167 - Evolution of Intelligence

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary

[NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.]

“The evolution of intelligence: Now this is a very interesting idea. It means that the way not just to survive but to evolve is to get smarter.

“I think it’s time to dust off the word pagan again. The word pagan seems to mean one who loves life. A pagan is someone who loves humanity and would never dream of oppressing humanity with Original Sins and other life sentences, which distract from self-esteem and courage and self-confidence.”

“We were not descended from chimpanzees or apes, we are teenage, juvenile chimps or apes that didn’t grow up and develop tails and swing around in trees… . In many aspects, the human species is an immature species. We haven’t committed ourselves to a final form, and therein, perhaps, lies our great usefulness to the DNA code and the biological wisdom.”

“If you want to increase your intelligence, if you want to evolve, and grow, and go through the changes, the many changes that are possible, at all costs avoid terminal adulthood.”

“If you stay in the same place, you tend, obviously, to not be exposed to new challenges, and you’re not going to be under pressure to grow. Although, it is well known though, that if you migrate, if you want to change, if you want to grow, if you want to develop, if you want to reach a higher level, a standard genetic tactic, and a standard human tactic, is to migrate to a new frontier where you have a chance to develop and grow.”

“People born in the same generation share an unspoken sense of reality throughout the world.”

“DNA uses juvenilization, mutation and change in the young, only when there’s a challenge that the old way can’t face.”

“The last fifty years of the twentieth century in this country are simply the history of the baby boom moving like a pig through a python through American culture.”

“If you find yourself in a generation that is pretty stuffy, migrate! A generation is an island in time. … You’re as old as the people you hang out with.”

“The intelligent evolutionary tradition has always been intelligent skepticism of authority.”

“Throughout human history, those in power have been wrong 99% of the time.”

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Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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And here we are at the beginning of 2009.

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At least that’s where we are today while I’m recording this podcast.

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But the way podcasting works, you might be hearing this sometime in the future.

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So I hope I haven’t caused anyone to think they’re experiencing a flashback of some kind.

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anyone to think they’re experiencing a flashback of some kind.

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However, flashing back to my last podcast, I don’t think I properly thanked Miguel Fernandez for providing the Terrence McKenna talk that I played.

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And now he has done it again and posted a rapid share link on our Notes from the Psychedelic

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Salon blog, where you can download an MP3 version of one of Terence’s last talks,

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which he titled Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligence Machines.

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So thanks again, Miguel.

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We all really appreciate your help in getting this information out to a wider audience.

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And by the way, if I remember correctly, Miguel joins us each week from Portugal,

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a country that holds many fond memories for me from my days in the corporate world Thank you. But I sure do remember the people, the meals, the parties, the nights of fado and port.

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Wonderful times.

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And there are several other people I’d like to thank today also. They are Wilma V. and Benjamin H., both of whom sent in very generous donations this past week.

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And thanks to Wilma, Benjamin, and all of our other donors in the years past.

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Benjamin, and all of our other donors in the years past.

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I want to thank you all from the very bottom of my heart for your love and support for these podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon.

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And for the talk we are about to hear,

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I’d also like to thank Dennis Berry and Bruce Dahmer,

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who, along with the help of a lot of volunteers,

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preserved and digitized much of the material from the Dr. Timothy Leary archive,

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and then gave me copies to play here in the salon.

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And so I thought we’d start 2009 off with some more words of wisdom from the good doctor.

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As with Terrence McKenna, when you hear quite a few of his talks,

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you’re going to hear some stories and content repeated.

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You know, after all, McKenna and Leary made their living by going from town to town and giving lectures.

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You know, that was back in the days before YouTube. Heck, it was even before the web.

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And so you really can’t expect them to be able to come up with 20 or more original raps

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every year or so. But whenever it seems to get repetitious,

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I’ll just cut out any stories that we’ve heard several times,

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unless they need to remain in for continuity,

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or, as in the case of the talk we’re about to hear,

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when the telling of a familiar story exceeds its original pinnacle.

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In other words, I just enjoyed hearing it again and thought you might too.

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Now, one of the things that struck me when I first heard this talk is that about 30 minutes

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into it, when Dr. Leary goes on about how the baby boomers could change history, and

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I guess in a way they did, but everything he says in this talk about that generation

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could also translate to the young adults who are listening

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to podcasts like this one today. In fact, if Timothy Leary were alive today, I’m sure that

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it is the young to whom he would continue to speak most fervently, and I doubt if his message would

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be much different from the one we’re about to hear. So when he speaks directly to the baby boomers,

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we’re about to hear.

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So when he speaks directly to the baby boomers,

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take it to heart yourself,

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because he may be talking directly to you,

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no matter what your age.

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Now, as you listen to this 1983 talk that was given in Boulder, Colorado,

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try to pretend that you’re a straight,

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Christian, God-fearing, law-abiding parent

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of a teenager that,

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in this ultra-conservative town you just caught using LSD.

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Now, as you pretend that you’re a parent like that, listen and wonder to the man who at that particular time,

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or a little before that, was called the most dangerous man in America.

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And see if you can understand why some people truly thought of Dr. Timothy Leary in those terms.

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The topic of my talk tonight is the evolution of intelligence in species and individuals.

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And by individuals, I mean, of course, you and you and you and me. Now, I consider these two words, evolution and intelligence, to

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be tremendously important terms. They have always been shrouded with a little controversy.

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Indeed, one of the great vicious debates

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that’s been going on for the last hundred years

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has been about evolution.

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There are two theories of evolution

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that have been held in this country.

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The Christian notion of creation

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and then the Darwinian theory of natural selection.

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I think both of these are kind of irrelevant,

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but it’s interesting to see that these are the theories of evolution held.

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I’m convinced that the theory of evolution you have is tremendously important

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because it’s like your blueprint of what you think life’s all about

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and how we got here and where we’re going.

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It’s your blueprint, of course, not just for life, but for humanity.

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Who are we and where are we going?

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And even for yourself, what chance do you have?

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Can you change or are you stuck here with some static program?

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Now, the biblical theory of evolution,

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which has been held for two, perhaps three thousand years,

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well, I don’t know if you’re ready to have it summarized. It’s pretty ding-a-ling.

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According to Genesis, the theory of evolution that is held is that the whole thing was started somewhere around 4,000 years ago.

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Of course, that’s when the Bible was written

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by shepherd poets.

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And according to this theory,

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everything, the universe, stars, planets, Earth,

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was created by a man.

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Naturally.

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I don’t know.

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He’s right out in front, not a very nice guy.

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He’s mean, and he’s vengeful, and he’s dictatorial.

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He’s like a mafia capo, and he’s definitely like a hard-hearted condominium owner.

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and he’s definitely like a hard-hearted condominium owner.

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He created Adam and Eve, who are the first human beings,

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and said, well, welcome to paradise, folks.

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You all can do anything you want here,

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except there are two food and drug regulations.

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You see that tree there?

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You’re forbidden to eat of that.

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That’s called the tree of knowledge.

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And you’re forbidden to eat of the fruit of that,

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lest you become a god like me.

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And this tree over here is another controlled substance. If you eat of that, that’s the tree of immortality, and the fruit thereof will allow you to live forever and be a god like me.

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And I surely know you wouldn’t want to do that.

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Then, you know how the story went.

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They kind of blamed it all on Eve.

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Adam was a pretty straight arrow, crew cut marine type, but there was that naughty, naughty hip wiggling Eve that caused all the

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trouble they you know the story they ate of the fruit and by gosh it worked it was the

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it was an intelligence increase drug of some kind the the the blinds fell from their eyes

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and they began to see through good and evil and so forth. And, well, it didn’t end happily according to that theory of evolution.

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Jehovah heard about it.

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It came busting in, the sirens going, without a search warrant.

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It was the first narcotics bust in history.

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And because, talking about a hanging judge, because of this infringement of, you know,

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eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, humanity was condemned forever for original sin.

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As long as we’re down here, the earth really is, as Gordon Liddy likes to say, a bad neighborhood.

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And right from the beginning, we’re stuck with this terrible

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crime and so forth. Well, I don’t think that’s a theory of evolution that is going to urge you to

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stand up tall and look to the stars and move into the 21st century with a sense of species

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confidence or a sense of confidence in the human race or confidence in yourselves or

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America. I mean, it’s a pretty, it’s a downer, let’s face it. Now, about 100 years ago, another

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theory of evolution began percolating in Europe and in England. It’s the Darwinian theory of I guess they were so tired of an all-powerful, planful, bureaucratic, centralized Jehovah God

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that they said, there’s no plan whatsoever to evolution.

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It’s blind chance.

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There’s no meaning to it whatsoever.

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Well, that’s kind of dreary, isn’t it?

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When you get up in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror and realize it’s all

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an accident.

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A series of mutations.

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We’d all be unicellular creatures except for glitches or errors in the system that led

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to bigger and bigger and bigger males, bigger claws and so forth.

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Natural selection is a theory, a real, it’s kind of a barbarian power,

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very male, of course, oriented theory.

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Now, I don’t want to make too much fun of Darwin

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because Darwin, you know, we’re all creatures of our time and place.

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Darwin lived in the height of the British Empire,

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late 19th century.

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It was not a very, although some wonderful things came out of that empire, it was not a very although some wonderful things came out of that empire

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it was not a very humanistic

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time to live

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they were actually sending children

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out into the mines

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to mile underground

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to dig coal

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there was a tremendous difference between classes

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and so forth

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the Darwinian theory of evolution is not only blind

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it’s pessimistic.

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There’s nothing you can do about it.

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It was very comforting to the Bank of England and the King of England.

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So you just might as well relax.

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And, of course, we can excuse Darwin.

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Darwin was living before Einstein, before Freud, before Walt Disney, before Jack Kerouac.

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before Jack Kerouac.

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But sometime in the early 20th century,

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and increasingly,

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there has been developing a new theory of evolution in which it’s suggested

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that there is a purpose to evolution.

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There is a blueprint.

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There is a plan.

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Evolution is not blind chance,

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nor is evolution natural selection that’s going to lead to bigger dinosaurs and better armored, plated Reagan-Andropov submarines.

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The evolution of intelligence. Now, this is a very interesting idea. It means that the way not just to survive but to evolve is to get smarter.

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It’s also quite optimistic.

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It suggests that maybe you can look back at the history of evolution over the last four billion years

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and we can try to figure out how did she do it.

