jumped to that other point because that's one thing that really matters to me and it was something that was hard to learn. DAVID: So one thing that I've been thinking a lot about recently is you sort of see it in companies. You see it in countries like Singapore, companies like Amazon and then something like the Long Now Foundation with like the 10,000-year clock. And I'm wondering to you in terms of learning, there's always sort of a tension between short-term learning and long-term learning. Like short-term learning so often is maybe trying to learn something that feels a little bit richer. So for me, that's reading, whereas maybe for a long-term learning project there are things I'd like to learn like Python. I'd like to learn some other things like that. And I'm wondering, do you set long-term learning goals for yourself or how would you think about that trade off? MICHAEL: I try to sit long-time learning goals to myself, in many ways against my better judgment. It's funny like you're very disconnected from you a year from now or five years from now, or 10 years from now. I can't remember, but Eisenhower or Bonaparte or somebody like that said that the planning is invaluable or planning plans are overrated, but planning is invaluable. And I think that's true. And this is the right sort of attitude to take towards these long-term lending goals. Sure. It's a great idea to decide that you're going out. Actually, I wouldn't say it was a great idea to say that you're going to learn python, I might say. However, there was a great idea to learn python if you had some project that you desperately wanted to do that it required you to learn python, then it's worth doing, otherwise stay away from python. I certainly favor, coupling learning stuff to projects that you're excited to actually see in the world. But also, then you may give stuff up, you don't become a master of python and instead you spend whatever, a hundred hours or so learning about it for this project that takes you a few hundred hours, and if you want to do a successor project which involves it, more of it. Great, you'll become better. And if you don't, well you move onto something else. DAVID: Right. Well now I want to dive into the thing that I'm most excited to talk to you about today and that's tools that extend human thought. And so let's start with the history of that. We'll go back sort of the history of tools and there's had great Walter Ong quote about how there are no new thoughts without new technologies. And maybe we can start there with maybe the invention of writing, the invention of mathematics and then work through that and work to where you see the future of human thought going with new technologies. MICHAEL: Actually, I mean before writing and mathematics, you have the invention of language, which is almost certainly the most significant single event in some ways. The history of the planet suddenly, you know, that's probably the defining feature of the human species as compared to other species. Um, I say invention, but it's not even really invention. There's certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that language is in some important sense built into our biology. Not the details of language. Um, but this second language acquisition device, it seems like every human is relatively very set to receive language. The actual details depend on the culture we grow up on. Obviously, you don't grow up speaking French if you were born in San Francisco and unless you were in a French-speaking household, some very interesting process of evolution going on there where you have something which is fundamentally a technology in some sense languages, humans, a human invention. It's something that's constructed. It's culturally carried. Um, it, there's all these connections between different words. There's almost sort of a graph of connections between the words if you like, or all sorts of interesting associations. So in that sense, it's a technology, something that's been constructed, but it's also something which has been over time built into our biology. Now if you look at later technologies of thought things like say mathematics, those are much, much later. That hasn't been the same sort of period of time. Those don't seem to be built into our biology in quite the same way. There's actually some hints of that we have some intrinsic sense of number and there's some sort of interesting experiments that suggest that we were built to do certain rudimentary kinds of mathematical reasoning but there's no, you know, section of the brain which specializes sort of from birth in solving quadratic equations, much less doing algebraic geometry or whatever, you know, super advanced. So it becomes this cultural thing over the last few thousand years, this kind of amazing process whereby we've started to bootstrap ourselves. If you think about something like say the invention of maps, which really has changed the way people relate to the environment. Initially, they were very rudimentary things. Um, and people just kept having new ideas for making maps more and more powerful as tools for thought. Okay. I can give you an example. You know, a very simple thing, if you've ever been to say the underground in London or most other subway systems around the world. It was actually the underground when this first happened, if you look at the map of the underground, I mean it's a very complicated map, but you can get pretty good at reasoning about how to get from one place to another. And if you look at maps prior to, I think it was 1936, in fact, the maps were much more complicated. And the reason was that mapmakers up to that point had the idea that where the stations were shown on the map had to correspond to the geography of London. Exactly. And then somebody involved in producing the underground map had just a brilliant insight that actually people don't care. They care about the connections between the stations and they want to know about the lines and they want some rough idea of the geography, but they're quite happy for it to be very rough indeed and he was able to dramatically simplify that map by simply doing away with any notion of exact geography. DAVID: Well, it's funny because I noticed the exact same thing in New York and so often you have insights when you see two things coming together. So I was on the subway coming home one day and I was looking at the map and I always thought that Manhattan was way smaller than Brooklyn, but on the subway map, Manhattan is actually the same size as Brooklyn. And in Manhattan where the majority of the subway action is, it takes up a disproportionate share of the New York City subway map. And then I went home to go read Power Broker, which is a book about Robert Moses building the highways and they had to scale map. And what I saw was that Brooklyn was way, way bigger than Manhattan. And from predominantly looking at subway maps. Actually, my topological geographical understanding of New York was flawed and I think exactly to your point. MICHAEL: It's interesting. When you think about what's going on there and what it is, is some person or a small group of people is thinking very hard about how to represent their understanding of the city and then the building, tools, sort of a technological tool of thought that actually then saves millions or in the case of a New York subway or the London underground, hundreds of millions or billions of people, mostly just seconds, sometimes, probably minutes. Like those maps would be substantially more complicated sort of every single day. So it's only a small difference. I mean, and it's just one invention, right? But, you know, our culture is of course accumulated thousands or millions of these inventions. DAVID: One of my other favorite ones from being a kid was I would always go on airplanes and I'd look at the route map and it would always show that the airplanes would fly over the North Pole, but on two-dimensional space that was never clear to me. And I remember being with my dad one night, we bought a globe and we took a rubber band and we stretched why it was actually shorter to fly over the North Pole, say if you're going from New York to India. And that was one of the first times in my life that I actually didn't realize it at the time, but understood exactly what I think you're trying to get at there. How about photography? Because that's another one that I think is really striking, vivid from the horse to slow motion to time lapses. MICHAEL: Photography I think is interesting in this vein in two separate ways. One is actually what it did to painting, which is of course painters have been getting more and more interested in being more and more realistic. And honestly, by the beginning of the 19th century, I think painting was pretty boring. Yeah, if you go back to say the 16th and 17th centuries, you have people who are already just astoundingly good at depicting things in a realistic fashion. To my mind, Rembrandt is probably still the best portrait painter in some sense to ever live. DAVID: And is that because he was the best at painting something that looked real? MICHAEL: I think he did something better than that. He did this very clever thing, you know, you will see a photograph or a picture of somebody and you'll say, oh, that really looks like them. And I think actually most of the time we, our minds almost construct this kind of composite image that we think of as what David looks like or what our mother looks like or whatever. But actually moment to moment, they mostly don't look like that. They mostly, you know, their faces a little bit more drawn or it's, you know, the skin color is a little bit different. And my guess, my theory of Rembrandt, is that he may have actually been very, very good at figuring out almost what that image was and actually capturing that. So, yeah, I mean this is purely hypothetical. I have no real reason to believe it, but I think it's why I responded so strongly to his paintings. DAVID: And then what happened? So after Rembrandt, what changed? MICHAEL: So like I said, you mean you keep going for a sort of another 200 years, people just keep getting more and more realistic in some sense. You have all the great landscape painters and then you have this catastrophe where photography comes along and all of a sudden you're being able to paint in a more and more realistic fashion. It doesn't seem like such a hot thing to be doing anymore. And if for some painters, I think this was a bit of a disaster, a bit of dose. I said of this modern wave, you start to see through people like Monet and Renoir. But then I think Picasso, for me anyway, was really the pivotal figure in realizing that actually what art could become, is the invention of completely new ways of seeing. And he starts to play inspired by Cezanne and others in really interesting ways with the construction of figures and such. Showing things from multiple angles in one painting and different points of view. And he just plays with hundreds of ideas along these lines, through all of his painting and how we see and what we see in how we actually construct reality in their heads