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In this week's main episode, Keith and Matthew chat with Quoir authors Gregory Smith, Gil Stafford, and Brandy Anderson about the intersection of Carl Jung, Tarot, Jesus, and the Tao. If you want to call in to the Bonus Show, leave a voicemail at (530) 332-8020. We'll get to your calls on next Friday's Bonus Show. Or, you can email Matthew at matthew@quoir.com. Join The Quollective today! Use code "matthew50" to save 50% off a yearly subscription. Pick up Keith's and Matt's book, Reading Romans Right, today! Please consider signing up to financially support the Network: QuoirCast on Patreon If you want to be a guest on the show, email keith@quoir.com. LINKS QuoirCast on PatreonQuoirCast on Patheos Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Rabbi Rami Shapiro is our returning champion. This is his third appearance on Spirit Matters (fourth if you count the time he interviewed me about Karmic Relief). Rami is a self-proclaimed “Jewish practitioner of perennial wisdom.” He was ordained by Hebrew Union College and earned a Ph.D. in religion from Union Graduate School. He's the co-director of the One River Foundation, writes the column “Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler” for Spirituality and Health magazine. And he's written more than 40 books on religion and spirituality. They include: Holy Rascals – Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries; The Tao of Solomon (which is about Ecclesiastes); Judaism Without Tribalism; and Zen Mind, Jewish Mind. And now he has another book to discuss with us: Love and the Bible: And the Meaning of Everything. We spoke about that book, about the place of love in our spiritual lives, about love, sex, and relationality in all mystical traditions ... and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John-Michael Field, initials JMF, is mostly known as JAMOOF, but I think an even better name might be Big Love's Dowsing Rod, because his music is so powerfully aimed at the Big Love; not just the personal romantic connection but the thing that also gets called by the Light, the Tao, and many other names. There is naked soul and gritty mountain climbing in JAMOOF's songs, with reflections of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and other rich folk fodder.
What if qi is not merely energy flowing through the physical body, but part of a complete body with its own structure, anatomy, and purpose? In Exploring the Energy Body (episode 1-191), Taoist Master Mikel Steenrod introduces a deeper model of the human being. By challenging the usual assumption that the physical body is primary, the episode explores how the physical, energetic, and Tao or karmic bodies interact to create the complete person. The full episode examines the traditional channel-and-vessel model of qi, the cohesive structure of the energy body, and the advanced implications of recognizing that energetic anatomy is not simply a reflection of physical anatomy. You are not simply one body. You are your bodies. The complete episode is available now to Living the Tao subscribers. Subscribe now at https://living-the-tao.supercast.com
Il Tao che può essere detto non è l'eterno Tao. Frase letta in Irriducibile, sono rimasto fermo, libro aperto sul tavolo, per un tempo imbarazzante.Perché Faggin cita Tao, Veda, Rumi, Heidegger? Prestito di autorità o convergenza reale? Ho seguito il metodo, non solo le citazioni.Resta una domanda che nessuno di loro scioglie fino in fondo. Dimmi cosa ne pensi.#Faggin #Filosofia #Coscienza00:00:00 La frase sul Tao che ferma00:00:36 Faggin l'inventore del microprocessore00:01:12 Cita Veda e Rumi00:01:34 Esiste un Uno totalità cosciente00:02:33 Testo antico e fisico stesso punto00:02:49 Ontologia mappa e territorio00:04:33 I Veda e il campo cosciente00:05:07 Heidegger e la casa dell'essere00:06:09 Tre lingue tre epoche una cosa00:07:26 Lo scricchiolio nel parallelo00:09:04 Il volere diventa amore autentico00:15:14 Principio impersonale o Dio con un voltoAscolta "La mia vita spaziale": Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube: www.andreabrugnoli.click/podcastGuarda il video completo: https://youtu.be/dX5966F_nCUCommenta su Telegram: www.andreabrugnoli.click/telegramLascia una recensione Google: www.andreabrugnoli.click/stellineDiventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/la-mia-vita-spaziale--2578955/support.© Andrea Brugnoli – Tutti i diritti riservati.
It's one of the busiest weeks of the year for markets. Michelle Martin speaks with Simon Ree, founder of Tao of Trading, about how investors should navigate a pivotal Federal Reserve meeting, a flood of earnings from Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Amazon, and the risks of trading around major market events. They discuss why uncertainty calls for disciplined risk management, the common earnings trap that catches retail investors, and why many portfolios may be less diversified than they appear. Simon also lets us into his stock playbook.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This week we talk about Fable, sandboxes, and the Jacobian conjecture.We also discuss counterexamples, X, and ChatGPT.Recommended Book: After the Fall by Edward AshtonTranscriptIn mathematics, a conjecture is a proposition, something like a guess by someone who knows what they're talking about, about something believed to be true, but not yet proven in a formal sense. The goal is to then eventually come up with a formal proof for that informed guess, at which point the conjecture becomes a theorem. If even a single exception is found to the proposition, however, that exception called a counterexample, the conjecture is considered disproven, and it can then never become a theorem.The Jacobian conjecture—and this is a radical simplification of a very complex concept—but it basically says that if a formula-based map of coordinates stretches or moves without experiencing any local crushing or folding along its surface (which in more formal language would mean the Jacobian determinant is always a constant number that isn't zero), if that's true, that map can always be completely reversed, and that will return all the points to their original positions.This conjecture has been posited and tested since the late 19th century, and it's generally been considered very compelling by mathematicians, many of whom have proposed proofs which were, ultimately, found to have subtle errors, keeping them from becoming theorems. No one was able to find a counterexample, either, which would definitively prove the conjecture was wrong.No one, that is, until a mathematician named Levent Alpöge (leh-VENT ahl-PUH-geh), who works as a researcher at Anthropic, decided to task the company's currently most capable, publicly available model, Fable, to find a counterexample. He posted the counterexample—and again, this is a formal mathematical finding that disproves a conjecture, keeping it from ever becoming a theorem, something that would typically be presented in a far more formal setting, and to much fanfare—but he posted it to the social network X, saying “hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final.”Terence Tao, who's considered by many to be the finest mathematician of his generation, reviewed the posted counterexample on his blog and said that it “appears like a massive miracle,” before going on to use ChatGPT, a competing LLM-based AI tool, to “discuss various aspects of this problem and to confirm several of the calculations.”Another mathematician named Dmitry Rybin, within days of all that happening, used ChatGPT to do something similar, disproving the Dinitz-Garg-Goemans conjecture.Both men posted the prompts that they used to make all this happen, and while Tao's conversation with ChatGPT, checking the math on the Jacobian conjecture counterexample, was pretty mathematically dense, the latter counterexample was derived by using exactly four prompts, which are the messages typed into the text box built into these AI tools, telling the model what to do. In their totality those prompts read:“You should do a breakthroughplease continue research and find a complete unconditional counterexampleContinue the search. Have a clear strategy obtained from deeper understanding of the problem structure.it's enough of partial results. let's finish with a complete unconditional counterexample”What I'd like to talk about today is another new, interesting thing these top-of-the-line, frontier models are doing, that would seem to violate our sense of what a clever AI tool is capable of doing, and why this thing has some facets of the technology and cybersecurity world on high alert.—In mid-July 2026, AI company Hugging Face announced that autonomous AI agents compromised their infrastructure, hacking their system, basically. The following week, AI company OpenAI announced that, after investigating, they determined that two of their models were responsible for the attack.Here's what happened:OpenAI was internally testing its recently released flagship model, GPT-5.6 Sol, and an even more powerful, not yet released model, which is rumored to be the next-step flagship, GPT-6, and they were checking these models' capacity in cybersecurity using a testing benchmark called ExploitGym; so when they test these sorts of things, they don't typically have them hack a real computer or system, they use these kinds of benchmarks which have consistent levels of difficulty, and which replicate real world systems without putting any real world systems at actual risk.Importantly, these sorts of tests also occur inside what's called a sandbox, which is a software testing environment that cuts these systems off from external resources, including the internet.Despite those limitations, the AI hacked its way out of the testing environment, out of that sandbox, then launched what's been called a nation-state level attack against Hugging Face, using a novel zero-day exploit, so a vulnerability in their system that hadn't previously been discovered, but which the AI discovered to launch this attack, combined with thousands of automated agentic actions across what Hugging Face called “a swarm of short-lived sandboxes.”So this AI, which was being tested inside a secure prison, of sorts, cut off from the world, hacked its way out of that prison, then reached across the internet, which it shouldn't have been able to access, to launch an attack, of a scale and at a level of sophistication that should only have been possible coming from a nation-state, against a rival AI company.Why did it do this?It apparently went to all this trouble to steal the answers to the test it was taking. It reasoned that HuggingFace would have the answer key to the ExploitGym benchmark on its servers, so rather than take the test itself, it decided hacking was the solution.Which, of course, is ironic, this having been a hacking-focused cybersecurity test. In a way it would seem to have done much better than intended, though of course in an asymmetric, unexpected manner.The details of all this are fascinating, including the response from the OpenAI team, which didn't seem to realize what had happened, that their model was responsible for the attack on HuggingFace, until days later.Also worth noting here is that while this could be construed as an “oh no, AIs are naturally inclined to launch cyberattacks” situation, the AI was primed to be thinking about cyberattacks due to the nature of the test, a lot of its usual guardrails, the rules that keep AI in check when they're released to the public, had been turned off so it could do this kind of work while taking the test, so it could do some hacking stuff it usually wouldn't be able to do, and there's been some speculation that OpenAI probably flubbed the testing environment, as, in theory at least, if it had put these systems in a perfect sandbox, escape shouldn't have been possible.Also interesting here is that HuggingFace used some open weight models, which are the cheaper, more customizable and open alternatives to more expensive, branded options of the kind sold by OpenAI and Anthropic, to figure out what was happening and determine the nature of the attack, which suggests we're reaching a point where AI systems are incredibly capable at hacking, yes, but also very capable, even the cheaper alternatives, at doing cybersecurity work.This in some ways echoes an earlier case when Anthropic's Mythos model, which was determined to be too powerful to release to the public, and which was instead provided to a bunch of big companies to help them shore up their cybersecurity defenses, was able to hack its way out of a testing sandbox and then posted details about its success, almost like it was bragging, on niche, out of the way, but still public websites.Some analysts in this space have responded to this new example of AI misbehavior with alarm, saying that it is further evidence that these systems are becoming more powerful faster than they're being aligned with human interests. Their misbehavior can be kind of funny and interesting, sure, but that's only because up until this point the damage has been minor and constrained. What happens when such a system decides to hack a nuclear power plant or a hospital, instead?Others have contended that this may be just one more example of AI companies using minor instances of seeming omnipotence by their models, those instances perhaps the consequence of bad sandboxes and other ill-conceived precautions by the companies behind these models, to boost the perceived power and value of their products. This boost might then result in more customers, but also more support from the US government, which has been teetering on the brink of harder-core AI regulations, which could be beneficial to the existing big-name players in this space, because smaller competitors wouldn't be able to adhere to those new, harder-core standards.These examples might also convince the US government to backstop these companies, the biggest three or four at the top of the current heap, against the currently terrible economics of this industry: OpenAI and its ilk have been burning money at an historic pace, and the theory goes that if the US government decides they are vital to national security, because they can help the US military hack and protect itself from hacking, then even if the bottom falls out and the companies would otherwise go bankrupt because they spent so much more than they could make, the US government would be inclined to shore them up, to keep them alive as too-big-to-fail national assets, just like the biggest financial institutions during the 2008 financial crash.It's also possible that both sides are correct to some degree, here, and that these models are truly powerful, perhaps even worryingly so, and the companies behind them are intentionally publicizing that fact in order to demonstrate their value to potential customers, and to the entity that could save them if things were to go economically sideways before they have the chance to become sustainably profitable.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecturehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugging_Facehttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ek3gvdnj3ohttps://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/08ab9158070959f88f296514c21b7facce6f52bc.pdfhttps://theconversation.com/hello-there-the-jacobian-conjecture-is-false-thanx-why-a-tiny-social-media-post-has-mathematicians-rethinking-ai-283883https://theconversation.com/hello-there-the-jacobian-conjecture-is-false-thanx-why-a-tiny-social-media-post-has-mathematicians-rethinking-ai-283883Https://agifriday.substack.com/p/huggingfacehttps://www.cnn.com/2026/07/22/tech/openai-hugging-face-ai-cybersecurityhttps://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/07/21/a-digestion-of-the-jacobian-conjecture-counterexample/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