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By she, I mean Gaia, the biological intelligence, biological wisdom, DNA.

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I don’t, God, I don’t care what you call her.

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But obviously there seems to have been some intelligence at work,

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and we seem to be evolving more intelligently.

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So let’s look back at the track record and see how she did it,

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how she brought us from the Precambrian slime to the high altitude of Boulder, Colorado,

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in just a brief four billion years.

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Maybe if we can see how evolution worked in the past,

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we can then apply these tactics and methods and techniques and strategies to our own life,

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and lo and behold, we can think about evolving ourselves.

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We can think of our own lives not as a static situation, but as a series of evolutionary steps.

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Now, I haven’t defined intelligence yet.

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Intelligence, I looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and believe it or not, intelligence

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is one of those words, I think, that’s so powerful that it’s almost suppressed.

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The Encyclopedia definition of intelligence

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is mainly about the Stanford-Binet IQ test

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which is not much help, is it?

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the other use of intelligence, of course, is CIA

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you say, I’m an intelligence agent

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you should think that if you went around saying you’re an intelligence agent

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that would be, oh, wow, great, glad to meet you

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turn me on, you know, wow, great, I’m glad to meet you.

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Turn me on, you know.

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Lift me up, you know.

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But instead, when you think of an intelligence agent,

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you think of some spook sanding axles behind the Iron Curtain or plotting to destabilize Chile or Argentina or Honduras or Nicaragua,

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or can you keep them straight?

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So I would prefer to define, if you want me to define intelligence very precisely and scientifically,

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I’ll be glad to do it in the question and answer periods.

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There’s a lot of things to talk about tonight.

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It’s my hope, it’s my goal, it’s my dream that together tonight we can reawaken and renew ourselves

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and we can, through an inundation of facts and figures and scientific findings and new models,

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which I hope to spray you with and strobe you with tonight,

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we can come out with a sense of real, precise navigation as to where we go next in this very tricky paradoxical moment in human history.

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Let’s say, just for starters, though, that intelligence is like compassionate wisdom which encourages growth.

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Well, I know that’s almost tautological, that intelligence is something that…

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Evolution is something,

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is intelligence that helps you evolve.

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But all right, let’s start with that.

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I am suggesting, of course,

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that there’s a scientific aspect to intelligence.

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Now, by science, I do not mean

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IBM, Pentagon, people with crew cuts

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and mainframe computers

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planning World War III. By science,

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I mean humanist science, or when I talk about intelligence, I mean humanist intelligence,

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or a word I like very much, pagan intelligence. I think it’s time to dust out the word pagan again. You know, the word pagan seems to mean

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one who loves life.

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A pagan is someone

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who loves humanity

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and would never dream

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of oppressing humanity

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with original sins

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and other life sentences

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which detract from self-esteem

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and courage and self-confidence.

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A pagan, by loving life, loves all forms of life, is ecologically sensitive and almost symbiotically intuitive

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as to how we have to share this planet with other forms of life. Above all, I see a pagan scientist as one,

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or a pagan philosopher as one,

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who believes in evolution.

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Now, let’s talk about some of the tactics

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that DNA, or the biological intelligence,

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has used to get us from the Precambrian slime

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to this wonderful place a mile high in Boulder, Colorado.

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The first concept, which I think is one of the most interesting that biology has come up with recently,

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is the concept of juvenileization, or neoteny, or pedomorphosis.

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Now, what these three complicated words mean is simply this.

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Evolution works only with the juveniles of a species.

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When you go home tonight, look up the dictionary definition of the word adult,

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and you will be amused and amazed to find that the word adult is the past participle of the verb

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to grow. In other words, an adult is someone who has stopped growing. An adult is that form of the verb to grow. In other words, an adult is someone who has stopped growing.

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An adult is that form of the species

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that has reached its final form.

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No more metamorphosis, no more mutation,

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no more change, final form.

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Now there’s one thing that biological wisdom does not like,

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it’s final forms, because by the very definition,

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if we’re into the evolutionary game,

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we want forms that can change.

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And of course, there’s a lot of evidence coming from

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every branch of biology now, which is indicating that when DNA wants things to change, she changes

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the younger model. See how this works is, by the way, when I talk about Gaia or biological

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intelligence, I really do believe there is a genetic wisdom or biological

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intelligence. I’ll just give you a couple of examples. I could give you a hundred.

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I live in Los Angeles and there’s a big problem with the enroachment of condominiums and housing

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and spread of humanity in Los Angeles County. The coyotes are in trouble. The ranges of the

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coyotes are becoming smaller and smaller. Now what the coyotes do when trouble. The ranges of the coyotes are becoming smaller and smaller.

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Now what the coyotes do when they’re in trouble

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is they double the size of the litters

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and they change the sex ratio of the litters

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from 50-50 to 3-1 female.

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Obviously so that they can produce more coyotes. Now, think about that for a minute. What’s the intelligence there? What’s

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that incredible survival evolutionary shrewdness that looks around and says, hey, we’re kind

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of in trouble. You know, this neighborhood is getting unhealthy for us. The tone of this

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neighborhood has gone down. All those people are moving in and makes those changes in the egg

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supply or the selection of X and Y chromosomes to produce the foxes. I could give you many examples

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of this genetic intelligence. I’ll give you another one, which is very relevant, by the way,

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to everyone in this room and every person who’s grown up in the last 20, 30 years in America.

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The salmon. Consider the salmon.

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Now, the typical salmon, as you know, is born in a spawning pool

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somewhere miles up the Columbia and up a tributary

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and there’s a little smaller creek and then there’s a little pool

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and there the salmon is born.

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Usually the salmon waits until about age two.

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Big, tough, wiry, grown-up linebacker salmon swims down the Columbia River out into the sea,

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where it kind of maneuvers around a bit, and then maybe a year later makes that incredible voyage up the river,

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up the tributaries, up the small creek to that little spawning pool,

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and then the female prepares a little nesting place and the male releases his sperm over the cloud of the eggs.

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However, it comes as no surprise to you when I tell you

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that things have been a little hard on the salmon recently

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because of overfishing, commercial fishing in the seas,

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because of pollution, and because of the increasing damming of rivers.

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It’s harder and harder and harder, and fewer and fewer and fewer adult salmon

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are getting up to the spawning grounds.

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Okay, so your DNA intelligence, you know, you want to keep the salmon around. So what do you do? Well, here’s what she did. She developed an amazing

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process of juvenileization. When the big male salmon comes and they get into the mating pasture, and when the cloud of female eggs is released,

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small, immature salmon call par.

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Dozens of them suddenly dart in and squirt their sperm over the eggs.

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Now, if you were a good, hard-working, tax-paying, middle-aged, moral majority salmon, how would you feel if all these kids suddenly zapped in?

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Well, from your standpoint, you might be a little ticked off, but from the standpoint of the species you see, DNA preparing, because the most important thing is to keep

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the experiment going. So juvenileization means that, well, final forms are dangerous, and

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it’s well known anthropologically and morphogenetically that the human being, in a sense, is a…

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We were not descended from chimpanzees or apes.

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We are teenage, juvenile chimps or apes

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that didn’t grow up and develop tails

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and swing around in trees.

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The skull of a human baby and a chimp baby

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is pretty much the same,

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but if you know what happens to the skull of a chimp

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in many aspects the human species

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is an immature species

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we haven’t committed ourselves to a final form

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and therein perhaps lies our great usefulness

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to the DNA code and the biological wisdom

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the dinosaurs, what happened to the dinosaurs

00:23:01 ►

please listen Henry Kissinger, Andropov, and President

00:23:05 ►

Reagan. The dinosaurs got bigger and bigger and bigger. They thought size and they thought strength

00:23:10 ►

was important. Pretty soon, they got so unwieldy, they were kind of thrashing around in the swamp

00:23:16 ►

and got to that point where DNA realized, hey, we can’t go on with this experiment much longer.

00:23:23 ►

So she said to the younger generation,

00:23:25 ►

hey, look at them over there.

00:23:27 ►

You know, there’s Nixon and there’s Reagan

00:23:29 ►

and Kissinger and Brezhnev.

00:23:32 ►

I mean, you know what?

00:23:35 ►

Let’s drop out of that, huh?

00:23:37 ►

And that’s actually how the avian or bird species develop.

00:23:41 ►

I think you’ve made the point,

00:23:43 ►

and I’m going to come back to it.

00:23:44 ►

But step number one, if you want to increase your intelligence, if you want to evolve and grow and

00:23:50 ►

go through the changes, the many changes that are possible, at all costs avoid terminal adulthood.

00:23:58 ►

Or to put it differently,

00:24:09 ►

keep yourself rejuvenalized in every way possible and i’m going to give you many practical ways of doing that and a matter of fact in our seminar saturday sunday i’m going

00:24:14 ►

to go through 24 stages of of rejuvenalization and discuss in great detail there’s another

00:24:20 ►

technique though that a tactic that the evolutionary strategy uses, and that’s migration.

00:24:27 ►

Now, if you stay in the same place, you tend, obviously, not to be exposed to new challenges,

00:24:35 ►

and you’re not going to be under pressure to grow.

00:24:40 ►

Oh, it’s well known, though, that if you migrate, if you want to change, if you want to grow, if you want to develop, if you want to reach a higher level, a standard genetic tactic and a standard human tactic is to migrate to a new frontier where you have a chance to develop and grow.

00:25:01 ►

to develop and grow.

00:25:06 ►

You know,

00:25:08 ►

we’ve been through this before.

00:25:11 ►

We’ve been at this migration and evolution of intelligence business

00:25:14 ►

for a long time.

00:25:16 ►

You remember, don’t you,

00:25:17 ►

when we were all amoebas?

00:25:21 ►

The Precambrian slime?

00:25:23 ►

That was a pretty successful way of life

00:25:25 ►

but it got to be pretty boring

00:25:27 ►

so when things got too crowded

00:25:33 ►

overpopulated

00:25:34 ►

it’s always a time to evolve

00:25:36 ►

and DNA took a young generation of amoebas

00:25:38 ►

and they began hanging around shallow pools

00:25:41 ►

ingesting a dangerous mutational drug called calcium.

00:25:48 ►

You remember the AMA, that’s the Amoeba Medical Association.

00:25:54 ►

Calcium, totally dangerous.

00:25:56 ►

Don’t let your kids eat calcium because they’ll grow bones.

00:26:02 ►

Head, tail, or symmetry, they’ll leave home.