from the images that we see. And he did so much of that. It really became something that I think a lot of artists, I'm not an artist or a sophisticated art theory person, but it became something that other people realized was actually an extraordinarily interesting thing to be doing. And much of the most interesting modern art is really a descendant of that understanding that it's a useful thing to be doing. A really interesting thing to be doing rather than becoming more and more realistic is actually finding more and more interesting ways of seeing and being able to represent the world. DAVID: So I think that the quote is attributed to Marshall McLuhan, but I have heard that Winston Churchill said it. And first, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us. And that seems to be sort of the foundation of a lot of the things that you're saying. MICHAEL: Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, on the other side, you also have, to your original question about photography. Photographers have gradually started to realize that they could shape how they saw nature. Ansel Adams and people like this, you know. Just what an eye. And understanding his tools so verbally he's not just capturing what you see. He's constructing stuff in really, really interesting ways. DAVID: And how about moving forward in terms of your work, thinking about where we are now to thinking about the future of technology. For example, one thing that frustrates me a bit as a podcast host is, you know, we just had this conversation about art and it's the limits of the audio medium to not be able to show the paintings of Rembrandt and Cezanne that we just alluded to. So as you think about jumping off of that, as you think about where we are now in terms of media to moving forward, what are some of the challenges that you see and the issues that you're grappling with? MICHAEL: One thing for sure, which I think inhibits a lot of exploration. We're trapped in a relatively small number of platforms. The web is this amazing thing as our phones, iOS and whatnot, but they're also pretty limited and that bothers me a little bit. Basically when you sort of narrow down to just a few platforms which have captured almost all of the attention, that's quite limiting. People also, they tend not to make their own hardware. They don't do these kinds of these kinds of things. If that were to change, I think that would certainly be exciting. Something that I think is very, very interesting over the next few years, artificial intelligence has gotten to the point now where we can do a pretty good job in understanding what's actually going on inside a room. Like we can set up sufficient cameras. If you think about something like self-driving cars, essentially what they're doing is they're building up a complete model of the environment and if that model is not pretty darned good, then you can't do self-driving cars, you need to know where the pedestrians are and where the signs are and all these kinds of things and if there's an obstruction and that technology when brought into, you know, the whole of the rest of the world means that you're pretty good at passing out. You know what's inside the room. Oh, there's a chair over there, there's a dog which is moving in that direction, there's a person, there’s a baby and sort of understanding all those actions and ideally starting to understand all the gestures which people are making as well. So we're in this very strange state right at the moment. Where the way we talk to computers is we have these tiny little rectangles and we talk to them through basically a square inch or so of sort of skin, which is our eyes. And then we, you know, we tap away with our fingers and the whole of the rest of our body and our existence is completely uncoupled from that. We've effectively reduced ourselves to our fingers and our eyes. We a couple to it only through the whatever, 100 square inches, couple hundred square inches of our screens or less if you're on a phone and everything else in the environment is gone. But we're actually at a point where we're nearly able to do an understanding of all of that sufficiently well that actually other modes of interaction will become possible. I don't think we're quite there yet, but we're pretty close. And you start to think about, something like one of my favorite sport is tennis. You think about what a tennis player can do with their body or you think about what a dancer can do with their body. It's just extraordinary. And all of that mode of being human and sort of understanding we can build up antibodies is completely shut out from the computing experience at the moment. And I think over the next sort of five to ten years that will start to reenter and then in the decades hence, it will just seem strange that it was ever shut out. DAVID: So help me understand this. So when you mean by start to reenter, do mean that we'll be able to control computers with other parts of our bodies or that we'll be spending less time maybe typing on keyboards. Help me flesh this out. MICHAEL: I just mean that at the moment. As you speak to David, you are waving your arms around and all sorts of interesting ways and there is no computer system which is aware of it, what your computer system is aware of. You're doing this recording. That's it. And even that, it doesn't understand in any sort of significant way. Once you've gained the ability to understand the environment. Lots of interesting things become possible. The obvious example, which everybody immediately understands is that self driving cars become possible. There's this sort of enormous capacity. But I think it's certainly reasonably likely that much more than that will become possible over the next 10 to 20 years. As your computer system becomes completely aware of your environment or as aware as you're willing to allow it to be. DAVID: You made a really interesting analogy in one of your essays about the difference between Photoshop and Microsoft Word. That was really fascinating to me because I know both programs pretty well. But to know Microsoft word doesn't necessarily mean that I'm a better writer. It actually doesn't mean that at all. But to know Photoshop well probably makes me pretty good at image manipulation. I'm sure there's more there, but if you could walk me through your thought process as you were thinking through that. I think that's really interesting. MICHAEL: So it's really about a difference in the type of tools which are built into the program. So in Photoshop, which I should say, I don't know that well, I know Word pretty well. I've certainly spent a lot more time in it than I have ever spent in Photoshop. But in Photoshop, you do have these very interesting tools which have been built in, which really condense an enormous amount of understanding of ideas like layers or an idea, different brushes, these kinds of ideas. There's just a tremendous amount of understanding which has been built in there. When I watch friends who are really good with these kinds of programs, what they can do with layers is just amazing. They understand all these kind of clever screening techniques. It seems like such a simple idea and yet they're able to do these things that let you do astonishing things just with sort of three or four apparently very simple operations. So in that sense, there are some very deep ideas about image manipulation, which had been built directly into Photoshop. By contrast, there's not really very many deep ideas about writing built into Microsoft Word. If you talk to writers about how they go about their actual craft and you say, well, you know, what heuristics do use to write stories and whatnot. Most of the ideas which they use aren't, you know, they don't correspond directly to any set of tools inside Word. Probably the one exception is ideas, like outlining. There are some tools which have been built into word and that's maybe an example where in fact Word does help the writer a little bit, but I don't think to nearly the same extent as Photoshop seems to. DAVID: I went to an awesome exhibit for David Bowie and one of the things that David but we did when he was writing songs was he had this word manipulator which would just throw him like 20, 30 words and the point wasn't that he would use those words. The point was that by getting words, his mind would then go to different places and so often when you're in my experience and clearly his, when you're trying to create something, it helps to just be thrown raw material at you rather than the perennial, oh my goodness, I'm looking at a white screen with like this clicking thing that is just terrifying, Word doesn't help you in that way. MICHAEL: So an example of something which does operate a little bit in that way, it was a Ph.D. thesis was somebody wrote at MIT about what was called the Remembrance Agent. And what it would do, it was a plugin essentially for a text editor that it would, look at what you are currently writing and it would search through your hard disk for documents that seemed like they might actually be relevant. Just kind of prompt you with what you're writing. Seems like it might be related to this or this or this or this or this. And to be perfectly honest, it didn't actually work all that well. I think mostly because the underlying machine learning algorithms it used weren't very clever. It's defunct now as far as I know. I tried to get it to run on my machine or a year or two ago and I couldn't get it running. It was still an interesting thing to do. It had exactly this same kind of the belly sort of experience. Even if they weren't terribly relevant. You kind of couldn't understand why on earth you are being shown it. It's still jogged your mind in an interesting way. DAVID: Yeah. I get a lot of help out of that. Actually, I’ll put this example. So David Brooks, you know the columnist for the New York Times. When he writes, what he does is he gets all of his notes and he just puts his notes on the floor and he literally crawls all around and tries to piece the notes together and so he's not even writing. He's just organizing ideas and it must really help him as it helps me to just have raw material and just organize it all in the same place. MICHAEL: There's a great British humorist, PG Boathouse, he supposedly wrote on I think it was the three by five-inch cards. He'd write a paragraph on each one, but he had supposedly a very complicated system in his office, well not complicated at all, but it must have looked amazing where he would basically paste the cards to the wall and as the quality of each paragraph rose, he would move the paragraph up the wall and I think the idea was something like once it got to the end, it was a lion or something, every paragraph in the book had to get above that line and at that point it was ready to go. DAVID: So I've been thinking a lot about sort of so often in normal media we take AI sort of on one side and art on another side. But I think that so many of the really interesting things that will emerge out of this as the collaboration between the two. And you've written a bit about art and AI, so how