 Boom. What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We are on site in Los Angeles in California. We are going to be talking about all things Buddhism, all things digitizing artifacts, and we have Jeff Wallman joining us on the show. Hello. Hello. How are you? Thank you so much for coming on. I'm glad to appreciate it. I'm super excited for this. Jeff's background is perfect for this conversation. He is 17 years as the executive director emeritus now of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to seek out, preserve, organize, and disseminate Buddhist literature using digital technology. Previously, previous 10 years were in the information sciences, digital archiving, digital library operations, software development, organizational management, strategic planning. He did philosophy in MechE from Boston University, and he's a 22-year practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism with several Eastern Lamas. Whoa. Okay. So, we like to take a big history perspective on things when we jump into conversation, and this is a very unique aspect to what has happened. We find ourselves now over a period of evolution, a stewards of Earth, and we've had this foundation of collective learning that we've built on top of, yet we've lost so many of the artifacts along the way. And to now be able to digitally log these artifacts, especially when it's something as sacred as the practices of Buddhism and the wisdoms that come from that, is so crucial. So, tell us about your thoughts on now we have the technology, now we're digitizing these artifacts. Tell us about that synthesis of where we're at this moment in history. Yeah, I think the key thing is that the physical culture is preserved digitally so that the oral culture, the living culture, can improvise, continue to recreate itself, regenerate itself. So, when you take the physical substrate out, the foundation, the physical cultural foundation out, the living culture really kind of can spin. So, in the Tibetan case it's extremely interesting that over a thousand years the Tibetans really carefully documented so much of their experiences, so much of their philosophy and their view and the traditions specifically around spiritual awakening and around consciousness, around meditation, around transformation. And, you know, the physical form that they encoded it in, there was a premium for the real estate, right, these little block prints so they had to carve things very carefully. So, really the words are encoded. So, essentially this awareness and this view is encoded on the page and you really need a key to unlock it. So, I think that work is going to, of unlocking it, that work is going to take a couple hundred years given the scope of what the Tibetans were all about for a thousand years. We call it the long winter effect, right, when you have nothing but a long winter, you know, you can tend to get a lot done internally. Yeah. Yeah. Whoa. So, now this is thousands of years of spiritual awakening and consciousness study that has, again, this long winter period where they can really spend time doing some inward reflection on these topics and then write down these wisdoms and it was etched into wood. Well, in cases where etched into manuscripts first and then manuscripts, but written down, I think the key is it's written down. The Tibetan paper was hardwood paper, so it's super robust. The surviving manuscripts today are really solid, actually, much more so than the modern paper. So, they wrote things down in manuscript form. And then, when there was an interest in gathering and publishing that information, they would carve that into wood. So, the whole prospect of carving into wood, you know, is very intensive. So, that's where there was a lot encoded, like to shorten words and so forth. And so, it's really interesting and you really do need a key to unlock it. You know, you need a key to unpack, you know, really what the meaning of what is being said. Would you say that is then partially due to a limitation in being able to etch into that size of manuscript and also then it becomes like a compression algorithm of the wisdom? Totally. That totally is part of the physical culture. The role of the physical culture is like an efficiency, you know, to try to pack as many words as you can into the page. Yeah. And then, teach us about this, you say physical, and then what was the other one? Well, the living culture. The living culture. So, the practice, the actual practice? Actually, in the oral traditions, the explanations, the way I look at it is that culture is living. So, can you preserve something that's living? You know, you can protect its conditions for life. You can protect and facilitate conditions so that it can thrive, but you can't really preserve life in a way. I view culture very much as the same thing, that it's a living entity in a way. It's a living group experience. And so, when we're preserving the physical form, which is like the, you know, in the cultural studies they call like tangible culture and intangible culture, that's the difference. So, you need to preserve the tangible as the foundation as the bedrock so that the intangible, the lived experience of the culture can kind of move, can have some connection back to the past, right? That's the key thing, is connecting back in to our ancestors. Yeah. Yeah, there's, we talk about this so much, but the 100 billion humans that have built all of the foundation of civilization that we have, it's so important to be able to go back and immerse ourselves in the hardships and their lives and really get behind their eyes. And so, take us back the, are we talking about 2,000 years? Well, the Tibetan Buddhism, which comes from India, you know, started in the 7th or 8th century. Yeah. So, the written record is like from 900 or 1,000 AD. So, you know, it's, yeah, it's about 1,000 years total. For the written record. For the written record. But the enlightenment of Buddha is like 2,500 years. And then it was over that period of 1,500 years, it was just orally disseminated. Mostly, but then there was also a lot written, but in different traditions, not in the Tibetan tradition, the Tibetan tradition was much later. It was the Yogis and the Sadhus and the Siddhas moved over the Himalayas into the Tibetan regions much, much later. The earlier kind of spreading of Buddhism. Yeah, they wrote down all