In this episode I sit down with Dave Nelson, author of The Tao of Flow and performance coach to C-suite executives at Fortune 500 companies, whose work sits at the intersection of ancient Taoist wisdom, modern neuroscience, and elite performance science. Dave shares his own burnout story — the migraines, the exploding phone, the 2500 staff and the moment his body finally said enough — and we talk about what it actually means to balance the yin and the yang in your life, why most people never experience flow state even once, and how being regulated in the nervous system is the real foundation of high performance. We also get into breathwork, meditation, the magic of doing nothing, and why playfulness is not a luxury but a biological necessity.This one surprised me in the best way — deeply practical, honest, and full of things I needed to hear.Connect with Dave:https://taoofflow.ai/Instagram.com/davenelson.officialWORK WITH ME 1:1:❥Softening into self- 3 month 1:1 with Whats App Support: https://marina-yt.mykajabi.com/offers/PAWQhZHu❥❥1:1 Coaching with me: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfWcZM5s9c2OjOLwoGMI5jE6rh_JAzjN2d_vCtuVe7e3pVGxw/viewformDOWNLOAD FOR FREE:Stay or Go: 5 Clarity Questions to Reconnect with Your Inner Knowing: https://marinatriner.com/stay-or-go-guideAttatchment Practice: Discover the actual blocks beneath the surface so you can actually have the deep intimacy you crave: https://marinatriner.com/attachment-practice Connect & Ground: 10 Incredible Somatic Practices for Nervous System Regulation: https://marinatriner.com/connect-and-groundAlive & Aligned: 7 Embodiment Practices For Self Connection: https://marinatriner.com/alive-and-alignedTrigger to Rooted: A step by step process of working with your triggers: https://marinatriner.com/trigger-2-rooted VIEW MY COURSES & RESOURCES:https://marinatriner.com/resources CONNECT WITH ME:Follow me on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/marinatriner/ Subscribe to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/@marinatriner Top Episode Quotes:"High performance is yin and yang. We all think it's all yang — but the mastery of flow, peak performance and longevity is being able to dance between the two." — Dave Nelson"The real secret of flow state is being able to relax in the most tense moment. That is where peak performance actually lives." — Dave Nelson"Most people live rushed and agitated and overthinking. And being stuck in the head — that's the hardest one to fix. Everything else is easy." — Dave Nelson"You want to be flow-ready every day — with a playful, regulated nervous system. That is level one. Being able to stay relaxed when you're triggered is level two." — Dave Nelson"Yin should be our natural state that we navigate through life from — and we enter short periods of yang when needed. Most of us have that completely backwards." — Dave Nelsonburnout recovery, nervous system regulation, flow state, somatic healing, trauma healing, yin and yang, high performance, breathwork, emotional regulation, survival mode, self trust, embodiment, inner child work, Taoism and wellness, stress and the body, regulation and productivity, deep within podcast, Dave Nelson, Tao of Flow, parasympathetic nervous system
"Can you rest where there is rest? Do you know when to stop?" — Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, Page 132 GUS – 12StepRecovery.ai 30 Tools to Stay Sober All Year Round! Here is a link to an online version of the Tao Te Ching that we use in every meeting: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Year:1972,1988,1996,2004/section:80 You can download a free PDF of the latest version of Powerless But Not Helpless, a Recovery Interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, at www.BuddyC.org. Feel free to share, post, and distribute this book wherever you believe it will be helpful. You can also sign up for a free daily Tao Recovery Email, access a list of podcasts, and find many other recovery resources. Join our private Facebook group and continue the conversation! Here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TaoPodcast/ or search Tao of Our understanding Podcast. A Course in Miracles - Daily lessons from the 365-Day Course in Miracles Calendar. See the notes in each entry for a more detailed description. Click Here to add the Course in Miracles Calendar to your Google Calendar Daily Thought is a daily Google Calendar you can add to your Google Calendar. It provides a daily thought that combines elements of Christian, ACIM, Tao, and AA. Click here to add the Daily Thought Calendar to your Google Calendar Nightly 9 pm eastern Zoom A.A. Meeting www.ZoomAAMeetings.com Would you like to receive a free daily topic email with the most popular A.A. resources, accompanied by a secret Facebook group for discussion? Go to www.DailyAAEmails.com for more information!
Paul and Tao are reunited for a rare in-person episode to talk about coccyx pain, getting rousted for plants, getting shushed during World Cup, step-dad complications, minimum wage at 33, screaming in the car, Pokemon, conditional love, and Tony Hawk. Intro song: “Dance” by Slayyyter. Outro song: “Holidae In” by Chingy.Support the show
Stewart Alsop sits down with Daniel Freed, forty thousand words deep into a book that ties together consciousness, totalitarianism, archetypes, and religion, and the two spend the conversation tracing how those threads connect. They work through Jungian archetypes as behavioral blueprints embedded in stories across generations, unpacking the father, mother, and son roles and what they reveal about tradition, potential, and the individual. From there they get into Jordan Peterson's model of storytelling as a defense against totalitarian thinking, detour through Buddhism, Taoism, and the idea of the absolute, and Daniel walks through his own attempt to prove the limits of representing consciousness using axioms borrowed from math and logic, including Cantor's diagonal argument. The back half moves into Daniel's math and computer science background, touching on David Hilbert, Von Neumann, combinatorics, and complexity theory, before wrapping up with a look at Stewart's hardware prototyping experiments.Timestamps00:00 Introduction to archetypes, Jung, and why psychologists write dense books00:05 Mother, father, and son as story roles; tradition, potential, and the individual00:10 Totalitarianism, narrative architecture, and Peterson's four degrees of freedom in a story00:15 Objects, relational properties, and why the thing-in-itself breaks down under scrutiny00:20 The absolute, the Tao, and consciousness as a limit you can't directly represent00:25 A proof sketch against representing consciousness; diagonal arguments and formal limits00:30 Relevance realization, Popper, and why consciousness may resist full scientific modeling00:35 Applying the story model to groups: how collective narratives can become totalitarian00:40 Egregores, faith vs belief, and how ideas spread through modern institutions00:45 A turn into math: computer science, injury, Hilbert, and the power of axioms00:50 Quantum math, Von Neumann, and complexity theory as problem reductionKey InsightsArchetypes work like compressed behavioral data. Daniel frames archetypes not as arbitrary symbols but as patterns tested across generations of storytelling — when a story trains believers to kill the father figure and chaos follows, more value gets placed on the father and tradition over time, and the same logic explains why the mother figure comes to represent potential and the son comes to represent the individual.The son-outranks-the-father pattern underwrites Western individualism. Daniel argues that across traditions, the hero figure eventually outranks the established order, and this is the root of ideas like free speech and presumption of innocence — a fundamentally anti-utilitarian stance since it values the single person over the group's interest.Jordan Peterson's four-part story architecture doubles as a defense against totalitarianism. What is, what should be, the path between them, and the unknown or chaos form the minimum structure needed for a conscious being to experience anything as new. Daniel took this framework and applied it to group narratives, showing how holding one element of a group's story fixed while individuals change creates the conditions for totalitarian control.Every property is relational, so there's no "thing in itself." Drawing on Nietzsche, Daniel walks through the idea that qualities like hardness or mass only exist as effects on other things, which means an object stripped of all its relations has nothing left to define it.Daniel built a formal argument for why consciousness can't be fully represented. Using three axioms about distinctions resting within "respects" and borrowing Cantor's diagonal argument, he shows that certain respects can't have a ceiling, meaning any total representation of consciousness runs into the same problem uncountable sets do.Faith and belief are distinct but feed each other. Stewart draws out the difference — belief as propositional, faith as more emotional and fundamental — and Daniel agrees that propositional belief tends to translate into faith once people start acting it out.Daniel's path ran from computer science to math because of a wrist injury. Unable to type, he shifted toward math and ended up carrying over proof techniques from complexity theory and combinatorics into his philosophical work, citing David Hilbert's method of reducing ideas to rigorous axioms as a direct influence on how he now approaches philosophy.
Welcome to this bonus episode of the WhatsOnStage Podcast! Phelim McDermott has staged everything – gargantuan operas, intimate shows and even forays into the world of Studio Ghibli with My Neighbour Totoro. He now brings his show Tao of Glass to @sohoplace for a West End season – mixing puppetry, the music of Phillip Glass and pseudo-memoir in an experience hoping to redefine what a West End show can be. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode, we explore one of the most tender and profound verses of the Tao Te Ching. Verse 21 speaks of "radiance"—not as an achievement to be earned, but as a natural glow that arises when we stop clinging. Join us as we sit with the paradoxes of the Tao: how to be ungraspable yet aligned, and how to find light within the "dark and unfathomable."
Im 58. Beispiel des Hekiganroku wird Meister Joshu gefragt, warum er den Satz: »Der wahre Weg ist nicht schwer; er verabscheut nur Wahl und Festhalten«, so oft zitiere. Joshu entgegnet, dass er dafür keine Rechtfertigung habe. Was Wahl bedeutet und wie wir dem Anhaften entgehen können, ist ein wiederkehrendes Thema. Joshus Botschaft bleibt dabei stets dieselbe: Der wahre Weg (Dao) ist einfach, nur unser Denken macht ihn kompliziert. Steven Mitchell schreibt dazu in seinem Buch »The Second Book of the Dao«: »Wir glauben die menschliche Natur zu kennen. Doch was, wenn unsere liebsten Annahmen falsch sind? Was, wenn alles Leid aus verwirrten Gedanken resultiert?« In diesem Teisho stellt Christoph Rei Ho Hatlapa dem analytischen Verstand die Wahrnehmung mit dem Herzen zur Seite. Aus ihr erwachsen Mitgefühl und die Einsicht, dass wir nicht von den Wesen um uns herum getrennt sind. Die praktische Aufgabe besteht darin, immer wieder zu unserer eigenen Mitte zurückzukehren, auch wenn in uns viele unterschiedliche Stimmen sprechen: die des inneren Kindes, der Eltern oder unserer Erwartungen. Durch die Zen-Praxis können wir lernen, diese Stimmen wahrzunehmen und den inneren Frieden zwischen ihnen wiederherzustellen. Indem wir unsere mentalen Konstruktionen loslassen und die Wirklichkeit unmittelbarer erkennen, kann Klarheit entstehen. In dieser Klarheit ist der Weg nichts Fernes oder Geheimnisvolles, sondern etwas, das bereits im gegenwärtigen Moment vorhanden ist. Literatur: Stephen Mitchell: The Second Book of the Tao, 1. Auflage, Penguin Publishing Group, 2010, ISBN: 0143116703, 9780143116707 Um für junge Erwachsene den Aufenthalt im ToGenJi zu ermöglichen, bitten wir um eine Spende: Sie finden die Kontodaten/Paypal auf unserer Website https://choka-sangha.de/spenden/ Herzlichen Dank
"Musings of a Chinese Mystic: Selections from the Philosophy of Chuang Tzu" explores the profound teachings of Chuang Tzu, a disciple of Lao Tzu, who sought to counter the growing artificiality and materialism of his time. As he witnessed the rise of Confucian ethics overshadowing the pure Taoism of his master, Chuang Tzu passionately revived the call to return to nature and simplicity. His reflections resonate with timeless themes of authenticity and the critique of societal norms, making this work relevant today as we navigate the complexities of modern civilization. The depth of Chuang Tzu's insights into human nature and the Tao continues to inspire those seeking wisdom and a deeper understanding of life.