can maybe art or artificial intelligence help people be more creative in this way? MICHAEL: I think we still don't know the answer to the question, unfortunately. The hoped-for answer the answer that might turn out to be true. Real AI systems are going to build up very good models of different parts of the world, maybe better than any human has of those parts of the world. It might be the case, I don't know. It might be the case that something like the Google translate system, maybe in some sense that system already knows some facts about translation that would be pretty difficult to track down in any individual human mind and sort of so much about translation in some significant ways. I'm just speculating here. But if you can start to interrogate that understanding, it becomes a really useful sort of a prosthetic for human beings. If you've seen any of these amazing, well I guess probably the classics, the deep dream images that came out of Google brain a couple of years ago. Basically, you take ordinary images and you're sort of running them backwards through a neural net somehow. You're sort of seeing something about how the neural net sees that image. You get these very beautiful images as a result. There's something strange going on and sort of revealing about your own way of seeing the world. And at the same time, it's based on some structure which this neural net has discovered inside these images which is not ordinarily directly accessible to you. It's showing you that structure. So sort of I think the right way to think about this is that really good AI systems are going to depend upon building and do currently depend on building very good models of different parts of the world and to the extent that we can then build tools to actually look in and see what those models are telling us about the world, we can learn interesting new things which are useful for us. I think the conventional way, certainly the science fiction way to think about AI is that we're going to give it commands and it's going to do stuff. How you shut the whatever it is, the door or so on and so forth, and there was certainly will be a certain amount of that. Or with AlphaGo what is the best move to take now, but actually in some sense, with something like AlphaGo, it's probably more interesting to be able to look into it and see what it's understanding is of the board position than it is to ask what's the best move to be taken. A colleague showed me a go program, a prototype, what it would do. It was a very simple kind of a thing, but it would help train beginners. I think it was Go, but by essentially colorizing different parts of the board according to whether they were good or bad moves to be taking in its estimation. If you're a sophisticated player, it probably wasn't terribly helpful, but if you're just a beginner, there's an interesting kind of a conditioning going on there. At least potentially a which lets you start to see. You get a feeling for immediate feedback from. And all that's happening there is that you're seeing a little bit into one of these machine learning algorithms and that's maybe helping you see the world in a slightly different way. DAVID: As I was preparing for this podcast, you've liked a lot to Brian Eno and his work. So I spent as much time reading Brian Eno, which I'm super happy that I went down those rabbit holes. But one of the things that he said that was really interesting, so he's one of the fathers of ambient music and he said that a lot of art and especially music, there will sort of be algorithms where you sort of create an algorithm that to the listener might even sound better than what a human would produce. And he said two things that were interesting. The first one is that you create an algorithm and then a bunch of different musical forms could flower out of that algorithm. And then also said that often the art that algorithms create is more appealing to the viewer. But it takes some time to get there. And had the creator just followed their intuition. They probably would have never gotten there. MICHAEL: It certainly seems like it might be true. And that's the whole sort of interesting thing with that kind of computer-generated music is to, I think the creators of it often don't know where they're gonna end up. To be honest, I think my favorite music is all still by human composers. I do enjoy performances by people who live code. There's something really spectacular about that. So there are people who, they will set up the computer and hook it up to speakers and they will hook the text editor up to a projector and they'll have essentially usually a modified form of the programming language list a or people use a few different systems I guess. And they will write a program which producers music onstage and they'll just do it in real time and you know, it starts out sounding terrible of course. And that lasts for about 20 seconds and by about sort of 30 or 40 seconds in, already it's approaching the limits of complex, interesting music and I think even if you don't really have a clue what they're doing as they program, there's still something really hypnotic and interesting about watching them actually go through this process of creating music sort of both before your eyes and before your ears. It's a really interesting creative experience and sometimes quite beautiful. I think I suspect that if I just heard one of those pieces separately, I probably wouldn't do so much for me, but actually having a done in real time and sort of seeing the process of creation, it really changes the experience and makes it very, very interesting. And sometimes, I mean, sometimes it's just beautiful. That's the good moment, right? When clearly the person doing it has something beautiful happen. You feel something beautiful happen and everybody else around you feel something beautiful and spontaneous. It's just happened. That's quite a remarkable experience. Something really interesting is happening with the computer. It's not something that was anticipated by the creator. It arose out of an interaction between them and their machine. And it is actually beautiful. DAVID: Absolutely. Sort of on a similar vein, there's a song called Speed of Life by Dirty South. So I really liked electronic music, but what he does is he constructs a symphony, but he goes one layer at a time. It's about eight and a half minute song and he just goes layer after layer, after layer, after layer. And what's really cool about listening to it is you appreciate the depth of a piece of music that you would never be able to appreciate if you didn't have that. And also by being able to listen to it over and over again. Because before we had recording, you would only hear a certain piece of music live and one time. And so there are new forms that are bursting out of now because we listen to songs so often. MICHAEL: It's interesting to think, there's a sort of a history to that as well. If you go back, essentially modern systems for recording music, if you go back much more than a thousand years. And we didn't really have them. There's a multi-thousand-year history of recorded music. But a lot of the early technology was lost and it wasn't until sort of I think the eighth, ninth century that people started to do it again. But we didn't get all the way to button sheet music overnight. There was a whole lot of different inventions. For instance, the early representations didn't show absolute pitch. They didn't show the duration of the note. Those were ideas that had to be invented. So in I think it was 1026, somebody introduced the idea of actually showing a scale where you can have absolute pitch. And then a century or two after that, Franco of Cologne had the idea of representing duration. And so they said like tiny little things, but then you start to think about, well, what does that mean for the ability to compose music? It means now that actually, you can start to compose pieces, which for many, many, many different instruments. So you start to get the ability to have orchestral music. So you go from being able to basically you have to kind of instruct small groups of players that's the best you can hope to do and get them to practice together and whatever. So maybe you can do something like a piece for a relatively small number of people, but it's very hard to do something for an 80 piece orchestra. Right? So all of a sudden that kind of amazing orchestral music I think becomes possible. And then, you know, we're sort of in version 2.0 of that now where of course you can lay a thousand tracks on top of one another if you want. You get ideas like micropolyphony. And these things where you look at the score and it's just incredible, there are 10,000 notes in 10 seconds. DAVID: Well, to your point I was at a tea house in Berkeley on Monday right by UC Berkeley's campus and the people next to me, they were debating the musical notes that they were looking at but not listening to the music and it was evident that they both had such a clear ability to listen to music without even listening to it, that they could write the notes together and have this discussion and it was somebody who doesn't know so much about music. It was really impressive. MICHAEL: That sounds like a very interesting conversation. DAVID: I think it was. So one thing that I'm interested in and that sort of have this dream of, is I have a lot of friends in New York who do data visualization and sort of two things parallel. I have this vision of like remember the Harry Potter book where the newspaper comes alive and it becomes like a rich dynamic medium. So I have that compared with some immersive world that you can walk through and be able to like touch and move around data and I actually think there's some cool opportunities there and whatnot. But in terms of thinking about the future of being able to visualize numbers and the way that things change and whatnot. MICHAEL: I think it's a really complicated question like it actually needs to be broken down. So one thing, for example, I think it's one of the most interesting things you can do with computers. Lots of people never really get much experience playing with models and yet it's possible to do this. Now, basically, you can start to build very simple models. The example that a lot of people do get that they didn't use to get, is spreadsheets. So, you can sort of create a spreadsheet that is a simple model of your company or some organization or a country or of whatever. And the interesting thing about the spreadsheet is really that you can play with it. And it sort of, it's reactive in this interesting way. Anybody who spends as much time with spreadsheets is they start to build up hypotheses, oh, what would happen if I changed this number over here? How would it affect my bottom line? How would it affect the GDP of the country? How would it affect this? How would it affect that? And you know, as you kind of use it, you start to introduce, you start to make your model more complicated. If you're modeling some kind of a factory yet maybe you start to say, well, what would be the effect if a carbon tax was introduced? So you