00:26:09 ►

They’ll migrate. And anyway anyway it’s immoral if god had intended amoebas to grow bones she would not have made calcium illegal

00:26:22 ►

then we presumably we got to the fish, and the fish stage is very interesting.

00:26:27 ►

It’s mobility, better forms of communication, a more complex nervous system.

00:26:33 ►

But then it got a little bloody, and some fish began, younger fish began,

00:26:38 ►

from, gee, I want to stay here, fighting the dolphins versus the sharks versus the barracudas

00:26:41 ►

that began hanging around shorelines.

00:26:44 ►

dolphins versus the sharks versus the barracudas that began hanging around shorelines.

00:26:52 ►

They actually got up in the shoreline and began looking at the sun and sniffing, tooting a very dangerous drug called oxygen.

00:26:57 ►

Well, I mean, the FDA, that’s the Fish Drug Administration.

00:27:05 ►

Well, no, in fact, oxygen is a lethal drug.

00:27:08 ►

And the sophisticated young fish said,

00:27:12 ►

No, man, cut it with nitrogen and it’s great.

00:27:23 ►

Well, I could go on right through the whole series of evolutionary steps.

00:27:29 ►

You know, we were all mammals, and then suddenly someone realized that the great evolutionary advance

00:27:37 ►

as to the higher you are, you know, the better you are, began climbing trees and looking down at the mammals

00:27:43 ►

fighting their four-foot territorial thing.

00:27:45 ►

And from the first primitive primates, they learned how to communicate at a distance.

00:27:53 ►

They learned binocular vision.

00:27:54 ►

They learned to free their hands.

00:27:55 ►

They learned to, that led to, led to what?

00:27:58 ►

The trajectory of evolution, as we look at the history of four billion years on this planet,

00:28:03 ►

of evolution. As we look at the history of four billion years on this planet, it seems quite clear that the blueprint of evolution is higher, faster, better forms of communication,

00:28:11 ►

better forms of linkage or social relationships, so that there’s a clear directory to evolution.

00:28:21 ►

And when I said that migration is one of the ways of evolving yourself

00:28:26 ►

that’s simply saying mobility is nobility

00:28:28 ►

and if you don’t like it where you are

00:28:31 ►

don’t blame your parents or don’t blame the government

00:28:33 ►

try moving

00:28:34 ►

how many Colorado natives are there in this room?

00:28:47 ►

Pretty good.

00:28:49 ►

You came here, your parents came here,

00:28:50 ►

because this was a place, it was a wild frontier,

00:28:53 ►

and we’re all descendants of wonderful, itchy-footed migratory people.

00:28:59 ►

Now, there’s another tactic,

00:29:04 ►

or another clue to the evolution of intelligence.

00:29:07 ►

And this is a pretty new idea.

00:29:09 ►

This is the hot, innovative idea in biological science today.

00:29:14 ►

It’s generational consciousness.

00:29:19 ►

Now, the theory is that just as where you’re born determines a great deal about how you grow up.

00:29:28 ►

If you were born in the Shiite section of Tehran, that’s the Ayatollah section,

00:29:35 ►

you’re going to grow up differently than someone that lives in the Sunni neighborhoods of Tehran.

00:29:41 ►

Or if you’re brought up in Rome, you’re going to be different than someone that was brought up in Tehran. Or if you’re brought up in Rome, you’re going to be different than someone

00:29:46 ►

that was brought up in Tehran. The generational notion is that when you were born is equally

00:29:56 ►

important. That those that are born at the same time share the same relative history. If your generation was born at a time when there was plenty and affluence,

00:30:10 ►

those great moments in history, like in Egypt, perhaps Athens,

00:30:15 ►

during the 3rd, 2nd century, 5th, 4th century B.C., those exciting times,

00:30:23 ►

that was a wonderful time to be born.

00:30:25 ►

If you were born at a time when, as you got to be a parent, there was a war and your side

00:30:30 ►

lost, everyone in your generational group shares these tragedies or these victories

00:30:35 ►

or these stimulations.

00:30:38 ►

And matter of fact, the two most important things to know about yourself or anyone else these days,

00:30:45 ►

according to this theory, would be your zip code and your year of birth. Or even better

00:30:54 ►

yet, the three numbers in the prefix of your telephone number and your date of birth. People born in the same generation share an unspoken

00:31:07 ►

sense of reality that throughout the country, throughout the world, you know, young people in

00:31:14 ►

Hong Kong and in Singapore and even in Moscow and even in Warsaw, Poland, you know, wanted to put on

00:31:21 ►

blue jeans and play rock and roll. Why? Because they sensed that was a generational stimulation

00:31:26 ►

that was shared by everyone that was born after 1946.

00:31:33 ►

Now, in the past, this concept of generation

00:31:36 ►

or generational consciousness was not important

00:31:39 ►

because who cared if you were living in a village in the Middle East

00:31:42 ►

or in a slow-moving, feudal civilization

00:31:46 ►

society. It didn’t make much difference. You were born. You grew up like your parents.

00:31:54 ►

Juvenilization wasn’t necessary because DNA uses juvenileization, mutation and change in the young, only when there’s a challenge that the old way can’t face.

00:32:20 ►

This brings me to what I consider to be, and many other demographers and evolutionary theorists believe to be,

00:32:24 ►

one of the most amazing and important events, certainly in American history, if not in human history.

00:32:32 ►

I refer to an extraordinary phenomenon that happened in America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand between the years 1946 and 1964.

00:32:35 ►

I’m sure you know what I’m going to say.

00:32:37 ►

In these 18 years, the birth rate in America doubled.

00:32:43 ►

Now, you just don’t go around doubling birth rates. There’s a

00:32:47 ►

genetic meaning. There’s a significance here. It totally fooled the demographers. They expected

00:32:53 ►

in all industrial countries, the birth rates had been declining. They expected right after

00:32:57 ►

World War II, there’d be boom, boom, the soldiers would come home. There’d be a little jump

00:33:01 ►

in the birth rate. And then they expected 36 million Americans born between these 18 years. Instead, 76 million. That’s 40 million

00:33:11 ►

more than we expected. They simply don’t release 40 million more minds, bodies, mouths, souls,

00:33:19 ►

twice the number you expected on a country without enormous impact. And the last 50 years of the 20th century in this country are simply the history of the baby boom moving like a pig through a python.

00:33:37 ►

Through American culture.

00:33:54 ►

I mean, now, not only do we have to double the diaper factories and the baby powders, you know, to powder 40 million more little soft bottoms.

00:33:56 ►

We had to double the nursery schools.

00:33:59 ►

We had to double the primary schools.

00:34:06 ►

We had to, my, immediately American enterprise and advertising caught on.

00:34:09 ►

Phew, this generation is twice the consuming power.

00:34:13 ►

So immediately we had Davy Crockett hats, and we had breakfast of champions for you,

00:34:17 ►

and we had Pepsi-Cola because you’re a champ, and because you’re the best,

00:34:19 ►

you should have the best kind of jeans, you know.

00:34:25 ►

As this generation, oh, not only is this generation your generation those born between 46 and 64

00:34:30 ►

not only are you twice as big

00:34:31 ►

right from the beginning

00:34:33 ►

you were trained to be different

00:34:35 ►

number one, you’re the first generation

00:34:37 ►

after Hiroshima

00:34:38 ►

you’re the first generation

00:34:39 ►

born with that knowledge

00:34:40 ►

in your blood, in your bones

00:34:42 ►

that there could never be

00:34:44 ►

another great, wonderful

00:34:48 ►

Georgie Patton World War.

00:34:51 ►

You were the first generation

00:34:52 ►

that was exposed to television.

00:34:54 ►

When you crawled out of the crib,

00:34:56 ►

you began dialing and tuning realities.

00:34:57 ►

By the time you were five,

00:35:02 ►

you had seen more realities,

00:35:03 ►

more perceptions.

00:35:04 ►

You had that whole concept of turning on and turning off, switching channels,

00:35:07 ►

that you’d experienced more than the most affluent, well-traveled sultans and philosophers of the past.

00:35:15 ►

The most complicated thing about this generation, you were the Dr. Spock kids.

00:35:22 ►

Demand feeding.

00:35:26 ►

That Dr. Spock the right wingers are right

00:35:29 ►

he totally undermined the Eisenhower

00:35:33 ►

system

00:35:36 ►

treat kids as individuals

00:35:40 ►

encourage them to be different.

00:35:46 ►

Give them self-confidence.

00:35:48 ►

Listen to what they have to say.

00:35:50 ►

You know the terrible, terrible litany

00:35:52 ►

of humanistic theories

00:35:54 ►

that Dr. Spock laid upon

00:35:57 ►

we parents who are bringing

00:35:58 ►

you baby boomers up.

00:36:01 ►

Now,

00:36:03 ►

in the late 60s

00:36:08 ►

and early 70s

00:36:10 ►

the baby boom generation

00:36:13 ►

76 million strong

00:36:15 ►

sweeping through American society

00:36:16 ►

like an avalanche

00:36:17 ►

like a tidal wave

00:36:18 ►

hit high school and college

00:36:20 ►

wow

00:36:21 ►

what you did

00:36:24 ►

there’s never been a revolution like it in human history.

00:36:30 ►

Like a, like a tsunami wave, you changed every aspect of American culture. At the height

00:36:35 ►

of American empire, Henry Luce and President Eisenhower and the Dulles and the CIA controlling everything, and 76 million Dr. Spock baby boomers, you know,

00:36:47 ►

you didn’t want that cheap black and white war.

00:36:52 ►

You didn’t want to be rushed off into the draft.

00:36:55 ►

You were trained to look within and to appreciate your individuality.

00:37:00 ►

You didn’t want the old hypocritical sexual mores.

00:37:03 ►

You changed the educational system.

00:37:07 ►

You definitely wanted, as demand feeders, you wanted better drugs.

00:37:18 ►

You were not going to settle for dry martinis on the rocks.

00:37:24 ►

You were called heads,

00:37:26 ►

which is interesting

00:37:26 ►

because you were the first emissaries

00:37:29 ►

or the first messengers

00:37:31 ►

of what’s called the Information Society.