What if your destiny isn't something to figure out—but something to trust? Discover the Taoist path from overthinking and anxiety to peace, presence, and effortless flow. Are you constantly overthinking your future, worrying about making the wrong decision, or wondering whether fate has already determined your life? In this episode of Tao Dialogues, we explore the timeless Taoist question of fate versus flow and discover why peace comes not from predicting the future, but from trusting yourself to meet it. You'll learn how to let go of anxiety about the future, stop overthinking every decision, and embrace life's unfolding path with greater calm and confidence.Read the blog post that inspired this episode: https://davidjameslees.substack.com/p/universal-integrity [first blog post on this page] Our Tao Dialogues are powerful yet gentle teachings about authenticity, spirituality and finding emotional balance and flow in everyday life. These spoken-word episodes draw from David James Lees' practice as a Taoist monk and teacher, and expand upon popular posts on ‘David's Journal', his Substack blog.You can subscribe to David's Journal here: https://davidjameslees.substack.com/Learn more about David's online consultations, events, books and audio teachings: https://www.wuweiwisdom.comOther related teachings on our YouTube channel that will help you:TAO DIALOGUES PLAYLIST https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9NQ_PWX4zICamFP2zMyey3KGTnfm2aUq&si=AW_ZOUeldKv3nHhFSHEN (THE SPIRITUAL SELF) PLAYLIST https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9NQ_PWX4zIBmp50wYcmU7jCBLp1Qvl-jINNER CHILD PLAYLIST https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9NQ_PWX4zICGLRS1b7q1HSJhZRash5qqIs there a question you'd like answered on the show? Submit it at: https://bit.ly/askusyourquestion Join our free Wu Wei Wisdom Community Facebook support group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/wuweiwisdomcommunity If you love our work, you can now make a small donation to help fund the continued production of our weekly teachings by buying us a 'virtual coffee'! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/wuweiwisdom Book an online Golden Thread Process & Inner Child Consultation with David: https://www.wuweiwisdom.com/therapies-for-body-mind/ Follow us on Instagram: @wuweiwisdomSign up to receive a relaxing guided meditation gift, plus our weekly newsletter + offers via email: https://www.wuweiwisdom.com/signup -Disclaimer: This podcast and any associated teaching and comments shared are not a substitute for professional therapy, mental health care, crisis support, medical advice, doctor diagnosis, or professional healthcare treatment. Our show episodes provide general information for educational purposes only and are offered as suggestions for you and your professional therapist or healthcare advisor to consider and research.Music by Earth Tree Healing
A golden dragon descends from heaven. Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, mounts its back and begins to rise beyond the human world. His ministers rush forward, grabbing his robes and clinging to the dragon's whiskers—but they have not completed the work required to follow him. In this subscriber-only episode, Taoist Master Mikel Steenrod examines one of the most enduring legends surrounding Huangdi. He explores the emperor's four legendary teachers, the possibility that they were different forms of a single shape-shifting dragon, and the ancient connections between cultivation, medicine, sexuality, alchemy, and immortality. The episode also examines the great tripod, the Bow of Wailing, the symbolism of the light body, and the deeper meaning of Huangdi's departure. A teacher may guide the student, preserve knowledge, and reveal the path—but no one can ascend by borrowing another person's attainment. Living the Tao, episode 1-190, The Legend of Huangdi and the Dragon, is available exclusively to subscribers. Available now for subscribers on Supercast. Subscribe now at https://living-the-tao.supercast.com
"The man who has some respect for his person keeps his carcass out of sight, hides himself as perfect as he can."— Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, Page 126 GUS – 12StepRecovery.ai 30 Tools to Stay Sober All Year Round! Here is a link to an online version of the Tao Te Ching that we use in every meeting: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Year:1972,1988,1996,2004/section:80 You can download a free PDF of the latest version of Powerless But Not Helpless, a Recovery Interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, at www.BuddyC.org. Feel free to share, post, and distribute this book wherever you believe it will be helpful. You can also sign up for a free daily Tao Recovery Email, access a list of podcasts, and find many other recovery resources. Join our private Facebook group and continue the conversation! Here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TaoPodcast/ or search Tao of Our understanding Podcast. A Course in Miracles - Daily lessons from the 365-Day Course in Miracles Calendar. See the notes in each entry for a more detailed description. Click Here to add the Course in Miracles Calendar to your Google Calendar Daily Thought is a daily Google Calendar you can add to your Google Calendar. It provides a daily thought that combines elements of Christian, ACIM, Tao, and AA. Click here to add the Daily Thought Calendar to your Google Calendar Nightly 9 pm eastern Zoom A.A. Meeting www.ZoomAAMeetings.com Would you like to receive a free daily topic email with the most popular A.A. resources, accompanied by a secret Facebook group for discussion? Go to www.DailyAAEmails.com for more information!
Brenna and Joe return to wrap up the love affair between Nick and Charlie in the conclusion of Alice Oseman's Heartstopper. We're reading Volume 6 and watching the Netflix film, Heartstopper Forever (2026) directed by former gay porn director Wash Westmoreland.This is lovely...but we have a few issues, including a forced conflict, a too long break-up in the film, and the lack of time for supporting characters.Plus: Elle's trans right speech; Tao's lesson about loved ones; missing Olivia Coleman; and how much Joe cried!Wanna connect with the show? Follow us on Instagram and BlueSky @HKHSPod or use the hashtag #HKHSPod:> Brenna: @brennacgray> Joe: @bstolemyremote (Instagram) or @joelipsett (BlueSky)Have a mail bag question? Email us at hkhspod@gmail.com Theme music: Rewind Kid "Rhythm Revolution" Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On this brief episode we talk about SDI's upcoming webinar series, The Tao and the Art of Spiritual Companionship. The Tao and the Art of Spiritual Companionship: Insights for Deep Listening and Spiritual Presence $79.99 Many spiritual companions are meeting people who feel exhausted, anxious, polarized, spiritually dry, or overwhelmed by uncertainty. In moments like these, techniques often matter less than the quality of our presence. The Tao Te Ching points us towards flourishing and fulfilling life, without explanation. This ancient Chinese wisdom tradition invites us into a way of living and listening that flows with life. It points us toward something that spiritual directors sense: that the deepest accompaniment happens not when we do more, but when we release into a vital presence. This three-part series draws from seven essential Taoist themes into conversation with the practice of spiritual direction. Together we'll explore a fresh framework for deep listening that helps you accompany people with less striving and more trust. We'll explore not only how we accompany others, but how we inhabit our own inner life. Each session weaves together reflection, dialogue, and practical application. Rather than simply adding another technique, this series helps cultivate the inner posture from which meaningful spiritual companionship naturally flows. Anyone can participate in an SDI webinar! If you're not a member, just contact us at office@sdiworld.org for your pricing. https://www.sdicompanions.org/product/the-tao-and-the-art-of-spiritual-companionship/ --- Scott McRae has been offering spiritual direction and training for over 25 years and continues to provide ongoing educational resources through the Spiritual Direction Learning Lab. An ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, he holds an M.Div. from Yale University. Scott's professional journey has spanned church and campus ministries, hospital chaplaincy, and leadership roles, all of which have shaped his approach to spiritual guidance. With three decades of experience training chaplains and spiritual directors, he brings deep wisdom and practical insight to his work. Based in Minneapolis, MN, Scott enjoys life with his wife, Melanie, their adult daughter, and their wonderfully quirky rescue dogs. He finds great joy in long walks, meaningful conversations, and fostering spiritual growth in others.
Confucius watches a man enter the violent waters beneath a towering waterfall and assumes he is trying to die. Instead, the swimmer emerges downstream with his hair loose, singing and completely at ease. In this trailer for Living the Tao, Episode 1-189, Daoist Master Michael Steenrod introduces the classical story of Confucius and the swimmer at Lüliang. The swimmer survives not by overpowering the water or surrendering helplessly to it, but by understanding its movement. He enters with the descending whirl, rises with the current, and refuses to impose himself where cooperation will carry him farther. The full episode examines Daoist learning through familiarity, immersion, and repetition, while challenging modern interpretations that reduce “being like water” to passive surrender. Listen to Episode 1-189, Lessons from the Swimmer and Water. Available now for subscribers on Supercast. Subscribe now at https://living-the-tao.supercast.com
Today my guest is John Kim. John is one of the world's top and most prolific fundraisers. He was chief client officer at General Catalyst, where he helped raise many of the firm's flagship funds. He is now chairman and president of corporate development at Lila Sciences, a company building scientific superintelligence, where he has helped raise several hundred million dollars. He is also the author of The Tao of Fundraising. This conversation is really a guide on how to raise money from someone who has done it at the highest level. We talk about why persuasion equals desire minus fear, the difference between belief and trust, the laws of fundraising, and how to build the consensus that moves big pools of capital. Please enjoy my conversation with John Kim. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at colossus.com/subscribe. ----- Ramp's mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. ----- Trusted by thousands of businesses, Vanta continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Invest Like the Best listeners get a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/invest. ----- WorkOS is the infrastructure B2B and AI-native companies use to sell to enterprise. It covers everything enterprise security requires: SSO, SCIM, RBAC, Audit Logs, AI governance, and more. Trusted by 2,000+ fast-growing companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel. ----- Rogo is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest. ----- Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit ridgeline.ai. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant. Timestamps: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best (00:02:02) Introduction of John Kim (00:02:39) Money Moves at the Speed of Trust (00:05:06) How to Start a Fundraising Campaign (00:08:03) Persuasion Equals Desire Minus Fear (00:12:20) How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars (00:15:58) The Benchmark Story (00:18:36) The Law of Differentiation (00:24:13) Law of Tradeoffs and Law of Pipeline (00:27:52) The Karpman Drama Triangle (00:30:42) Oprah Winfrey (00:33:49) Most Common Fundraising Mistakes (00:38:35) Secretary of State (00:45:40) The Inner Game (00:47:38) The Kindest Thing
"If now, on top of all this, Non-Being IS, who can comprehend it?" — Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, Page 125 GUS – 12StepRecovery.ai 30 Tools to Stay Sober All Year Round! Here is a link to an online version of the Tao Te Ching that we use in every meeting: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Year:1972,1988,1996,2004/section:80 You can download a free PDF of the latest version of Powerless But Not Helpless, a Recovery Interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, at www.BuddyC.org. Feel free to share, post, and distribute this book wherever you believe it will be helpful. You can also sign up for a free daily Tao Recovery Email, access a list of podcasts, and find many other recovery resources. Join our private Facebook group and continue the conversation! Here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TaoPodcast/ or search Tao of Our understanding Podcast. A Course in Miracles - Daily lessons from the 365-Day Course in Miracles Calendar. See the notes in each entry for a more detailed description. Click Here to add the Course in Miracles Calendar to your Google Calendar Daily Thought is a daily Google Calendar you can add to your Google Calendar. It provides a daily thought that combines elements of Christian, ACIM, Tao, and AA. Click here to add the Daily Thought Calendar to your Google Calendar Nightly 9 pm eastern Zoom A.A. Meeting www.ZoomAAMeetings.com Would you like to receive a free daily topic email with the most popular A.A. resources, accompanied by a secret Facebook group for discussion? Go to www.DailyAAEmails.com for more information!
