In this episode, Charlie Gilkey explores the ancient wisdom of the Tao Te Ching and where it meets modern life. What if you’re doing everything right—staying productive, chasing growth, keeping up—but still feeling off? What if the discomfort you feel isn’t a sign to push harder, but an invitation to let go? This conversation unpacks how its timeless insights can help us navigate today’s fast-paced world, including the rise of AI. You’ll discover a grounded look at how presence, simplicity, and inner alignment still matter—perhaps now more than ever—and how ancient wisdom and new technology can, surprisingly, work hand in hand.
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 “Daodejing,” an ancient Chinese text attributed to Lao Tzu.
- Application of Daodejing 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 Daodejing: simplicity, compassion, and patience.
- The role of philosophy in fostering human connection and understanding.
- Encouragement to embrace the teachings of the Daodejing for personal growth and fulfillment.
Charlie Gilkey is the author of Start Finishing: How To Go From Idea To Done. An Army veteran and near Ph.D. in philosophy, Charlie is the founder of Productive Flourishing, a company that helps professional creatives, leaders, and change-makers take meaningful action on work matters. He’s widely cited in outlets such as Inc. Magazine, Time, Forbes, The Guardian, Life Hacker, and more and his work will help you discover the path from the ideas in your head to the actions you take in your daily life and how to go about getting things done.
Connect with Charlie Gilkey: Website | Instagram | Facebook
If you enjoyed this conversation with Charlie Gilkey, check out these other episodes:
How to Get Things Done with Charlie Gilkey
Embrace the Chaos: Finding Clarity Through Meditation with Henry Shukman (Part 1)
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Episode Transcript:
Charlie Gilkey 00:00:00 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.
Chris Forbes 00:00:16 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 a 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:00 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 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, I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Charlie, welcome to the show.
Charlie Gilkey 00:01:46 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:54 We’re going to 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 Tao Te Ching. 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:29 Which one wins? The one you feed. So maybe we can just use that as the place to jump into the Tao.
Charlie Gilkey 00:02:36 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’s stuck with me for now, 31 years. I started reading Tao early. Right? Yeah. Is, I think, how it would take the one you 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. Yep. 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 Dalai 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:03:33 That’s 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 in 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:00 Yeah, well, the Tao Te Ching 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:34 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. You 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:34 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 wanted 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. So you start to feel at home in the world.
Charlie Gilkey 00:06:27 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 dot I Ching.
Charlie Gilkey 00:06:34 Yeah, 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 to metaphysical, right in that way.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:06 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 that and that’s really beautifully, beautifully said. And the Tao itself, that word Tao is hard to translate.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:35 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:08:22 Yeah, I think that in resonance, they all sort of work. And I think the thing you need to sort of appreciate about Tao 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 so I don’t mix translations.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:46 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:08:57 So there’s a lot that’s going on with that, right? Because what it is really counter opposing is reality versus our ability to comprehend reality. Right to know specifically. Now, later chapters of the Tao 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 counter pose, 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. Yeah, we can be in accord with it.
Charlie Gilkey 00:10:01 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. Sidney High’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 meet a process that the more you fall out of flow, right? Yes. And in another way, when we look at joy and, you know, one of the two nested themes, which we’ll talk about more explicit acceptance and in contentment. Yeah, like a lot of people struggle with being joyfully happy with what they have. Yes. And they can’t just experience the joy in what they have without having some sort of overlay of why they enjoy it.
Charlie Gilkey 00:11:01 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:13 I don’t.
Charlie Gilkey 00:11:13 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? I would prefer not to have them. I like other things. And when you sort of accept at a certain point that maybe your Tao, maybe your way, maybe that force that you’re attuned to, it’s just a tune that way and it’s okay, right? 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:11:58 And sort of our Western tradition, just for the way that you feel that joy that you feel to be enough in 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 let’s break it Taon. This is work for everybody. Why does that matter? Yeah, 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:26 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’s spelled depending on the translation. T or D 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:06 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:13:44 Absolutely. You know, Shambhala Buddhist tradition has a concept called wind, horse, wind. Like, you know, the air moving and horses that you ride. And the idea is that when you find your, your dharma, your path, your job in the world, it is like you’re riding on a 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:14:19 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? Yes. 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 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 5 or 10% faster and throwing off your flow or trying to slow Taon your gait 5 or 10%. So if you’re listening to this listener, like, try it, right. If you’re walking, try to walk just 5 to 10% faster, or try to walk 5 to 10% slower. And you’ll notice how awkward it is actually.