00:37:34 ►

And I definitely believe in Alvin Toffler

00:37:36 ►

and John Naisbitt,

00:37:38 ►

who tell us that we’re moving

00:37:39 ►

from an industrial society

00:37:41 ►

in which conformity

00:37:44 ►

and mass assembly lines and that sort of thing, where basically

00:37:48 ►

where work is important, we’re moving into the information society. And you were brought up on

00:37:52 ►

television. You were brought up to be heads. You were brought up to think. You were brought up to

00:37:55 ►

deal with information. You’ve been inundated. You’ve been fed. You’ve been incredibly indulged

00:38:02 ►

with information all the way through your history. And, of course, you want more.

00:38:06 ►

You’re really addicted to information.

00:38:07 ►

And you’re going to get it.

00:38:13 ►

Now, you change the musical styles.

00:38:17 ►

You change the dress styles.

00:38:21 ►

You develop the concept quality of life.

00:38:24 ►

You develop the concepts of levels of

00:38:27 ►

consciousness and expansion of consciousness. You developed the notion, or you reawaken, really,

00:38:33 ►

the notion, the basic American notion, the Jeffersonian notion, of individual potentiality.

00:38:39 ►

Ralph Waldo Emerson going to Harvard and getting kicked out in 1838 because he said,

00:38:44 ►

look within,, look within.

00:38:46 ►

Find God within.

00:38:50 ►

God’s not in those big Unitarian and congregational churches in Boston.

00:38:52 ►

The divine spark is within.

00:38:53 ►

And drop out.

00:38:54 ►

Be self-reliant.

00:38:55 ►

Think for yourself.

00:38:56 ►

It’s the American way.

00:39:06 ►

So that the baby boom generation, I see it as an awakening of the glorious American traditions of looking within.

00:39:07 ►

Socrates said it.

00:39:12 ►

The function of human life is to grow, develop, become intelligent.

00:39:15 ►

Intelligence is equated to virtue and wisdom.

00:39:19 ►

Then what happened?

00:39:28 ►

I think this is very instructive for the intelligent evolution of all of us in this room.

00:39:33 ►

What happened to the wild 60s and early 70s?

00:39:35 ►

Did people suddenly become conservative?

00:39:39 ►

Well, no, I don’t think so.

00:39:42 ►

I spend a great deal of my time going around to colleges. I give 34 college lectures a year.

00:39:42 ►

I spend a great deal of my time going around to colleges.

00:39:44 ►

I go to 34 college lectures a year.

00:39:50 ►

I spend a lot of time listening to young people.

00:39:57 ►

As a matter of fact, I developed a theory of generational migration.

00:40:03 ►

Just as you find yourself in Ireland, where people are still fighting Catholics versus Protestants,

00:40:10 ►

and you want to get out, migrate to Europe. If you find yourself in Boston, where the ethnic groups are still fighting with each other, migrate to Boulder, or migrate to California. The same thing is true, the same

00:40:18 ►

thing is true, my friends, of your generation. If you find yourself in a generation that, you know, is pretty stuffy,

00:40:27 ►

migrate.

00:40:29 ►

A generation is an island in time.

00:40:33 ►

A generation is like a big school of fish

00:40:36 ►

moving through time.

00:40:37 ►

You can migrate temporally.

00:40:40 ►

You can migrate from one generation to another.

00:40:42 ►

Now, I personally, to give you an example of this,

00:40:45 ►

I spend about 60…

00:40:54 ►

Busted again, huh?

00:40:56 ►

Is that Big Brother or what?

00:41:04 ►

I spend about 60% of my time these days with baby boomers, people between the ages of 18 and 36.

00:41:10 ►

And I learn so much.

00:41:13 ►

I spend about 30% of my time with whiz kids, those born after 1964.

00:41:23 ►

I spend about 10% of my time

00:41:25 ►

with old-timers,

00:41:28 ►

part of my original generation.

00:41:30 ►

See, I’ve definitely migrated from the old turf.

00:41:33 ►

But occasionally, like, you know,

00:41:34 ►

a successful Sicilian

00:41:37 ►

who’s opened a pizza parlor,

00:41:39 ►

I go back to Italy.

00:41:41 ►

I go back to the old village

00:41:42 ►

and talk to the old-timers.

00:41:43 ►

I can talk old-timer.

00:41:44 ►

I can talk about World War II.

00:41:46 ►

I was in it.

00:41:47 ►

I can talk about alcohol prohibition in the 20s

00:41:50 ►

and how wonderful it was

00:41:51 ►

because I was brought up

00:41:52 ►

for the first 12 years of my life

00:41:53 ►

seeing alcohol in my house

00:41:55 ►

as an abused, dangerous, illegal drug.

00:41:58 ►

So, oh sure, I can,

00:41:59 ►

I think it’s wonderful.

00:42:00 ►

And when I say age is everything

00:42:02 ►

and generational consciousness is everything,

00:42:04 ►

I don’t mean to say, you know, don’t trust anyone over 30.

00:42:09 ►

That’s a dumb thing to say because we’re all going to get over 30.

00:42:13 ►

I’m not even going to say don’t trust anyone born before 1946

00:42:17 ►

because, you know, don’t believe anyone that tells you anything dogmatic like that.

00:42:22 ►

But this notion of you’re as old as the generation you

00:42:27 ►

hang out with is so wonderful. Now, let me tell you a little bit about the whiz kids. And this

00:42:33 ►

is probably the most profound thing that you baby boomers have done. Here’s a question I want to

00:42:39 ►

pose to you. How come the birth rate, which had doubled for 18 years, dropped in 1964?

00:42:47 ►

Well, if you believe as I do that DNA is kind of watching things, then there’s a reason for this.

00:42:54 ►

There are many reasons.

00:42:57 ►

The first obvious reason is that by 1964, the first wave of the baby boomers were hitting young adulthood,

00:43:06 ►

when naturally they were expected by society to breed blindly.

00:43:11 ►

You know?

00:43:11 ►

You know?

00:43:16 ►

Keep your legs crossed until you’re married, then get in there and breed.

00:43:21 ►

It’s been going on for 4,000, 25,000 years.

00:43:26 ►

You’re the first generation.

00:43:28 ►

You see why?

00:43:28 ►

Well, number one, you were demand-fed.

00:43:32 ►

You’re used to selecting.

00:43:33 ►

So you weren’t going to eat blindly and you weren’t going to go to war blindly.

00:43:39 ►

So naturally, you weren’t going to breed like animals.

00:43:42 ►

You were the first generation in human history that bred consciously.

00:43:48 ►

For one reason, because you had the pill. But that’s not the real reason. The real reason is that you’ve got the concept of life as a wonderful growth scenario. And the average

00:43:56 ►

baby boom couple had to make the decision, well, shall we have a baby or shall we go around the world?

00:44:08 ►

Or shall we have a baby or shall we buy a house?

00:44:12 ►

Or shall we have a baby or buy a Porsche?

00:44:18 ►

Or shall we have a baby or will the wife or husband go through medical school or dental school or law school?

00:44:20 ►

That notion of self-confident, intelligence, choice, options,

00:44:25 ►

that you’re compassionately and precisely in charge of your life.

00:44:29 ►

You’re not a victim of these forces of the past.

00:44:34 ►

So that the baby boomers bred consciously.

00:44:38 ►

What that means is that the kids of the baby boomers are like no generation.

00:44:43 ►

And if you’ve spent any time with kids born after 64,

00:44:47 ►

you know whereof I talk.

00:44:49 ►

We’re talking here about the Spielberg kids.

00:44:51 ►

We’re talking about the heroes of E.T.

00:44:53 ►

Wow, what a subversive movie that was, huh?

00:45:00 ►

The only adult, well, there are two nice adults in the movie,

00:45:03 ►

the mother and then the scientist who remembers when he was a kid.

00:45:07 ►

All the rest of the adults were portrayed as kind of well-meaning bumblers.

00:45:12 ►

And that’s the best you can say about Washington, D.C., you know?

00:45:17 ►

Take back well-meaning.

00:45:26 ►

It was no accident when in the countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland,

00:45:30 ►

they banned E.T. for kids under 12.

00:45:30 ►

Did you know that?

00:45:38 ►

Rightly so, because they said E.T. instills or encourages disrespect for adults.

00:45:40 ►

Right on.

00:45:51 ►

Because intelligent disrespect for adults is juvenileization, the number one key of the evolutionary code.

00:45:53 ►

That’s how we are here instead of being dinosaurs. The young dinosaurs had that ability to say, hell no, we won’t go.

00:46:00 ►

So I spend about 30% of my time with whiz kids.

00:46:06 ►

This includes my 9-year-old son, my 11- and 12-year-old grandchildren.

00:46:14 ►

They teach me computers, they teach me video games, they teach me more than that, an incredible sophistication. I’m not the first person to tell you that

00:46:26 ►

just as the baby boomers are by far

00:46:29 ►

the most sophisticated, experienced, intelligent, realistic,

00:46:34 ►

that’s the bottom line on the baby boom generation, realistic.

00:46:37 ►

After what you guys have been through,

00:46:39 ►

you’re pretty practical.

00:46:42 ►

But the Whiskids are extraordinarily sophisticated, as you know,

00:46:46 ►

and many moralists are upset about the fact that the new television series

00:46:49 ►

all show these little whiz kids as very, very suave sophisticates

00:46:56 ►

and adults being kind of like bumblers.

00:46:58 ►

Now, there’s a reason for that.

00:47:01 ►

I study very carefully the behavior of the whiz kids, because like it

00:47:07 ►

or not, they’re going to write our future. I was very interested, for example, in the

00:47:13 ►

fact, well, I love war games, didn’t you? Two 14-year-old kids that, you know, stop World War III.

00:47:28 ►

I’m very interested in, for example, video games.

00:47:31 ►

I think that the popularity of video games,

00:47:34 ►

the fact that video arcade games in this country generate $7 billion a year.

00:47:38 ►

That’s money coming mainly from whiz kids.

00:47:40 ►

$7 billion a year.

00:47:41 ►

That’s more money that President Reagan and NASA spend on the real stuff

00:47:45 ►

Now this is discouraging

00:47:51 ►

As far as the old timers are concerned

00:47:54 ►

But it’s very encouraging

00:47:55 ►

When you realize that these kids are going to

00:47:57 ►

Naturally they’re going to zoom around in space

00:48:00 ►

I was very interested

00:48:03 ►

I hang around video arcades

00:48:05 ►

and whiz kids

00:48:06 ►

to find out what they’re thinking

00:48:07 ►

and what they’re doing

00:48:08 ►

because there’s a meaning there

00:48:09 ►

the video arcade games

00:48:11 ►

are like the fairy tales

00:48:14 ►

they’re the legendary myths

00:48:16 ►

of the new generation

00:48:18 ►

let me give you an example

00:48:20 ►

if you know what to look for

00:48:21 ►

you’re going to find it

00:48:22 ►

the first big

00:48:24 ►

arcade video game and home video game success

00:48:28 ►

that made more money than probably the top five or ten

00:48:32 ►

to hit super status, number one on Billboard’s top ratings,

00:48:37 ►

you know what it was?

