Leaving Legal to Follow Passion with Laurence Brahm

Today’s show is about following your dreams and pursuing your passion. Our guest, Laurence Brahm left his career to follow what he felt was right. Laurence went searching for Shangri-La and had quite a journey. He tells us of the Shambhala project or Shangri-la and his journey and insights and mindset. Let’s listen to his adventures.

√ Laurence Brahm’s VIP Page
√ China Daily article
√ China Daily second article
√ Lost Horizon book by James Hilton
√ His studio, Laurence’s site – Shambhalastudio.com (has 3 locations, in Hutongs of Beijing, Great Wall Studio, and Katmandu Boda studio)
√ Laurence’s latest book: A Time for Shambhala: Pandemic, Capital Collapse, and Recoding a New Planet Paradigm. Get them at:
– Barnes and Noble
– Amazon Kindle
– Amazon Paperback

Thanks Laurence for sharing with us. That was an interesting conversation. I saw a wake up call for the rest of us to also follow their dreams or to be kinder to earth and to think more about our environment and its sustainability.

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[00:00:00] Episode 304 of Global From Asia searching for Shangri-la and no, we’re not talking about a hotel. Welcome to the Global From Asia podcast, where the daunting process of running an international business is broken down into straight up actionable advice. And now your host, Michael Michelini. Thank you everybody for choosing to download, stream or however you get this audio feed into your earbuds.

[00:00:33] Speaking of earbuds, I just had a lot of a, I’m kind of like a teacher here in Shenyang, China with my kids, got some app a friend told me about, and today was the human body. So ears was one of them. Eyes and ears and it’s a kind of fun little thing. It’s, I even learned a couple of things about the human body today and take a little bit of interactive games.

[00:01:00] It’s still truly wild that there’s no school. It’s kind of like snow days when I was a kid, but for months on end, these kids, my son even thinks school has done for him forever. He thinks he’s finished with school and seen this, uh, this generation of kids will be older and they’ll be talking about what they were doing during the Covid19 outbreak or Covid2020 right now.

[00:01:27] And today’s show is also about this as always, but um, Lawrence here he is a, he is an ex lawyer or a hot shot lawyer from Hong Kong. American there in Hong Kong that followed his passion and followed what he felt was right. Uh, back in the early two thousands and went searching for Shangri-la and, and, uh, had a, quite a journey.

[00:01:54] And he’s, he’s feeling like this whole Covid19 stuff. Maybe it was a long, you know, uh, I saw a wake up call for the rest of us to also follow their dreams or to be kinder to earth or more about environments and sustainability. Yeah. We have a really interesting conversation learning about his project, Shambhala project or Shangri-la and his journey and insights about more mindset stuff.

[00:02:25] Kind of maybe a little bit of continuation from last week’s Qing Zhou interview. I hope you guys enjoyed that. It’s, it’s a very, um, thought provoking conversation. Hopefully it gets all of us to think more about things in life than just money and business. I know maybe this is a business podcast and maybe you guys are like, what’s up with these crazy interviews, Mike?

[00:02:45] But this one is a, I hope you enjoy, Laurence is an amazing, very intelligent person in Beijing that shares some very interesting insights. Let’s tune in. So we’ve completed four group buys at loadpipe.com L O A D P, I P E. dot com something I’ve been had. I’ve had this domain since 2007 it’s been something that I wanted to do since I came to China to help people put together their orders, to be bigger buyer from factories have more influence and control and an interaction.

[00:03:16] So we’re doing also webinars for loadpipe.com/webinar it’s a little bit separate from Global From Asia. We are separating the two. We have different partners and potential investors there. And, it’s something we’re working on really hard. If you want to check it out and learn more about this group buying from factories direct, go to www.loadpipe.com.

[00:03:39] So thank you all for choosing to what, listen to another Global from Asia podcast. This show I’m really excited to have with us today. Laurence Brahm. He’s, he’s a veteran in China and Asia business and, uh, culture. He’s, uh, we also have an amazing video recording today with Laurence, and he was just an a, he’s.

[00:04:01] Really well, I know is the search for Shangri-la, and he’s doing amazing things with his studio and his, his, uh, really trying to help get, especially with this whole covid19 pandemic, trying to get the world’s changed their mindset. Right. Would you say, or we have to change the mindset, of course. And you know, I spent years doing these expeditions searching or Shangri LA, which is really a misspelling of a term called Shambhala.

[00:04:30] Okay. And the legend of Shambala, we have this, this story about, you know, sort of what they call the age of Kali or the age of destruction when it ended up. The prophecies talk about pandemics and destruction of the environment and a time when greed is the main principle driving mankind. That causes a lot of, uh, in fighting and this sort of pretty much the situation we’re in now.