Charlie Gilkey 00:15:16 Yeah, 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?
Chris Forbes 00:15:42 If you want to check it out for yourself, you can grab the interactive Tao experience Eric built with Rebind at one UI. Net Tao spelled t o. That’s one you feed net. It’s a really cool way to actually talk with the verses and with Eric as you read.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:03 One of the things that the Tao points to, like any eastern tradition, is the value of presence, of being here now, right? And 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 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 The presence is that the vast majority of us are not going to suddenly become less busy.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:41 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:17:12 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:32 Yeah.
Charlie Gilkey 00:17:33 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:17:50 And also I don’t want to continue this sort of valorization of being busy, you know, like, oh, it’s a it’s a badge of honor that I’m so overwhelmed. Like, now 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. Yeah. When it’s time to stop walking, I need to stop walking. Right. But, and that’s great. And I think when we accept that. So when, when you think about whether you’re a creator or a creator 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:18:40 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. Yep. Right. And so what do you do? How do you find that Venn overlap between being present and being engaged? And that’s where the sweet stuff happens.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:58 Yeah, I love that idea. Reminds me of, like, a poem by a guest of the show, Danusha LaMaris, who’s a poet. And in it, she’s talking about this experience of being present. And 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 long shaTao, 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:49 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 or 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 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:20:48 Precisely when we look at sort of the top five things that make people happy.
Charlie Gilkey 00:20:52 And I just wrote a post on this, so it just happens to be top of mind, but in order they tend to be a bottom is playing music or listening to music. Number four is playing. Number three is exercising. Number two is connections with or like being in connection with other people. And number one is having sex.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:09 Heroin. Oh, sorry. Number one is heroin.
Charlie Gilkey 00:21:14 Okay. Clearly, clearly.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:16 Coming in at number six. Crystal.
Charlie Gilkey 00:21:19 Let’s just say that people’s top five are different, but they sort of catalogue 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 like. And for all of them? Yes, all of them. There’s a limit to how much you enjoy that. Like too much ice cream is a bad thing, right? Yeah. And so we need that variety. And I think when you lean into the, the sort of multiplicity of being human, which is part of each of our Tao, 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 present, so and so forth.
Charlie Gilkey 00:22:00 It’s only when we get rigidly stuck on something. And so I guess, you know, while we while 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 doorway of the Tao teaching 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:23:01 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 thawed overnight. Guess what? You don’t walk across the river anymore. You change your plan, right? Yeah. 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 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:23:58 But just being like, you know what? World changed. I’m changing with it and that’s okay. Let’s go.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:03 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 he’s home from daycare and I got a call yesterday. My mom is in the hospital and then I get another call. My dad is in a different 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 what do you call them versus chapter chapters?
Charlie Gilkey 00:24:44 I will usually say chapter. And then there’s a verse like when it when it’s like, yeah, yeah, okay. And then sometimes I’ll say a line, right. Just, just because that is the other thing.
Charlie Gilkey 00:24:53 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 chapter and make it all make sense in context versus finding that line or that verse. It’s like, oh, that is the thing that’s going to resound within me all day, right?
Eric Zimmer 00:25:15 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 Danushka Lemus. 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:25:35 Yeah, that’s not unnatural with how we think about music, actually. Like if you think about your favorite songs, like. Yes, it can be the vibe.
Charlie Gilkey 00:25:41 Yes, it can 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? Yeah. And that line has the emotional and insightful and attractive gravitas of the entire song. Right. So approach the dial 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 it’s like, oh, I understand that now. Or that resounds with me now. Yeah. And I need to think about how I’m going to cultivate that.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:24 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? I 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:51 And I think a lot of what the Tao 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 sit 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, 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 helped 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:16 All right. Let’s try and transition from where we are now into what Rebind is.
Charlie Gilkey 00:28:24 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 Tao, to go beyond knowing that the Tao teaching is there, to maybe being stumped by the Tao Te Ching 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?