kinds of things in different languages in Pali and Sanskrit and went to Sri Lanka, actually to China, Southeast Asia. So, there was a big spreading, but the stuff that we worked on at the Buddhist Digital Resource Center with Tibetan initially is in Tibetan language, which is a little later. And we'll get to this, but you are now entering into, this is like 15 million pages of text and a million per year is being added across different languages as well. Which is in Southeast Asian countries. So, we're really excited to, and we'll also be talking a bit about the tech, like the metadata and all this exciting stuff. This history, this foundation is actually really important because it, like you said, it's really hard to capture the current contemporary archaeology of what's going on, these artifacts between us. We have all the digital data that we're leaving behind, but they're in data silos and we'll talk about that too. But to be able to go back and find artifacts that have not been digitally organized and able to be searched and able to be replicated digitally on an unlimited amount of times is super critical. So, I want you to teach us about that. Well, there's two, there's two parts of it really is the essentially data and metadata, right? So, the capturing the physical form of the culture, like whether it's a book or a piece of art, capturing that digitally. So, taking essentially a photograph, but then you have to describe it and you can describe it along many axes, right? You can describe it along its kind of biographical, geographical, social, political axes. And so, this idea of metadata becomes really important because that kind of situates the object or the form that you've preserved in the right context. So, without that metadata, you essentially have millions of pictures and you don't know what they are or what they're for. Even with advanced machine learning that can read the content of those images, you really still need a human to evaluate what it is and to ascribe some categories and basically describe it in a way that honors its context, that situates it in the culture then and now as well. And that's really what Gene Smith was all about is really doing that work. He was an unbelievable polymath of the literature and of the traditions. And so, he really encouraged us to build a good system that really helped this ongoing effort, you know, so that after he was gone, which I think he was pressioned about that we could continue that work, you know, for generations. Essentially, it's like sophisticated tagging, right? Yes. So, you need to be able to do it fast enough, right, because you have this huge corpus. Totally. You can't get too involved in it. But at the same time, you need to assign the right information to it. Yes. Yeah, so that metadata is really, really, really important because that allows then, like, searching an organization of the digital information to be done. And I think the more and more digital information we have, the more and more that kind of metadata context is really, really important. Yeah, it's so interesting how you have this, like you said, this corpus of that you need to photograph and then you need to add the metadata tags and you need to break it down. And it's good that Gene Smith and you had this push with a big team. How big was the team? Well, at the beginning, it was just a few people. And then, you know, the large team was like 10. No, no. It's still a small team. Yeah. It's a testament to what you can do with a small number of people. That's right. Yeah, yeah. That's right. And so you had to move with, like you said, the corpus was big so you had to move with a certain amount of speed. You couldn't get too involved in every single one of the images. So now, you know, walk us through this process of you have the, how do you actually get the metadata tags? Because how do you know about the geographic and all the other tags that you mentioned that you know about? Well, in the Tibetan books, there's often at the end, there's these caliphon titles, which are descriptions of who commissioned that work and when and where. And, you know, it's very kind of rich information. So in the Tibetan books, there are often clues and some, in many cases, descriptions of what the context of that work is or was. So in that case, it's simply reading, right? But again, it's at 15 million pages, you know, it's time intensive. So you need to know exactly how to do that. And a lot of that has to do with being skilled at what the structure of the work is, right? And then some of it is just simple library science. Like this is the title, the author and the subject and, you know, straight metadata. What is the form, the support, the script? What language is it in? You know, those kind of really basic things. Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. But that information really aggregates really well if you do that well. So the metadata structure, having some flexibility around that so that you can describe what's in front of you is really important. And that really aggregates well, that builds up and you essentially key all that into a database and then provides search and everything on top of that. Yeah, because then you can actually dive deep into, you have this big data repository and I'm able to queue a search that can then extract that data based on the metadata on the tags that you've set with it, which is so interesting. And then it was also quite crazy to see that out of these, what is it, 100 plus thousand books of Tibetan Buddhist history and that when you handed over to other alums around on the east, it turned hemisphere when, I believe, Gene and I think you, as well. Oh yeah, for years, yeah. Give them hard drives or yeah. Yeah, give them a hard drive, a USB stick with the 100,000 plus books with millions of pages on such a small and searchable. That's a profound moment for our ability to really expand the library to more and more people. That was really interesting. Totally, yeah. And that's one of the wonders and enormous benefits of technology because that's just obviously now possible if it's not digital, if it's analog. You know, you can't stuff as much analog information into that size space. So that actually helps the kind of cultural preservation part because then what happens now to this day is a lot of the work that we did over the past 20 years now is on