[00:04:57] And Shambhala’s that sort of age of Aquarius that’s supposed to follow when we get our heads back together and we realize that we have to be thinking keen about everything from a really multi dimensional point of view. Everything’s interconnected. The environment is interconnected, health is interconnected and business can be a driver for those things.

[00:05:18] Business can be a source of and finance of driving new technologies for environment, for healthcare, for addressing something like this pandemic, or it can be used to be the source of these problems and it’s really up to us and our intention and how we applied that an intention to make the difference.

[00:05:35] Sure, sure. So this is fascinating. Before we get so deep into it, and I’d love to hear your story, your, you were, um, you came to China as in 1980, 81, I believe, as a, an exchange student. Was that, you know, it’s really interesting because I came in 81 and if we remember US, China relations were formalized by Jimmy Carter, Deng Xiaoping back in ‘79 so I was really the second wave of foreign students to come here.

[00:06:05] I mean, it was just really the beginning. And you know, I look back on those times and see where we’ve come in building the relationship between these two powers, these two giants on opposite sides of the globe, and of course there’ve been ups and downs, Hills and valleys. There have been rough times, there have been better times, but now we’re in a really bad time and really a time for, I guess us veterans, people like myself, like you, people been around here for a long time to reach out across borders.

[00:06:42] Something like Coronavirus knows no borders, knows no ideology. Has no politics. It’s a threat to us all, and it’s really trying to find ways in which we can have collaboration beyond politics that can really be not only a way to defeat this virus and other challenges ahead like climate, which is going to be hitting us just as badly in the years ahead.

[00:07:09] And to be able to do it, working together. And I think it’s really not enough time for us to rise above all of that, but unfortunately right now because of politics, this relationship has probably gone into a Valley rather than being in a peak. We’ve got to get it out of that Valley. Yeah, I totally agree.

[00:07:26] I mean, I like your idea, your, what you said is there’s no borders for this virus, right? As much as we want to think it’s a political thing or, or whatever, it’s a, it’s everywhere and we have to deal with it now. Um, um, about your story. So you know, you, I read your China daily article, which will also include the show notes for today for those that also I recommend to read it.

[00:07:50] You originally were working within Hong Kong as a lawyer for a while. And you, you said in your article, which I’d love to hear some more on, is you kinda got tired of these huge multinational corporations that were really just doing it for profit only, not for the environment, not for the, not for the society, right?

[00:08:08] I mean. Sure I, I was, I was a lawyer for major multinational corporations. I mean, you know, a lot of big industrial companies at the time has a lawyer. I think, you know, I saw an investment come in. I saw suddenly people had jobs. I was suddenly, you know, employment. There was suddenly some technology transfer.

[00:08:28] There was suddenly some industry and we thought we were doing something good. And then I sat back and I realized it’s not that good. It’s creating a lot of side effects. It’s creating tremendous, uh, damage to the environment. Uh, very often the people would be fired after they were, you know, the joint venture was done and they were bringing in new people.

[00:08:48] Um, and when I think what disturbed me is very often the core of management. The executive level. I mean, I met all these chairman of boards and CEOs of the coming out here all the time and they couldn’t care less about anything, not even their own shareholders, except to pump up the share price so they could be able to get rid of their shares at the right time, retiring and binge flip.

[00:09:13] And I really felt that I, I had trouble continuing on this path. And so I wanted to stop being a lawyer, working for these corporations, and use those skills in other areas on environment, on social change. And so it was, it was something I had to make a decision with. Okay. And that decision occurred in the year 2001.

[00:09:36] At the beginning of the millennium [00:06:00] and it just came with the idea of let’s, let’s just stop everything and go searching for Shangri-La. It sounds like a crazy idea, but that was the turning point. Great. So it was, that was kind of my follow up question. It was, it was like a a sudden change, or was it like a transition?

[00:09:54] Was, was it, were you leading up to this or are you just woke up and decided, I’m gonna find Shawn. In any circumstances for anyone is really the sudden it accumulates over time. So it’s sort of like you have this building of something and then at some point there’s this, this tipping point. It could be just this tiny spark in many ways.

[00:10:14] The Corona virus today is, it’s a tipping point for a whole sequence of events that have been built up in terms of data, in terms of structures, and it’s going to change all those structures. And I guess I’m from my story of Shangri LA. It was just a turning point. At a certain point, I was sitting with a very famous pop singer named IGA.

