The One You Feed - Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Life: Finding Ease and Clarity with Charlie Gilkey

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

You're doing everything right, staying productive, chasing growth, keeping up. But what if the discomfort you feel isn't a sign that you need to do more, but a signal to let go? In this episode, Charlie Gilkey and I explore the Tao Te Ching, which is one of my favorite books of all time, but not as a relic from the past, but as a guide for navigating the speed and complexities of modern life, including the rise of AI.We talk about how ancient wisdom can live side by side with new technology and how presence, simplicity, and inner alignment still matter, now more than ever,The Tao Te Ching is one of those books I keep coming back to. Ancient wisdom, wrapped in poetry, that somehow feels more relevant every year. Like this line: “If you look to others for happiness, you will never be happy. If your well-being depends on money, you will never be content.“Simple. Clear. Actually useful.I’ve teamed up with Rebind.ai to create an interactive edition of the Tao—forty essential verses, translated into plain, everyday language, with space to reflect, explore, and ask questions. It’s like having a conversation not just with the Tao, but with me too. If you’re looking for more clarity, calm, or direction, come check it out here.Key Takeaways:Discussion of the Tao Te Ching, an ancient Chinese text attributed to Lao Tzu.Application of Tao Te Ching, teachings to modern life and contemporary challenges.Exploration of themes such as presence, simplicity, and inner alignment.The balance between engagement and busyness in daily life.The metaphor of feeding the “good wolf” within us and acknowledging both positive and negative aspects of our nature.The significance of flexibility and adaptability in navigating life’s changes.The importance of mental health and accessibility to support systems.Reflection on the “Three Treasures” of the Tao Te Ching: simplicity, compassion, and patience.The role of philosophy in fostering human connection and understanding.Encouragement to embrace the teachings of the Tao Te Ching, for personal growth and fulfillment.If you enjoyed this conversation with Charlie Gilkey, check out these other episodes:How to Get Things Done with Charlie GilkeyEmbrace the Chaos: Finding Clarity Through Meditation with Henry Shukman (Part 1)For full show notes, click here!Connect with the show:Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPodSubscribe on Apple Podcasts or SpotifyFollow us on InstagramSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You thought you were crossing a frozen river. It thawed overnight. Guess what? You don't walk across the river anymore. You change your plan. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think

ring true. And yet for many of us our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.

You're doing everything right. Staying productive, chasing growth, keeping up. But what if the discomfort you feel isn't a sign that you need to do more, but a signal to let go? In this episode, my good friend Charlie Gilkey and I explore the Daode Qing, which is one of my favorite books of all time. But not as a relic from the past, but as a guide for navigating the speed and complexities of modern life, including the rise of AI. We talk about how ancient wisdom can live

side by side with new technology, and how presence, simplicity, and inner alignment still matter, now more than ever. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed. Hi Charlie, welcome to the show. Eric, I'm so delighted to be back. I'm a huge fan of the show for many different reasons as listeners on the show that have heard me talk before know. We're gonna be doing something slightly different today which is going to be a conversation between you and me around a book that we both love deeply, The Doubt Hitching. And so this is not really me interviewing you or you interviewing me, but a conversation where we both share what's really important to us about this book and how it's going to

apply to people's lives. And a project that I've done around it that I think is interesting. So I'm going to read the parable. Grandparent talking to the grandchild, two wolves inside of us, always at battle, one's a good wolf, one's a bad wolf, which one wins, the one you feed. So maybe we can just use that as the place to jump into the Tao. Pete I love that because I think one of the core things of the Tao, one of the principles of the Tao that I love the most and why it stuck with me for now 31 years, I started reading Dao early, right?

Is, I think how it would take the One-Year-Feed story a little differently is it wouldn't push the dark or bad wolf out. It wouldn't say that's bad, just choose that. What it would say is there are both and both can be teachers. Yup. Both are part of our natures. Both can be teachers. And so what you're choosing in the moment with the Tao and the fluid way that the Tao is about is what is the lesson? What's the way that you're going to use that particular thing as a guide and as a teacher like one of the verses from the Tao Te Ching is and I'm going to use that particular thing as a guide and as a teacher, like one of the verses from the Dao Te Ching is, and I'm going to use Mitchell's version because I've been reading Mitchell's version more recently, is like, I think it's, what is a bad man but

a good man's teacher, as a paraphrase, right? And so, when you look out and you see people feeding the bad wolf or feeding that wolf, what you should focus on is not necessarily them and their actions per se, but like what's going on in that moment. Is there a way in which that's acting out something important, but more importantly, what's happening inside of you that you can choose to be the yin to that yang or yang to that yin? Yeah. Well, the Daode Qing is a book that comes from ancient China and is attributed to someone named Lao Tzu. Although the scholarship seems to be out on the point of whether he was an actual human, one person, whether this book was written by lots of different people over different periods, the scholarship seems to kind of come back and forth.