desk, can travel very easily. And what we've seen was now there's a kind of a revitalization of the literary culture. So scans were taken and then new wood blocks were created from the scans and traditional texts were printed from the new wood blocks. So that's not a result we ever thought would happen where it would actually spur a revitalization of the material culture, the print culture itself. We thought, oh well, people will just print it out with printers or whatever, but now it actually went full circle back into wood blocks. And then so that was a fascinating and really powerful impact result of the work. Yeah. Now, we'll get a little more into the nuance of the tech. I want to hear about a lot of the origin story for you guys. So initially after your undergraduate you decided to explore some Nepal and India. Yeah. And then that kind of led you into teach us about this. Oh yeah. I mean, it's just the ultimate expression of naivete, right? I mean, I had no idea. Actually, it was 22 years old right after college and I had studied a lot of Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy in school at BU. I had some great teachers in the philosophy department. And I painted a couple houses that summer and went initially with a friend to India and I remember actually arriving at the airport. And the customs agent in India looked at my passport and looked at me and then shook his head like basically like you have no idea what you're getting yourself into. I don't know what I was presenting, but it was sure it was naivete with long blonde hair and sparkly. I have no idea what I'm doing here. And I just was called. I felt really connected to India, always have, still do. It's really a beautiful country and friends there. But also the Himalaya, like I was traveling with a friend at that time and he, you know, good buddy of mine. And he, after a few months, he was like, I can't do this anymore. I'm going to Scotland to drink tea and a veranda. And it was a joke to this day that we still joke about. I was like, okay, man, you can do that, but I'm going to stay here. And I went to Nepal and I just stayed there for a couple of months. And I remember actually my first encounter with a Tibetan Lama was up in the Khumbu area, which is the area near Everest. And we went up and we walked. It was like three weeks walk because there was, you know, the transport. This was like 1988, right? So it was a different world there then than it is now. A three week walk. Yeah. I mean, but a lot of people do that. But yeah, it was in good shape and it was fun. And I didn't know what I was doing, you know, you know, just walking along these paths. And you had this idea, like, want to go see Everest and the whole region. And we got to this region, the Khumbu. And there's a very famous monastery there. And they had this festival where they basically allow, they bring local villagers and visitors into the monastery. And you make offerings and they do some ceremonies. And the people I was with were like, why do you want to do that? And I was like, why wouldn't you want to do it? So again, those things that where is that coming from? You know, I just have no ideas of karma, I guess. And then I remember going to this monastery. Curiosity. Curiosity. And also the design, like you had some sort of an inclination that was you were being drawn out to something that was more ancient than you were. Right. You know, and you wanted to tie yourself into, into that. Right. That's so beautiful. I'm glad. This is the, I hope that that can enter into the children being born today as well as go and immerse yourselves in the ancient when you visit different places around the world and go look in those ancient areas, not just the new modern areas. Oh yeah. No, I totally tell my son today, you know, the sign of a good summer is when you get, you know, scars and wounds, you know, it's like, you know, physical exploration. Absolutely. So I, but I remember this moment. And we were walking through this ceremony. It was just really a procession. And the main llama was doing blessings right to to the villagers and I just kind of jumped in this line. And I remember getting up to this llama and I looked at him and he just looked at me and there was a feeling of love that I had never experienced before. It was like this really deep love. And I was just like, my whole body just melted and I, he just smiled at me and it was amazing. And I didn't actually touch Tibetan Buddhism for 10 years after that, not because I was avoiding it just because I didn't even know what that experience was except I knew that it was profound. And later on I see that and starting to get involved in meditation and so forth that that culture of compassion and love is cultivated and very needed. Obviously, you know, I don't know what that llama saw as I was walking through. But whatever he saw, he met, you know, I was going to look at the other side. He met me and I met him and we met together in that space and it was really powerful. Can you tell us more about that feeling of profound love that you felt? What was that feeling like and how did that energy sort of keep going with that? Yeah, well, it's warm and there's no boundaries, right? There's no conscious ideas, it just melts, it just flows, it just flows. And it's right from the heart, you know. It's not from your thoughts, you know, or your brain body, it's from your heart. And it just really, it was really clear, you know, and I felt like I was remembering something, you know. I was remembering something in myself that was beyond me but that I was still connected to and a part of. And, you know, my current teacher, who I see less now, he's in India, I saw the same feeling when I go see him. It's kind of like, no matter what my state of mind is, you know, there's just a melting of those concepts and that struggle and all of that. It's gone. I guess the question is, why does it come again? Yes, I want to take this too interesting. But I definitely know it goes away too, so that's good. That's good information, that that struggle goes away. It's not part of our nature actually, it comes up but it goes away. And that was one of the things that really struck me about the tradition, is that idea of Buddha nature, that we're awake, we're alive, we're awakened naturally. That's our natural state. That's our first state. Okay, there's two places quick