[00:10:33] We were very good friends and uh, talking about new ideas for her music and other things. And suddenly I came up with this idea of searching for Shangri LA and she’d say, Hey, this is incredible. You’ve got to do it. And the next thing I know is she put together for me, my initial team of cinematographers and also brought in Sambal who was the top.

[00:10:56] Uh, really the top music music composer in China, he’s Mongolian, and he did all of our music scores for us. And from that point, it was almost like things took over a, you know, you say I was driving it, but it was almost like it was a wave of events that took over. Next thing I knew is a few weeks later we were in Las Appleby.

[00:11:16] The search for Shangri-La had begun. Not realize you were. It would take us. That’s amazing. I mean, I love, I love it too. I mean, you have to follow your fall, fall, follow your heart. Follow trends. Was there any comments from your old corporate life. Uh, colleagues, what, when you announced this or what were there things people thought?

[00:11:37] People thought it was crazy and I think they thought it was even crazier when years later I moved to the, uh, Tulasa and from there we set a number of social enterprises that were in the form of heritage hotels. And then we opened up medical clinics and then we SAP program for education. We raise funds for  eye operations.

[00:11:58] And we began what would become the very beginning of the social enterprise concept. At that time, I was very close with Muhammad Yunus and we were working on this as the concept later. Now it’s called impact investing today. In those days, we called it social entrepreneurship, and I remember friends in the investment banking community, in the banking community at Hong Kong.

[00:12:21] Really, they look at me like I was crazy and say, well, not, you’re, you’re what, you know, what are you doing? You, you’re, you’re shoveling yak window or with farmers. I mean, they really looked down upon in what we were doing, but actually when you look at what we were initiating, I do feel that after Corona virus and we restructure our global economy, every company is going to have to be an impact investment enterprise.

[00:12:46] We’re going to have to be running our businesses with the same kind of concept about how we impact environment, social, health factors, as much as we think about profit. Okay. Yeah. I love it. Ultimately, that’s our profit. Ultimately, our profit is in our environment. Our profit is in social health. Our profit is in the next generation.

[00:13:07] Um, that is our biggest asset and we’re just not investing into it. I like it. I hope, I hope. I hope that’s true. I hope that happens because so many times people forget about, you know, they. They know what they’re supposed to be on a diet. They know they’re supposed to do good things for the environment, but then they, they watch the movie or they hear a speaker and then they go back to their normal life the next day.

[00:13:31] You know? But I hope, I think this one is a big one, right? This virus has been around, it’s affecting people’s lives, work, business, everything. So it does seem like this one’s gotta be big enough to make people really make a change. Um, we mentioned a few times the name Shambhala. Uh, and this is where I get to kind of blame my audience, but I’m not a, I’m honestly, I’m not so familiar with Shangri La, and I know if I’m not, then probably most of our listeners aren’t so much either.

[00:13:58] So if you could feel, I think most of us think of the five star hotel, you know, to be honest, the, uh, the, the, the international hotel, um, I. I’d love to maybe give, give listeners a little bit of a Shangri La or a Shambhala one-on-one kind of so they can understand, um, some of the basics. The term Shangri-La was first coined by someone named James Hilton in a book he wrote called Lost Horizons.

[00:14:24] I think it was written around 1931 or something like that. And it then became one of the earliest blockbuster Hollywood movies. And it talked about a plane that crashed in the Himalayas, and the survivors found this, you know, wonderful kingdom. Something like Bhutan where you have not, it grows natural happiness.

[00:14:50] Everybody cares for everyone else. Everyone’s happy. Everyone, uh, puts out, there’s enormous care for the environment. There was a lot about gender empowerment, women’s rights in that book. There’s a lot of these, these factors, and hello, I’m here. I’m here. You must’ve cut for a sec. There’s a lot of these, these elements in the book, and what.

[00:15:12] Where did he get these ideas from? Actually, he’d never been to Asia. Never been to the Himalayas. Most of this came from reports of Joseph Rock, national Geographic’s first Bureau chief in China, in Yunnan province, who lived in Lijiang and traveled extensively in the, uh, Tibetan and ethnic ethnic regions.

[00:15:37] And his reports came in to the, you know, the British library where Hilton basically borrowed these ideas. And Shangri-La is basically a pinion. You could say like, you know, we say, you know, Jiang Jieshie, that Guomindang general is called ah, Chiang Kai Shek in English. Or, you know, Mao Zedong, goes Mao

[00:15:59] Tse-tung, you know. It’s really a misspelling of Shambhala, which is a core concept which comes up in Tibetan Buddhism, but is also shared by a number of the cultures of the Himalayas. It’s also in the Hindu concept. It’s, it’s, it’s out there and it’s very much part of the Himalayan worldview. Great. Great.