And I would say that where I land is we don't know. There's an old legend that's an interesting one where Lao Tzu worked in a royal court as sort of their archivist or you know, keeping of all the records and he finally got fed up with life at court and he left on a donkey and he came to a famous pass between two mountains that was guarded. And as he was about to go through, the guy there stopped and said, wait, aren't you the one they call the old master, Lao Tzu? He says, yes, I am. And he said, well, before you leave the world, like, tell us what you know. And so Lao Tzu went back and wrote these 81 verses of the Tao, and we have that.

So that's the legend. Again, who knows? But the Tao is 81, we could call them chapters, verses, poems, depending on how you want to frame it up, but they are short teachings, musings, and poems about what it means to live a good life, what life is about. And so it's a book that's really interesting because it's not a linear book. You don't pick it up and start and read verse one and that leads you in this straight journey to verse 81. I would say it's more holographic. It circles around itself again and again.

You can pick each of them up and just read it alone and it stands alone. And I think the other thing about it that I think probably you and I both love is that it's deep wisdom that is wrapped in poetry. So that's kind of what the Tao is. And out of it, I think people who spend a lot of time with it like you and I emerge certain themes that repeat again and again about living a good life. There's a translation of it that I love by these gentlemen named Ames and Hall. And they say, if we want to emphasize the outcome of living according to the Tao, we might translate it as feeling at home in the world, which

I just love. I think that's a great summation of what you can get from reading and trying to live the Tao as you start to feel at home in the world. Yeah, I love that. You know, when people ask me about the Tao, because I'll use the word just Tao a lot, right? I don't necessarily always say Dao Te Ching, right? But the way that I think about the Tao is it's your natural resonance in the world,

right? I used to say your nature, but then people would get western about that, right? Yeah, just imagine that you had a certain frequency in the world and When you find and you live according to the Tao and your Tao What you're doing is finding that harmony between your frequency and what's going on And so sometimes that helps without going too metaphysical, right, in that way. I actually love that. I think that's really good because as soon as you say nature, like you said, you start getting into like, what's my nature? What part of that has been conditioned in nature versus nurture and all that stuff, which is interesting on some level and

ultimately sort of fruitless to try and pull apart. But we do recognize that we all have a certain resonance at a certain point. And that's really beautifully, beautifully said. And the Tao itself, that word Tao is hard to translate. It's often translated as the way, your own resonance is another beautiful way. And the book comes right out of the gate saying that the Tao that we can comprehend is not the real Tao. So that it says from the beginning, anything we try and say about what this thing is exactly is going to miss the mark. Another analogy of that word Tao and what it means that I have always thought was an interesting one and it's not an exact one. But I think it and I'd be curious to see your opinion of it is that it's a little bit like the force in Star Wars, right? It's this thing that pervades everything.

You can use the force for good, you can use the force for bad, but it is the energy of everything. Yeah, I think that and resonance, they all sort of work and I think the thing you need to sort of appreciate about Dao Te Ching is letting go of trying to grasp conceptually to what's going on. Because even that first verse, and this is a very Western thing that we have, right? It says, so read it again for us so I don't mix translations. In the interpretation I did, it says the way that can be comprehended is not the eternal

cosmic way. Just like an idea that can be verbalized can't represent the limitless idea. So there's a lot that's going on with that, right? because what it is really counterposing is reality versus our ability to comprehend reality, right? To know specifically. Now, later chapters of the Dao will continually push against this knowing, knowing, knowing. And there's a way of thinking about it is rational understanding, scientific mathematical way of understanding it. However, what it will always sort of counterpose that style of knowing is a way of feeling or intuiting. So it's like you can't know it, but you can intuit or feel it.

You can vibe with it to use that word that's now popular, right? And so it's like we can't fundamentally understand the force, the resonance, because it's not a thing that admits to that. But we can feel it. We can experience it. We can intuit it. We can be in accord with it, right? And so I think about it this way, not to overuse my resonance sort of thing, but it's like so much of our suffering, especially in the body of work that I teach around productivity and self-actualization and skill and talent development, it's like flow in a lot of ways. Chiksa Mihai's concept of flow. Like if you're in flow, you might not know how or why you got there, but you feel it, right? It is a very direct experience of that.