00:48:38 ►

It was Donkey Kong.

00:48:40 ►

Definitely mammalian.

00:48:45 ►

Poor Mario, you know. definitely mammalian poor poor poor Mario

00:48:47 ►

you know

00:48:47 ►

this big

00:48:48 ►

gorilla

00:48:49 ►

has taken his girl

00:48:50 ►

and he’s climbing

00:48:51 ►

he’s jumping

00:48:52 ►

and he’s hitting

00:48:52 ►

it’s definitely

00:48:53 ►

you know

00:48:54 ►

then

00:48:56 ►

the third game

00:48:57 ►

I mean

00:48:58 ►

it’s amazing

00:48:59 ►

how this works

00:49:00 ►

the third

00:49:01 ►

after about another year

00:49:02 ►

the third game

00:49:03 ►

to hit number one

00:49:04 ►

was Donkey Kong Jr.,

00:49:06 ►

in which Donkey Kong Jr. is a primate, swinging and jumping and leaping from tree to tree,

00:49:10 ►

and there’s poor Mario, you know, the mammal coming around, so that I see a direct evolutionary sequence.

00:49:17 ►

Now, it’s interesting, too, young girls like different games than young boys.

00:49:27 ►

Girls like Centipede. Guess why?

00:49:31 ►

Well, Centipede is like this huge spermatozoa.

00:49:35 ►

And Miss Egg shoots down the ones she doesn’t like, and if one gets through, then…

00:49:42 ►

Well, I like the game, too.

00:49:54 ►

Okay, let me talk for about five or ten more minutes,

00:49:56 ►

and then let’s take a break and stretch,

00:49:57 ►

and then come back, and I’d like to stay as long as we can.

00:49:59 ►

I’d really like to talk with you and hear your ideas

00:50:02 ►

and any questions you have,

00:50:03 ►

and we can get into more detailed stuff about… I’m not going to talk with you and hear your ideas and any questions you have. And we can get into more detailed stuff about…

00:50:06 ►

I’m not going to talk about dope here, now.

00:50:09 ►

If you want to talk about dope later, I will.

00:50:12 ►

There’s a lot happening.

00:50:17 ►

What I’d like to do now is kind of…

00:50:21 ►

We’ve taken a very quick review of evolution.

00:50:30 ►

Kind of, we’ve taken a very quick review of evolution from, we were amoebas and then we end up now in this room in Boulder, Colorado in 1983.

00:50:40 ►

You know, there’s a lot to be depressed about if you look around the planet Earth.

00:50:48 ►

I think evolution got a setback in 1980 when Ronald Reagan got elected president number one Ronald Reagan’s age now again I’m I’m very compassionate because I’m pagan and I love

00:50:58 ►

all human beings and it’s my job to try to turn them on and to make them feel better and to relieve

00:51:02 ►

paranoias and tensions and so forth and I’d love to be able to talk to Ronald Reagan

00:51:05 ►

and suggest that he and Nancy spend like,

00:51:09 ►

well, maybe 50% of their time with baby boomers

00:51:12 ►

and only 10% of their time with whiz kids.

00:51:15 ►

But you know that Ronnie and Nancy

00:51:17 ►

never hang out with anyone, anyone,

00:51:21 ►

except old-timers, cold warriors. The only baby boom member of the Nixon

00:51:28 ►

administration, I mean the Reagan administration, was poor old Stockton. And you know what they

00:51:33 ►

did to him? He took him into the woodshed and he gave him a spanking, quote-unquote. You know why? about the budget. Anyway, I really feel that the Jimmy Carter, I’m going to really go on a limb

00:51:51 ►

here, but the Jimmy Carter administration was a great step forward. And I think history will see

00:51:55 ►

that Jimmy Carter was a wonderful president, except he couldn’t get it together.

00:52:01 ►

You know, he was for human human rights he was a very compassionate man

00:52:05 ►

he filled his staff with young people

00:52:08 ►

all those young guys

00:52:10 ►

that were stealing hubcaps in Atlanta

00:52:12 ►

and suddenly they’re running the White House

00:52:13 ►

they were really

00:52:17 ►

wonderful people

00:52:19 ►

the problem was

00:52:20 ►

they were dealing with

00:52:22 ►

the most dinosaur, wheelchair, elephantine,

00:52:30 ►

backward-looking organization in the North American continent,

00:52:33 ►

the Congress and Senate of the United States.

00:52:36 ►

And those cold-blooded mothers made mincemeat out of the poor kids.

00:52:41 ►

No more singing Bob Dylan and having blue jeans and a White House boy.

00:52:45 ►

We’re going to show you.

00:52:47 ►

We don’t want no more of this youth stuff.

00:52:50 ►

Don’t talk to us about human rights.

00:52:51 ►

They really sabotage poor Jimmy Carter.

00:52:55 ►

So now we have the Reagan administration.

00:52:57 ►

Well, I’m very compassionate, and I don’t want to,

00:53:01 ►

and what I say now is more to make you laugh. I don’t want to and what I say now is more to make you laugh

00:53:05 ►

I don’t want to raise any

00:53:07 ►

negative feelings here

00:53:09 ►

but I must say

00:53:10 ►

I feel that

00:53:11 ►

the Republican Party

00:53:13 ►

forms an iron triangle

00:53:18 ►

with the weapons manufacturers

00:53:20 ►

and the military in this country

00:53:22 ►

there’s no denying that

00:53:23 ►

and what they have done in the last two and a half years is to you know just make

00:53:29 ►

the manufacture and distribution of weapons a national obsession I feel that

00:53:34 ►

the the men who run the Republican Party the real guys behind the scenes are mean Mean, male, macho, pre-adolescent, pre-sexual, locker room, jockstrap, mean people.

00:53:58 ►

Now, I’m not coming out for the Democrats here.

00:54:00 ►

I mean, how about Tip O’Neill?

00:54:09 ►

Democrats here, I mean, how about Tip O’Neill? The Democrats are classically compassionate.

00:54:14 ►

They’re for the young people. They’re for the minorities. But the thing is age. See,

00:54:19 ►

and poor Tip O’Neill is blundering and bumbling. He’s probably got a good heart and so forth.

00:54:25 ►

Most Democrats are kind of nice guys. They might steal a little, but they’re not going to steal the country from you.

00:54:28 ►

But they’re old.

00:54:29 ►

Age is the key.

00:54:32 ►

Age is the key to politics.

00:54:41 ►

Now, in the 1960s and early 70s, we had the term turn on, tune in, drop out. Drop out, of course, didn’t mean smoke marijuana and

00:54:46 ►

play Sgt. Pepper day and night. I mean, one week and drop out of that, huh? I mean, come

00:54:52 ►

on. Drop out meant think for yourselves, don’t follow leaders, get off the assembly line,

00:55:00 ►

self-reliance, change, evolve, change.

00:55:05 ►

Yeah.

00:55:08 ►

But not much you could do.

00:55:10 ►

The baby boomers couldn’t do anything.

00:55:14 ►

They had buying power, but you didn’t have any.

00:55:17 ►

You stopped the country, you stopped the war, you changed the education system.

00:55:20 ►

Have you forgotten what it was like in the 60s?

00:55:23 ►

There was that actual war between the police and the longhairs.

00:55:24 ►

Remember that?

00:55:28 ►

That any young person driving on the highway would get automatically busted for suspicion of being young. Do you remember that? Of course, that ended. You know why? Because the new generation

00:55:34 ►

of cops were young. Okay. It looks pretty bad in 1983 when you realize that the Reagan administration and the men who have been running the CIA and running our foreign policy since 1946, since World War II, are obsessed with their fear and competitive jealousy of the Russians.

00:56:01 ►

of the Russians.

00:56:04 ►

Now, I hear Gordon Liddy standing on platforms.

00:56:05 ►

I’ve heard him 20 times complaining

00:56:07 ►

that we don’t have a big enough CIA,

00:56:10 ►

that the KGB is 10 times bigger.

00:56:14 ►

I mean, don’t you think that’s ridiculous?

00:56:21 ►

The men in the Reagan administration,

00:56:23 ►

the coal warriors,

00:56:24 ►

have, and of course, the Russians are administration, the coal warriors, have…

00:56:25 ►

And of course, the Russians are worse, ten times worse.

00:56:28 ►

But they’re obsessed.

00:56:30 ►

All they do is they see every country in the world either belongs to Russia or to us.

00:56:35 ►

And if they belong to us, we send the poor, poor guys guns.

00:56:41 ►

And if they belong to the Russians, or we think they do, we do everything in our power to destabilize them.

00:56:47 ►

The Russians are doing the same thing.

00:56:48 ►

International terrorism, the Russians sick Libya and Chad.

00:56:51 ►

This, my friends, the Russian government and the American foreign policy and the American

00:56:56 ►

State Department, the American Pentagon, are guilty of behavior which any civilized

00:57:01 ►

society, or in the future, the 20th century, will look back upon this Cold War as not only barbarism, species suicide, but speaking as a clinical psychologist who has written two books on personality diagnosis, I can confidently label the behavior of these Cold warriors as certifiably lunatic.

00:57:37 ►

Well, I’m going to leave you with this one notion. It’s the notion that I have been laying out for the last 23 years of my public life.

00:57:46 ►

And it’s the American tradition.

00:57:51 ►

The intelligent evolutionary tradition has always been intelligent skepticism of authority.

00:58:02 ►

You know, and I know, that the big S, the big systems, whether it’s

00:58:06 ►

labor, government, whether it’s Air Force, the Army, the FBI, the CIA, whether it’s the churches,

00:58:10 ►

I don’t care, the big systems operate for one purpose, to keep themselves in power. And they

00:58:16 ►

have no interest in patriotism, that the Army would lose a war any time rather than give up

00:58:20 ►

their own power or give up any of their power to the Navy. You should probably know the worst enemies of the FBI are not the mafia or the communists,

00:58:29 ►

it’s the CIA. I’m sure you know that. Or the local police. So I have to close every little

00:58:40 ►

meeting like this with a reminder that throughout human history

00:58:45 ►

those in power

00:58:46 ►

had been wrong

00:58:47 ►

99% of the time.