that I want to go. You talk about this compassion, you talk about this love, this heart-centric approach to looking at someone else in the eyes and what that does, and leaving that positive wake everywhere you go, that positive aura everywhere you go, that that is so beautiful and to see that in more children and adults around the world is exactly what we need to get to that unity, so that we can best prosper moving forward. And practices like this are a really, really great way to get there. So I want you to pick up the story. Okay, so after that experience with the Lama, you said it took you like 10 years to pick up the story. Well yeah, then I did the usual trajectory. I left India, I went back, I had my mid-life crisis at age 24. Like what am I going to do with my life? I did the usual thing. I started thinking about my career and relationships and I moved to California for a few years. Then I decided to do graduate school. I went to graduate school in math and mechanical engineering for some reason. Again, curiosity like I think I can do this. And then I worked for a few years as an engineer and then I started feeling that need again of like, okay, what am I doing? How can I improve my experience? How can I improve my happiness? How can I... something's missing, right? So it started to call again that kind of curiosity and that longing. And then while I was working in these engineering companies, I started meditation practice, formal meditation practice. And I met several Lamas and then got involved in meditation community in Boston. And then from there started retreats and then saw that there's a whole formality and path and tradition and teachings in the view and practice. And then it got more and more complicated and more and more incredible that there was so much diversity of practice for each kind of person. And I started to get really inspired like, wow, this is really an incredible tradition. You know, really an awesome tradition in its diversity and its care. And it's experiential. And it's experiential grounded in that. Yeah. So, yeah, so that was... that was... that takes us right into like 2002. And when I... 2001, I wasn't getting enough time off of my corporate job. So I decided to quit my job and I went on a bunch of meditation retreats because I wasn't getting enough time off, right? Which I think is something the corporate world definitely needs to take into consideration of letting people deepen their experience so that they can be more creative in production. Yeah, productive. Because after that retreat, it's like, yeah, the fire was lit. Yeah, totally lit. And then I threw a friend who I still keep in touch with introduced me to Gene, to Gene Smith. And I met him and instantaneously, yeah, he was just like, well, I'd like you to come work and help me with the technology. So, and then it took off. Yeah. Okay, I want to take us to this point that you made about this, this diversity of practices of getting to awakening. Yeah. There's a lot of diverse practices. And after having done the amount of diverse practices, been at retreats, talked to so many people, what can you say? Do people just go and test at different retreats, the different diverse strategies and then figure out what works best for them? Yeah. And I think that's a really important process. I think people need to have in general just more patience in their own process around that. And I think that the way that you evaluate the teacher, the way that you connect in with a teacher is very individual, very personal. And I think it's really important to honor how you can hear them, whether or not you can hear what they're saying. Because I've sat in the audience with many very good teachers, they're incredibly learned, but it's like right over my head. It's like, I just don't connect with it somehow. And I think that process of honoring your own, that connection that you feel in yourself when you're in the presence, in that kind of presence, is really important. Because that spark, that initial connection is really the ground. And so the diversity I'm not talking about necessarily is not necessarily with all these different teachers and traditions, which of course now, today and our age, we're incredibly fortunate to be exposed to so much, even with social media, to be exposed with this unbelievable amount of diversity of information. It's unbelievable on some level, the abundance of it. There's that kind of diversity, but just even in one vertical, the diversity is incredible in the Tibetan tradition, because there's so many different practices within each tradition that really kind of get at the diversity of enlightenment, the diversity of waking up, that there's so many different styles, so many different approaches. There's so many different, from the Buddhist point of view, there's so many different defilements to purify. So there is a real care taken around constructing practices to address that variety. And I think that's where the diversity comes from. That was really good. It's so important for us to look at ourselves objectively in the mirror and realize the defilements that we want to eradicate from our lives and go through these wisdom practices to do so. And also you mentioned this really important that sometimes when you listen to different teachers or mentors, sometimes information goes over your head, but with other teachers it really syncs and resonates. So it's up to us to find those pairings for us. Exactly. Interesting. That was a good one. Okay, so now I want to talk about this. You and Gene end up going, okay, we're going to figure out how to properly digitize this, and you speak about this as well. It's really important to understand scale is a big deal here. If you're only doing a thousand pages, that's one thing. When you're doing millions of pages, it becomes a whole different animal. Exactly. Yeah, so tell us about that. Yeah, I mean the scale just influenced this project from the very beginning. One of the first things I did was ask Gene, how many pages are there? So he had this whole 7.2 million. So I was like, okay, that's a lot. So after a few years, I was like, we were at 9 million. I was like, what happened to the 7.2 million? It was just an estimate. I think he purposely underestimated the scope just for encouragement purposes when he knew it was way bigger. But that really informed everything at the