And the more that you try to figure that out, the more that you try to meta-process that, the more you fall out of flow, right? And in another way, when we look at joy and one of the two nested themes, which we'll talk about more explicitly, but acceptance and contentment. Like a lot of people struggle with being joyfully happy with what they have. And they can't just experience the joy in what they have without having some sort of overlay of why they enjoy it. Is it okay if they enjoy it? Like, they'll go into all of that instead of just saying, you know what, this is your resonance. This is what works

for you. Right? I don't like mushrooms. I don't either. Right. If you put mushrooms in my food, then I might eat it, but I'm not going to like it. I don't have to have a whole scientific knowing and what's about my taste buds and things like that to know that I don't prefer mushrooms, right? So I would prefer not to have them. I like other things and when you sort of accept at a certain point that maybe you're Dow, maybe you're away, maybe that force that you're attuned to is just attuned that way and it's okay. Then you can start to accept like, oh, I don't like mushrooms. I don't have to make a thing about that. I can be content with what I have because I like it. The way that I feel is sufficient.

And that is such a remarkable thing in sort of our Western tradition is just forward the way that you feel, that joy that you feel to be enough and that experience of thing. And so I think so much of the Tao is trying to get us to accept that and to get out of this knowing and like, what is that? Like, let's find, let's break it down. This is work for everybody. Why does that matter? It works for you in this moment, in this season. And there might be a moment in season where it doesn't. And that's okay too. Yeah. Yeah. I love that idea of sort of trusting what arises for you as being okay. And there's a lot of directions we could go out of what you just said. And I do want to get back to contentment

and simplicity at one point. But the book is called the Tao De Ching, and De, it was spelled depending on the translation, T-E or D-E, is a strange word. If Tao as the way is hard to understand, this one almost to me feels harder to understand because it can be translated as virtue or strength or integrity. And I like virtue, but I think the thing about virtue is that virtue as it's presented to us often in our Western traditions and particularly in our Judeo-Christian traditions, virtue is something that you have to fight against yourself, right? You have to impose this virtue on yourself. And the Tao is pointing at something very, very different, which is more of what you

just said, that when you're in accord with the way things are, virtue arises very naturally. Absolutely. You know, the Shambhala Buddhist tradition has a concept called wind horse. Wind like, you know, the air moving in horses that you ride. And the idea is that when you find your Dharma, your path, your job in the world, it is like you're riding on a horse in the wind, right? Meaning you're moving fast and things feel effortless and things like that. And it's expressing the same sort of thing. The Western traditions will sometimes call this like when you find your calling, right? Things and sort of lean into your calling, things start to move for you. So yeah, virtue is not normative in the way that we talk about it in the West of like

a moral virtue, right or wrong, right? It is the way that a thing is and the day or day part of it is closer to an actualization of the way the thing already is, right? And so, it does have that sort of forceful element to it. Here's how I would describe this and you get all sorts of metaphors when you deal with Taoist, right? Or people who are Tao-inspired. It's that difference when you're just like out on a walk going where you're going and

you're walking at your natural pace going where you want to go versus trying to walk five or 10% faster and throwing off your flow or trying to slow down your gate five to 10%. So if you're listening to this listener, like try it, right? If you're walking, try to walk just five to 10% faster or try to walk five to 10% slower. And you'll notice how awkward it is actually. Right? And so it's really more thinking about how can you be moving at that natural pace for you and do that over the long term. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can grab the interactive Tao experience Eric built with Rebind at OneYouFeed.net slash Tao, spelled T-A-O.

That's OneYouFeed.net slash Tao. It's a really cool way to actually talk with the verses and with Eric as you read. One of the things that the Tao points to, like any Eastern tradition, is the value of presence, of being here now, right? And I just, as a time of you and I talking, I turned the draft of my book in yesterday. So I have been deep in that.

And I think the last chapter is about presence. And in it, I'm identifying last chapter is about presence and in it I'm identifying some of the obstacles to presence and one of them that I identified is busyness. Now the challenge with identifying busyness as a challenge to presence is that the vast majority of us are not going to suddenly become less busy, right? That's not a sacrifice most of us are willing to make and that's okay. So the question then becomes, and the thing I'm exploring in the book, is how can we be busy but not rushing? Right? That rushing is that push. It's that leaning forward, leaning ahead. And I think

we can move through life at a pace, but there's something about the internal, you know, I like to think of just leaning back just a little bit as we go. Yeah, I mean, as someone who's written about productivity for so long, there's been so many ways of helping people navigate their own busyness, right? And so another way of thinking about this, I think when we think about the difference when we feel engaged versus when we feel busy, there's a difference enough for people. I don't want to be less engaged with life. I don't want to be less engaged with my body of work. I don't want to be less engaged with my clients. But that sort of

frenetic juggling multiple things, feeling compressed, not having margin, like those aspects of busyness, I want to let go. And also I don't want to continue this sort of valorization of being busy. You know, like, oh, it's a badge of honor that I'm so overwhelmed. Like, no, let's get out of that. And so obviously you can tell someone that's inspired by the diary would want to pick a word like engage. Like, no, I actually do want to be doing the walking that I'm here to do. When it's time to stop walking, I need to stop walking, right?