introduce some new column into the spreadsheet or maybe several extra columns into the spreadsheet and you start to ask questions, well, what would the structure of the carbon tax be? What would help you know, all these sorts of what if questions. And you start very incrementally to build up models. So this experience, of course, so many people take for granted. It was not an experience that almost anybody in the world had say 20 or 30 years ago. Well, spreadsheets data about 1980 or so, but this is certainly an experience that was extremely rare prior to 1980 and it's become a relatively common, but it hasn't made its way out into mass media. We don't as part of our everyday lives or the great majority of people don't have this experience of just exploring models. And I think it's one of the most interesting things which particularly the New York Times and to some extent some of the other newsrooms have done is they've started in a small way to build these models into the news reading experience. So, in particular, the data visualization team at the New York Times, people like Amanda Cox and others have done this really interesting thing where you start to get some of these models. You might have seen, for example, in the last few elections. They've built this very interesting model showing basically if you can sort of make choices about how different states will vote. So if such and such votes for Trump, what are Hillary's chances of winning the election. And you may have seen they have this sort of amazing interactive visualization of it where you can just go through and you can sort of look at the key swing states, what happens if Pennsylvania votes for so and so what happens if Florida does? And that's an example where they've built an enormous amount of sort of pulling information into this model and then you can play with it to build up some sort of understanding. And I mean, it's a very simple example. I certainly think that you know, normatively, we're not there yet. We don't actually have a shared understanding. There's very little shared language even around these models. You think about something like a map. A map is an incredibly sophisticated object, which however we will start learning from a very young age. And so we're actually really good at parsing them. We know if somebody shows us a map, how to engage, how to interpret it, how to use it. And if somebody just came from another planet, actually they need to learn all those things. How do you represent a road? How do you represent a shop on a map? How do you represent this or that, why do we know that up is north like that's a convention. All those kinds of things actually need to be learned and we learned them when we were small. With these kinds of things which the Times and other media outlets are trying to do, we lack all of that collective knowledge and so they're having to start from scratch and I think that over a couple of generations actually, they'll start to evolve a lot of conventions and people will start to take it for granted. But in a lot of contexts actually you're not just going to be given a narrative, you know, just going to be told sort of how some columnist thinks the world is. Instead, you'll actually expect to be given some kind of a model which you can play with. You can start to ask questions and sort of run your own hypotheses in much the same way as somebody who runs a business might actually set up a spreadsheet to model their business and ask interesting questions. It's not perfect. The model is certainly that the map is not the territory as they say, but it is nonetheless a different way of engaging rather than just having some expert tell you, oh, the world is this way. DAVID: I'm interested in sort of the shift from having media be predominantly static to dynamic, which the New York Times is a perfect example. They can tell stories on Newyorktimes.com that they can't tell in the newspaper that gets delivered to your doorstep. But what's really cool about spreadsheets that you're talking about is like when I use Excel, being able to go from numbers, so then different graphs and have the exact same data set, but some ways of visualizing that data totally clicked for me and sometimes nothing happens. MICHAEL: Sure. Yeah. And we're still in the early days of that too. There's so much sort of about literacy there. And I think so much about literacy is really about opportunity. People have been complaining essentially forever that the kids of today are not literate enough. But of course, once you actually provide people with the opportunity and a good reason to want to do something, then they can become very literate very quickly. I think basically going back to the rise of social media sort of 10 or 15 years ago, so Facebook around whatever, 2006, 2007 twitter a little bit later, and then all the other platforms which have come along since. They reward being a good writer. So all of a sudden a whole lot of people who normally wouldn't have necessarily been good writers are significantly more likely to become good writers. It depends on the platform. Certainly, Facebook is a relatively visual medium. Twitter probably helps. I think twitter and text messaging probably are actually good. Certainly, you're rewarded for being able to condense an awful lot into a small period. People complain that it's not good English, whatever that is. But I think I'm more interested in whether something is a virtuosic English than I am and whether or not it's grammatically correct. People are astonishingly good at that, but the same thing needs to start to happen with these kinds of models and with data visualizations and things like that. At the moment, you know, you have this priestly caste that makes a few of them and that's an interesting thing to be able to do, but it's not really part of the everyday experience of most people. It's an interesting question whether or not that's gonna change as it going to in the province of some small group of people, or will it actually become something that people just expect to be able to do? Spreadsheets are super interesting in that regard. They actually did. I think if you've talked to somebody in 1960 and said that by 2018, tens of millions of people around the world would be building sophisticated mathematical models as just part of their everyday life. It would've seemed absolutely ludicrous. But actually, that kind of model of literacy has become relatively common. I don't know whether we'll get to 8 billion people though. I think we probably will. DAVID: So when I was in high school I went to, what I like to say is the weirdest school in the weirdest city in America. I went to the weirdest high school in San Francisco and rather than teaching us math, they had us get in groups of three and four and they had us discover everything on our own. So we would have these things called problem sets and we would do about one a week and the teacher would come around and sort of help us every now and then. But the goal was really to get three or four people to think through every single problem. And they called it discovery-based learning, which you've also talked about too. So my question to you is we're really used to learning when the map is clear and it's clear what to do and you can sort of follow a set path, but you actually do the opposite. The map is unclear and you're actually trailblazing and charting new territory. What strategies do you have to sort of sense where to move? MICHAEL: There's sort of a precursor question which is how do you maintain your morale and the Robert Pirsig book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He proposes a university subject, gumptionology 101. Gumption is almost the most important quality that we have. The ability to keep going when things don't seem very good. And mostly that's about having ways of being playful and ways of essentially not running out of ideas. Some of that is about a very interesting tension between having, being ambitious in what you'd like to achieve, but also being very willing to sort of celebrate the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest successes. Suddenly a lot of creative people I know I think really struggle with that. They might be very good at celebrating tiny successes but not have that significant ambitions, but they might be extremely ambitious, but because they're so ambitious, if an idea doesn't look Nobel prize worthy, they're not particularly interested in it. You know, they struggle with just kind of the goofing around and they often feel pretty bad because of course most days you're not at your best, you don't actually have the greatest idea. So there's some interesting tension to manage there. There's really two different types of work. One is where you have a pretty good goal, you know what success looks like, right? But you may also be doing something that's more like problem discovery where you don't even know where you're going. Typically if you're going to compose a piece of music. Well, I'm not a composer, but certainly, my understanding from, from friends who are, is that they don't necessarily start out with a very clear idea of where they're going. Some composers do, but a lot, it's a process of discovery. Actually, a publisher once told me somebody who has published a lot of well-known books that she described one of her authors as a writing for discovery. Like he didn't know what his book was going to be about, he had a bunch of kind of vague ideas and the whole point of writing the book was to actually figure out what it was that he wanted to say, what problem was he really interested in. So we'd start with some very, very good ideas and they kind of get gradually refined. And it was very interesting. I really liked his books and it was interesting to see that. They looked like they'd been very carefully planned and he really knew what he was doing and she told me that no, he'd sort of come in and chat with her and be like, well, I'm sort of interested over here. And he'd have phrases and sort of ideas. But he didn't actually have a clear plan and then he'd get through this process of several years of gradually figuring out what it was that he wanted to say. And often the most significant themes wouldn't actually emerge until relatively late in that whole process. I asked another actually quite a well-known writer, I just bumped into when he was, he was reporting a story for a major magazine and I think he'd been working, he'd been reporting for two weeks, I think at that point. So just out interviewing people and whatever. And I said, how's it going? And he said, Oh yeah, pretty good. I said, what's your story about? He said, I don't know yet, which I thought was very interesting. He had a subject, he was following a person around. But he didn't actually know what his story was. DAVID: So the analogy that I have in my head as you're talking about this, it's like sculpture, right? Where you start maybe with a big thing of granite or whatnot, and slowly but surely you're carving the stone or whatnot and you're trying to come up with a form. But so often maybe it's the little details