beginning, right down to how we structure the directories on these disks. Because the other really overriding interest was the preservation, the long-term preservation, and making this corpus of data, this corpus of material portable be able to share on disk, eventually print it out maybe, put in a concrete bunker somewhere on paper. But definitely the interest of not just building like an archive online where people would go, but also to make sure that the actual data is distributed throughout the planet. I mean, he thought about that right from the very beginning. So that influenced the architecture, the portability, and then the size. And the size fundamentally is almost like a workflow issue, right? You perfection can't be the enemy of the good, right? So you have to do a good enough job to make sure that what you're archiving is defined well enough, situated well enough in the context in which it was created. But at the same time, given that there's so much, you need to keep that moving. At one point, last year, I counted, there were about 450,000 metadata records that pointed into the text. And that was keyed in by people, by librarians in Cambridge, basically. And they're still working every day, so there's still a lot of production. And there was a real vision about those records as kind of nodes in a network, and that the pages were also nodes in a network. And how you tag these nodes, and if you are careful and disciplined and you have the right amount of information, it's not too much and not too little, then you can make a lot of progress. So the scale was really, really important from the very beginning, because we knew it was big. And then will you speak on the scholarly validation side of things? Yeah, that's really critical. Always vetting the text in the sense that being able to disambiguate versions and additions, making sure that we're not scanning the same thing twice, that's a big issue. Oftentimes, it's not clear exactly if there were duplicates. Gene always showed us that if you print a text from a wood block, like 200 years ago, from the time from 200 years ago, which is the first printing to today, you keep printing, there's variations in the prints, because the blocks wear out. So that's one problem, is the volatility of the blocks themselves. But the other problem is that there are these kind of what they call editorial redactions in the blocks. So as they're printing, there's re-carving and stuff with the blocks. So you see actual differences in the prints, not just the fade, but you see these kind of real-time editing taking place during the printing process. We always had to be really careful about what the edition is, what the version is, what the print is, and to make sure that that information is accurately reflected in the metadata. And that really does require scholars. So that's a huge thing, what scholars contribute. And just really access to the text and the importance of the text and being able to describe what the text is, what the boundaries of the text is, and being able to situate things well, describe things well. So scholarly validation is critical. Yeah, as you were speaking on that, I was thinking about the craziness of trying to see what a version was like between these hundred-year periods. And then trying to store that as well as version control, basically, of saying that, oh, this is the one from 1400, this is the same page from 1800. Yeah, it's like xylographic subversion or GitHub through xylographs. I mean, to say that there's a ton of variation in the blocks themselves is kind of overstating it to make a point that the blocks are not static. And that's definitely, because you're doing this cultural preservation work, look at it from kind of almost a management perspective, it's so expensive to preserve material. You're at the point of preservation. You've flown across the world, you've traveled 100 miles in a jeep. You have all this equipment that comes together. You need to go to this location, you need to sit down and set everything up and people need to agree to that, and then you actually start to photograph a text. And at that moment, you make a rash decision and you say, oh, we have this already. That's a real danger. So that's part of it, is that really to make sure that you are really serious about when you say we have it already. And of course, we joke a lot in our organization about we have it already, and that whole comment, whenever anyone says we have it already, I always say, are you sure? Yeah, yeah, that's funny. And that's definitely the genes. Funny joke. And with old text, this is really important. You know, manuscripts, you know, manuscripts are unique. There are different instances and different events around how they were produced. And so with old culture, it is really important to make sure that you really look carefully. You also explain this crazy flying across the world with all the equipment, traveling in a jeep to the location, setting it all up. And then you either, you know, you have to get permission from them to do it and then you realize maybe we have this already, maybe we don't yet. Well, is this a different version? How so? And so you're still identifying the million that are pages that are being added every single year. And across all these new languages as well. So you're right now, Thailand has a big focus. So Thailand, Cambodia, Mongolia as well. Burma, what? Nepal, India. So tell us about how these are different ancient texts from the cultures of Buddhism around different kind of Southeast Asian. Yeah, over a couple hundred years they accumulated these and now you're aiming to log those with the Tibetan ones in a single searchable and you would then search them by Tibetan Buddhists or by Thai Buddhists, etc. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, and just really trying to basically repeat the model of what we did with and continue to do with Tibetan. Repeat that in other cultural regions where there were a lot of texts or where there are a lot of texts still present. And part of that again is the scholarly validation where the important collections and it's really important to work with really good scholars. In Thailand we set up shop at a legendary scholar's house who basically did the same thing as Gene Smith but he did it with Burmese and Thai manuscripts. And this is floor to ceiling, three stories high and we just page by page and those are all etched in palm leaf. So the material support of the text is palm leaf so you have to actually in order to activate the etching you have to clean the text and you have to put kind of oil on it and the oil activates the script so that you can see it. So that has to be clean page by page and there are like 22,000 volumes of texts in that collection but it's the same process. Digitized which is photograph and then described with the metadata and that's going to take a while. But I'm retired so other people are doing that now. I'm there to stop. It was really interesting you said someone else there was doing Thai and Burmese which was that's really cool that other people around the world also have this interest in collaborating on digitizing. Yeah exactly because essentially if you're interested in books your life work can be about collecting but when you amass this collection then what? That's where the digital is really powerful. Okay well then we can digitize that collection and it's much easier to browse through. It's much easier to retrieve and find. It's not easier to read and understand that you still have to do that work but just the whole organization of it and then the durability of it after you pass away you can be insured that the digital version of the collection is available. Instead of the risk of it being put inside an institution where it's not available anymore and so on. So yeah these efforts of working with the scholars that have collected large amounts of material is really critical. And then you've open sourced. This is actually kind of, this is really crazy. These artifacts when they're in silos as we were talking about earlier also with technology industry and our data it makes it more difficult for us to add our creativity to augmenting and evolving this foundation of knowledge. And so this is so strange. The private collections of civilizations artifacts we need to get to a point where we're open sourcing and people scan and enter that in digitally and build on top of these things. Right. There's lots of different layers to that. There's the sharing of the data itself. The photographs or the images or the scans of the sourced material then there's sharing the metadata so that it can be machine harvested. That was another thing that we did at BDRC is to ensure that the metadata structures that we created could be harvested by machines. And then all the source code about how you build the archive, how you archive it, how you archive the material and all the code that you write, that is all open sourced too. So like the three layers all has to be open for these large projects. And I think that there are a lot of methodologies now like including the Semantic Web which is something that we're working on now. I continue to be interested in it which is these are information strategies about how to structure your data so that's machine readable and machine understandable by other machines. So if we could get to a point where it's fine if information is in silos because these collections are physically in silos. That's okay. The boundaries have to be porous. Porous boundaries. That's what needs to happen because I don't think the silos is the problem. I think it's the boundaries that are a problem. The boundaries are locked down and then you can't have access except for one portal and that just really undermines the kind of interoperability of the information. To have the portability of machine readable data. Formats. And of course this was kind of the original intention in building the internet itself by Tim Berners-Lee is to have an internet of exchange, not just a publication channel or a harvesting channel but actual exchange so that machines could actually talk to each other more effectively. He designed a whole language and programming language around that. Maybe we could return to that. That's actually quite interesting as a part of our future is the ability, especially as we enter like internet of things and autonomous vehicle age and all of our connected devices across all of the facets of our lives, that that ability for data to be able to be read in machine readable portable formats is so interesting and crucial. That way the talking can actually happen more easily. I want to hear about the other ties. We kind of talked about how you're doing this now, how you're doing this next one million each year, additional pages and working with different Southeast Asian countries to add the Buddhist texts. I'm curious what about Himalayan art resources to Benton Himalayan Library, Rubin Museum of Art, the Treasury of Lives, can you teach us about those? Yeah, sure. There was a lot of work in the 2000s of using technology in various aspects of the culture. So the Himalayan art resources is still very much about looking at the art and doing a similar process on really accurately cataloging the art and making it available, kind of collecting digital images, cataloging stuff, search. So that's definitely an incredible project, an incredible effort. The Tibetan Himalayan Library in Virginia, they're doing a lot of work surrounding kind of the underpinning, technological underpinning of things. They had done a lot of work that entered into the open source space regarding Tibetan language and ensuring that Tibetan language is accurately represented and supported in the digital world. And they've continued to do a lot of work around intangible culture, dictionaries and things like that. So at the beginning in the 90s and the 2000s, there was a lot of grassroots efforts to start this work kind of on behalf of the Tibetans. And some amazing projects kind of emerged from that space, actually very much a kind of nucleus around Jean because Jean's actually connected to all these projects. You know, actually the reason, original reason why we moved down to New York City was because of the Rubin Museum to help establish that museum. So now it's a fully fledged organization that has its own mission and is doing great work. So yeah, those were kind of like the wild years, the early years, you know. So things have definitely matured, technology has matured, the internet has matured, there was no Facebook or... I remember when we started, actually it was hard to email an image. I don't know if you remember that. Probably too young for that. But you couldn't email an image. The whole machine