And that's great. And I think when we accept that, so when you think about whether you're a creator or a creative professional, when you're deep in your sort of thing, you don't want to be less engaged with that, right? Yes. When you're in your craft, when you're in your skill, when you're in your Dharma, when you're in your infinite game, I can use all sorts of words pointing at the same thing. Right?

You want to be doing more of that. And so that's why I think to your point, even if we get out of the valorization of busy, people don't want to be less engaged. Right? And so what do you do? How do you find that then overlap between being present and being engaged? And that's where the sweet stuff happens. Yeah, I love that idea. It reminds me of like a poem by a guest of the show, Danusha Lamaris, who's a poet. In it, she's talking about this experience of being present. She says, isn't this what the mystics meant when they spoke of forsaking the world?

Not to turn our backs to it, only to its elaborate plots, its complicated pleasures in favor of the pines along shadow, the slow song of the grass. Right? And I think that's exactly what you're saying is when we are encouraged by various spiritual traditions or different things to take a step back, it's not from the world, it's not from engagement, it's from, and I just love this thing, the elaborate plots that we create out of reality because what I'm after in any

sort of spiritual endeavor is connection, which is just another way of saying engagement. And I've thought a lot about this because there's this whole idea that like you shouldn't work so much, right? You shouldn't work so much. And you've been a huge help to me in my life, recognizing that that sometimes is very true, right? That that sometimes is very true. But what I've recognized about myself, and you talk about learning your own resonance, I don't like to just sit around. It's not me.

And I thought for a while that was a problem. Like, shouldn't I just be able to sit here and chill out? But I am a person who is best, most connected, happiest when I am engaged with the world, with things that I like. So for me, this has been a learning of it's okay to fill your time up with things if those things lead to deeper connection. Precisely. When we look at sort of the top five things that make people happy, and I just wrote a post on this, so it just happens to be top of mind, but in order they tend to be, bottom

is playing music or listening to music. Number four is playing, number three is exercising. Number two is being in connection with other people. And number one is having sex. Heroin. Oh, sorry. Number one is heroin. Okay. Clearly. Clearly. Coming in at number six, Crystal. Let's just say that people's top five are different, but they sort of catalog commonalities there. Like if you chose any one of those things, right, it's not like if you got to fill your

time up with those that you would be disappointed with those. And for all of them, yes, all of them, there's a limit to how much you enjoy that. Too much ice cream is a bad thing, right? And so we need that variety. And I think when you lean into the sort of multiplicity of being human, which is part of each of our Dao, and you lean into that, you will find a natural sort of flow between the things that bring you joy,

the things that are teaching you, between the things that help you be in presence, so on and so forth. It's only when we get rigidly stuck on something. And so I guess while we've talked about way, wu, wei, or we've talked about way way, or simply way, yin and yang, acceptance, complicity and simplicity day, I think it would be remiss to not call out the fluidity and flexibility that is inherently part of the Tao structure, the Tao way of the Tao, the Qing paradigm. Because there is that native ability to, and many

verses are about avoiding rigidity and being more supple and being more pliable. And I think where we find so much of our suffering, so I'll talk about it from the suffering perspective first, is when we become overly rigid, we become myopically fascinated. When we get stuck in those human plots and we think that those plots are reality, that's where our suffering comes from. But when we're more fluid and say, you know what, like this was my plan for the day, my energy and the time and what's happening in the world are not in accord with that plan I made yesterday. I need to lift and shift. I need to do something different. That's where we can get out of

that story and shame of like, I didn't do the thing and like, you know, something's messed up with me. It's like, no, the world changed. Right? You thought you were crossing a frozen river. It followed overnight. Guess what? You don't walk across the river anymore. You change your plan. Right? And being able to do that with grace, not because you just changed your mind or it got hard, but because you were able to see that the conditions of the world, the conditions of the moment have changed significantly enough that it would be out of alignment to try to pursue that course. That is a fundamental teaching that I think so many of us in the West can learn a lot more of. It's just being flexible in that

way. But flexible without shame. So there's plenty of people who will be flexible, but they'll still hold on to the residue of the previous and they'll still sort of get beat up about it. But just being like, you know what, world changed. I'm changing with it and that's okay. Let's go. Yeah, my friend and editor, Chris, we're talking about this yesterday. They adopted a two-year-old and his mother is aging and his father is aging. And we were just talking about the chaos of his life where he's like, I plan to do this. And then Zeppi's home from daycare. I got a call yesterday, my mom is in the hospital