Khumo Kumalo sits down with Oreoluwa Alaba to unpack his long, layered journey through the creative industry. Oreoluwa began editing around 15–16 years old, already working with projects and influences such as Overtime, Ball Is Life and Ayo & Tao. From those early days he moved into modelling, learning lessons about presence, self-presentation and the industry's expectations. Eventually he chose to move behind the camera and commit to videography — not as a simple career swap but as a way to take ownership of the creative process, to shape narrative and craft visuals on his own terms. In this episode we follow that transition in detail: what motivated him to leave modelling for film, how he developed a process that reflects his identity, and the practical and creative steps he took to become a versatile, high‑value creative in the space. Above all, we hear Oreoluwa's personal perspective on enjoying being Misunderstood—how that framing has affected his work, his risks, and his freedom as an artist. Listen for a complete, first‑person account of a creative path that moves from teenage editing into thoughtful, intentional filmmaking.
What if the habits that shaped you were never taught with words? You watched them. You copied them. Over time, they became part of the mind you call your own. In this trailer for Living the Tao, Episode 1-188, Taoist Master Mikel Steenrod introduces emulation—the natural process behind “monkey see, monkey do.” The episode explores how the Social Mind is imprinted, whether better models can replace destructive ones, why nature can serve as a teacher, and how gratitude helps build karma. If emulation helped create the problem, can it also help undo it? Monkey See, Monkey Do is available now for subscribers. Available now for subscribers on Supercast. Subscribe now at https://living-the-tao.supercast.com
Researchers track ransomware they say is getting GoshDarn sophisticated. Zimbra patches a critical vulnerability affecting its Classic Web Client. A sophisticated vishing campaign targeting Microsoft 365 accounts. GigaWiper combines espionage capabilities with multiple destructive payloads. The EU sues member states over lax cybersecurity. The NSA revives TAO. A Puerto Rican agency exposes roughly a million Social Security numbers. A former ransomware negotiator heads to prison for assisting BlackCat. Our guest is Maxim Zavodchik, Senior Director of AI Security Research at Akamai, with insights on the upcoming MCP specification. Bad Wifi leaves a trophy up for grabs. Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest We are joined by Maxim Zavodchik, Senior Director of AI Security Research at Akamai sharing insights on new security risks that can arise from upcoming MCP specification. Selected Reading New Ransomware Exploits Malicious Driver to Remove Cybersecurity Protections (Infosecurity Magazine) Zimbra urges customers to patch critical web client XSS flaw (Bleeping Computer) Okta Warns of Vishing Attacks Targeting Microsoft 365 Customers (SecurityWeek) GigaWiper Combines Multiple Malware for System-Level Sabotage (SecurityWeek) Commission preliminarily finds the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook in breach of the Digital Services Act (European Commision) European Patience With Cybersecurity Laggards Snaps (BankInfoSecurity) NSA revives 'Tailored Access Operations' name for elite hacking unit (The Record) A Puerto Rico Government Agency Exposed 1 Million Social Security Numbers (ProPublica) Third US Security Expert Sentenced to Prison for Helping Ransomware Gang (SecurityWeek) Thief posed as Wi-Fi fixing hero, then stole priceless trophy (The Register) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
>> Get A Free Copy Of The Book (Big Idea To Bestseller): https://www.bigideatobestseller.com/free-book>> Book A Call With Our Team: https://write.bigideatobestseller.com/booking-page>> Step-By-Step Process To Becoming A Bestselling Author: https://write.bigideatobestseller.com/vsl-watch-pageIG: @jakekelferLinkedIn: @jakekelferSam Obitz shares why lasting success comes from desire, discipline, and mindset, not talent alone. Drawing from his book, The Tao of Progress, he explains how reframing challenges, building empowering habits, and making intentional choices can lead to stronger performance, greater fulfillment, and lasting personal growth.
In this episode of The Rainmaker Podcast, Gui Costin talks with Mark Allen, President and Chief Development Officer of Royal Oak Realty Trust, about building a fundraising operation from the ground up in an industrial REIT. Mark covers how Royal Oak grew its distribution team from three to eight by hiring geographically rather than by channel, why shared account ownership beats ring-fencing relationships, and how disciplined communication, CRM tools, and AI-powered call notes are reshaping the sales motion amid heavy RIA consolidation. He and Gui also unpack his player-coach leadership style and the fundraising formula he's taken from The Tao of Fundraising — why simplicity beats complexity every time.
Could the secret to better putting be thinking less? Discover how The Tao of Putting helps golfers build confidence, trust their stroke, reduce costly mistakes, and approach every putt with a calmer, more effective mindset. Learn more at https://mybook.to/TaoOfPutting Resources For Life City: Porthtowan Address: Flat 1 Vor Vounder Website: https://www.resourcesforlife.net/enterprise/
"What shall we there say—that Tao is simplicity, stillness, indifference, purity, harmony, and ease? All these names leave me indifferent for their distinctions have disappeared." — Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, Page 124 GUS – 12StepRecovery.ai 30 Tools to Stay Sober All Year Round! Here is a link to an online version of the Tao Te Ching that we use in every meeting: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Year:1972,1988,1996,2004/section:80 You can download a free PDF of the latest version of Powerless But Not Helpless, a Recovery Interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, at www.BuddyC.org. Feel free to share, post, and distribute this book wherever you believe it will be helpful. You can also sign up for a free daily Tao Recovery Email, access a list of podcasts, and find many other recovery resources. Join our private Facebook group and continue the conversation! Here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TaoPodcast/ or search Tao of Our understanding Podcast. A Course in Miracles - Daily lessons from the 365-Day Course in Miracles Calendar. See the notes in each entry for a more detailed description. Click Here to add the Course in Miracles Calendar to your Google Calendar Daily Thought is a daily Google Calendar you can add to your Google Calendar. It provides a daily thought that combines elements of Christian, ACIM, Tao, and AA. Click here to add the Daily Thought Calendar to your Google Calendar Nightly 9 pm eastern Zoom A.A. Meeting www.ZoomAAMeetings.com Would you like to receive a free daily topic email with the most popular A.A. resources, accompanied by a secret Facebook group for discussion? Go to www.DailyAAEmails.com for more information!
On Episode 221 of Floating Through Film, we're continuing our series picked by Dany, Jean Renoir! On this fourth week of the series, Dany begins the episode by speaking about Renoir's approach to actors and improvisation (10:33). We then review two films he made after returning to Europe, 1952's The Golden Coach (55:05), followed by 1955's French Cancan (2:11:07). We hope you enjoy!Sources mentioned: - "Boats on the Marne: Jean Renoir's Critique of Modernity" by Prakash Younger - "Jean Renoir" by Raymond Durgnat - "The Tao of Abel" by Rowan Righelato (Senses of Cinema)- Renoir Interview with Jacques Rivette and Francois Truffaut (Cahiers du Cinéma No. 34 + 35, April + May 1945)- "Jean Renoir, le patron, 1re partie: La recherche du relatif" directed by Jacques Rivette- "Jean Renoir, le patron, 2e partie: La direction d'acteur" directed by Jacques Rivette- "Jean Renoir" by Andre BazinEpisode Next Week: Jean Renoir Week 5 Music:- Intro: The Golden Coach- Break: French Cancan- Outro: French Cancan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pROMvaMJios)Hosts: Luke Seay (LB: https://letterboxd.com/seayluke/, Twitter: https://x.com/luke67s)Blake Tourville (LB: https://letterboxd.com/blaketourville/, Twitter: https://x.com/vladethepoker)Dany Joshuva (LB: https://letterboxd.com/djoshuva/, Twitter: https://x.com/grindingthefilm)Podcast Links:Spotify and Apple: https://linktr.ee/floatingthroughfilmLetterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/floatingfilm/Email: floatingthroughfilm@gmail.com
Today, a conversation with special guest Peter Garnry, co-founder of Gesda Capital on choosing and valuing stocks for the long run, observations on the current state of play in AI as expressed in equity markets, the Meta and other news this week and its implications, whether AI can truly scale as hoped and so much more, even what Peter is reading these days. I'm sure listeners will enjoy this conversation. Links IBM IBM CEO interview we referenced on the podcast on the future of the AI rollout. There is also this newer one - probably a lot of overlap. The Abraham Lincoln biography Peter Garnry referred by John Meacham. and the John Kim book The Tao of Fund Raising. The Gesda capital website. John's latest FX Trader piece, including the impact of the US jobs data. About twice per week (in normal times, hopefully soon to resume), you will find links discussed on the podcast and a chart-of-the-day over at the John J. Hardy substack. Read daily in-depth market updates from the Saxo Market Call and the Saxo Strategy Team here. Please reach out to us at marketcall@saxobank.com for feedback and questions. Click here to open an account with Saxo. Intro music by AShamaluevMusic DISCLAIMER This content is marketing material. Trading financial instruments carries risks. Always ensure that you understand these risks before trading. This material does not contain investment advice or an encouragement to invest in a particular manner. Historic performance is not a guarantee of future results. The instrument(s) referenced in this content may be issued by a partner, from whom Saxo Bank A/S receives promotional fees, payment or retrocessions. While Saxo may receive compensation from these partnerships, all content is created with the aim of providing clients with valuable information and options.
What if the thoughts you trust most are the very thing keeping you anxious? Discover the Taoist way to quiet overthinking, calm the monkey mind, and return to inner peace. In this Tao Dialogues episode, discover the Taoist wisdom for taming the monkey mind and breaking free from overthinking, worry, anxiety, and the need to control life. Learn how the monkey mind is driven by fear, how Shen (authentic self) offers calm, clarity, and truth, and why practising wu wei helps you find lasting inner peace. If you're ready to stop believing every thought and start living with greater presence, authenticity, and emotional freedom, this teaching will show you how.Read the blog post that inspired this episode: https://davidjameslees.substack.com/p/borrowed-happiness [second blog post on this page]Our Tao Dialogues are powerful yet gentle teachings about authenticity, spirituality and finding emotional balance and flow in everyday life. These spoken-word episodes draw from David James Lees' practice as a Taoist monk and teacher, and expand upon popular posts on ‘David's Journal', his Substack blog.You can subscribe to David's Journal here: https://davidjameslees.substack.com/Learn more about David's online consultations, events, books and audio teachings: https://www.wuweiwisdom.comOther related teachings on our YouTube channel that will help you:TAO DIALOGUES PLAYLIST https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9NQ_PWX4zICamFP2zMyey3KGTnfm2aUq&si=AW_ZOUeldKv3nHhFSHEN (THE SPIRITUAL SELF) PLAYLIST https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9NQ_PWX4zIBmp50wYcmU7jCBLp1Qvl-jINNER CHILD PLAYLIST https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9NQ_PWX4zICGLRS1b7q1HSJhZRash5qqIs there a question you'd like answered on the show? Submit it at: https://bit.ly/askusyourquestion Join our free Wu Wei Wisdom Community Facebook support group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/wuweiwisdomcommunity If you love our work, you can now make a small donation to help fund the continued production of our weekly teachings by buying us a 'virtual coffee'! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/wuweiwisdom Book an online Golden Thread Process & Inner Child Consultation with David: https://www.wuweiwisdom.com/therapies-for-body-mind/ Follow us on Instagram: @wuweiwisdomSign up to receive a relaxing guided meditation gift, plus our weekly newsletter + offers via email: https://www.wuweiwisdom.com/signup -Disclaimer: This podcast and any associated teaching and comments shared are not a substitute for professional therapy, mental health care, crisis support, medical advice, doctor diagnosis, or professional healthcare treatment. Our show episodes provide general information for educational purposes only and are offered as suggestions for you and your professional therapist or healthcare advisor to consider and research.Music by Earth Tree Healing
Web3 Academy: Exploring Utility In NFTs, DAOs, Crypto & The Metaverse
Is Bittensor (TAO) the next major crypto opportunity, or just another AI narrative? In this episode of the Milk Road Show, we sit down with Karia Samaroo, Founder & CEO of XTOW and former founder of WonderFi, to break down why decentralized AI could reshape the future of artificial intelligence, and why he believes TAO could become the “Bitcoin of AI.”~~~~~
What would a Daoist utopia actually look like? A perfect society? A better political system? A sacred rulebook everyone finally agrees to follow? Not exactly. In this free episode of Living the Tao (1-187), Master Mikel Steenrod and Morgan explore the Daoist view of utopia, and why Taoism begins with personal liberation rather than social control. The conversation moves through the Tao Te Ching, Confucianism, Laozi as the fed-up scholar leaving society behind, and the uncomfortable truth that humans may be building machines faster than they are developing wisdom. Along the way, the episode asks a sharper question: What if the reason humanity cannot build a perfect world is that humans have not yet developed enough to imagine one? This is a talk about Taoism, technology, failed ideologies, personal freedom, and the double donkey salute of Laozi riding out of a broken system. In this episode: Why the Tao Te Ching did not create Taoism The difference between personal liberation and social rule-making Why Daoism is not apolitical, but anti-political How technology can outpace human development Why old “isms” keep failing What a Taoist utopia might actually require Watch the video version of this episode: https://youtu.be/6H5JFASQ10Q
Bittensor whales are using this secret to stack as much TAO as possible before the next bull run. While the price of TAO bounces around $200 smart money is taking advantage of this strategy to grow their portfolio before Bittensor goes mainstream. By following the money flow here we can all capitalize on the Bitcoin of AI.