[00:16:23] So it sounds beautiful and uh, you know, we’ve actually connected through my, my amazing wife, Wendy, and we’ve traveled a bit. Not, nothing like you have, but we’ve gone to some different places. We were in Kathmandu and then we went to the birth place of Buddha or one of the birthplaces I’m forgetting the name.

[00:16:43] Lumbini right? Well, yes. And the tree. And, uh, there was like the, where he was born he had this tree’s kind, kinda like falling apart, like building that you know, you could go in and, uh, and see the, see the restructure of where he was born. And, um, it was pretty amazing. And there’s so much to this. I, I wondered, like back to this whole corporate and profit first is.

[00:17:11] Is this like an East versus West kind of thing? Is this is Shangri La and or Shambhala and this, you know, this environment is this a Eastern kind of thought process? And then most of us. Core in the Shambhala, core in the Shambhala teachings is the concept of non-duality. A very important concept of Shambhala is we call it chakra wheel of time and space.

[00:17:38] And the idea that there is no time, there is no space, so that everything is an interconnected matrix. It’s an interconnected matrix over time, over distances. And if you look at an economic level, what happens with, you know, a riot in Kenya may be affecting coffee prices. Somewhere else may be affecting you going to Starbucks.

[00:18:00] Everything’s interconnected. And in that respect, it’s really changing our outlook. And working in a positive way. Respecting the environment, respecting other people, making sure those that don’t have have and building an interconnected, synergistic, harmonious foreal. And this is really what the core concept of Shambala is.

[00:18:27] So it’s not really a place that you have to go searching for and have to find beyond the mountains, beyond the clouds. It can be created right here and right now anytime, just by switching, switching on and, and being aware of what you’re doing and how it affects others. And we can, each and individual can be craving Shambhala every second, every moment that we live.

[00:18:47] And beyond. And so this is really the core concept. And so I think right now the Corona virus. Again, brings us into into into focus. Because the Shambhala processes are about a time when greed destroys the planet and we have to rebuild it and rebuild it as Shambala. And I think now it’s said, we are building it where every business is an impact investor.

[00:19:11] Everybody is working in a different mindset than we did before. And just as the virus knows no borders, maybe a lot of our mental borders. Ideologies need to come down. We need to be thinking as an integrated whole human race. So the core thinking of Western thinking and Asian thinking, and this is Asian thinking that arrive, arrives from this concept is non-duality.

[00:19:37] There’s yin and there’s yang, but you have to have the yin and the yang. They have to be working together. There’s no black and white. There’s no right or wrong. There is. There is. What is the situation right now? How do we

[00:19:50] How do we transform it. As opposed to a Western thinking, which over the feudal period on in Europe, very much became right. Wrong, good, bad, You, us, them. Black or white, you’re either a capitalist or you’re communist. you’re not false. You can’t, you know, you can’t be planning a market economy. All of these things are, um, barriers to our own perception of the world and ourselves.

[00:20:20] And so it’s really trying to break those down and have this yin-yang view of the world, uh, which is, I think, at the core of the Shambhala. Okay. This is great. I like it. Yeah, I, I agree. You know, again, with, with Wendy, I always watch these movies, um, and documentaries. So I see the whole idea of we are, yeah.

[00:20:44] There’s no individual. There’s no, I, right? And like Buddha, Buddhist thinking or in Eastern thinking, there’s, um, yeah, we’re all part of the one system. We’re all part of this system, whereas like Western, or maybe it seems the way I have most, most Westerners are raised as there’s, There is me and this is mine, and this is my food and this is my clothes and this is, I am here and this is now, and it’s all about me usually or me, this is yours, this is mine.

[00:21:16] This is the line, right? Like that’s kind of how I remember my Western life. What are the most important stages in practice in the Tibetan Buddhist practices is a, is a, is a process called Tak, which is basically to destroy your ego, to try and eliminate that and think in a multifaceted, interconnected way where you’re part of a universal matrix.

[00:21:46] You are not just the only person me, first type of thing. I think that’s really where our planet is going to have to go. It’s getting too many people, too crowded, not enough resources, not enough water. And the Corona virus is just a harsher reminder of many things we have to do now to change our economic models and in many cases, our social perspectives.

[00:22:11] Let’s talk about your experience. So you left court, you know, the elite lawyer, hot shot lawyer, you know, central Hong Kong, Beijing, travels and multinational corporations, and you went to Laci and started searching for Shangri-La. Do you want to give us a little bit of a idea of how that, how that experience went and how the journey went?