would choke and then it would go slow and it was like unbelievable. So things have really opened up and things have become much more fluid. And like we were talking about before, I think the main issue now is decentralization. Yeah, talk about this. So this is kind of where... I want to also say that it's so cool that you're working with these different kind of symbiotic orgs because they're all doing in a way the archaeological logging of the preserving cultural heritage. And that is so crucial for us moving forward. And you know, Rosetta Project, Long Nouse Project, we love you guys so much. These are the things that are going to enable us to look back and say thank you. Thank you for pitting time into logging this so we actually have a record of it because so many things have just gone in the dust. And it's so sad that they did because we could so better understand where we actually came from if we did keep those. So tell us about what is next for you. You mentioned decentralization. So yeah, tell us about this. Yeah, so this definitely is informed by my experience working with Tibetan techs. There are the holders of these traditions and the holders of the texts themselves. There needs to be some representation or some voice of individuals and of individual organizations. So even as we're doing work and still do this work, there was always a sense of like, okay, well this is my text and now I'm going to give it to you. Like how does that work? So then we have licensing, you know, being able to describe that relationship and licensing and so forth. And I think the original kind of vision of the internet was not that. It was that actually individuals could be actors on the internet and that actors could relate directly with each other. And I think that the more and more centralization that's happened, which is good in the cultural case, you know, it's very good because those centralizing efforts had an effect of preserving large amounts of information. But I think in the future the network is sufficiently distributed throughout the planet so that individual actors and individual organizations could have directly their own say and individual consumers could have directly their own say about what they're interested in. So I want to work on that. I want to start to move in that direction. And all of the silos that were created could become still or totally relevant in that space, right? Because they are the storehouses of information and they're the great contextualizers, right? It's kind of like the role of a library in the age of the internet, you know? They still have a role, even though you can get stuff everywhere like the entire internet is essentially a library. You know, these individual libraries are concentrations of knowledge and of context. So I think you can have both, but I think the move to decentralization is really needed because information has gotten so consolidated in these large companies that it's affecting people, right? I mean, election disruption is just one example. But just having what you see heavily weighted by AI based on the AI's view of you is kind of concerning, you know, for me. And so I like the decentralization move because it actually allows the individual creators to have their own voice and have individual consumers connect directly. And that, to me, gets more at what culture is in the first place. There's definitely a big concern with psychometrics, profiling and artificially intelligent bot targeting, deep fakes. This is a pressing time for portability and machine-rehabilitable data formats and a stronger passion for open source and unity. I think what can eradicate a lot of the malevolence in the world is a lot of these practices that you are digitizing. And I want to touch on this as we get to these final questions. As we talked about this process of inward reflection and meditation and awakening, it drives a really deep, profound sense of love and compassion into our lives and then we carry that around as a wake everywhere we go. It can solve these most pressing challenges as we move into this exponential technology age. Yeah, I think we owe it to ourselves. We owe it to the world to not lose our humanity in the face of AI. I feel like that is what I can offer AI. AI is going to try to figure out what I'm all about through its own analysis. But as a human, I can offer back to that system how I think and what concerns me. That's what we have to remember, that we're creating these systems. We're creating these systems that then we struggle with and that struggle and that concern is very much our responsibility to continue to express. And I think that the more and more we can ground ourselves in the organic experience of meditation, of consciousness, of awareness, of love and compassion and of this planet, of the earth itself and the wisdom of the physical world. That's what we can offer the digital. As the digital becomes more and more independent of us, we can offer that and not forget that. And I think about that all the time when I'm in my feed. I'm like, why is this coming into my feed? It's kind of interesting. But on the other hand, my reaction to it is actually really important to not forget. We talked about this a bit. It's quite interesting to think about the next evolution of intelligence on earth from single-cell to multi-cell to animal to human to potentially an artificial general intelligence and really being able to bring some sort of this humanity of a heart-centric theory to the machines that will be quite interesting and challenging. And I look forward to that. Okay, the couple questions on the way out. What's the core driving principle of yours? It's got to be love. There's been so many ups and downs and so many struggles and so much obstacle. One Tibetan teacher said to me, if you want to do something good, you're going to have a lot of obstacles. And I like that. But what really has pushed me through is that I'm not going to think my way out of this. And that love is the medicine. That's such a good quote. If you're going to do something good, there's going to be a lot of obstacles. Exactly. You've got to get through those adversities so that you can bring that good to the world. And that will bring the most meaning to your life by doing that. That's good stuff. And love is the medicine. How about if you could rebuild civilization from scratch, how would you