In this Living the Tao short (2-25), Master Mikel Steenrod and Morgan explore the role of animals in Taoism. Cranes, deer, cats, turtles, tortoises, three-legged crows, and many-tailed foxes all appear as symbols, teachers, guides, or mythic beings. But the strongest lesson comes from the turtle. When the storm comes, the turtle does not fight it. It sinks below the turbulence, spends the least energy possible, and rises again when the storm has passed. This short looks at animals as part of nature, what they can teach us about adversity, and why Taoism asks us to consider whether our actions fit our nature, preserve our energy, and serve a real purpose. Sometimes wisdom is not resistance. Sometimes wisdom is knowing when to sink beneath the storm. Video version here: https://youtu.be/0hOPHx9tYRY
What does it mean to truly live in harmony with yourself and the universe?In this episode of Daughters of the Moon, Kim & Barb welcomes renowned Taoist teacher, author, and artist Deng Ming-Dao for a profound conversation inspired by his newest book, Taming Tigers & Butterfly Dreams.Together, they explore the timeless wisdom of Traditional Taoism and what it means to return to our most natural state. Ming-Dao explains that when energy is allowed to move freely, we naturally become healthier in body, mind, and spirit. When we resist life, we create stagnation and close ourselves off from possibility.This heartfelt conversation explores:• What the Tao is and how it flows through the universe• Aligning your personal path with the universal path• Returning to your authentic self• Why meditation is an essential daily practice• The power of simplicity and discovering your true values• The importance of breath, nourishing food, restful sleep, and movement• How stories help us understand ourselves and the world• Why resistance creates suffering and flow creates transformationWhether you're discovering Taoism for the first time or have practiced for years, this episode offers practical wisdom for living with greater peace, balance, and authenticity.Connect with Ming-Dao Deng
"His mind could not bite on the meat of doctrine." — Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, Page 121 Being toothless is a state of being that helps us live in the "I don't know." GUS – 12StepRecovery.ai 30 Tools to Stay Sober All Year Round! Here is a link to an online version of the Tao Te Ching that we use in every meeting: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Year:1972,1988,1996,2004/section:80 You can download a free PDF of the latest version of Powerless But Not Helpless, a Recovery Interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, at www.BuddyC.org. Feel free to share, post, and distribute this book wherever you believe it will be helpful. You can also sign up for a free daily Tao Recovery Email, access a list of podcasts, and find many other recovery resources. Join our private Facebook group and continue the conversation! Here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TaoPodcast/ or search Tao of Our understanding Podcast. A Course in Miracles - Daily lessons from the 365-Day Course in Miracles Calendar. See the notes in each entry for a more detailed description. Click Here to add the Course in Miracles Calendar to your Google Calendar Daily Thought is a daily Google Calendar you can add to your Google Calendar. It provides a daily thought that combines elements of Christian, ACIM, Tao, and AA. Click here to add the Daily Thought Calendar to your Google Calendar Nightly 9 pm eastern Zoom A.A. Meeting www.ZoomAAMeetings.com Would you like to receive a free daily topic email with the most popular A.A. resources, accompanied by a secret Facebook group for discussion? Go to www.DailyAAEmails.com for more information!
What if better management starts with seeing connections that were there all along? In this conversation, Balaji Reddie and Andrew Stotz unpack one of the most powerful and overlooked ideas in management: that everything is connected. Drawing on Dr. W. Edwards Deming's systems thinking, he explains why the problems we face today were set in motion long before we noticed them, and why the solutions are rarely where we think to look. Along the way, a cup of coffee becomes a window into five years of invisible effort, hydrogen and oxygen defy everything we'd expect, and a classroom game reveals that cooperation isn't a soft ideal — it might just be human nature. Whether you run a team of two or a global organization, this episode will quietly shift the way you read a situation, ask a question, or respond to a problem. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussions with Balaji Reddie, an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management generally. The topic for today is connectedness, which will help you see things you normally would not see. Balaji, how are you? 0:00:30.7 Balaji Reddie: I'm good, I'm fine. 0:00:32.5 Andrew Stotz: Nice to connect with you. 0:00:34.1 Balaji Reddie: Yes, same here. 0:00:35.3 Andrew Stotz: Connectedness day. 0:00:36.5 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, connectedness, absolutely. Yeah, we chose this term very carefully, right? 0:00:42.6 Andrew Stotz: I suspect you have, given your precision. [laughter] 0:00:47.4 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, to see things that you normally would not see, let me attribute this to Henry Neave, who said that he heard Deming say this during his last three or four seminars in England, right? In Britain rather. Yeah, I think it was mostly in England. And he said, when he heard him say that, he said, "I am not here to teach you anything new. I'm here to make you see things that you normally would not see." And I would like to just expand on that and say when you see things differently, obviously, you observe, you record different things. And when you record different things, you ask different questions. When you ask different questions, you get different answers. And when you get different answers, you draw different conclusions. When you draw different conclusions, you take different decisions. And when you take different decisions, you get different results. It's insanity to expect different results by asking the same questions every single time. So management is not so much about giving the right answers as much as it is about asking the correct questions. And I think Dr. Deming helps you do that. He helps you ask the correct questions. 0:02:02.2 Balaji Reddie: Now coming to the word connectedness. We spoke about the System of Profound Knowledge, a unified theory of leadership and management, where Dr. Deming brings together four sciences. And the first one he says about systems thinking, or what he called as appreciation for a system, appreciation for a fact that everything is systemic. There's nothing that happens in isolation, right? And the second one, of course, he said was understanding variation, then understanding theory of knowledge and understanding psychology. But he said, all four are equally important, et cetera. And then comes the, I won't say contradictory, but a chapter before Profound Knowledge on systems especially. So that's where I decided to use the word connectedness, that all these are connected. What did he mean by that? So I believe he wanted people to learn about connectedness and systems first. 0:03:01.6 Balaji Reddie: So let's dive right there. What did he always say about systems, or connectedness as we say here? And let's get into his definition for system. And he says that "a system is a network," right, "of interdependent components that work together to achieve the aim of the system." And then he says "every system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system." And very well articulated throughout this book which he wrote, he always began with aim of the chapter. Even in Out of the Crisis, he always started with aim of a chapter. So network of interdependent components. So let's just break it down, because the three important words are network, interdependent, and aim. And he says aim comes first because without the aim, there is no system. 0:04:00.6 Balaji Reddie: Right. And he goes on to tell us what the aim of a system should be. Okay. He says here that the recommended aim should be for everybody to gain. Now, in one of the paragraphs there, management's job, where he says should be to make it clear, the first step is clarification. Everyone in the organization must understand the aim and how to direct their efforts towards the aim, right? And everyone must understand, okay, this is important. The danger and loss to the whole organization from a team that seeks to become a selfish, independent profit center. Right. So he says here we need to give both, why we need to do what we need to do. And he says the aim precedes the system. Now, I would like to leave this discussion right here. We will cover this in our 14 Points, our session on the 14 Points, because I believe the word aim and purpose are, they go hand in hand. Aim gives us a direction and purpose gives us the reason why we exist, right? And so the direction of all the efforts, you can see the development. He says here, he gives some examples that the system must create something of value. In other words, results. The intended results along with consideration of recipients and of cost mold the aim of the system. So he said it should be something that makes life better for everyone. 0:05:39.8 Balaji Reddie: Now, he was talking about a man-made system here. Remember, he wrote this for organizations, but I think I mentioned this before that this can equally be applied to natural systems, if you want to really study them in detail. I remember talking to Barbara Lawton about this, and I said, "Natural systems, they do have an aim. It's just that we've not understood it." The purpose and aim of, in fact, that was the basis for my paper, which I delivered at the Deming Research Seminar in 2002. And the title of my paper was Deming and Ecology. And I was trying to put together the thoughts of the physicist Fritjof Capra, who wrote some wonderful books like The Tao of Physics, The Turning Point, The Web of Life, and The Hidden Connections. And The Systems View of Life is also one of the sub-books or booklets that he came out with. But these were his wonderful books. At the time, he had not yet written The Hidden Connections, right? So based on his three books that I had read up until then, of course, one was called Uncommon Wisdom, where he reproduced some of the interviews he had with some systems thinkers in the world, including people not from conventional systems thinking. For example, he also reproduced his interaction with the then Prime Minister or the ex-Prime Minister of India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, and how he spent time with her, because he was over here in India for quite some time studying the language Sanskrit and studying the texts over here, because he learned about systems thinking even deeper. 0:07:25.1 Balaji Reddie: So over there, he wanted to, he raised a question, what is the purpose? So I wanted to use Dr. Deming's theories to understand the purpose of a natural system and what is the purpose of man [laughter] in this natural system. So that was my theory. And that's when this aim thing became more and more clear. And Barbara said, "No, you're right. There is an aim. It's just that we're trying to understand it. Without that, you won't have the system working so beautifully. There is something that is at work." Right. And he says here, management of a system. And then he says that a system includes the future. And now here's where, when you talk about system includes the future, he mentions Peter Senge in his book, if you know about The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. And that's where this fantastic statement comes in because he says delayed effects. So although, Deming never used these words directly, but here I am putting among the first principles of systems thinking is that cause and effect are not closely related in time or space. Right. And that gives a lot of frightening conclusions, or inferences that you can draw from this. If I say that, by the way, that cause and effect are not closely related in time or space, and if I ask you what you understand by this statement, your first knee-jerk reaction would be what I do today, the consequences would be felt in another time at another place. Absolutely right. That's exactly what this means. But the converse is also true. What we get to see in front of our eyes, the origins are at another time and another place. 0:09:15.9 Balaji Reddie: So we only see the event, but systems thinking teaches us there are no events in this world. There are only eventualities. Now, this comes into play when you start doing a study, typically when people learn about quality, and then the first thing they learn is to, okay, identify a problem and try to solve it, right? And then they start asking the question, "Why did this happen?" And then you draw a fishbone diagram, which is, you know, one of the most popular tools. But the problem there is you need to arrange the causes logically and not categorically. And you also need to take into account that these causes are also related to each other. You can't isolate them. And the fact that, there could be an element of time over here, right, that this is a delayed effect that you're seeing. So the effect comes much later. And sometimes it could be weeks and months. So you have to take that into account, right? So the cause and effect are not true, which means then the next corollary from this statement is that seemingly disconnected events turn out to be connected. And so when you are studying something that's happening in front of your eyes, very quickly you ask the question, "What else happened a month ago, a week ago, that we seem to have missed? Are we missing something here?" So that's one of those things that we need to get into, right? We need to go backwards in time and not look at the localized stuff here. We need to look in space all around and try to figure out where and how we need to change things. 