[00:22:35] Transformational for me, because you know, we didn’t know what Shangri LA was. We had an idea that came from this book. Uh, we traveled all around the, you know, to, you know, the Himalayan plateau, asking one question where a Shangri-La, and it was really amazing, the variety of answers we’ve got. And then we did a second and we did a film, we did a film, we did a book, I did a book.

[00:23:00] Um, we did a film series, we did a CD, we came up with music. And then, uh, we decided to do a second expedition and that second expedition was to go and find Joseph Rock’s own materials and then match it to the book lost horizon and really figure out what um, you know, Joseph Rock was reporting what she saw through his eyes and what James Hilton was extrapolated from those reports to become the myth of Shangri-La in Lost Horizon.

[00:23:37] But during that journey, a really interesting thing happened and we suddenly really became aware. That Shangri-La was Shambhala and this Tibetan concept, uh, or this Badre on a Buddhist concept of the Shambhala realm and the entire story of the age of Kali or age of destruction that we’re in now. Really became apparent and we did.

[00:24:01] Then a third film, a third documentary called the Shambhala Sutra, because there is a Sutra that has all these prophecies, and we went looking for the Sutra in Western Tibet and we went all the way out to what’s the last kingdom of Guge, which is a mysterious kingdom because it rises out of the desert and it’s all abandoned.

[00:24:22] And we tried it, you know? Was that Shambhala? You know, we were still searching for a physical place. Now, fast forwarding after saying that the social enterprise and the Himalayan consensus, silk spice road dialogue, different, um, you know, multi-lateral working groups. Um, we, you know, working on environment and technology and that’s where I put my lawyers skills then for many years is working on environmental policy, working in, uh, environmental negotiations.

[00:24:53] But a few years ago in 2017 we had the idea of doing a new series of films, searching for the Lotus born master and the story of Guru Padmasambhava or in Chinese, Lian Hua Sheng Da Shi, the Lotus born master, who is the father of Badrinath Buddhism, and asking whether he might also be the father of quantum physics and looking at the multidimensional matrix, not just from an economic point of view.

[00:25:23] But from an electromagnetic field point of view, how is everything interconnected? A level of science as well as the level of economics. Okay. Amazing. So, so yeah, you kind of went through the whole last, you know, really quickly. Thank you for that, uh, journey. So, so then you have a few documentaries, and that was up until 2017.

[00:25:50] and we’ve been seeing for those that are watching the video version of this, we’ve seen a couple of you’re outside, your courtyard and now your studio. Can you share where, where you’re, where you are now? Like where you are now in this journey. So we’ve done two films in a series about Guru Padmasambhava, Lotus born master.

[00:26:10] The first we went searching for his own journey. He was born in Pakistan. He lived in India, Nepal, Bhutan. Eventually he came to, uh, Tibet. He traveled all over the Western regions of China. There’s even records of him teaching these concepts that we call today Tibetan Buddhism or Vajrayana Buddhism.

[00:26:32] And really, we’re asking the question, his eight manifestations or his eight appearances, cause he always appears in eight different types of images. Are these representing a quantum energy fields and was he the father of quantum physics? Or if you want to ask the question differently. are tra-, the traditional wisdom that we can find in Buddhism that we can find also in Hindu that we can find in shamanism.

[00:27:02] Is this built on concepts of understanding universal phenomena that are also as scientific as the empirical science that emerged really just over maybe 150 years ago, 200 years ago at the most. That process of emerging and was the empirical Newtonian science rejecting a lot of things that could not be explained because they can’t be explained and therefore not understanding them.

[00:27:31] And when we start to look at quantum physics and we start to look at technologies today, we start to look at the interconnectivity of all the different fields we’re now discovering because we’re realizing that in addition to electromagnetic fields, there’s all kinds of fields out there that, you know, we are now.

[00:27:47] Beginning, just beginning to understand, did ancient knowledge know something we didn’t know? And should we be listening to some of that in terms of also their teachings about environment, interconnectivity of everything. And so we’ve done two films on the Lotus born master. We’re now working on the third film.

[00:28:10] And what we’re doing right now every day is we’re working on a different film. We’re working on something called Searching for Kng Fu, which is looking at the Chinese martial arts and international martial arts as their practice. Uh, and looking at it not just as fighting, not just as, Oh, you know, martial arts ultimately became MMA and UFC.

[00:28:31] That’s not as important as the philosophies behind that and how those philosophies are part of health. Body, mind, spirit, wellbeing, and at a time like Corona virus when not everybody can have access to medical care, where medical care has become actually in some places, in some countries only exclusive for the elite or the rich.

