IntelVerse

In this recording from a 1992 retreat, Ram Dass talks about dealing with change, using the stuff of your daily life to get free, and how your karma defines your dharma. 

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This episode of Here and Now is from a talk Ram Dass gave during a retreat at the Omega Foundation in 1992. 

Beginning with quotes from the great poets Kabir and Rumi, Ram Dass talks about how you start to work with each thing in your life as a method, as a practice. What you’ve got in life becomes what you work with, so your karma defines your dharma.
Ram Dass brings up the constant changes we’re dealing with in terms of ecology, politics, and how living in “interesting times” can be seen as a blessing instead of a curse. “In dealing with these changes that are going down,” he says, “part of the real art is to look at what is changing and see how your identification with that which changes is creating so much fear in you that you’re pushing against change.”
Continuing with his exploration of change, Ram Dass brings aging and death into the mix. He digs into dealing with changes to the body as we age, and how his work with people who are dying is really work on himself. “For me,” he says, “each act becomes part of the awakening.” 
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“And what you do is you just start flipping and taking what you’re given and start to work with it. In other words, your karma defines your dharma. That means what you got is what you work with. I mean, like, my baldness is my karma. I mean, it’s my genetics, it’s everything. Now, it becomes my dharma. Now, I can use it in order to become free of being bald, or being not bald, or whatever.” – Ram Dass

Ram Dass: Every Human Being Has a Right To Be Fed | Here & Now  Ep. 284

In this inspiring poetry-infused talk, Jack weaves Rumi’s wisdom on the camel, lion, and child of the spirit into a journey from devotion, to courage, to wonder—inviting us to awaken the Buddha’s Lion’s Roar within and remember the inner royalty of the heart.

Ep. 302 – Awakening the Lion’s Roar Within: Poetry of Courage, Compassion, and Wonder

Framed by the Sufi wisdom of Rumi, a 13th century mystical poet, Omid Safi brings our awareness to the profound ways that we are interconnected with the divine.

Ep. 221 - Ram Dass Fellowship- The Mystical Power of Rumi with Omid Safi, Hosted by Jackie Dobrinska

Ep. 13 - Resilience & The Power of Presence with Ilarion ‘Kuuyux’ Merculieff

Continuing their earlier conversation, Dr. Bruce Damer and Raghu Markus have a socially charged discussion on facing our collective karma with equanimity and grace. 

Ep. 608 –  Facing Our Collective Karma with Dr. Bruce Damer

Musician Craig Wedren reflects on his rise to fame in the D.C. hardcore scene, blending together punk rock, spirituality, and healing. 

Ep. 139 - Meditation & Music with Craig Wedren

In this new, technological age, Alan Watts explains how seeing reality via only one perspective can lead to a fragmented view of the world; instead, he encourages listeners to adopt both the analytical and the organic. 

Today’s episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/alan and get on your way to being your best self.

In this episode, Alan Watts dives into:
- Living in an age of technology in a culture obsessed with rational control 
- How someone can easily be obstructed by their own cautiousness
- The problem of human ecology and how one should best relate to their environment
- Considering what our idea of heaven is and what desires we truly want 
- The western model of the universe (intellectual, architectural, mechanical) 
- Reductive thinking: seeing  the world through a net and making everything into a comprehensible, geometrical unit
- Alan’s personal definitions of prickly people versus gooey people 
- The science of medicine and how it can make one see things very narrowly 
- The fundamental difference between a mechanism and an organism 
- How understanding the world through only conscious attention can lead to seeing everything as parts rather than the whole picture
- Combining the academic, analytical mind with the organic, ‘gooey’ mind 

This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit Alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.

“Go to the science of medicine. You get a specialist who really understands the function of the gall bladder. He studied gall bladders ad infinitum and he really thinks he knows all about it. But, whenever he looks at a human being, he sees them in terms of gall bladder.” – Alan Watts

Alan Watts: Seeing through The Net | Being in the Way Podcast Ep. 36

Reminding listeners that they can be fully supported and guided by the Dharma, Gil Fronsdal discusses the Buddhist concept of taking refuge.

Ep. 222 - Going For Refuge with Gil Fronsdal

Recorded live at the 2025 Summer Mountain Retreat, this homestyle chat with Raghu Markus, Nina Rao, and Robert Thurman explores the Bhakti-Buddhist lineage of Ram Dass and Maharaj-ji.

Ep. 609 – The Bhakti-Buddhist Lineage with Raghu Markus, Robert Thurman, and Nina Rao

In part 1 of this Q&A session, Joseph Goldstein gives Buddhist-flavored insight on accepting impermanence, developing our practice, and loving selflessly.

Ep. 251 – The Selfless Path to Happiness

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Danny Bickson, co-founder and VP at Dato, and the principal organizer of the Data Science Summit (full disclosure: I’m a member of the conference organizing committee). Among machine learning students and practitioners, recommender systems have become somewhat of a canonical use case and application. One of the early and popular building blocks was GraphLab’s collaborative filtering toolkit, a library originally written and maintained by Bickson. He has continued to keep tabs on the latest developments in recommenders and continues to help organize workshops on related topics throughout the world.