at the end that are so far removed from that piece of stone at the very beginning that make a sculpture exceptional. MICHAEL: Indeed. And you wonder what's going on. I haven't done sculpture. I've done a lot of writing and writing often feels so sometimes I know what I want to say. Those are the easy pieces to write, but more often it's writing for discovery and there you need to be very happy celebrating tiny improvements. I mean just fixing a word needs to be an event you actually enjoy, if not, the process will be an absolute nightmare. But then there's this sort of instinct where you realize, oh, that's a phrase that A: I should really refine and B: it might actually be the key to making this whole thing work and that seems to be a very instinctive kind of a process. Something that you, if you write enough, you start to get some sense of what actually works for you in those ways. The recognition is really hard. It's very tempting to just discount yourself. Like to not notice when you have a good phrase or something like that and sort of contrary wise sometimes to hang onto your darlings too long. You have the idea that you think it's about and it's actually wrong. DAVID: Why do you write and why do you choose the medium of writing to think through things sometimes? I know that you choose other ones as well. MICHAEL: Writing has this beautiful quality that you can improve your thoughts. That's really helpful. A friend of mine who makes very popular YouTube videos about mathematics has said to me that he doesn't really feel like people are learning much mathematics from them. Instead, it's almost a form of advertising like they get some sense of what it is. They know that it's very beautiful. They get excited. All those things are very important and matter a lot to him, but he believes that only a tiny, tiny number of people are actually really understanding much detail at all. There's actually a small group who have apparently do kind of. They have a way of processing video that lets them understand. DAVID: Also, I think you probably have to, with something like math, I've been trying to learn economics online and with something like math or economics that's a bit complex and difficult, you have to go back and re-watch and re-watch, but I think that there's a human tendency to want to watch more and more and more and it's hard to learn that way. You actually have to watch things again. MICHAEL: Absolutely. Totally. And you know, I have a friend who when he listens to podcasts, if he doesn't understand something, he, he rewinds it 30 seconds. But most people just don't have that discipline. Of course, you want to keep going. So I think the written word for most people is a little bit easier if they want to do that kind of detailed understanding. It's more random access to start with. It's easier to kind of skip around and to concentrate and say, well, I didn't really get that sentence. I'm going to think about it a little bit more, or yeah, I can see what's going to happen in those two or three paragraphs. I'll just very quickly skip through them. It's more built for that kind of detailed understanding, so you're getting really two very different experiences. In the case of the video, very often really what you're getting is principally an emotional experience with some bits and pieces of understanding tacked on with the written word. Often a lot of that emotion is stripped out, which makes can make it much harder to motivate yourself. You need that sort of emotional connection to the material, but it is actually, I think a great deal easier to understand sort of the details of it. There's a real kind of choice to be to be made. There's also the fact that people just seem to respond better to videos. If you want a large audience, you're probably better off making YouTube videos than you are publishing essays. DAVID: My last question to you, as somebody who admires your pace and speed of learning and what's been really fun about preparing for this podcast and come across your work is I really do feel like I've accessed a new perspective on the world which is really cool and I get excited probably most excited when I come across thinkers who don't think like anyone who I've come across before, so I'm asking to you first of all, how do you think about your learning process and what you consume and second of all, who have been the people and the ideas that have really formed the foundation of your thought? MICHAEL: A Kurt Vonnegut quote from his book, I think it's Cat's Cradle. He says, we become what we pretend to be, so you must be careful what we pretend to be and I think there's something closely analogously true, which is that we become what we pay attention to, so we should be careful what we pay attention to and that means being fairly careful how you curate your information diet. There's a lot of things. There's a lot of mistakes I've made. Paying attention to angry people is not very good. I think ideas like the filter bubble, for example, are actually bad ideas. And for the most part, it sounds virtuous to say, oh, I'm going to pay attention to people who disagree with me politically and whatever. Well, okay, there's a certain amount of truth to that. It's a good idea probably to pay attention to the very best arguments from the very best exponents of the other different political views. So sure, seek those people out, but you don't need to seek out the random person who has a different political view from you. And that's how most people actually interpret that kind of injunction. They, they're not looking for the very best alternate points of view. So that's something you need to be careful about. There's a whole lot of things like that I enjoy. So for example, I think one person, it's interesting on twitter to look, he's, he's no longer active but he's still following people is Marc Andreessen and I think he follows, it's like 18,000 people or something and it's really interesting just to look through the list of followers because it's all over the map and much of it I wouldn't find interesting at all, but you'll find the strangest corners people in sort of remote villages in India and people doing really interesting things in South Africa. Okay. So he's a venture capitalist but they're not connected to venture capital at all. So many of them, they're just doing interesting things all over the world and I wouldn't advocate doing the same thing. You kind of need to cultivate your own tastes and your own interests. But there's something very interesting about that sort of capitalist city of interests and curiosity about the world, which I think is probably very good for almost anybody to cultivate. I haven't really answered your question. DAVID: I do want to ask who were the people or the ideas or the areas of the world that have really shaped and inspired your thinking because I'm asking selfishly because I want to go down those rabbit holes. MICHAEL: Alright. A couple of people, Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart, who are two of the people who really developed the idea of what a computer might be. In the 1950's and 60's, people mostly thought computers were machines for solving mathematical problems, predicting the weather next week, computing artillery tables, doing these kinds of things. And they understood that actually there could be devices which humans would use for themselves to solve their own problems. That would be sort of almost personal prosthetics for the mind. They'd be new media. We could use to think with and a lot of their best ideas I think out there, there's still this kind of vision for the future. And if you look particularly at some of Alan Kay's talks, there's still a lot of interesting ideas there. DAVID: That the perspective is worth 80 IQ points. That's still true. MICHAEL: For example, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, right? He's actually, he's got a real gift for coming up with piddly little things, but there's also quite deep ideas. They're not two-year projects or five-year projects, they're thousand year projects or an entire civilization. And we're just getting started on them. I think that's true. Actually. It's in general, maybe that's an interesting variation question, which is, you know, what are the thousand year projects? A friend of mine, Cal Schroeder, who's a science fiction writer, has this term, The Project, which he uses to organize some of his thinking about science fictional civilizations. So The Project is whatever a civilization is currently doing, which possibly no member of the civilization is even aware of. So you might ask the question, what was the project for our planet in the 20th century? I think one plausible answer might be, for example, it was actually eliminating infectious diseases. You think about things like polio and smallpox and so many of these diseases were huge things at the start of the 20th century and they become much, much smaller by the end of the 20th century. Obviously AIDS is this terrible disease, but in fact, by historical comparison, even something like the Spanish flu, it's actually relatively small. I think it's several hundred million people it may have killed. Maybe that was actually the project for human civilization in the 20th century. I think it's interesting to think about those kinds of questions and sort of the, you know, where are the people who are sort of most connected to those? So I certainly think Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay. DAVID: Talk about Doug Engelbart, I know nothing about him. MICHAEL: So Engelbart is the person who I think more than anybody invented modern computing. He did this famous demo in 1968, 1969. It's often called the mother of all demos, in front of an audience of a thousand people I believe. Quite a while since I've watched it and it demonstrates a windowing system and what looks like a modern word processor, but it's not just a word processor. They're actually hooked up remotely to a person in another location and they're actually collaborating in real time. And it's the first public showing I believe of the mouse and of all these different sorts of ideas. And you look at other images of computers at the time and they're these giant machines with tapes and whatever. And here's this vision that looks a lot more like sort of Microsoft Windows and a than anything else. And it's got all these things like real-time collaboration between people in different locations that we really didn't have at scale until relatively recently. And he lays out a huge fraction of these ideas in 1962 in a paper he wrote then. But that paper is another one of these huge things. He's asking questions that you don't answer over two years or five years. You answer over a thousand years. I think it's Augmenting Human Intellect is the title of that paper. So he's certainly somebody else that I think is a very interesting thinker. There's something really interesting about the ability to ask an enormous question, but then actually to have other questions at every scale. So you know what to do in the next 10 minutes that will move you a little bit towar