and then I get another call, my dad is in a different hospital. I mean, that's life. Like you can't control that. And the Tao does talk about this idea again and again of being pliable or flexible. I mean, I think of like verse 36 or chapter 36. I never know what to call them. What do you call them? Verses, chapters? Usually chapters. I will usually say chapter and then there's a verse like when it's split

up. I see. Yeah. Okay. And then sometimes I'll say a line, right? Because that is the other thing if we're about to start talking about rebind and things like that. But readers, if you're paying attention to the Tao and you're trying to read it, I think where a lot of people get mixed up is they try to take the entirety of the chapters and make it all make sense in context versus finding that line or that verse that's like, oh, that is the thing that's going to resound within me all day, right? Yes, that's a great way of thinking of it. I keep coming back

to it being poetry, but that's the way I read poetry too, right? I just pulled out a line from that poem by Danusha Lamaris. It's a long poem, but that line, when I read it, I went, oh, okay, that's me, right? Boy, do I come up with a lot of plots, right, for the world. Yeah, that's not unnatural with how we think about music, actually. Like, if you think about your favorite songs, like, yes, it could be the vibe, yes, it could be a beat,

but all of you listeners, you know of that song where there's like a line that will stop you in your tracks for whatever reason. And that line has the emotional and insightful and attractive gravitas of the entire song. Right? So approach the DAO that way, right? It's like that line for you in this moment. But trust me, as someone who's read it over the last three decades, that same line will lose its profundity for you, but there'll be the next line that actually hits you and is like, oh, I understand that now or that resounds with me now. And I need to think about how I'm going to cultivate that. Yeah, in the interpretation I did of the Tao, the chapter 36, the line that talks about what we've been talking about is the soft and gentle overcome the hard and the strong. And in the conclusion to the book, it's just on my mind, right? It just turned it in yesterday. I was writing about how planning is the right thing up until it's not. Right?

And at that point, changing your plans is the right thing. And I think a lot of what the Dao points to and I think a lot of what wisdom in general points to is this ability to respond to the fact that life never sits still. We don't sit still, we're always changing, life is always changing, the people around us are always changing. That's another key Tao thing, right? Everything is in constant motion. And so to think that we can set up a position, a plan, an approach, approach a tactic whatever it is and that that thing is going to be the only thing we need

is to be mistaken about how life works and the fluidity the flexibility that you're talking about to sort of move as life moves you know, I think a plan and you're a productivity guy, right? You talk about plans like you help me with plans. And you help me realize when, okay, well, that plan isn't going to work, is it? Or we thought the world looked like this, but now it looks different. How are we going to respond? And to me, that's what wisdom is. All right, let's try and transition from where we are now into what Rebind is.

So Eric, throughout the conversation, we've sort of floated through the Rebind project that you've done and how that can be a helpful tool to start understanding the DAO, to go beyond knowing that the DAO ditching is there, to maybe being stumped by the DAO ditching, to actually deeply understanding it. So, what is this project? And I'm curious because there are a lot of reasons one does projects. Why did you choose to do this project in this time, especially as you have a book coming, you know, coming forward at the same time?

One of the books that I've spent the most time with in my entire life is the Dao De Qing. It's an ancient Chinese manual for living well that somehow also reads like poetry. Here's an example of one verse that I come back to over and over through the years. If you look to others for happiness, you will never be happy. If your well-being depends on money, you will never be content. That kind of simple truth doesn't just sound good, it actually changes how you live if you let it. It's simple, it's direct, and it hits me harder every year. If you've ever been curious about the Tao or just want some ancient wisdom

that actually works in real life, I've got something special. I teamed up with rebind.ai to create an interactive edition of the Tao. I handpicked 40 core verses, translated them into plain relatable language, and built them into a guide where you can ask questions and get my take in real time. It's like having a conversation not just with the Tao, but with me too. You can grab it right now at dotnet slash Dow that's spelled t a o that's one you feed dotnet slash Dow t a o if you're looking for a little more clarity calm or direction I'd love to meet you there. The rebind project I have to tell a short story in order for anybody to understand what it is so it's a company that was started by a guy who had a plumbing business he sold it his family business made a lot of, and he decided what he wanted to do in his spare time was

study philosophy. So he went out and got philosophy books and didn't understand anything he was reading. He had a lot of money. So he turned around and he went like, okay, if I want to learn about Alfred North Whitehead, who's the leading Whitehead scholar in the world, I'll call him up and I'll pay him to tutor me. And he suddenly found that these books made a lot of sense and transformed his life and were powerful.

And then he got to thinking, well, that's lovely for me, but what about everybody else? And started having these thoughts around the time that AI really started taking off. And so he came up with this idea of let's take a great book, let's pair it with a scholar of that book or an expert in that book, and let's try and see if there's a way that readers can read that book, but also have their own conversation with that scholar. So that's what Rebind is.