design it? We need an architect to answer that question. I think we would need to just live more in harmony with the natural world. And I think that the abstraction that we have to overcome, that these spiritual disciplines call us to overcome, are created. And I think that if we live more in harmony with other beings and with the natural world, that I think we would have less alienation. It's the abstraction and the alienation which drives so much of our craziness. So I think that really groundedness of Earth-based wisdom is really, I think we should stick to that. I think we should go back to that. I think we have, it's like 5,000 years. I think our experiment is complete. So I really feel like it's Earth-based wisdom and that kind of harmony, that feeling that we get when we're in a place of presence. That was so good, that Earth-based wisdom and that it is quite likely that thousands of years ago civilizations had a stronger connection to Earth-based wisdom than we do now. And although we may have scientifically probed and whatnot and there may still be some patches of this deep spiritual connection to Earth and that wisdom around the world, a lot of the children being born today aren't being taught that heart-centric love and compassion. We're intellectualizing everything. So this leads us into the next question about what would be the one thing that you could recommend to parents, teachers, and kids to get them on that heart, compassion, love side of things? Yeah, be outside, you know. Learn the wisdom of fire. Look at a fire. Make a fire outside. Appreciate the abundance that we have. I think that gratitude is really the most important thing because that undercuts everything. If we're grateful for the abundance, this opportunity, if we're grateful for where we are right now, that drives a lot. That drives us in the right direction. Yeah, those were great. Gratitude is so crucial and also that going out into nature and a wise man sees a different tree than a fool. It's such an interesting quote. A wise man is seeing the roots, is seeing the underground, is seeing the connection to all the other intricate nutrients in the soil, it's seeing the animals play in the tree, it's seeing the sunlight hitting the leaves in the process of photosynthesis. It's seeing a totally different tree than one that doesn't realize the sheer complexity of that. And I think that same thing can be applied to civilization. A wise man sees a civilization, sees an earth with that love and consciousness differently than a fool and so to train the faculties of the children, of the adults is so, so important. We know how to do it. I think we just need to remember. We do need to remember. What exists past our 3D reality? Other realities which we can't imagine. Right? Does it look the same? I don't know. I can't really imagine them with my 3D kind of consciousness. But yeah, I often have dreams and visions and stuff and that dreams are a lot of information is in dreams and I think we have to kind of own that as well. So our dreams are part of beyond the 3D reality, I think definitely, because they're not actually dimensional but yet they're still there and they still have a lot of information in them. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Dreams are so interesting. Okay, how about we ask you about time? What is time? Well, there's like, I always, when I was studying a lot of math it was always interesting that you had time as an axis. So like you would have, which is the fourth dimension, right? So you have this 3D dimension but then it's changing in time. So I always found that like really compelling and that there's a math around the rate of change. So I think that time is simply an expression of the rate of change, of impermanence, the decay or the birth. And do you think this is a simulation? That we're in now. I have no information to deny it or to affirm it. It very well could be. If this is a simulation then everything is a simulation, right? That's very possible. How can we negate that? Yeah, I think we have to accept that possibility. But we still have responsibility. Absolutely, totally. Just because it's a dream doesn't mean you don't act well. Oh, because it's a dream it almost makes it even more important to level up and do your due purpose here in this character experience for you. Exactly. And then wherever we move to the next character experience. It's like what is the ethical foundation of our avatars in the digital space? And the answer is simply that it's the same. Just because it's your avatar doesn't mean the avatar doesn't have ethical boundaries. It's the same. You have to have the continuity of our intention. Yeah, like bringing in the ethical idea of never, ever killing, ever. It's just destructive, yeah. An awakening to that degree for everyone would be... Last question. Okay, what's the most beautiful thing in the world? Our connection that we feel when we're connected. Which part of our connection? Tell us about that wind. It's just our connection to, you know, we're not alone. We're symbiotic with everything around us. Yes. The interconnectedness. The interconnectedness. And then what's the wind? And the wind is just the aliveness of that. The sparkle. Love it. Oh, Jeff, this has been super fun. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming to the show. Thank you. This has been super fun. Really good. Yeah, really fun, really fun. Thank you everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate you. Thank you so much. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the topics we talked about. Also, go and check out the links below. We'll have all the links that we mentioned in the show. Check them out, learn more about what we're doing to preserve the cultural heritage just from around the world. Also, everyone continue supporting great organizations and supporting us as well. So we continue doing cool things like coming on site to talk to awesome people like Jeff. And go and build the future, everyone. Go and manifest your destiny into the world. And go and do that heart-centric passion practice. Do that with yourself. Do that with your family, with your friends, your coworkers, the people around you. Let's get that roaring around the world. Much love, and we'll see you soon. That's it, man. Cool, man. That's it. Awesome. Good job. Thanks. That was fun. That was really fun, yeah.