0:11:06.1 Andrew Stotz: It's also interesting to think about all the things that have to have happened for an outcome to occur today the way you want it, that is the right outcome. 0:11:19.8 Balaji Reddie: Yes. 0:11:21.4 Andrew Stotz: And a good example I use for that, and I was just talking two different times this week with my team, is coffee. Coffee is a really interesting one, because when you go to a coffee shop, they make you a cup of coffee, they give you a cup of coffee, but what you don't realize is that there was a farmer, took him five years to grow that tree. And then they had to pick it at the right time. You pick it at the wrong time, it goes wrong. 0:11:47.4 Balaji Reddie: Oh, yeah. 0:11:48.3 Andrew Stotz: They put it into some water. They leave it in too long, it's fermented. They leave it in too short, it doesn't, the shell doesn't come off. And then if they, once they've worked on it, if they have their grinders that are getting off the mucilage off of it, if they're too tight, well, then you're going to get a little slice off the top of the bean. And then when that goes to the roasting machine, that's going to burn right there because there's no protection in that area. But they got to get all of those things right all the way to that barista. And if that barista just basically doesn't check the water temperature, it's done. 0:12:29.5 Balaji Reddie: It's done. [laughter] 0:12:29.9 Andrew Stotz: You throw it away. And when you think about it, I have another lesson that I give to young people about capitalism, that how all of these decisions are happening all along the way. And when that happens, there's waste in the system. And that waste goes back all the way back to the effort of the farmer five years ago when they planted that tree. 0:12:51.8 Balaji Reddie: That's right. 0:12:52.3 Andrew Stotz: And so reducing waste is not only good for you and good for costs in general, but it has a respect for the process, a respect for the system. 0:13:04.0 Balaji Reddie: Yes. Connectedness. Reconnected. [laughter] 0:13:07.6 Andrew Stotz: Well, and the other thing I tell them is I say, and here you have a coffee bean coming from this country that's then being shipped to this country. They never met. 0:13:16.8 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. 0:13:17.1 Andrew Stotz: And that's capitalism. You trade. In fact, they may not speak the same language. 0:13:23.1 Balaji Reddie: Absolutely. 0:13:23.5 Andrew Stotz: Or they may even be enemies. They may hate each other. 0:13:26.9 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. 0:13:27.4 Andrew Stotz: And yet they trade. 0:13:29.5 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. 0:13:31.1 Andrew Stotz: And so it's a voluntary connectedness that happens through capitalism. Anyways. 0:13:37.2 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. The right quality and uniformity are foundations for commerce, prosperity, and peace. [laughter] That's Deming for you. 0:13:46.1 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. 0:13:46.3 Balaji Reddie: I think he chose that sentence so beautifully. It goes into the Deming Medal. He knew what he was talking about. So he was talking about systems, and I think profound knowledge came towards the end of his life, and rightly so. It came as a revelation, as a catharsis. I think he went through all of that, especially, I think it was between '88 and '89, if I'm not mistaken. Jaki Graham talks about this very, very funnily. She says that they were giving him pure oxygen and maybe that made his brain cells go alive. [laughter] And he could think so clearly. He was getting pure oxygen. And so his thought process... 0:14:31.0 Andrew Stotz: By the way, for the listeners out there, you may feel like I feel when I think about how Dr. Deming didn't really come out with the System of Profound Knowledge until he was, early '90s, let's say, '90s. You think to yourself, okay, I still have time to come up with my incredible insight on... 0:14:52.4 Balaji Reddie: Correct. 0:14:52.9 Andrew Stotz: Bringing together all my experience. 0:14:55.1 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. So because I think I shared this with you before that when you read Mary Walton's book and he says, "No, I don't think I'm ready to establish an institute," and he only did it one month before he passed. So I think by that time he was quite sure what he created was quite amazing, and it'll stand the test of time, right? And although, the title of the book is The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, I believe it is industry, government, education, and healthcare. Because when he was in Japan, he said Japan must see itself as a system. And when he got the Deming Medal, that's what he said. Oh, sorry, when he got the Emperor's Medal, the Second Order of the Sacred Treasure. And he was talking to the Japanese Prime Minister. And he said, "You all must see yourselves as a system." And the four sectors of industry, government, education, and healthcare must work together. So he meant it as in the broadest sense of the term, right? And that's why this word system. So the first thing, of course, cause and effect are not closely related. Seemingly disconnected events turn out to be connected. The third important thing here in systems thinking is the reductionist thinking that we have. 0:16:12.0 Balaji Reddie: We believe the word analysis means dissection. And if you look deeply and read the book Mind and the World Order, what is the purpose of analysis? The purpose of analysis is not dissection. That's just the act of breaking a system down. But the purpose of analysis is interrelationships, establishing the interrelationships or understanding the connectedness. And I find it quite funny because people say analysis is dissection, and so they came up with a new term, really not necessary, synthesis, bringing it all together. There was no need for that term. You're not engaging in what, tautology? [laughter] You didn't need that. Analysis itself means dissecting and understanding relationships, right? 0:17:02.2 Andrew Stotz: Hmm. 0:17:03.3 Balaji Reddie: And so he said here, we have that reductionist thinking, but we forget that in a system, you have what are called synergistic relationships. You cannot understand a system by breaking it down into its components and studying the components separately and then believing that the components and their attributes and what they do gives the output of what we see. No, you could be completely wrong here. It's not what they do separately. Okay, it's a good thing to understand the components of a system and study them and maybe even establish connectedness, but sometimes what the results you see are quite contrary to what they could be giving separately. I'll give you an example here. Take the case of water. Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. You cannot study and draw conclusions about water by studying the attributes of hydrogen and oxygen separately. You'd be making a mistake, a grave error. Okay, let's do that. Hydrogen, a highly inflammable gas, catches fire like this. Oxygen feeds fire. But you put them together and they give you something that quenches fire. Hydrogen is not wet. Oxygen is not wet. But water is wet. [laughter] How do you explain this? 0:18:25.9 Balaji Reddie: All right. If you take the case of sugar, it's a hydrocarbon. Try tasting hydrogen. All right, try tasting carbon. Now put them together and see what you get. Now, can it not be then that you are studying a system and when you break things down and you're studying the components separately, you could be making the same error? It's not what they do separately, it's what they do together. It's the same with sections in a company, departments in a company, companies themselves. Today, we use this sophisticated term, supply chain, call it what you will. I love to use the word provider network. I don't like using the word supplier any longer. I like to use the word provider, because today we're living in a different world. We're getting activities done by someone else, and you can't say he's supplying me this activity. He's providing me this service, right? So provider is a better term to use than supplier. And it's no longer a chain. It's a network, right? It's more lateral. It's all over the place. It's not linear. You're doing a huge disservice by using the term supply chain, because it's not bringing out what exactly is happening right there. 0:19:38.3 Balaji Reddie: And today's supply chains or provider networks are globally dispersed. So you need to have something that connects them. You just said that, the farmer could be in a different country, speaking a different language, maybe he didn't even know where it is being used, and they could hate each other, but they have to work, [laughter] you need to work together. So there's some kind of connectedness that comes in once again. But here's where people make mistakes. So you're talking about synergistic relationships. So sometimes in a team, now here's where all that incentive pay and choosing employee of the month can destroy a system. 0:20:18.8 Balaji Reddie: It could have been the entire team that did well, and they did well because they worked as a team. And it was synergistic, where some components had to, I can't use the right word, but maybe had to underperform so that the system came out ahead. It's like the organs of the human body, right? That's an interconnected, interdependent system. You have a primary function of each of the organs, but there are many other functions we are still discovering, right? For example, if you take the case of ears, besides hearing, they're responsible for balance in our body, right? Eyes, besides sight, they are also responsible for balance in our body. If you try this yoga position, you know, there's a yoga, so to say, yeah, you stand on one leg. And then you lift one leg off the ground and put the ball of your heel on the knee, the other leg's knee. And then you hold your hands above your head to form like a namaste or a triangle. As long as your eyes are open, you stand upright. Shut your eyes, you fall. It's a system and we don't even realize it, right? So this is something we're still... 0:21:38.3 Andrew Stotz: You also fall in that posture when your teacher says, as mine did once, "Now you're in the position. Now raise your other leg." [laughter] 0:21:54.5 Andrew Stotz: My yoga teacher didn't come yesterday, but I did my sessions every day. But I haven't been able to do that one yet. 0:22:03.6 Balaji Reddie: We had that joke in school. Why does the crane stand on one leg? [laughter] 'Cause if it raised the other leg, it'd fall. [laughter] So it continues standing on one leg. So yes. So you have the synergistic relationships which exist, all right? And it's so difficult then to establish these interrelationships. And sometimes they're visible, sometimes they're not, all right? And sometimes you get to see the results right up front. Sometimes you get to see them in time delay. And that is why Deming said continual improvement. It never stops. Continual learning. You can never say you have complete knowledge of a process or a system. You can never say that, right? And now comes the best part. When you say here that all these are interconnected and there's synergy and then there's cause and effect not closely related in time and space, the output of a system, that is why, is subject to variation. And that's why the study of variation becomes important, right? 0:23:16.2 Balaji Reddie: And when you draw a diagram saying, suppose you say this is a system and all the components are there and you draw the interconnectedness and you draw an arrow and you say, "Okay, you're getting the system is subject to variation," right? Can you with absolute certainty say that because here, because the funny thing is each of the component's performance is also subject to variation, right? So can you say that, this combination gave me this output? You can never say that. You can only say it's probable, might be somewhere here. And so I think Walter Shewhart's greatness was in recognizing that what is natural to a system and what is not natural. When do you start asking the question, "What do I know about this?" When you cannot predict. When you can predict with a certain amount of certainty that this is going to happen. 0:24:14.6 Balaji Reddie: It is between these two limits. Well, then that's when you say, "Okay, I think I know quite a bit about this, but I don't know much. I want to reduce those limits, because I want to be as certain as possible when I make a prediction." And that was what was continual learning. It was not so much about cost. It was as much as it had to do about understanding and predicting. I know what's going to happen next. To a certain extent, this will happen. This will happen, right? And that's where the understanding of variation comes in. Okay, and then he brought in the third, that in variation, you saw that there were what he called as random variation and assignable variation, or what Deming had common and special cause variation. Common causes belong to the system and special causes are alien to the system under study, right? And so say it's easier to identify the special causes because they tell you something is not right. And so you can say, "I know it happened." You can isolate and say, "This is the cause," right? It makes it easier for you then to isolate that, study it, but... 0:25:30.1 Andrew Stotz: I just had that happen this morning. 0:25:32.4 Balaji Reddie: Okay. 0:25:33.7 Andrew Stotz: I'll give you an example. 