It's an attempt to take a great book and allow you to read it and also ask questions about it and be asked questions about it so that you engage with it more deeply. And so they approached me about doing a book and I chose the Tao Te Ching. Now I used a few words a few minutes ago, great scholars, world leading experts, all of that, none of which would I qualify for as the Daode Qing. However, like you, I am somebody who has lived with and beside and tried to live into that book for 30 plus years. And when they asked me to pick a book that I love, that I thought would be good for this,

it was the book that came up. So the first thing that had to be done was we needed a translation of the book that was in the public domain, meaning it's going to be 50 plus years old. All the translations of the Tao that are over 50 years old are very arcane. They're hard to understand. There's a bunch of more contemporary ones like the Stephen Mitchell or the Derek Lin version that you and I both love. Ursula K. Le Guin did a great one, but they're all under copyright. So the first thing I did was I decided, okay, I'm going to just do my own interpretation of it. And I cut it down from 81 verses to about 50, my selections. And then I spent a lot of time both with people from Rebind questioning me, interviewing me, me talking, writing, all of this, a bunch

of content to go along with it. So now we have this translation, we have all this content, they load it into the rebind software and now you go in there, you buy it like you buy a book, although it's all digital, you see it on your computer, and you can read the interpretation and you and I can have a conversation about it to the degree that AI creates real conversations, but boy, it sure seems like it, right? This thing is uncannily like me. In regards to the Tao, when you ask it questions about the Tao, it responds in the way that I would.

It would be a different thing if you did it, or Stephen Mitchell did it, or everybody's going to have their own interpretation. But this is kind of like sitting down and having me as your tutor, friend, conversation partner about the Tao. I love that. And I love that it has that point of view to it. And I don't know if you knew this, Eric, but actually as an undergraduate, there I was minding my own business as a junior in philosophy and I was approached by a psychology professor who wanted to learn more about American pragmatism, which I happen to have been studied a whole lot of in my professors. He's like, oh, if you want someone to tutor you on that one, you need to talk to Charlie.

Okay. So he approaches me and he's like, hey, I want to learn about this. And I'm like, this is the weirdest thing ever. Like you're a PhD psychology professor. Why do you want to hear me talk about? But we met, you know, every other week and we'd read some of the greats from American pragmatism. And I'd be like, oh, so here's what you got to go on. Like I knew enough about psychology and enough about philosophy to really do this sort of thing. And so this was 1999, 2000, right? And also when I taught philosophy as a philosophy instructor, this is the value of a human or

in our age of a digital clone of having something that's been taught on the patterns of what that human would teach. Because again, let's talk about it because AI, Rebind, you know, are really about pattern recognition and recreating those patterns. If you were learning from a tutor, what you would be learning is the patterns that they've taught other students or the patterns by which they see that. And so, you know, any good teacher, tutor, coach, you know, advisor, you know, speaker, like when you hear them, it sounds new and original novel again. But if they're really being honest, it's like, no, I've actually said this 3000 times, right? I'm just able to say it in a way that makes it sound new and fresh and apply to you,

which is exactly what the rebind technology does, right and what what you're getting from this book So yeah, it is like you're sitting down, you know, I played with a little bit I know what's in it and it's like this is dope This is one of those ways I wish I could have learned some of the things You know some of the great books that you know, I chewed through the hard way Like I don't know if that guy's in in the art of motorcycle maintenance, but I read that one when I was like 13 and it kicked the crap out of me, right? Anyways, so that's what you get with the rebind project.

Yeah, it is really interesting and there are other rebinds out there besides me. I mean, Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Deepak Chopra, Lena Dunham. You look at this page of these rebinders and then I'm on it. I sort of feel like one of these is not like the others. But there I am. But I think what you said there is really important because you could just go to chat GBT and say, teach me about the Tao. And it would.

And probably a significant portion of what it said would be correct in the way that we said this thing can mean lots of things to lots of different people. What the rebind thing is doing and why I wanted to do it was it's not a conversation with a faceless AI. It's a conversation to some degree that has my personality and flavor. Now that kind of weirds me out on one level, but I'm a real big believer that like technology arrives and it never goes backwards, right? And so AI is here and just like the internet arriving or social media arriving or cars arriving, there are going to be lots of great things that come out of that and probably all sorts of consequences we wish didn't come out of that. So I just wanted to land on the side of how can we use this in a good way?

What can we do with this that's actually useful that we couldn't have done before? And before you couldn't have had a conversation with me about the Tao or you couldn't have a conversation with Margaret Atwood about A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens or all these other things. And so I think it combines the technology in an interesting way but also keeps a human element, right? And I think that's what a lot of us are really afraid of with AI is that it can in many ways replace humans. Now, what I think is very interesting about that is AI when it seems like it's replacing a human is just copying humans.