00:58:50 ►

They laughed at Columbus

00:58:51 ►

when he said the world was round.

00:58:52 ►

They crucified Jesus Christ.

00:58:53 ►

I don’t have to get on there.

00:58:54 ►

When Galileo said

00:58:55 ►

we went around the sun

00:58:57 ►

they busted him.

00:58:58 ►

They burned Bruno at the stake.

00:59:00 ►

The long history

00:59:01 ►

of errors on the part

00:59:04 ►

of those in power is 99% predictable.

00:59:10 ►

Why? Because they don’t give a damn. They just want to keep themselves in power. There’s

00:59:14 ►

no question, though, that the baby boom generation understands this. I think you’re the first

00:59:19 ►

generation in human history that are realistic enough to realize that we can’t run a government

00:59:24 ►

with partisan policies. We can’t run a government with partisan policies.

00:59:26 ►

We can’t have a spaceship Earth or even the United States or even one state of this country

00:59:31 ►

with two weirdos like Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan in the pilot cabin fighting over who’s going to.

00:59:39 ►

And if we’re losing gas, well, if it’s a Democrat in power, good.

00:59:44 ►

The Republicans, right?

00:59:46 ►

That’s the way that system operates.

00:59:47 ►

We can’t do that anymore.

00:59:48 ►

And I know your generation, all the polls show that you certainly are skeptical of Republicans and Democrats and donkeys and elephants.

00:59:55 ►

Indeed, you’re skeptical of all those old systems.

00:59:58 ►

We are actually, in spite of the grim things we see around us, we’re in the golden age of human history here in America.

01:00:08 ►

We are going to lay down a model for the rest of the world because that’s our duty and obligation to do that.

01:00:13 ►

Yeah, it’s true.

01:00:15 ►

There are a lot of problems in this country.

01:00:17 ►

Proliferation of nukes, nuclear pollution, the tremendous discrepancy, the growing discrepancy between the haves and the has-nots,

01:00:27 ►

the terrible racial problem which hasn’t gone away.

01:00:35 ►

Worst of all, worst is the loss of hope, the erosion of the American dream of progress and the American confidence that we can, through democracy and openness and good humor, can

01:00:40 ►

show the rest of the world how to go.

01:00:42 ►

Yeah, there are a lot of things to be concerned about.

01:00:44 ►

However, the fact that we’re aware of these issues is good because they existed 100 years ago

01:00:49 ►

and nobody cared. I go around the country a lot and I want to give you some good news.

01:00:55 ►

There are at least 20, possibly 30 million Americans, most of them young, but some older,

01:01:08 ►

of them young, but some older, who are, I want to be scientifically precise here, reasonably enlightened. Ah, they’re not Buddhas yet. But they’ve been through a lot. They understand

01:01:17 ►

about multiple reality. They basically understand about you’ve got to really get your own act

01:01:22 ►

together. They’re not expecting society or the Democratic Party to take care of them.

01:01:27 ►

They understand, you know, that we’ve got to work together.

01:01:29 ►

They’re basically good humor.

01:01:30 ►

They’re basically tolerant about sex and about giving everyone a chance.

01:01:36 ►

This generated just an enormous minority of really great people out there.

01:01:42 ►

And in 1988, the baby boomers are going to take over.

01:01:46 ►

All you have to do is look around and understand your power. And the golden age, which we’re now

01:01:51 ►

in, is going to go platinum. Are you ready for that? Okay, let’s take a break for 10 minutes. We’re getting very precise.

01:02:14 ►

The question has to do with something I wrote a few years ago.

01:02:19 ►

I think it was in Intelligence Agents where I talked about geography is destiny.

01:02:31 ►

Habitat determines species. If you live underwater,

01:02:40 ►

you’re either a fish or a dolphin or a scuba diver. And the question has to do with the With the distinctions between Boulder and Berkeley and Los Angeles and Seattle.

01:03:07 ►

I think that Boulder and this area of the country, Aspen, and even running down this kind of a magical,

01:03:10 ►

even down to maybe even Santa Fe,

01:03:12 ►

there’s a special little scene going on in this area.

01:03:18 ►

I think there are people that got flying in from New York

01:03:23 ►

and saw the Rockies and decided to drop down for a while

01:03:25 ►

and found that, in truth,

01:03:27 ►

this is one of the most beautiful places

01:03:29 ►

to live on the planet

01:03:30 ►

and have taken advantage of that.

01:03:34 ►

Just as at the Iron Triangle

01:03:36 ►

of the Republican Party

01:03:37 ►

and the weapons manufacturers

01:03:39 ►

in the Pentagon,

01:03:40 ►

there’s a cosmic triangle

01:03:41 ►

of Santa Cruz, Santa Fe, and Boulder.

01:03:47 ►

I think these are very valuable outposts,

01:03:49 ►

and I see these cities or communities as probes.

01:03:59 ►

San Francisco is an extraordinary experiment.

01:04:04 ►

It’s without any question the most liberated city in the world.

01:04:10 ►

It’s a city, and it’s probably the only city west of the Rockies,

01:04:15 ►

because, as you know, most of the urban situations or population centers west of the Rockies are almost like space colonies.

01:04:26 ►

There’s no Los Angeles.

01:04:27 ►

There are 30 or 40 little enclaves around Los Angeles.

01:04:31 ►

And that experiment, which developed in the industrial age of popping everyone in big high-rises

01:04:39 ►

like New York City and Paris and London and Chicago, I think this experiment is over and that we’re not

01:04:46 ►

going to develop new high-rise New York cities west of the Rockies.

01:04:53 ►

San Francisco is a, I spent a lot of my life there and I think it’s a wonderful place.

01:04:59 ►

I think L.A. is the communication center of the world right now.

01:05:02 ►

I think it’s obvious that the movies are made there.

01:05:07 ►

Most of the music comes out of there, the television.

01:05:11 ►

Of course, the computer is Silicon Valley, and we certainly have to mention that as an outpost of evolution.

01:05:22 ►

There’s no such thing as L.A., really.

01:05:27 ►

of evolution. There’s no such thing as L.A., really. There’s really more Hollywood and

01:05:36 ►

Burbank and that constellation of communication systems. I live down there because I think

01:05:41 ►

that the job of a philosopher today is to be a communicator. And I think that if Aristotle and Plato lived today, they’d have their own talk shows.

01:05:48 ►

Because we are the information age.

01:05:50 ►

We are the age of intelligence and communication.

01:05:55 ►

And we live not just on air and water and food.

01:05:58 ►

Information now is the very stuff. It’s the very food of anyone that wants to evolve.

01:06:01 ►

of anyone that wants to evolve.

01:06:06 ►

And I try to do my best in Hollywood to encourage people to make positive movies

01:06:10 ►

about the future instead of negative soap operas

01:06:12 ►

about the past.

01:06:15 ►

I ramble because I don’t have a clear answer

01:06:18 ►

to your question.

01:06:19 ►

I spend as much time as possible

01:06:21 ►

in all three places.

01:06:24 ►

Oh, Seattle.

01:06:26 ►

Seattle is a very interesting place.

01:06:29 ►

It’s very big on space.

01:06:31 ►

Seattle people tend to be a little damp, as far as I’m concerned.

01:06:36 ►

And there is a feeling in Seattle, they kind of resent California,

01:06:41 ►

which I think they don’t have to.

01:06:44 ►

I think, and Oregon is a wonderful state, too.

01:06:50 ►

A very high percentage of enlightened people in Oregon.

01:06:55 ►

I used to say that the Greenwich hours are not hours, but centuries.

01:07:00 ►

And when you went from Pacific time to Eastern time, it’s 300 years. And

01:07:09 ►

when you go nine hours to London and Paris, boy, you’re really going 900 years. But that’s

01:07:16 ►

getting, like any generalization, it gets, you have to drop out. It’s too static. The

01:07:20 ►

idea is mobility. The idea is to move and keep changing and don’t feel… It’s nice to have roots, but it’s also nice to feel that you have outposts and networks.

01:07:32 ►

It’s getting networked.

01:07:33 ►

And also, as we move in the information age, territory, that old mammalian notion of territory,

01:07:40 ►

is going to be less important because the electronic cottage…

01:07:44 ►

I belong to a computer network now

01:07:46 ►

and I can tap out messages to the modem

01:07:48 ►

and so that,

01:07:50 ►

and as we move into space,

01:07:52 ►

territory is going to be less crucial.

01:08:00 ►

Earlier you mentioned Kerouac and Burroughs

01:08:02 ►

and the B generation.

01:08:04 ►

I was wondering in terms of generational consciousness, where did they come from?

01:08:08 ►

Because it was the late 40s and they were already grown men.

01:08:12 ►

In terms of what you said, where did they come from?

01:08:15 ►

How did they materialize?

01:08:17 ►

Well, I think in every generation there is a certain percentage of people that are wired and geared to be innovators, to be artists, or to be frontier people.

01:08:30 ►

The bohemians, the romantics, the poets, the freethinkers, there’s this long tradition.

01:08:36 ►

The beatniks come from that tradition.

01:08:39 ►

They came along, of course, let’s see, in the 50s, they were kind of young men, Kerouac. They were in their 20s. And they looked around at Eisenhower and at Howdy Doody and, you know, squeaky clean stuff. this tradition of protest and rebellion and romantic individualism.

01:09:06 ►

And they were the first steps which led to, I think, the 60s and the 70s and the whiz kids.

01:09:13 ►

Did that make sense?

01:09:14 ►

Yeah.

01:09:15 ►

Were they like a subculture within the generational consciousness?

01:09:19 ►

Do you see what I’m getting at?

01:09:20 ►

Because the large generational consciousness was 50s, Eisenhower,

01:09:25 ►

but yet they were the same time and they were part of that generation, but yet they were different.

01:09:29 ►

So are they like a subspecies within that?

01:09:32 ►

Yes.

01:09:32 ►

You see, the generation before the baby boom, and it’s Kerouac, Ginsburg, I, I’m a little

01:09:38 ►

older, Neil Cassidy, the Beatniks, they came from a very small gene pool because they were kind of

01:09:50 ►

depression kids and there weren’t many of them. And so they didn’t have that enormous demographic

01:09:56 ►

sense of 76 million of them. They were kind of outcasts and they were living in garrets and they

01:10:01 ►

were living in the North Beach and in the Lower East Side of New York,

01:10:06 ►

carrying on the old bohemian tradition of consciousness and protest and rebellion.