[00:28:55] Everyone needs to be able to have preventive medicine. And a lot of that comes down to techniques of breathing, of conditioning, of mind, of being able to use your mind to control your energies, to control your health. And I think right now this is going to be the beginning also of a revival of many traditional techniques that have proved over time.

[00:29:19] You know, people can be in top physical condition, even without a gym. If they know how to do these techniques and they know how to take care of themselves. These are ancient solutions for the future, and I think this is what we’re doing now. Great. That’s really exciting. Okay, so you know, just, I’m sure our listeners are wondering what, what can they, of course we can, I’d love to maybe link or share how people could.

[00:29:43] Could a watch or consume your content, your, your, your, your works. Uh, is there some actions people could take? You know, just to keep in mind, a lot of our listeners are like e-commerce sellers, business, you know, entrepreneurs, you know, it’s English language. Those Westerners maybe either in Asia or wanting to do business in Asia.

[00:30:00] What, what, what can they do or what, what, what. I think this message is, how can we use the technology positively? Like, cause I see a lot of technology being used for negative purposes. I watch my kids turn on the video. They’re looking at YouTube, they’re looking at stuff. A lot of it’s hate, a lot of it’s anger.

[00:30:19] I see it all the time, and I also see that this is very much part of a process of programming our youth. To think in a way that fits into the politics today. Anger, greed. I mean the idea that people should be driving fancy cars all the time and having bought some gold chains and, well then, I don’t know if this is a standard for a good person or not.

[00:30:45] I don’t think it is. I think that these are creating artificial goals and objectives. And they’re telling people, these are the values you should have, and when are we going to start to have videos that are showing people rebuilding communities, going out and working on new energy systems, and having been a lawyer doing a lot of advisory work on green energy, on environmental issues.

[00:31:11] I can say the core issue right now is how to convert the grids. It’s the cell phones. It’s the computers that are sucking up energy like crazy, like it’s never been used in this planet before. Rare earth, other materials, and they’re not being replenished. And that energy is coming most of the time from fossil fuels.

[00:31:32] And if we’re going to be using electrical appliances for our communication. Cause that’s all these things are as electrical appliances. But they’re very, um, misusing tech, you know, energy appliances. We have to start to then have technologies that can solve this problem every single cell phone should have as it’s panel solar panels.

[00:31:59] That technology exists. It can be used. People should boycott until they produce that, because you need to be able to have, let’s have action to be able to solve these problems. Right now. You know everything that involves renewable energy involves big data. Data is core. Data is core to energy efficiency, and we need to be putting the.

[00:32:28] Innovation into these areas, and this is where innovation can occur. Right now. The innovation is not occurring in this area is innovation is all about consumption. It’s all about how quick you can get a Coke delivered to you or a coffee, or it’s an entertainment which is violent and anger inciting. What are we going to have entertainment that’s teaching people to work together.

[00:32:52] I want to see something like that come out. I want to see something that’s unifying us rather than tearing us apart. That’s what Shambhala is all about. That’s what the journey to Shangri-La is all about, and technology can be the greatest force for improvement, or it could be the cause of a lot of the problems that we’re plunging into.

[00:33:11] Right now. Okay. This is great. Yeah. Hopefully this motivates some listeners and viewers to take action to. Maybe the next product they sell is more, like you said, maybe the, if they’re an inventor, entrepreneur or doing a new product or design, just try to think more about sustainability, impact investing or like you mentioned or, or, uh, you know, it’s so true though.

[00:33:33] Like the videos now are all, I guess that’s what the human brain likes that I guess, wants to watch. Cause they say they make the video to get people to keep watching. Right. So they say that they keep making these apps so that you stay on the app longer. You don’t leave. You’re, you’re checking your notifications, you’re checking the feed, you’re checking, you know what somebody said on your posts, you know, or the newest article.

[00:33:59] It’s creating a lot of emotion, a lot of instability. And in young people, you know, a lot of, you know, my, my, my children’s, you know, they talk with their kids and their friends about how, you know, they’re emotionally disturbed by the stuff on Instagram. They feel insecure. They have . Heck, you know, when I was a kid.

[00:34:18] We used to go out hiking and camping and we would go up into the mountains and we will learn how to even describe. yeah. and that sometimes I just tell the kids, put your phone away, throw it out. Just walk away from it have time for yourself. Connect back to this planet. And then use the technology intelligently to save the planet.

[00:34:37] Because if we build, we’re not going to have a plan to live on various stuff, and the Corona virus is bringing this right to our face. Let’s bring it right home. In this case, I have to say, I compliment a Chinese. I used 5G. they use a lot of big data to get control the virus to do the quarantine systems, and in many ways it was very simple application of technologies, but it was putting it in the right place to solve a problem.