Eric Zimmer 00:28:54 One of the books that I’ve spent the most time with in my entire life is the Tao de Ching. 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:17 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 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 one Eufy store. That’s spelled T. That’s onyoufeed.net/tao 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:30:22 He sold it. His family business made a lot of money, 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 he started having these thoughts around the time that I really start 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:17 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 Tao Te Ching. 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 loved 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:16 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, you know, I creates real conversations. But boy, it sure seems like it, right? And this thing is uncannily like me.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:16 I mean, 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, you know, 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:33:37 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. And 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:34:07 And I’m like, this is the weirdest thing ever. Like, you’re a PhD psychology professor. So 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, like this is the value of a human or in our age of a digital clone of having some something that’s been taught on the patterns of what that human would teach. Because again, let’s talk about it because 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, I’m any good teacher or tutor coach, you know, advisor, you know, a speaker.
Charlie Gilkey 00:35:09 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? Yeah. 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, playing with it 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 they’ve got Zen 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 with the Rebind project?
Eric Zimmer 00:35:52 Yeah, it is really interesting.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:54 And there are other rebuilds out there besides me. I mean, Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Deepak Chopra, Lena Dunham. You look at this page of these binders and then I’m on it. I sort of feel like one of these is not like the other.
Charlie Gilkey 00:36:07 You were going to go there, but.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:09 But there I am. But I think what you said there is really important. Because you could just go to ChatGPT 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 could 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:54 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 it. 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, the, 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:57 But this was a 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 Tao or you’re going to like me in the way that I see the world and people listening to this show, hopefully both.
Charlie Gilkey 00:38:16 Yeah, yeah. I mean, on this one, I’m a moderate techno optimist, meaning I’m 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 maybe someone’s right. There’s a winTao.
Charlie Gilkey 00:38:54 Eric, you, Eric, and the Rebind team may not like me saying this, but there’s a winTao of 5 to 7 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, absolutely, that’s an inevitability. So there’s a window. Get Eric 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, like enough electricity and a cell phone that can actually be learning from the best people or people that they resonate with from around the world. Yeah, right. That’s the key. Unlock that we have here. Yep. 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:39:54 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, and wisdom. This Rebind project is sort of a drop in that larger pool of, of where we want to to go with this, which is what made me excited about it in the first place, to show up and talk about it.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:15 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 I have this conversation with a friend of mine who’s a therapist, and we talk about eye therapists.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:54 And he originally was like, that’s terrible. It’s an awful idea. It’s 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 eye 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:41:46 Absolutely. And to your therapist point, like robot has been out for a long time. And what it was, is it a text based interface to where you would text robot about what’s going on and help you sort of with some different therapeutic models process what you’re doing and it help people get better.
Charlie Gilkey 00:42:02 Yep. Right. Was it as good as, you know, the world class, you know, mental therapist? No. But, Eric, you know, of some folks who’ve been there. I know of plenty of folks where when you’re in some of those patches, like a solution that’s good enough is way better than no solution at all. Yep. Right. Yep. And in that case, like 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? Yeah. The Rebind project, that’s the this that I’m referring to is a part of that. Yeah, that’s what’s really exciting about it.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:41 Wobot 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 Mastroianni, who’s an online writer, but he wrote a he wrote a post called A skull full of poison, which is his descent into some sort of mental illness slash depression.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:03 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 Tao for our remaining little bit of time here.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:07 Do you have a favorite chapter now. Like what chapter now is like ringing your bell.
Charlie Gilkey 00:44:15 The enduring 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 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:54 Signals. What were the three again?
Charlie Gilkey 00:44:55 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:45:18 Yeah, 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 a simpler option. Yeah, 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. Yeah 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:01 You know, 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:11 I took 15 or so different English language translations and sort of patch them together into what felt most resonant. I may have translated that phrase you just use there as shortcuts. Right. People prefer the 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 were 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:08 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:47:37 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. Right. We’d 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 content and 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:48:19 Yeah, right. And so I love that you chose that one. Yeah. There’s so many. You know, if we actually in the 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 Tao is one of those bingo slots. Right. Because I do it so frequently depending on would be like, well, one of my favorite lines in the Tao is about, you know, being as careful at the end as you are. Yeah, I’m 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:49:12 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. Yeah, 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 some one 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 is 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:50:18 And they had it, she had it, I have it. Which means likely someone in the future is going to have this to. And it’s a thread that connects us.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:29 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 to 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.
Charlie Gilkey 00:51:03 Thanks for having me and I look forward to our next conversation and however that thread connects us.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:09 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:18 Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.
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