01:10:12 ►

I honor them tremendously, and I think they kept the thing going.

01:10:19 ►

Tim, you talked once about the possibility that DNA chains have masked segments

01:10:25 ►

which at evolutionarily appropriate moments become unmasked

01:10:30 ►

and cause a kind of quantum leap in evolution.

01:10:34 ►

And I think I heard you kind of imply that you felt there might be some kind of design to that,

01:10:40 ►

kind of a plan to which segments were masked

01:10:44 ►

and kind of the appropriate timing of the unmasking.

01:10:47 ►

Could you say something more about that?

01:10:51 ►

Yes. Is the question clear?

01:10:54 ►

I believe that the human DNA code has expressed probably no more than half of its potential.

01:11:04 ►

I think the human species right now is a very juvenile species.

01:11:08 ►

I think that we’ve got a lot of stages to go through,

01:11:10 ►

just as a five-year-old doesn’t realize that it’s going to be a 16-year-old.

01:11:15 ►

And I think that there’s a lot of evidence to show that there are large areas of the DNA code

01:11:23 ►

that they don’t understand yet.

01:11:26 ►

Remember, the old scientists, they’re so pessimistic.

01:11:31 ►

They talk about junk DNA.

01:11:36 ►

Instead of saying DNA that we’re not smart enough to figure out.

01:11:47 ►

And in the… Those of you that read my books in the workshops on Saturday and Sunday,

01:11:51 ►

we’re going to go into the future stages of human evolution.

01:11:55 ►

I think I can predict the next eight or nine stages,

01:11:59 ►

inevitable stages of human evolution,

01:12:01 ►

and then it becomes our challenge and our opportunity

01:12:03 ►

to gear

01:12:05 ►

ourselves up personally to enjoy it and contribute to the next stages of evolution.

01:12:12 ►

Yeah.

01:12:15 ►

I just read your autobiography, and it was really inspiring to me, being a 36-year-old

01:12:21 ►

on the cusp, so to speak. And I wanted to ask you about, if you’ll address this,

01:12:29 ►

about Kennedy and what you think happened there with him

01:12:32 ►

and this woman that you talked about, Mary Pinchot.

01:12:36 ►

Yeah.

01:12:38 ►

Well, for those of you that haven’t read the book, obviously you should.

01:12:43 ►

If you want to pass Boulder 1A.

01:13:06 ►

I have a history of the 60s and 70s, and I was lucky enough to be involved with some of the most important events,

01:13:10 ►

cultural events, and some of the great heroes and heroines of that time.

01:13:14 ►

And one of the people that I write about is a woman named Mary Pinchot Meyer,

01:13:20 ►

who came from a very distinguished Washington East Coast family.

01:13:23 ►

Now, I didn’t know who she was when she came up to Harvard.

01:13:28 ►

We had a lot of people at Harvard come through and would take courses with us,

01:13:30 ►

and sometimes at Millbrook, too, they’d come through,

01:13:35 ►

and we’d check them out, and they seemed to be well-balanced people.

01:13:36 ►

We would train them and so forth.

01:13:39 ►

And she was part of this group of people. It was only later that I found out who she was.

01:13:43 ►

Her name was Mary Pincher Meyer, and for 32 months she was the mistress of Jack Kennedy.

01:13:47 ►

It’s also become obvious from many, many reports that she was bringing drugs, psychedelic drugs, into the White House and taking them with Jack Kennedy’s later years.

01:14:02 ►

and taking them with Jack Kennedy in his later years,

01:14:06 ►

and that there’s more and more evidence coming out,

01:14:07 ►

particularly now in 1983,

01:14:10 ►

which is the 20th anniversary of Jack Kennedy’s assassination.

01:14:12 ►

More stories are coming. You know, the real story of the Kennedy situation is locked in the files.

01:14:17 ►

It’s not supposed to be out in 50 years, is it?

01:14:18 ►

Do you know?

01:14:20 ►

I’m not sure, but I know for a long time.

01:14:23 ►

Yeah, probably something like that.

01:14:25 ►

But more of the stuff is coming out,

01:14:27 ►

and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that Jack Kennedy, in his last months,

01:14:32 ►

was really going through a change of philosophy.

01:14:34 ►

We know that he was thinking of pulling our people out of Vietnam.

01:14:38 ►

We know that he was angry at the CIA after the Bay of Pigs.

01:14:42 ►

Then tracking what happened with Bobby,

01:14:45 ►

you know, it’s no accident that Bobby,

01:14:48 ►

three or four years later,

01:14:50 ►

suddenly becomes a spokesperson for young people

01:14:52 ►

and grows his hair

01:14:54 ►

and becomes the most powerful anti-war person.

01:14:58 ►

There’s an enormous amount of evidence coming out now

01:15:01 ►

that Jack Kennedy was going through all sorts of changes politically,

01:15:06 ►

and I might use the word spiritually or certainly psychologically.

01:15:11 ►

And I describe the story of Mary Pinchelmeyer,

01:15:16 ►

and the interesting thing about Mary Pinchelmeyer was, I didn’t know it then, but it came out later,

01:15:21 ►

that she had been married to a man named Cordmeyer, Jr.

01:15:24 ►

Now, Cordmeyer, Jr. was a man that I knew when I was after World War II.

01:15:29 ►

It turns out that Cordmire Jr., you probably never heard, how many have ever heard of Cordmire Jr.?

01:15:33 ►

He turns out to be one of the original CIA youngsters, and over the years he’s become the Mr. Chips of the CIA.

01:15:41 ►

He’s probably the most single important CIA person in the history of

01:15:45 ►

that dubious organization. And he’s notorious as being the most hard line, the most fanatic, the

01:15:51 ►

most violently dogmatic person that never listens to anyone that’s convinced of his mission. And the

01:15:59 ►

mission of America is to somehow lock in some eternal love-hate relationship with his counterparts in the KGB.

01:16:09 ►

Now, Mary Pinchot Meyer, my friend, had been married to him.

01:16:13 ►

She was, therefore, a runaway CIA wife.

01:16:18 ►

A year after Jack Kennedy’s assassination, she was assassinated on the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath in Washington.

01:16:26 ►

A rather mysterious death because she was shot twice in the head and once in the body.

01:16:30 ►

She was not carrying a purse.

01:16:32 ►

There was no apparent motive.

01:16:34 ►

They never found the gun.

01:16:36 ►

They never found the assassin.

01:16:38 ►

The thing kind of just covered up.

01:16:41 ►

The fact that Kennedy’s mistress and the wife of a CIA official

01:16:47 ►

was killed this way I’m very interested in cover-ups I have no by the way I’m I

01:16:53 ►

have not a great conspiracy buff I don’t know who killed Kennedy of and I’m not

01:16:56 ►

implying any of that but I’m I’m suggesting that they’re incredible

01:16:59 ►

cover-ups here and as a scientist and as a as an intelligent American I want to

01:17:04 ►

know no and it gets very much

01:17:07 ►

involved. I had a lot of trouble in even mentioning some of this stuff in my book. And with the legal

01:17:11 ►

staff of my publishers, I had to censor several pages about the stuff I’m talking about now.

01:17:17 ►

And, well, I won’t go on, but you’re going to hear the name Mary Pinchelmeyer a lot,

01:17:22 ►

I think, in the next few months as we learn more about Jack Kennedy in his last years.

01:17:27 ►

Hi. Do you really think that we evolved that far from the amoeba?

01:17:31 ►

Well, first I have three questions.

01:17:32 ►

My first question is, do you really think we evolved that far from the amoeba?

01:17:36 ►

My second question is, I’m around youth a lot myself.

01:17:39 ►

To me, they seem to be so caught up in the bureaucracy.

01:17:42 ►

And I was wondering, with our advanced forms of communication

01:17:45 ►

and our games we have out, computer games,

01:17:49 ►

if somehow they’re going to take on

01:17:51 ►

and they’re going to be locked in the same dogma

01:17:53 ►

that our leaders are presently following.

01:17:55 ►

And my third question is,

01:17:56 ►

do you think if, as a society,

01:17:59 ►

we seen God as a woman, we’d still have wars?

01:18:05 ►

No, as a society, if we seen God as a woman, we’d still have wars. No, as a society, if we seen God as a woman, would we still have wars?

01:18:15 ►

Well, let’s ask Maggie Thatcher.

01:18:35 ►

It’s true that two of the most successful kick-ass leaders in the last ten years have been women, Indira Gandhi and Mrs. Thatcher.

01:18:37 ►

But there, again, is age.

01:18:42 ►

I hate to be repetitious here, but the answer to most questions have to do with age.

01:18:47 ►

And the first question was,

01:18:51 ►

will the younger generation, when they get into power, become bureaucratic like the old generations? That’s what the conservatives are counting on. They say, ha, we’re going

01:18:57 ►

to get them. We’ll co-op them. Ha, ha, ha. We’ll dangle a little power in front of them

01:19:01 ►

and they’ll become just like us. Well, good luck. I don’t

01:19:06 ►

think it’s going to happen that way. I think that, oh, granted, 76 million of you, you

01:19:12 ►

better believe there are a lot of military macho assholes among you. I’m not denying

01:19:15 ►

that. When I debate Gordon Liddy at colleges, there are a lot of ROTC guys with crew cuts in the front saying, you know, nuke Mother Teresa. So I’m not suggesting that all 76 million of you

01:19:33 ►

are Buddhas or Einsteins or Joan of Arc’s, but the basic mythos and the basic essential reality imprints of the generation comes during

01:19:48 ►

their adolescent years. Now, Ronnie Reagan and Tip O’Neill’s adolescent years, their

01:19:52 ►

60s hero was, you know what I’m going to say, Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt was the great

01:20:00 ►

macho hero of that generation. About, you know, 1906, 1908, 1910. Good old Teddy

01:20:06 ►

Roosevelt, he went down to Cuba and he

01:20:07 ►

kicked ass and he defeated the Spanish

01:20:09 ►

there. Then he got to be president

01:20:11 ►

and he carried a big stick.

01:20:14 ►

The headline in the

01:20:15 ►

Cover Time magazine says, big stick,

01:20:18 ►

just last week. I mean, it’s so obvious

01:20:20 ►

that then

01:20:21 ►

talk about Nicaragua, give me a

01:20:23 ►

break.