Scott Pirsig reflects on a hardcore canoe trip into Canada's Quetico Provincial Park.

The story of Auschwitz survivor Kazimierz Piechowski and Ross Pirsig's quest to meet him.  

Episode 23 is here and with it comes advice on making your own luck in both Magic and Life! With over 300 drafts between them in the past couple months, your hosts give you their wisdom about playing Magic in the optimal mental state to 3-0 your next draft. People/ideas discussed: Dave Ramsey - The Total Money makeover/Financial Peace Thomas J. Stanley - The Millionaire Next Door Zig Ziglar - How to Stay Motivated: Developing the Qualities of Success Jon Acuff: Quitter and Start Geoffrey Colvin - Talent is Overrated Channelfireball.com articles by Will Jonathan - sports psychologist who writes articles about how to improve your mental game in magic. http://www.starcitygames.com/article/36159_Social-Currency.html by Gerry Thompson - his story about self improvement through Magic. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig  

PIECE OF DREW PODCAST #3 - Static Notes Check out my writing on Medium.com https://medium.com/@drewfrench https://medium.com/@drewfrench/ignore-the-static-to-turn-work-into-play-9b4b0a5fe8d1 This podcast hosted on Soundcloud.com https://soundcloud.com/drew-french-3 An amazing show: 6 Feet Under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Feet_Under_(TV_series) How do you seperate the wheat from the chaff? “People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” ― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh https://www.audible.com/pd/Bios-Memoirs/Zen-and-the-Art-of-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Audiobook/B002VA8G6M “The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.” ― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values “Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” -Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” -Albert Einstein “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ― Anaïs Nin The Diwan of Shams of Tabriz 1823 I don`t get tired of You. Don`t grow weary of being compassionate toward me! All this thirst-equiptment must surely be tired of me, the waterjar, the water-carrier. Show me the way to the Ocean! Break these half-measures, these snall containers. All this fantasy and grief. Let my house be drowned in the wave that rose last night out of the courtyard hidden in the center of my chest . Joseph fell like the moon into my well. The Harvest i expected was washed away. But no matter. A fire has risen above my tombstone hat. I don`t want learning, or dignity, or respectability. I want this music and this dawn and the warmth of your cheek against mine. The grief-armies assemble , but I`m not going with them. This is how it always is when I finish a poem. A Great Silence overcomes me, and I wonder why I ever thought to use language. -Rumi