It's taking humans and just channeling them. But this was an even more on point way of saying like, okay, this is new technology that's really cool. But it's also there's a person right there with you that, you know, if you're going to buy my rebind, you're either going to be interested in the Dow or you're going to like me in the way that I see the world and people listening to the show, hopefully both. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, on this one, I am a moderate techno optimist, meaning I'm not one of those guys that is just like exuberantly pushing all the new technology and how it's going to change the world and we don't have to worry about the bad things, right? I'm not that. However, this is one of the many promises of AI that actually make me excited about it because this is a fractal of tutoring tools, or is this a version of tutoring tools? And imagine the world's population having access to someone that can teach them different things or many someones, right? There's a window, Eric and the rebind team may not like me saying this, but there's a window of five to seven years to where at a certain point it's going to be easier for

anyone to sort of clone the voice of someone else about a given sort of thing. Like that's an inevitability. So there's a window, get Eric's while you can now, right? But imagine being that student in the south of Kenya who lives in a small village, you know, has water, you know, enough electricity in a cell phone that can actually be learning from the best people or people that they resonate with from around the world. Right?

That's the key unlock that we have here. And we do need more models of people using the technology in ways that are neutral positive or positive for us to be able to accept that way and that way we can see much like the Tao itself, like yes, people are going to use these technologies in all sorts of nefarious ways. Yes, there are externalities that we need to get sorted and figured out. And it's also true that people are going to be using this as a tool to enhance human flourishing and understand them in wisdom. This rebind project is a sort of a drop in

that larger pool of where we want to go with this. Which is what made me excited about it in the first place to show up and talk about it. I agree and I think that that is one of the beauties of what this technology can do is provide people who would not have access to a thing at all, some degree of access. And I think the rebind is a great example of it. Like if we could all hire a private Alfred North Whitehead tutor to get on a call with us one on one for an hour every week, that would be the best.

However, 99.999999% of the world is never going to do that. So now they have a different option. I have this conversation with a friend of mine who's a therapist, and we talk about AI therapists. And he originally was like, that's terrible, it's an awful idea, it's blah, blah. And I'm like, well, okay, like I'm a degrees kind of guy, a middle way kind of guy, it's just built into my nature.

Yes, a very good competent therapist in person? Best. Worst, suffering deeply from mental illness and being able to get no help. In between? A very well-trained AI that can help you deconstruct your problems? Better. And I think that's how I've been thinking about a lot of these things is there's an ideal world, but that's not the world for the most part. And so to your point that you're making about,

I think the thing that most excites me about this technology as a whole is exactly what you're saying. It's able to bring learning and knowledge to people in a way that far surpasses what we've been able to give before. Absolutely. And to your therapist point, like, Wobot has been out for a long time. And what it was is a text-based interface to where you would text Wobot about what's going on and it help you sort of with some different therapeutic models process what you're doing. And it helped people get better. Right? as good as the world-class mental therapist? No.

But Eric, you know of some folks, you've been there, I know of plenty of folks where when you're in some of those patches, a solution that's good enough is way better than no solution at all. And in that case, that means more of us stay alive. And more of us can show up with our own Tao in our own way and be part of the human harmony. And who wouldn't want more of that? Right?

The Rebind Project, that's the this that I'm referring to as a part of that. That's what's really exciting about it. Woebot is very cute, too, I have to say. It's sort of adorable in its way. But I was having this conversation with somebody recently on this podcast. It was Adam Mastriani, who's an online writer, but he wrote a post called A Skull Full of Poison, which is his descent into some sort of mental illness slash depression.

And he just wrote about what he found surprising about it. And one of the things that he said he found surprising was, if you want tacos, the whole world will tell you where to get good tacos. Everybody's got an opinion on where to go get a good taco. But if you need mental help, a therapist, you are really stuck. It's not that they're not out there.

It's not that you can't get them all that. However, all of that assumes a certain level of competency and wellness to even navigate that whole system. I guess we're sort of hitting the same point again. Some of these tools can be helpful. It's interesting, they've done some studies where they asked people to rate an online conversation with a therapist. And it turns out that most people end up preferring the AI version right up until they know it's an AI version. And then of course, they prefer the other one.

And all that points to is that there is value that can be gained in these things. So now let's turn back to the DA Tao for our remaining little bit of time here. Do you have a favorite chapter now? Like what chapter now is like ringing your bell? The endearing favorite chapter is the one about the three treasures. Oh, yeah. So the three treasures are simplicity, compassion, and patience. Okay.