01:20:26 ►

Teddy Roosevelt went down there.

01:20:27 ►

He wanted the Panama Canal.

01:20:28 ►

And he said to Columbia, get out.

01:20:29 ►

I’m just going to take it.

01:20:30 ►

You know, I’ll show you who’s boss.

01:20:31 ►

It’s been a recurrent malarial fever, Caribbean fever.

01:20:35 ►

President Sence said, Teddy Roosevelt,

01:20:37 ►

if you want to show you’re tough and strong,

01:20:38 ►

bully the Latin Americans.

01:20:40 ►

That’s so…

01:20:42 ►

But the younger generation, your heroes, they’re not Teddy Roosevelt. I mean, he’s a real

01:20:48 ►

joker, that Teddy Roosevelt running around, you know, safaris in Africa and so forth. Your heroes

01:20:55 ►

are people like Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac,

01:21:13 ►

Ken Kesey, you know, your heroes are your basic generational adolescent realities are, I think, much more individualistic and questioning authority.

01:21:32 ►

And I’m going to continue to tell your generation, to remind you of this and to look around and you’re going to find, I believe it true that when, if we could have a 37 or 8 year old or a 40 year old, in 1988 or 1990,

01:21:39 ►

we had a 40 year old young cabinet of American men and women, you know, going over the Soviet Union, you know, with those geriatric dinosaurs there.

01:21:45 ►

I think they really are going to make a difference.

01:21:52 ►

Yeah, people are saying they need to go along.

01:21:57 ►

That’s certainly a problem in human nature,

01:22:01 ►

social contagion and docility.

01:22:05 ►

I simply am convinced that your generation is more

01:22:08 ►

skeptical, more realistic, and

01:22:09 ►

if a bunch of your generation are saying,

01:22:12 ►

hey, yeah, it’d be nice to have a man

01:22:14 ►

on a white horse come along, isn’t that great?

01:22:16 ►

I think there are enough of you that say, hey, are you crazy?

01:22:18 ►

You know, and I’m going to be around

01:22:20 ►

reminding you,

01:22:22 ►

don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters.

01:22:24 ►

reminding you don’t follow leaders watch your parking meters you’re listening to the psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a

01:22:33 ►

time don’t follow leaders watch your parking meters and even though it’s been 25 years since a good Dr. Leary made that statement, I think it’s still good advice.

01:22:48 ►

But isn’t it a shame that Timothy Leary’s hope and faith in the baby boomers turning things around was so badly misplaced?

01:22:57 ►

From where I stand, it looks to me like the baby boomers, like little Georgie Bush, have just made a bigger mess of things.

01:23:06 ►

Granted, the world isn’t as tightly screwed down as it was when I was growing up in the 40s and 50s,

01:23:13 ►

and there no longer is a draft,

01:23:15 ►

but we’ve still got a long way to go before we see anything close to a free and just society

01:23:22 ►

with leaders that we can trust.

01:23:24 ►

Now, I did edit out a few of his comments about the political situation at the time,

01:23:29 ►

but I tried to leave in enough to give you the flavor of the times without covering what

01:23:34 ►

now is ancient history.

01:23:36 ►

However, I kept his entire rap about the Republicans being mean people because from an historical

01:23:43 ►

perspective, I think it’s interesting that 25 years before

01:23:47 ►

the end of what has now been eight years of mean Republican hell, that Dr. Leary was so

01:23:53 ►

perceptive.

01:23:55 ►

I can only imagine what he’d be saying right now after so firmly stating that age is the

01:24:00 ►

key to politics.

01:24:02 ►

We’ll just have to stay tuned to see how things turn out with young Mr. Obama.

01:24:07 ►

And did you notice that Dr. Leary mentioned the word neoteny?

01:24:12 ►

You know, when I heard Terrence McKenna talk about that concept in my last podcast,

01:24:16 ►

it was the first time I remember ever hearing the word.

01:24:19 ►

Now we hear Timothy Leary talking about the same thing a good 15 years or so before Terence did in that one recording.

01:24:28 ►

And I’m not suggesting that Terence was copying or borrowing or anything like that.

01:24:34 ►

What I’m impressed with is the wide range of Timothy Leary’s knowledge and the synchronicity of the two of them,

01:24:41 ►

mentioning the same relatively obscure concept in two very randomly selected lectures.

01:24:48 ►

Well, there are several other things I feel like I should mention right now,

01:24:52 ►

but to tell the truth, I’m finding it a little difficult to get back into the groove

01:24:57 ►

after the disruption of the holidays.

01:25:00 ►

Although it hasn’t been holiday time for all of our fellow salonners,

01:25:04 ►

although it hasn’t been holiday time for all of our fellow salonners I do suspect that the last two weeks have been somewhat disruptive anyway

01:25:10 ►

due to so many people who actually do to get into the holiday spirit

01:25:14 ►

and now we’ve all got to take stock and look forward to this new year we’ve just begun

01:25:20 ►

that said it’s still going to take another week or so for me to get up to speed once

01:25:26 ►

again. So instead of me rambling on a while longer, I’m going to close for today and get this podcast

01:25:32 ►

posted, at least to iTunes, which reminds me that I forgot to post the program notes for my last

01:25:39 ►

podcast, and I’ll try to get that done in the next day or so, along with the ones for today’s podcast.

01:25:44 ►

and I’ll try to get that done in the next day or so, along with the ones for today’s podcast.

01:25:48 ►

I know a lot of people don’t subscribe through the RSS feed,

01:25:53 ►

and so they most likely don’t know that a new program’s been available since Christmas Eve.

01:26:00 ►

Now, if I was into New Year’s resolutions, I’d resolve to post my program notes sooner.

01:26:04 ►

But knowing my past history with New Year’s resolutions, I probably wouldn’t keep it

01:26:06 ►

very long. So now that I no longer make these false promises to myself, I do feel better about

01:26:12 ►

life. But I guess that in order to get this New Year off properly, I’d probably better come clean

01:26:19 ►

with you about something that has provided much merriment to my family, and that is my Facebook account.

01:26:27 ►

As you know, about a month ago,

01:26:29 ►

my youngest son more or less shamed me into setting up a Facebook page,

01:26:34 ►

and I’d been resisting that for a long time,

01:26:36 ►

primarily due to my experience of being kicked off of MySpace

01:26:40 ►

for reasons I still don’t understand.

01:26:43 ►

But I finally relented and signed up for an account.

01:26:46 ►

But in the back of my mind, I kept thinking that we’d better be really discreet this time

01:26:51 ►

so that the little behind-the-scenes censors don’t panic and delete my account.

01:26:56 ►

So what name or pseudonym should I use, I wondered.

01:27:00 ►

But I finally decided to just go with my name, Lorenzo Haggerty.

01:27:04 ►

At least that was my original plan.

01:27:07 ►

Now, if you’ve searched for me on Facebook under Lorenzo or my former first name, Lawrence, you won’t find me.

01:27:15 ►

And the reason is that on Facebook, and only on Facebook, I’m spelling my first name L-A-W-R-E-N-Z-O.

01:27:24 ►

Sort of a kludge between Lawrence and Lorenzo.

01:27:28 ►

Now, some of the enterprising people who actually did find me on Facebook

01:27:32 ►

have speculated that I was playing on the fact that I was once a lawyer

01:27:37 ►

or that some of my friends, like Gene Stolaroff, like to pronounce my name Lorenzo.

01:27:46 ►

And a few people have speculated that I did this just to throw people off

01:27:50 ►

and that you’ve really got to search to find me there

01:27:53 ►

because I’m trying this time to keep a low profile.

01:27:57 ►

And all of those reasons work for me, actually.

01:28:00 ►

But it was a close friend who wasn’t afraid to state the truth to me. He said, my God, Lorenzo, writing your first name is as automatic as it gets.

01:28:11 ►

You must have been really stoned.

01:28:14 ►

And so the truth is finally known.

01:28:18 ►

You know, I can actually remember seeing the warning notice that said I could change any of the original information I submitted except my

01:28:25 ►

name.

01:28:26 ►

And I actually remember reading that, but I didn’t bother to check my name, of course,

01:28:30 ►

because that’s so automatic, right?

01:28:33 ►

Well, not when you’re overly stoned, it isn’t so automatic.

01:28:37 ►

And now I’m going to circle around to an actual point to this confession.

01:28:42 ►

About the same time that I realized the mistake I’d made, Charlie

01:28:45 ►

Grobe sent me an article about some research that showed that cannabis may be of some benefit

01:28:51 ►

in holding off the ravages of dementia and Alzheimer’s, which is very good news if it

01:28:57 ►

proves to be true. However, in the case of us old guys who are heavy cannabis users,

01:29:03 ►

it at least provides a good cover.

01:29:06 ►

I can’t say for sure whether my screw-up was caused by carelessness, confusion, old age, dementia, or whatever.

01:29:13 ►

But if you’re an old stoner, no one thinks about those conditions when you do something silly.

01:29:18 ►

They just react like my friend and conclude that I was really, really stoned.

01:29:23 ►

Now, maybe I’m starting to lose some of my mental faculties, although I don’t think so

01:29:28 ►

myself.

01:29:29 ►

But in any event, it’s going to be very difficult for my friends to figure out whether I’m going

01:29:33 ►

batty or just enjoying some primo herb.

01:29:37 ►

So there’s the truth about why only the most dedicated among us have been able to find

01:29:43 ►

me on Facebook.

01:29:44 ►

So I hope I’ve provided you with a little laugh at my expense to get your year going.

01:29:49 ►

And stay tuned because I have a feeling that I’m going to have much more foolishness to report about myself in the months ahead.

01:29:57 ►

But until then, keep the old faith and stay high, as Terrence says.

01:30:01 ►

Hi, as Terrence says.

01:30:08 ►

Now, as always, I’ll close this podcast by saying that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are available for your use under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Like 3.0 license.

01:30:14 ►

And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of our Psychedelic Salon webpage,

01:30:21 ►

which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:30:24 ►

And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts,

01:30:27 ►

assuming I get going and get them done.

01:30:32 ►

Anyhow, Happy New Year.

01:30:33 ►

I’m glad you’re still with us,

01:30:35 ►

and I look forward to many good times ahead with you this year.

01:30:38 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:30:44 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

167 - Evolution of Intelligence

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