In which Jason and Ben wax philosophical on taking care of our stuff, orange Volvos named Gertrude, and the book that started it all. Maker Minute: R.M. Pirsig

I talk with James Wells about the book he chose, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. We get into Pirsig's theory of Quality, we talk about James's motorcycle, and we - this is the undiluted truth - have a lot of fun.

The Software Process and Measurement Cast 442 features our essay on capability teams. The use of teams to deliver business value is at the core of most business models.  Capability teams are a tool to unlock the value delivery engine of teams. Gene Hughson brings his Form Follows Function Blog to the cast this week to discuss his recent blog entry titled, Systems of Social Systems and the Software Systems They Create. We live in a complex world and just focusing on social systems or software systems misses the point! Our third column is from the Software Sensei, Kim Pries.  The entry this week is titled, Software Quality and the Art of Skateboard Maintenance. This entry is an homage to Robert M. Pirsig the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, who recently died. Re-Read Saturday News And welcome back!  For those who are interested, The Frederick Half Marathon last weekend was great.  I met my goals: I crossed the finish line, collected my medal and got to hang out with my family in Frederick.  This week, we begin Part Two of Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World by Brian J. Robertson published by Henry Holt and Company in 2015.  Part Two is titled Evolution At Play: Practicing Holacracy.  In my opinion, Part Two provides readers with the nuts and bolts needed to use Holacracy.  Chapter 4, titled Governance, takes all of the building blocks from previous chapters and starts to weave them together. Catch up on the first four entries in the re-read Week 1:  Logistics and Introduction Week 2: Evolving Organization Week 3: Distribution Authority Week 4: Organizational Structure Visit the Software Process and Measurement Cast blog to participate in this and previous re-reads. A Call To Action If you got a new idea this week while listening to the podcast, please give the SPaMCAST a short, honest review in iTunes.  Reviews help guide people to the cast! Next SPaMCAST The next Software Process and Measurement Cast will feature interview with Brad Clark.  Brad and I talked about cost estimation, estimation in government and Cocomo II and what is on the way in Cocomo III.   Shameless Ad for my book! Mastering Software Project Management: Best Practices, Tools and Techniques co-authored by Murali Chematuri and myself and published by J. Ross Publishing. We have received unsolicited reviews like the following: “This book will prove that software projects should not be a tedious process, for you or your team.” Support SPaMCAST by buying the book here. Available in English and Chinese.  

In this special family reunion edition of the Emerald Recommends series, Emerald writers Emerson Malone and Sararosa Davies are joined by a very special guest: Sararosa's mom! Here's what we recommend in this episode: 'Swear I'm Good At It' by Diet Cig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. This episode was produced by Emerson Malone.

Discovering Hands - In diesem Podcast unterhalte ich mich mit dem Arzt Dr. Frank Hoffmann. Er hat das Konzept von Discovering Hands entwickelt. Der Tastsinn blinder Frauen wird hier genutzt, um so die Brustkrebsfrüherkennung zu verbessern. Ein innovatives Konzept für mehr Sicherheit für die Erkennung von Brustveränderungen. Genießen Sie auch diese sehr inspirierende Folge, in der Sie auch sehr viele wichtige und hilfreiche Anregungen und Ideen erhalten. Viel Spaß bei diesem Gespräch mit Dr. Frank Hoffmann. [powerpress] KONTAKTDATEN: WEBSEITE INTERNET-RESOURCE/HILFSMITTEL: keine Empfehlungen BUCHEMPFEHLUNGEN: Zen und die Kunst, ein Motorrad zu warten: Roman von Robert M. Pirsig The post UMH 063 : Dr. Frank Hoffmann – Discovering Hands appeared first on Klaus Pertl Mentales Coaching.

01:04 - Travis Jeffery Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Stash 01:36 - Clang-format, Clang-Tidy 02:00 - What is a linter? 02:40 - Uses ClangFormat-Xcode 05:49 - Lining Up Method Perimeters 07:00 - Configuration 07:52 - Integration 08:50 - ClangFormat-Xcode 09:22 - Apple Support for ClangFormat 11:00 - Support for Swift 11:41 - Getting Started 14:13 - Code Style Documentation on Style Options 19:21 - Continuous Integration Workflow 20:48 - Clang-Tidy (Cont’d) clang-query Extra Resources Daniel Jasper: clang-format - Automatic formatting for C++ Daniel Jasper: Keep your code sane with clang-tidy: Meeting C++ 2015 Lightning Talks Picks objClean (Andrew) Swift-Clean (Andrew) Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners (Andrew) Help people that are new (Andrew) Hopper (Jaim) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig (Travis) Stash (Travis) A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irving (Travis)

01:04 - Travis Jeffery Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Stash 01:36 - Clang-format, Clang-Tidy 02:00 - What is a linter? 02:40 - Uses ClangFormat-Xcode 05:49 - Lining Up Method Perimeters 07:00 - Configuration 07:52 - Integration 08:50 - ClangFormat-Xcode 09:22 - Apple Support for ClangFormat 11:00 - Support for Swift 11:41 - Getting Started 14:13 - Code Style Documentation on Style Options 19:21 - Continuous Integration Workflow 20:48 - Clang-Tidy (Cont’d) clang-query Extra Resources Daniel Jasper: clang-format - Automatic formatting for C++ Daniel Jasper: Keep your code sane with clang-tidy: Meeting C++ 2015 Lightning Talks Picks objClean (Andrew) Swift-Clean (Andrew) Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners (Andrew) Help people that are new (Andrew) Hopper (Jaim) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig (Travis) Stash (Travis) A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irving (Travis)

Rejected a world record 121 times before finally finding a publisher and going on to sell millions of copies, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of the most widely read philosophy texts of the 20th-century.Robert Pirsig's semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional account of a motorcycle road trip with his son covers a lot of ground. America's psyche in the fifties and sixties; our fascination with and fear of modern technology; the age-old quest to unify the world around us: Pirsig crams it all onto one motorcycle ridden by one man. It should then be no surprise that we get a little lost in this one. So please bear with us as we fail to ask for directions and are forced to stop and check the fuel gauge/pistons/tappets/[insert motorcycle part here] more than a few times along the way.