Right. Probably in the 60s. 67. Nice. Okay. That's the one I come back to time and time again. Just when I look at people who are thriving, people who are happy, and people who really are on a path that I find compelling, they're practicing those

in certain ways. And also, when I'm suffering, I realize that I'm probably not practicing those. What were the three again? Simplicity, compassion, and patience. And compassion comes pretty native to me, so that's not the one. Well, self-compassion, that's a whole other story, right? But it's really simplicity and patience, right? Just because, unfortunately, the world does not move as fast as our minds do. Like when I hit publish on something, it may take a minute. Right? Turns out other people have their own agendas that are not on my own timeline. So usually my own suffering comes when I'm being myopic about timelines or when I've

overcomplicated something. You've probably heard me say in different ways, like when in doubt, choose the simpler option. Right? Because usually that's the way to go forward. The second one would be the one that's along the lines of the Tao is broad and plain, but people prefer the side paths. That's another one that comes up. It's like, what we need to do is like, it's pretty straightforward. We just need to do it. But like, we're off over here in these like plots

and side paths, like messing around and not actually getting anywhere. Like what happened if we just did the thing? Yeah, I may have translated or interpreted that. I suppose I should say translation would mean I went to the original Chinese and I translated into English, which is not what I did. I took 15 or so different English language translations and sort of patched them together into what felt most resonant. I may have translated that phrase you just use there as shortcuts, right? People for further shortcuts. For me, chapter 44 is an all-time favorite and it's one of the ones that drew me to the book and it keeps me. There are different parts of it, but I'll just read the

last part, which is, if you're content with what you have, you can take joy in what is, and here's the line that kills me. When you realize there's nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. I just love that. Because we think about all these things we need to do in order to be happy. We need to go get this and when I get that and when I arrange this. And this is just saying, well, you could try all that if you want, but there's a more direct path like you were just talking about. There's an actual path where you just go, well, let me try and just bypass all that if you want, but there's a more direct path like you were just talking about.

There's an actual path where you just go, well, let me try and just bypass all that. Not that it doesn't have value, but I can, if I realize there's nothing lacking and the few times in my life where that has truly landed have been the moments of the most ecstatic peace, joy, relief, where I just saw truly and completely there's nothing missing. This moment is sufficient unto itself, just this. Yeah, I'm with you on that one. And what's so surprising but not surprising is how many of those moments are found when you get out of your head It kind of goes back to what I was talking about with the first chapter I would like if you're like in your head like I could be doing this or you know

We both have partners that we love to death and if we're like is she happy and like what's going on? And is she contending like do we need to do that and you do all that kind of whatnot you miss Actually that moment. Yeah. Everything was fine. And what a gift actually to be in a place to where you can let the rest go and be like, this is here. Because many of us don't get that or we don't get nearly enough of that. Right? And so I love that you chose that one. Yeah, there's so many, you know, we actually in the PF community, when I do monthly calls, there's a PF bingo card of things that I talk about a lot, right? And so it's like Charlie references the Dow is one of those bingo slots, right?

Because I do it so frequently here, depending on, we'd be like, well, one of my favorite lines from the Dow is about, you know, being as careful at the end as you are in the beginning, right? And so it just is one of those things. And I think that's the beauty because if you read it and you practice it and you cultivate it enough, you can find that moment. You're like, oh, this is where that line that some guy, maybe guys, multiple guys, I don't know, wrote 2000 years ago, right? Many, many thousands of years ago, it applies to this moment. Honestly, that's why I still retain my label as philosopher. I never stopped being one because I left academia. And my joy was always philosophy for living.

Like how do we take these wisdom traditions, whether they're strictly on the philosophy side or whether they're strictly on the spirituality and religion side? And that divide is sometimes very, very tenuous. But how do we make them apply to us now? And how do we appreciate that this thing that I've been experiencing right now is tied to a feeling and thought that someone 300 years ago was having or a thousand years ago if you take the Western tradition some monk sitting in a monastery philosophizing had this very same or very similar experience and was trying to figure it out right and so for

me while many people think philosophy and some of these things like actually distance you and make you super heady following the platonic tradition, for me it actually isn't a fundamentally connecting thing because it makes me realize that like this thought, this idea, this belief, whatever it is, is a part of this human orchestra and they had it, she had it, I have it, which means likely They had it, she had it, I have it, which means likely someone in the future is going to have this too. And it's a thread that connects us. That's a beautiful, beautiful line. And I think that might be a great place for us to wrap up. I think the last thing I'll say is that idea of that line that connects us kind of goes all the way back to the phrase, the Tao itself. This line, this thread, this thing that interweaves everything

together. And beautiful, I love orchestra too, human orchestra, beautiful. Charlie, thank you so much. Thank you for coming on. I always love talking with you. Thank you for helping me share this rebind project with the world for the first time and great to see you. Same, thanks for having me and I look forward to our next conversation and however that thread connects us. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring or thought provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the

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