Building and Deploying Large-Scale Machine Learning Applications

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Parvez Ahammad, who leads the data science and machine learning efforts at Instart Logic. He has applied machine learning in a variety of domains, most recently to computational neuroscience and security. Along the way, he has assembled and managed teams of data scientists and has had to grapple with issues like explainability and interpretability, ethics, insufficient amount of labeled data, and adversaries who target machine learning models. As more companies deploy machine learning models into products, it’s important to remember there are many other factors that come into play aside from raw performance metrics.

Building Machine Learning Solutions That Can Withstand Adversarial Attacks

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Andrew Burt, chief privacy officer and legal engineer at Immuta, a company building data management tools tuned for data science. Burt and cybersecurity pioneer Daniel Geer recently released a must-read white paper (“Flat Light”) that provides a great framework for how to think about information security in the age of big data and AI. They list important changes to the information landscape and offer suggestions on how to alleviate some of the new risks introduced by the rise of machine learning and AI.

We discussed their new white paper, cybersecurity (Burt was previously a special advisor at the FBI), and an exciting new Strata Data tutorial that Burt will be co-teaching in March.

How Machine Learning Impacts Information Security

Three generals are voting on whether to attack or retreat from their siege of a castle. One of the generals is corrupt and two of them are not. What happens when the corrupted general sends different answers to the other two generals?

A Byzantine fault is "a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. The term takes its name from an allegory, the "Byzantine Generals' Problem", developed to describe this condition, where actors must agree on a concerted strategy to avoid catastrophic system failure, but some of the actors are unreliable."

The Byzantine Generals' Problem and associated issues in maintaining reliable distributed computing networks is illuminating for both AI alignment and modern networks we interact with like Youtube, Facebook, or Google. By exploring this space, we are shown the limits of reliable distributed computing, the safety concerns and threats in this space, and the tradeoffs we will have to make for varying degrees of efficiency or safety.

The Byzantine Generals' Problem, Poisoning, and Distributed Machine Learning with El Mahdi El Mahmdi is the ninth podcast in the AI Alignment Podcast series, hosted by Lucas Perry. El Mahdi pioneered Byzantine resilient machine learning devising a series of provably safe algorithms he recently presented at NeurIPS and ICML. Interested in theoretical biology, his work also includes the analysis of error propagation and networks applied to both neural and biomolecular networks. This particular episode was recorded at the Beneficial AGI 2019 conference in Puerto Rico. We hope that you will join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast site/application. You can find all the AI Alignment Podcasts here.

If you're interested in exploring the interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment, we suggest you take a look here at a preliminary landscape which begins to map this space.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

The Byzantine Generals' Problem
What this has to do with artificial intelligence and machine learning
Everyday situations where this is important
How systems and models are to update in the context of asynchrony
Why it's hard to do Byzantine resilient distributed ML.
Why this is important for long-term AI alignment
An overview of Adversarial Machine Learning and where Byzantine-resilient Machine Learning stands on the map is available in this (9min) video . A specific focus on Byzantine Fault Tolerant Machine Learning is available here (~7min)

In particular, El Mahdi argues in the first interview (and in the podcast) that technical AI safety is not only relevant for long term concerns, but is crucial in current pressing issues such as social media poisoning of public debates and misinformation propagation, both of which fall into Poisoning-resilience. Another example he likes to use is social media addiction, that could be seen as a case of (non) Safely Interruptible learning. This value misalignment is already an issue with the primitive forms of AIs that optimize our world today as they maximize our watch-time all over the internet.

The latter (Safe Interruptibility) is another technical AI safety question El Mahdi works on, in the context of Reinforcement Learning. This line of research was initially dismissed as "science fiction", in this interview (5min), El Mahdi explains why it is a realistic question that arises naturally in reinforcement learning

El Mahdi's work on Byzantine-resilient Machine Learning and other relevant topics is available on
his Google scholar profile.

The Byzantine Generals' Problem, Poisoning, and Distributed Machine Learning with El Mahdi El Mhamdi

The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit working to reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies. In particular, FLI focuses on risks from artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, nuclear weapons and climate change.

The Institute's work is made up of three main strands: grantmaking for risk reduction, educational outreach, and advocacy within the United Nations, US government and European Union institutions.

FLI has become one of the world's leading voices on the governance of AI having created one of the earliest and most influential sets of governance principles: the Asilomar AI Principles.

Founder of EPIC Knowledge Society and SPACE Creative Culture Labs. I am a Futurist and Data Scientist with Professional Mastery and Pragmatic Insights on Digital Transformation and Innovation Management with extensive credentials on Digital Enterprise Architectures, Crypto Economics, Customer Experience Design, Social Entrepreneurship Incubation, Business Model Innovation, Innovation Ecosystems, Innovation Analytics, Innovation Consulting, Social Business Networks, Academic Research Networks, Industrial Research Alliances, New Service Incubation, New Product Incubation, New Platform Innovation, High performing Teams, Cross Competency Innovation etc.

The Byzantine Generals' Problem, Poisoning, and Distributed Machine Learning with El Mahdi El Mhamdi

Future of Life Institute

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