Rejected a world record 121 times before finally finding a publisher and going on to sell millions of copies, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of the most widely read philosophy texts of the 20th-century.Robert Pirsig's semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional account of a motorcycle road trip with his son covers a lot of ground. America's psyche in the fifties and sixties; our fascination with and fear of modern technology; the age-old quest to unify the world around us: Pirsig crams it all onto one motorcycle ridden by one man. It should then be no surprise that we get a little lost in this one. So please bear with us as we fail to ask for directions and are forced to stop and check the fuel gauge/pistons/tappets/[insert motorcycle part here] more than a few times along the way.

Sendungsnotizen Carsten kommen anfangs die Sprachen durcheinander, perzik ist niederländisch und russisch für Pfirsich, es gibt aber kein entsprechendes Wort im Englischen. – Wikipedia: Uerige – Wikipedia: Zen und die Kunst ein Motorrad zu warten – Wikipedia: Heideggers Technikkritik – Hermann Maier geht etwas auf den Qualitätsbegriff des Buches ein, wobei zu sagen ist, was […]

"'The solutions all are simple... after you've already arrived at them.  But they're simple only when you already know what they are.'  -  from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig.  By listener request, may I humbly Introduce To YOU Motherhood Made ME Get Over MYSELF: A Metamorphosis.   A LIVE READING, entry by entry... from the horse's mouth! Please Tune In and ENJOY!  'Dear Prudence' Radio - Life Advice to Help YOU Cope!"Please join Amanda Grieme, Author of “Dear Prudence,” Motherhood Made ME Get Over MYSELF: A Metamorphosis, and former English/Creative Writing Educator. Amanda LIVES with Bipolar Disorder choosing writing as her catharsis and creative medium to help others. Her life experience with mental illness, self-medication will lend listeners invaluable, often quirky life advice. Tune in to share in life's struggles, folly, laughter, tears… idiosyncratic oddities… cradled by eclectic music selections.“Dear Prudence” Radio – Life Advice to Help YOU Cope will provide you with entertaining and informative fodder about life stuff, backed by research, justified by public opinion… and humbled by ill-experience. Check Out the NEW video trailer:http://youtu.be/PBQ3TADwSyQBooks:https://www.createspace.com/4714654http://www.eloquentbooks.com/dearprudence.htmlDear Prudence Column: http://www.newjerseynewsroom.comAbout The Host:  http://amandagrieme.hubpages.com/hub/GREAT-READS-BY-NEW-AUTHORS-CHECK-THEM-OUT-HERE

Another ancient belief held that an art should be governed by rules. Another ancient belief held that an art should be governed by rules. This assumption was discredited in 1674, when Longinus' treatise On the Sublime was translated into French. Technology might be written up in a manual, Longinus explained, but not the sublime. The need to understand a fine art without rules led to the formulations of aesthetics a century later.

E.H. Gombrich famously observed that 'there really is no such thing as Art' (with a capital A). Instead he described the practice of art as 'mastery', which equates to the Quality recovered by Robert M. Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). Quality is also a better word than 'virtue' to render the aretê that preoccupied Socrates in Plato's dialogues.

E.H. Gombrich famously observed that 'there really is no such thing as Art' (with a capital A). Instead he described the practice of art as 'mastery', which equates to the Quality recovered by Robert M. Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). Quality is also a better word than 'virtue' to render the aretê that preoccupied Socrates in Plato's dialogues.

Another ancient belief held that an art should be governed by rules. Another ancient belief held that an art should be governed by rules. This assumption was discredited in 1674, when Longinus' treatise On the Sublime was translated into French. Technology might be written up in a manual, Longinus explained, but not the sublime. The need to understand a fine art without rules led to the formulations of aesthetics a century later.

On Robert M. Pirsig's philosophical, autobiographical novel from 1974. What's the relationship between science and values? Pirsig thinks that modern rationality, by insisting on the fundamental distinction between objects (matter) and subjects (people), labels value judgments as irrational. Society therefore largely ignores aesthetic considerations in the buildings and machines that litter our landscape. With guest David Buchanan. Get the full discussion at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

This month, After Serenity is Shaken Not Stirred. Sam Chupp of the Bear's Grove finds himself in front of the After Serenity mic.Libertarian Futurist Societyhttp://www.lfs.org/awards.htmLila, by Pirsig:http://www.net4dem.org/cdhome/pirsig.htmMy Favorite Buddhist Writer, Natalie Goldberg:http://www.nataliegoldberg.com/American Indian / Native Americanhttp://www.ewebtribe.com/NACulture/Victorianhttp://killeenroos.com/link/victoria.htmThe Music from this episode:The Bedlam Bards:http://www.bedlambards.com/Kimo Watanbe, "Morning on Halekala Highway"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=cc1e383b285dc84daa87e24a2085dc8fFor more Shaken Not Stirred podcasts, check out the Shaken Not Stirred minisite at: http://www.fistfullofcomics.com/shaken/Stay Shiny!

This month, After Serenity is Shaken Not Stirred. Sam Chupp of the Bear's Grove finds himself in front of the After Serenity mic.Libertarian Futurist Societyhttp://www.lfs.org/awards.htmLila, by Pirsig:http://www.net4dem.org/cdhome/pirsig.htmMy Favorite Buddhist Writer, Natalie Goldberg:http://www.nataliegoldberg.com/American Indian / Native Americanhttp://www.ewebtribe.com/NACulture/Victorianhttp://killeenroos.com/link/victoria.htmThe Music from this episode:The Bedlam Bards:http://www.bedlambards.com/Kimo Watanbe, "Morning on Halekala Highway"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=cc1e383b285dc84daa87e24a2085dc8fFor more Shaken Not Stirred podcasts, check out the Shaken Not Stirred minisite at: http://www.fistfullofcomics.com/shaken/Stay Shiny!