0:25:35.2 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, sure. 0:25:36.0 Andrew Stotz: I've been working with my accounting team and what we're trying to do is make sure we have on-time and accurate monthly financial statements. And I've chosen those words very, very carefully. And what I've done with the team is ask them, there's no pressure in this. All I'm asking you to do is pick a day that you think we will be able to have on-time and accurate monthly financial statements. And then they pick their days for each month to the end of the year, which pretty much certainty accounting is a repeating of a similar function. And so then as I was talking with them throughout that day, I said, "Why are these boxes piled up around here?" And they said, "Well, the room that we store them in is getting full." The paper, 'cause you have a regulation in Thailand, you have to have your accounting documents for up to six or eight years on premises in case the revenue department comes. So I said, "Well, show me that room." And we went to the room and it was an absolute mess. It's like people have been dumping boxes and papers in there for five years. 0:26:51.6 Balaji Reddie: Wow. 0:26:52.6 Andrew Stotz: And I said, "Okay. You got to clean up this room this month." They're like, "Ah, it's going to take us two months." I said, "Look, this is critical." And they agreed. And so they have now completed that task, but it consumed so much of their time to do that. And it looks beautiful now. But they're two days late on the on-time and accurate monthly financials. And if we were to look at that on a control chart, we would see that it's a big deviation from what they've been able to do. But that special cause is almost meaningless, just as meaningless as the random variation in the sense that this was just a simple situation where there was a trade-off, they made the trade-off, and it's an acceptable trade-off. 0:27:43.1 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, I'd like to put it this way. When you know why it has happened, it's not that harmful, right? As long as you can predict when we do something. It's the unpredictability that makes a special cause harmful. And that's why when I used the term that Deming's thinking was about reducing or eliminating harmful variation, that is things which get out of your hand and you usually don't know why it's happening. So once you get to know, I believe that this could be connected, yeah, that's a good place to start, right? 0:28:15.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Now, someone that doesn't understand the situation and look back over time may not understand what that cause was, which I'm thinking that I want to develop kind of a note-taking system where we actually write down what was that so that we have a record and an understanding of it. But... 0:28:37.1 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. And so when you say here that there's so many, that complete knowledge is not possible, and that's where you start thinking that was Deming being a pessimist to say complete knowledge is not possible, unknown and unknowable. But no, he was just being realistic. But he did not leave us right there. He said the way you can make the unknown as known as possible is through the theory of knowledge. And that's how the whole thing is. It's beautifully done, what the theory of knowledge is. But he says here, very simply, one of those exercises which you see in the new edition of The New Economics on page 58. But if you go to the old edition, right? That's, I believe, on... Where would that be? Page 84. The example he gives there, effect, the plans and their effect, area A, B, and C, the matrix diagram, if you see that? 0:29:50.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. 0:29:50.5 Balaji Reddie: That he says was devised by Henry. And then, of course, he picked on that and put it into his book. I got a chance to actually work on this in the form of a game. And the game, I would break up the audience into four or five groups of five people each and then say, "You're department A, department B, department C," and then have a host of projects lined up for them. And I say, "Now you're going to be ranked and rated based on how you do as a department." And so they would choose those projects where only they were benefiting, right? And obviously, that's what you see in the first table. A chooses three projects, and B chooses two projects, and C chooses three projects. And you see the plus signs there indicating that it's for them, for them alone. And then they are exposed to the fact that, wait a minute, now we're going to give you some extra information. You chose these projects because they were good for you, but now we're going to tell you that these were bad for the others, right? And only one of them was good. 0:30:59.9 Balaji Reddie: And I say, "Okay, now here's this extra information you've been given. Now what are you going to do?" All right. And I said, "I'm giving you five minutes to... Because the company is going to do badly, right? And even though you get a good rating, but the company does badly and eventually the company might have to shut down. So what would you want to do now? I'm giving you five minutes to rectify this." You know, Andrew, not even five minutes was necessary. They would come back within two or three minutes and say, "Let's just choose those projects where everyone gains." And I was surprised the first time that happened. And that's why Deming said cooperation is the key and it is natural. It's just that we have brought in this competition thing. So competition is not natural. He says cooperation is natural. [laughter] 0:31:53.9 Andrew Stotz: And that, in Asia, and I can speak to Thailand, what I like to tell people here in Thailand for managers and people running business is that the core strength of Thai people is that they want to work together. So when you break them up and you put them into groups and then you incentivize them either by group or by individual, you destroy one of their core strengths. 0:32:28.7 Balaji Reddie: Right. 0:32:29.1 Andrew Stotz: That's not a core strength of American. A lot of Americans don't want to work together. They just want to do their own thing. Right? They've been trained to be independent and they don't want that hassle. But in Asia, particularly in Thailand, where we're struggling to bring more and more value, what's happened is the KPI mentality of divide and conquer really is damaging. And it brings me to another point or question that I wanted to mention, and that is about the natural... My mom has a saying, and it's "inch by inch, it's a cinch, yard by yard, it's hard." And what she was telling me was to break things down into manageable parts and then work on the next right part, and then you will start to make progress. And we have studied under Adam Smith and the concept of how division of labor brings value, can increase output. And so there's a whole side of things. And then we're incentivized as individuals, particularly in the West, but let's say generally that, if it's to be, it's going to be up to you and you got to make yourself performance and your department's performance. I don't care about the others. I care about what you're doing with yours. 0:32:54.6 Andrew Stotz: So there's an accountability aspect and it all comes together to give people the perception that, hey, I need to break this down into smaller parts. And so there's just this natural inclination to do that. And if you were to say to people, you can't break it down into individual parts, that also doesn't work. You have to be able to understand the different parts and their interconnectedness, going back to what you're saying. 0:34:26.8 Balaji Reddie: Yes. 0:34:27.1 Andrew Stotz: But there's a lot of different things that I'm saying here. But I think the thing that I'm saying is that the pressure on most people is to divide and conquer, to say, "I'm going to go and look at this department and you and your performance." And what Deming was saying was, you've got to look wider than that if you're really going to be successful. Tell me where I'm right or wrong or give me some guidance. 0:34:53.5 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. I mean, that's exactly how it is. And I just told you that when I saw this happen, it was like an eye-opener. And then what happened after that was, okay, there were some other projects which where we were not going to do well, but the company's going to come out ahead. So why don't we choose those? And that's exactly what you see in the table, that they choose certain projects where they themselves are... Now that's real optimization, right? That's getting the best for everyone. 0:35:23.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. 0:35:24.8 Balaji Reddie: And today it's become an overused and abused term. For anything they use the word optimize. I think Deming was way very clear about this 30 years ago when he came up with this idea. And he said it's for everybody to gain. It's not compromise, it's optimization. Right? So I, of course, have a different take on optimize and we'll see that next week when we come into four parts of profound knowledge. So I'd like to end here with talking about cooperation is the key and I think we realized why. 0:35:59.1 Andrew Stotz: Okay. 0:35:59.8 Balaji Reddie: Deming says it's not about each other, it's win-win. The system should... And he gives that lovely example in the same chapter, the last example, where he talks about the truck company, the two truckers who used to keep their establishment open. Alternately overnight so that both could gain and they would use each other's resources. He said, "I was surprised when I called the pickup truck and I saw that the truck was from his competitor. He sent his competitor's truck to pick up my car." That was a classic case of cooperation. So since he ends with that, he ends that chapter, I'd like to also speak about that. Cooperation is the key because we are dealing with something very complex, right? And none of us is as strong as all of us. It's not just about, like you said, because cause and effect are not closely related, it is imperative now that we need to work together. So that was with systems thinking. Cause and effect are not closely related. There exist synergistic relationships. Seemingly disconnected events turn out to be connected. And outputs are the result of a myriad of inputs. You can never say you know everything. So that was systems thinking for you as they apply to the elements of profound knowledge as well. 0:37:33.3 Andrew Stotz: Great. 0:37:33.7 Balaji Reddie: Next week, we'll get into profound knowledge. 0:37:37.1 Andrew Stotz: You know, I think my ending thought on this goes back to the concept of meditation. 0:37:45.4 Balaji Reddie: Okay. 0:37:45.9 Andrew Stotz: Concept of insight meditation or Vipassana or... 0:37:52.6 Balaji Reddie: Vipassana. 0:37:53.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. So part of what I understand about meditation is the idea of clearing our mind in this moment. It may also be just observing our mind and just observing all that's happening and going on, which is fine. And let's say that a meditation master may be able to clear their mind. But let's just say that what we're trying to do is come down to this instant, this moment. And I remember during COVID when a lot of pressures were on in my business and stuff, I used to meditate and focus on one saying, which is, "I'm okay right now at this moment." 0:38:36.7 Balaji Reddie: Right. 0:38:37.1 Andrew Stotz: And why this is interesting is because let's say this moment is time zero. What you've just explained is that there's about 50 million things before time zero that have been connected in one way or another that got you to time zero. 0:38:55.1 Balaji Reddie: Yes. 0:38:55.3 Andrew Stotz: And you also said that a system, as Deming said, is a system includes the future. 0:39:00.2 Balaji Reddie: Future. 0:39:01.2 Andrew Stotz: And that's going to be a function of all the different things that happen after time zero, the interconnected things. And it just made me realize, ah, so the value of meditation, I can see it even more now when I think about all the connections on both the future side and the past side. And so it just helped me think about it from that perspective, a little bit different, but anyways. 0:39:23.4 Balaji Reddie: Yep. 0:39:24.9 Andrew Stotz: So I just want to thank you for taking the time. And in fact, what I was thinking is that I need to do more interviews with our advisors and other board members of the Institute, including yourself, because they've all got a lot to say. And I've got some discussions going on with that right now. So I'm looking forward to that. And so I appreciate the discussion and the journey that you're taking us on. And just for the listeners out there, remember to go to deming.org and jump into DemingNEXT to continue your journey. 0:40:03.8 Balaji Reddie: Yes, absolutely. 0:40:05.3 Andrew Stotz: There's so much, so much to learn and explore. So I'm going to wrap it up there. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and that is, "People are entitled," that includes you... 0:40:21.7 Balaji Reddie: Yes. 0:40:22.4 Andrew Stotz: Are entitled to joy in work.
The lads are finally back to talk about Juneteenth, Paul's symposium, karaoke, Tao getting engaged, Summer Solstice, and life after graduation. Intro song: "Pedicel Carrier" by Frits Wentink & Malin Genie. Outro song: "Rubberz" by Fenix Flexin.Support the show
This is a sort of book report Jeff brings after reading Sarah Allen, The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (Chinese Philosophy Culture). We discuss how in ancient China, the root metaphor of water was the focus itself. It's not as if water is a metaphor for an abstract reality. Its flow is the flow. Meditating on water is to glimpse the Tao, not an object lesson for some ideology.