[00:35:01] And in America right now, we have a huge problem with the Corona virus. It’s totally out of control. And America’s a country where we supposed to be leading the world in technology. It’s because, it’s not because we’re not leading the world in technology, it’s because it’s been used in the wrong way, and now we have to use it the right way.

[00:35:18] We have to change our perception. I don’t want to get pol-, too political, but you know, some people feel worried about the data. Where’s the data going? Who is using it, who’s accessing it? You know? Of course it can be used for good, like controlling the virus, but it can also be used for, for ba. You know, that’s a, that’s a fear that people have.

[00:35:34] The only safe computer in the world is one that stays in the boxes, never opened. As soon as you open your Apple, as soon as you open your computer and you turn it on, people are sucking your data. Facebook. Twitter, Google, Amazon, they’re all taking it. They’re all, and who owns these companies?

[00:35:55] Ultimately big state, because they’re supported by quantitative easy, Now, repo funding, which is effectively treasury debt, which goes into the stock market. So in many ways, they themselves are beholden to the state apparatus. And if you look at what happened with, you know, I mean, you look at Cambridge Analytica case as an example.

[00:36:18] Nothing safe. All forms. Anyone who accesses your Data, anyone who picks up a cell phone and uses it is giving away their own information that can be used by anyone, whether it’s a state or a hacker, and they can use it. And this stuff’s so easy to hack into. I mean, the, the mythology that you have, security is a complete joke.

[00:36:39] And so the reality here is we each, every single individual have to put our mind in the right space. And if we’re starting to have people whose mind is contaminated with ideas of hatred, anger, all these things are being disseminated. Of course, they’re going to hack, they’re going to use this stuff wrong.

[00:36:56] And so if we can start, if you have a momentum of movement toward using this stuff in the correct way, then we’re going to change things. And I think that’s what’s the bottom line of it? Your security on your, on your appliances, never secure unless you don’t use an appliance. If you completely walk away from this stuff, which I do a lot of the time, go up in the mountains, then no one’s watching you and listening to you.

[00:37:22] But if you’re even holding it, you know, of course it’s being used. And so now is the time for us to recognize that, not be a fool of ourselves and say, okay, each and every one of us in the Shambhala tradition has to join hands as a unified feel of all of us and start to use this stuff in the right way.

[00:37:40] Agreed. Okay. Well, Lawrence, I know you’re busy. I know you got a lot of your, your own. We’ve been talking for a while, a little while. Uh, and I appreciate your time. Um, maybe some, some words. How can people find, find more about your projects and what you’re working on? I know. Sure. Shambhalastudios.com right is it’s a space that’s probably the easiest way to follow us.

[00:38:02] Okay. Um, shambhalastudio.com. Also their Shambala studio, and we chat, uh, on a tiktok on other. Other different platforms. Those are usually short videos, little little snippets of what we’re doing. We try and share as we go along in our journey so that other people can share in that journey. And uh, Hey, we all take the journey together.

[00:38:24] Sure. And then just so we get some more, I should’ve brought up at the beginning, but your location, your, where, where are you, you’re in Beijing? Right now I’m in the Shambala studio in Beijing. This is in central Beijing. It’s right in the old neighborhood. That was the old hutong, we called it. Yeah. Way back Ming, Qing dynasty, and this is our, you know, central studio for our work here.

[00:38:47] We are post production, editing and planning. We also have a studio out at the Great wall, a beautiful studio, which is also a martial arts studio and a retreat center for meditation or martial arts for yoga. And the Shambala studio there is where we do a lot of our production for the Searching for Kung Fu and other, um, you know, again, uh, Kung Fu martial arts related.

[00:39:11] Of programs that we have in, in unstack, you can say, we also have a studio in Kathmandu, right by Boudha, which is the, uh, the Great White Stupa in Kathmandu. And that studio, we can have a place called Shambhala cafes. So anybody who’s in Kathmandu who wants to have a cup of latte. Wow. I wish I had known that I was there a couple of years ago in that way.

[00:39:39] I think I know what you’re talking about. The white, you can walk around and ring the bell and then it’s a really beautiful, all white, like huge statue. Yeah. It was amazing. Well, we’re right near that stat that, that stupa and that’s where we do a lot of our, you know, most of our expeditions launched from there.

[00:39:56] That’s our studio for our field work. Okay, great. All right, Lawrence. Thanks again for sharing with us and, uh, and good luck with your, your, your next, uh, documentary.  Thank you so much for having me on your show. Thank you. Thanks Laurence.