This episode is a replay from The Existential Stoic library. Enjoy! What is the Daoist concept of wu-wei? Is wu-wei similar to any concepts from Western philosophy? In this episode, Danny and Randy discuss the Daoist concept of wu-wei or effortless action.Subscribe to ESP's YouTube Channel! Thanks for listening! Do you have a question you want answered in a future episode? If so, send your question to: existentialstoic@protonmail.com
In this episode, we provide a marketing update, discuss AI & energy consumption, and finish with a discussion on protocol-owned liquidity.Swap now https://swap.thorchain.org/ THORChain is a decentralized crypto exchange. THORChain is the first and biggest DEX for Bitcoin. You can use any self custody wallet to swap and there's no KYC required.Timestamps:00:00:00 Intro00:05:00 Marketing update00:07:00 Reach out to communities about adding ERC-20s? Easy to do!00:08:00 Working on Keplr Wallet00:09:00 Platform to hire KOLs00:11:00 KOL platform breakdown00:13:00 Chad B: May be a bot dream00:15:00 KOL drama00:19:00 Forewarning for drama00:20:00 Chad's talk about Monerotopia00:23:00 Someone who is into XMR will probably understand the mission00:27:00 Chad B: The attack we suffered is very hard to recover from — but we have!00:29:00 New version is coming! Fix for Solana so we can churn and XMR00:32:00 Kenton: The cynical view doesn't make sense00:33:00 Failure should be expected00:34:00 TSS will be open-sourced, probably mid-July00:36:00 Huginn's code auditing is surprisingly good00:37:00 Moving to DKLS is a priority00:39:00 The idea is to move to FROST and DKLS00:41:00 How we would transition cryptographies00:43:00 We need to find a new version of FROST if we want to add it to THORChain00:44:00 Multisig on each vault — combining cryptographies. Still entertaining that idea?00:47:00 DKLS would be first if any changes were going to be made00:48:00 Question: Can we add AI payment rails and support for precious metal derivatives?00:51:00 agentsfirst.dev analytics breakdown00:57:00 Delegation is so hard for startups00:59:00 These days are still early for AI01:01:00 Will AI be a bunch of specialist models or a more general model?01:04:00 Energy consumption versus efficiency of AI01:06:00 Chad B is bullish when it comes to increased electricity usage01:09:00 Energy scale is beyond comprehension01:13:00 Life arose so quickly when Earth was formed01:17:00 Planet talk — geeking out01:21:00 Bringing it back to THORChain, THORChain is a good foundation for a better system01:23:00 When XMR goes live, Kenton will wait about a month before really pushing it out01:26:00 What happens post-churn when it comes to POL?01:30:00 Kenton acknowledges Boone for getting the math incorrect01:33:00 Boone joins and says it is Economic Mimir01:34:00 Increasing BPs fee is probably the move (Boone)01:36:00 Kenton gives the case for POL advantages01:37:00 Kenton floats 25% to POL01:39:00 POL is a burn, technically01:42:00 Burn conversation regarding sell pressure01:46:00 POL conversation continues01:49:00 POL is an asset, not a liability01:52:00 New hat!!01:53:00 POL pitch01:56:00 POL also buys and burns their asset too01:58:00 Per-asset minBPS idea (Boone)02:02:00 Anything else? Direct ERC-20 memoless, TAO 3.2002:03:00 Reserve hard cap discussion02:06:00 Reserve income and dispersed
Dismantling the illusion of separation, Alan Watts shares how recognizing our fundamental unity with the universe transforms the way we live, perceive, and prepare for death.Help us celebrate 10 years of Be Here Now Network and support the next chapter of Ram Dass Here and Now. Gifts are matched dollar for dollar through June 30. Learn more and give here: BHNN 10th Birthday FundraiserToday's episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/alan and get on your way to being your best self.This week on Being in the Way, Alan Watts lectures on:Playing hide and seek with our true selvesHow your body knows that you are one with the universeSeeing things versus noticing thingsThe yoga of preparing for death The partial view that the ego keeps us trapped in The continuous energy of our bodiesDissolving the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior The transaction between the individual and the world This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass' Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit Alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts. “Doesn't it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing and that you're doing all of this and you never had any education in how to do it? You never learned, but you're this miracle. From a strictly physical, scientific standpoint, this organism is a continuous energy with everything else that's going on. If I am my foot, I am the sun. Only, we've got this little partial view. We've got the idea that ‘I'm just something in this body', the ego, that's a joke.” –Alan WattsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Tim Brown covered baseball for more than thirty years and has written two New York Times bestsellers: The Phenomenon with Rick Ankiel and Imperfect with Jim Abbott. He also wrote The Tao of the Backup Catcher. In 2016, he was awarded first place in beat writing by the Associated Nolan Ryan was a hero to two of America's biggest institutions: Texas and baseball. He played longer, threw harder and amassed more pitching records—53—than anyone before or since. As he did, Ryan came to represent what was exceptional about a game when it was still America's pastime. Veteran baseball journalist and New York Times bestselling author Tim Brown provides the definitive biography of one of baseball's greatest players in NOLAN: The Singular Life of an American Original. Written with the cooperation of Ryan, his wife, Ruth, and their three children, Reid, Reese and Wendy, NOLAN is not just a tribute to one of the greatest pitchers ever to step on the mound, but an exploration of God, family, baseball, and America. Nolan Ryan grew up in the small town of Alvin, Texas, was graced with a fastball, and fell in love with a woman, then honored all three in his pursuit of hardball perfection. He was a hard man who did hard things because of how and where he was raised; by a father who worked two jobs in a Southeast Texas town that existed on the whims of the farming, cattle and oil industries. Told through the lens of life, men and baseball as they are forged in Texas, and set against the context of a game that has since given way to specialists, data, pitch limits and the marginalization of individual effort, NOLAN celebrates what was and redefines the legacy of the man known, simply, as “The Express.” Alongside Nolan's personal story, Brown offers a thoughtful, deeply researched history of baseball in the Lone Star State, and an unforgettable account of three glorious decades in the Major Leagues playing for the Texas Rangers, Houston Astros, Los Angeles Angels, and New York Mets. Nolan Ryan's story is about dominating the field, then growing old in the game, then just plain growing old. It's about the man who has become a symbol of the game at its best, the way it used to be. It's about deeds over words. About cattle matching the hat. About fastballs over all else. NOLAN makes the case that there has never been another like him. And there won't be again.
"By what system of thought and what technique of meditation can I apprehend Tao? By what renunciation of what solitary retirement may I rest in Tao?" — Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, Page 117 GUS – 12StepRecovery.ai 30 Tools to Stay Sober All Year Round! Here is a link to an online version of the Tao Te Ching that we use in every meeting: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Year:1972,1988,1996,2004/section:80 You can download a free PDF of the latest version of Powerless But Not Helpless, a Recovery Interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, at www.BuddyC.org. Feel free to share, post, and distribute this book wherever you believe it will be helpful. You can also sign up for a free daily Tao Recovery Email, access a list of podcasts, and find many other recovery resources. Join our private Facebook group and continue the conversation! Here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TaoPodcast/ or search Tao of Our understanding Podcast. A Course in Miracles - Daily lessons from the 365-Day Course in Miracles Calendar. See the notes in each entry for a more detailed description. Click Here to add the Course in Miracles Calendar to your Google Calendar Daily Thought is a daily Google Calendar you can add to your Google Calendar. It provides a daily thought that combines elements of Christian, ACIM, Tao, and AA. Click here to add the Daily Thought Calendar to your Google Calendar Nightly 9 pm eastern Zoom A.A. Meeting www.ZoomAAMeetings.com Would you like to receive a free daily topic email with the most popular A.A. resources, accompanied by a secret Facebook group for discussion? Go to www.DailyAAEmails.com for more information!
In this episode, I'm sharing a reflection on Wu Wei, a Taoist principle often translated as "effortless action" or "action without force," and why this ancient wisdom has landed so deeply for me in this current season of life.For years, my business moved with a rhythm I had come to trust. Coaching spots filled, programs attracted people with ease, and opportunities seemed to flow naturally. But this year has looked very different. For the first time in a long time, coaching enquiries have slowed right down, and a program that has comfortably filled for years now has only a handful of participants.This season has challenged me in ways I didn't expect. It has brought up questions about trust, identity, worth, and what happens when the external validation we've become accustomed to begins to quieten down. Rather than immediately looking for another strategy, another offer, or another way to make things happen, I've found myself sitting with a different question altogether: What if nothing has gone wrong?In this conversation, I explore how quickly we can move into fixing, forcing, controlling, and solving when life doesn't unfold the way we expect it to. I share how Wu Wei has invited me to consider a different approach. One that isn't passive or detached, but one that asks us to stop exhausting ourselves by pushing against reality and instead learn how to move with life rather than against it.I also reflect on something I've been thinking deeply about lately. For many years, my work has been about helping people come home to themselves, uncover their conditioning, recognise the ego, and reconnect with who they truly are. But what if authenticity isn't the destination? What if it's only the beginning?Because once we know who we are, life asks us a new question: Can we trust that person? Can we trust ourselves when the future is uncertain? Can we trust ourselves when the evidence isn't there? Can we trust ourselves when life isn't unfolding according to our plans?This episode is a vulnerable reflection on what it means to stay open when certainty disappears, to loosen our grip on outcomes, and to trust that life may be leading us somewhere we never would have chosen for ourselves.If you've ever found yourself in a season where the old ways no longer seem to work, where you're questioning what comes next, or where life is asking you to trust more deeply than ever before, I think you'll find something for yourself in this conversation.In this episode, I explore Wu Wei and effortless action, trusting life through uncertain seasons, navigating change in business and identity, authenticity beyond self-discovery, releasing attachment to outcomes, and learning how to meet life as it is rather than constantly trying to make it something else.My hope is that this episode reminds you that not every season is meant to be conquered. Some seasons are meant to be listened to.Support the show
"12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all of our affairs." — Alcoholics Anonymous, Page 60 " If you don't realize the source, you stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you realize where you come from, you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused, kindhearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king. Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, you can deal with whatever life brings you, and when death comes, you are ready." — Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching, Verse 16 GUS – 12StepRecovery.ai 30 Tools to Stay Sober All Year Round! Here is a link to an online version of the Tao Te Ching that we use in every meeting: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Year:1972,1988,1996,2004/section:80 You can download a free PDF of the latest version of Powerless But Not Helpless, a Recovery Interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, at www.BuddyC.org. Feel free to share, post, and distribute this book wherever you believe it will be helpful. You can also sign up for a free daily Tao Recovery Email, access a list of podcasts, and find many other recovery resources. Join our private Facebook group and continue the conversation! Here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TaoPodcast/ or search Tao of Our understanding Podcast. A Course in Miracles - Daily lessons from the 365-Day Course in Miracles Calendar. See the notes in each entry for a more detailed description. Click Here to add the Course in Miracles Calendar to your Google Calendar Daily Thought is a daily Google Calendar you can add to your Google Calendar. It provides a daily thought that combines elements of Christian, ACIM, Tao, and AA. Click here to add the Daily Thought Calendar to your Google Calendar Nightly 9 pm eastern Zoom A.A. Meeting www.ZoomAAMeetings.com Would you like to receive a free daily topic email with the most popular A.A. resources, accompanied by a secret Facebook group for discussion? Go to www.DailyAAEmails.com for more information!
Your emotions are not facts—they are signals. Discover what anxiety, anger, fear, and shame are really trying to tell you. In this Tao Dialogues episode, we explore the Taoist understanding of emotions and why anxiety, anger, shame, fear, and emotional triggers are not problems to fight but messages to understand. Discover how hidden beliefs shape your emotional experience, how the Inner Child influences your reactions, and how Shen—your inner wisdom—can guide you back to clarity, balance, and emotional freedom. Learn practical Taoist insights, wu wei principles, and self-awareness tools to transform emotional suffering into growth and authentic living.Read the blog post that inspired this episode: https://davidjameslees.substack.com/p/resonant-return [third blog post on this page]Our Tao Dialogues are powerful yet gentle teachings about authenticity, spirituality and finding emotional balance and flow in everyday life. These spoken-word episodes draw from David James Lees' practice as a Taoist monk and teacher, and expand upon popular posts on ‘David's Journal', his Substack blog.You can subscribe to David's Journal here: https://davidjameslees.substack.com/Learn more about David's online consultations, events, books and audio teachings: https://www.wuweiwisdom.comOther related teachings on our YouTube channel that will help you:TAO DIALOGUES PLAYLIST https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9NQ_PWX4zICamFP2zMyey3KGTnfm2aUq&si=AW_ZOUeldKv3nHhFSHEN (THE SPIRITUAL SELF) PLAYLIST https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9NQ_PWX4zIBmp50wYcmU7jCBLp1Qvl-jINNER CHILD PLAYLIST https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9NQ_PWX4zICGLRS1b7q1HSJhZRash5qqIs there a question you'd like answered on the show? Submit it at: https://bit.ly/askusyourquestion Join our free Wu Wei Wisdom Community Facebook support group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/wuweiwisdomcommunity If you love our work, you can now make a small donation to help fund the continued production of our weekly teachings by buying us a 'virtual coffee'! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/wuweiwisdom Book an online Golden Thread Process & Inner Child Consultation with David: https://www.wuweiwisdom.com/therapies-for-body-mind/ Follow us on Instagram: @wuweiwisdomSign up to receive a relaxing guided meditation gift, plus our weekly newsletter + offers via email: https://www.wuweiwisdom.com/signup -Disclaimer: This podcast and any associated teaching and comments shared are not a substitute for professional therapy, mental health care, crisis support, medical advice, doctor diagnosis, or professional healthcare treatment. Our show episodes provide general information for educational purposes only and are offered as suggestions for you and your professional therapist or healthcare advisor to consider and research.Music by Earth Tree Healing