Are you enjoying this show? Enjoy what we’re doing here and want to connect with myself and others.

[00:40:15] In our cool little club, we have GFA VIP, that means Global From Asia VIP.com where we have a private forum. We have private calls and group sessions and private groups. I try to put discounts. I mentioned some of these online courses I have, and I’m also doing more and more for other communities where I try to give you discounts or.

[00:40:38] Freebies or special access to those things for our members. If you’re interested again, inside to work with us, Hey, get to know me and the others more on the inner circle. Check it out at www.gfavip.com. Thank you, Laurence. That’s pretty cool, huh? So he’s got studios in Beijing and the Great Wall. And in Kathmandu, I remember being in Kathmandu with Wendy, actually and Laurence

[00:41:08] I got connected to from Wendy, my wife, uh, she has a Buddhist style or, or, you know, mindfulness, wechat channel and she’s always sharing his, his work and, uh, they connected, which is pretty wild. And so we got on Monday show. Hopefully I can meet him sometime soon. He did even offer to have us be able to do some events at the Great Wall.

[00:41:32] Wouldn’t it be some wild things like you could get us all together at the Great wall for some Kung Fu and mindfulness and talk business and masterminds. As far as events right now, I think we’ll just take a little bit of a break from trying to promote events. Right now we just don’t know where things are going.

[00:41:49] I’ve been doing quite a bit of online events. Last week I was on a Global Sources Virtual Summit with Ash and Renaud, which was really cool. Meghla was our host. Thanks. Thanks for having us. As well as a, as a session there, and that was on the Work From Home initiative with Andy and Ace Estrada in the Philippines, about more of a

[00:42:12] For local Philippines about what they’re going to do with this Covid19 and how people will adjust there. And, I was also with Andy Lee and FBAulous, which is a great network of Amazon sellers and training in Southeast Asia. Talking about from diversifying from Amazon or building out some affiliate sites or, or content sites and converting them into eCommerce sites.

[00:42:35] So a lot of online training I did just last week. All online, everybody’s moving to online. So thinking about how to adjust that ourselves here, but I do appreciate you guys all listening to this, and I’m starting to, you know really adapt, you know, and like last week I mentioned Qing, Qing Zhou actually, I connected her in Laurence together and they’re chatting too.

[00:43:01] Now they have some very similar mind sets and ways of operating and thinking, which is pretty awesome. That’s what it’s all about, is connecting good people together. I. I’m still really going through a whole transformation. I hope you guys and girls enjoyed last week’s show where we talk about that. And I am been listening to that, that MP3 that Qing made all ne on repeat and when I wake up and when I, before I go to sleep.

[00:43:34] So I hope we’re all more appreciative and have gratitude. I’m really grateful to you, are all choosing to download and listen to this show. And I hope you are maybe moving more closer towards what you want to do. I mean, maybe the next business you do, you’ll think about sustainability, thinking about the environment, thinking about helping other people, educating other people.

[00:43:59] I am also working on thinking about that myself, so I think that’s all for this week. I will keep our blah, blah blah session a little short and a. Just still really thinking about where to go. I mean, sticking around Shenyang, I have some people, you know, a lot of people are interested to have me come back down to Shenzhen, but, uh, you know, it’s the wife and kids don’t really want to move right now and still kind of just readjusting, but it’s freezing cold.

[00:44:30] Wendy says it’s not this cold usually in late April in Shenyang. So she says global warming and that the world. You know, as punishing us with this virus to try to have us to be better and nicer to the earth and to the environment, which is fair enough. We have been very, um, not appreciative. Like Laurence was saying, we’re not really appreciating what we’re given.

[00:44:56] We’re, we’re put on this earth and we have all these resources and, you know, we’re, we’re humans are. Most of the time, not, not thoughtful and not not grateful. So I hope we can all become that. Like Zach Frankel has to, he sent me a picture of his roped off pool in his complex in Bangkok, and he says, I will be much more appreciative of this pool when it’s reopened.

[00:45:20] I think we all will be more appreciative of that. Thank you all for listening and I will see you next week. We have a bunch of amazing interviews coming up. It’s always hard for me to decide which one to go to next. I’m still deciding for next weeks, but maybe it’ll be more business related. All right.

[00:45:38] Take care everybody. Thanks for listening and have a great rest of your week and day and night or morning whenever you’re listening to this. Goodbye. To get more info about running an international business, please visit our website www.globalfromasia.com that’s www.globalfromasia.com also, be sure to subscribe to our iTunes feed.

[00:46:02] Thanks for tuning in.