Program Notes
Guest speakers: Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson
[NOTE: All of the following quotations are by Timothy Leary.]
“I don’t want to legalize drugs. It’s not the government’s business to legalize anything we do privately in our own homes. Are they going to legalize masturbation.”
“By far, the number one problem facing our species for the last 25,000 years has been the relentless, ruthless, perennial, almost invisible oppression of women and children by armed men. And it starts in the home.”
“The concept of a generation implies that young people are doing something different.”
“Each of these generations, my generation and the so-called hippie generation, we’re heroic. We were thrown into the future where there was no map, where there were no guidebooks.”
“Hippies, to be honest, were not very hip, compared to the beatniks.”
“The function of the 21st century is to learn how to operate our brains.”
“The human brain is designed to design realities.”
“You have to face the fact that people born between 1946 and 1964 are a new species.”
“The way evolution, as I understand it, works is DNA, biological intelligence, Gaia wisdom, egg intelligence does not like final forms. … You’ll see the word ‘adult’ is the past participle of the word ‘grow’. In other words, an adult is someone who has stopped growing, and it is also someone who has reached their final form. And if there is one thing you can say about evolution, she does not like final forms.”
“There really is an awesome epidemic of deliberate stupidity that is laid upon us by the media, by the press, by magazines and so forth. They simply do not raise any of the issues that challenge our interests or intelligence.”
[Quoting Abbie Hoffmann] “We may have been young, and we may have been silly, and we may have been idealistic, and we may have been too romantic, but god damn it, we were right!”
“I have one cause, and that’s the goal of the performing philosopher, is to encourage you, and inspire you, and empower you, to the extent I can, to Think for Yourself and Question Authority.”
Cody & Sancho’s Podcasting Tutorial
The Conversations Network (Levelator)
Previous Episode
177 - Surfing Finnegans Wake Part 2
Next Episode
179 - Timothy Leary at Cornell – 1989″
Similar Episodes
- 133 - The Cyber Society - score: 0.84522
- 152 - Question Authority and Think for Yourself - score: 0.83160
- 322 - The Evolution of Intelligence - score: 0.81345
- 183 - What Are Humans For_ - score: 0.80618
- 304 - Timothy Leary and Jerry Brown in 1995 - score: 0.78422
- 175 - The Intelligent Use of Psychedelic Drugs - score: 0.78390
- 192 - Timothy Leary Live at the Stone – 1987″ - score: 0.78116
- 145 - Leary-Live at the Inside Edge - score: 0.77592
- 219 - Tim Leary Live in San Francisco 1979″ Part 2 - score: 0.75873
- 473 - Outcasts and Future People - score: 0.75120
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
We’ve got an interesting program today with two of our old friends, Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.
00:00:35 ►
And I’ll tell you more about the short talks I’m going to play in just a minute.
00:00:40 ►
But first, I want to thank two of our fellow salonners who sent in donations this past week,
00:00:43 ►
and they are Mark S. and Robert O.
00:00:46 ►
So thank you very much, Mark and Robert.
00:00:47 ►
What can I say?
00:00:52 ►
If you’re new to the salon, by the way, you might not have heard me mention Robert before,
00:00:55 ►
but he’s been with us since the beginning.
00:00:58 ►
And what’s more, he’s, like me, he’s a grandfather.
00:01:02 ►
And I have a special affinity for grandfathers these days.
00:01:08 ►
And my guess is that, also like me, being a grandfather is probably one of the high points of his life.
00:01:09 ►
So Robert and Mark, hey, thanks again for your help.
00:01:12 ►
It means a lot to me.
00:01:15 ►
So what’s in store here in the salon today?
00:01:18 ►
Well, thanks to Dennis Berry and Bruce Dahmer and quite a few volunteers who digitized this material.
00:01:26 ►
We have some more talks from the Timothy Leary archives.
00:01:30 ►
As I’ve gradually been working my way through all of the files that they sent,
00:01:36 ►
I’ve come across a number of short segments that were recorded in several different settings.
00:01:41 ►
And so I thought it might be interesting to get some of these bits and pieces out into the light of day.
00:01:46 ►
So the first bit I’m going to play is from a tape that was labeled
00:01:50 ►
Timothy Leary and Michael Benner, 5-7-93, recorded at Leary’s home in L.A.
00:01:57 ►
Now, I’m not going to play this entire conversation
00:02:01 ►
because much of it was political speculation and wishful thinking
00:02:06 ►
about what the Clinton administration would bring.
00:02:09 ►
And we know how poorly that turned out.
00:02:12 ►
Poor Tim’s faith in the Clintons was certainly misplaced.
00:02:15 ►
But there are a few parts that provide an interesting perspective on how significantly
00:02:20 ►
life in the West has changed since the time of Tim Leary’s birth.
00:02:24 ►
He was 72 years old at the time of Tim Leary’s birth.
00:02:28 ►
He was 72 years old at the time of this interview,
00:02:33 ►
and looking back, I’d say those were 72 years of gut-wrenching change,
00:02:37 ►
sort of like the times we’re now entering into once again.
00:02:41 ►
So let’s listen to this first little segment,
00:02:45 ►
and then I’ll be back to tell you about some of the other little gems I found.
00:02:51 ►
It’s 1993, Tim. Where are we with LSD in 1993?
00:02:55 ►
Well, LSD has been
00:02:59 ►
a factor, I would say a significant factor,
00:03:03 ►
in incredible social and cultural changes that have taken place in the last 20 or 30 years.
00:03:08 ►
So it’s kind of hard to talk about LSD without talking about the context of
00:03:13 ►
tremendous cultural revolution and social change
00:03:18 ►
that we’ve all been going through.
00:03:22 ►
And when you talk about Millennium Mad madness, this change is going to accelerate
00:03:25 ►
in the next seven years
00:03:27 ►
as we zoom towards the 21st century.
00:03:31 ►
And there is now,
00:03:36 ►
as you know,
00:03:36 ►
a so-called resurgence of LSD.
00:03:40 ►
I never believe anything I read in the paper
00:03:43 ►
about anything,
00:03:44 ►
particularly about personal lives and drugs.
00:03:48 ►
But I spent a lot of time in college campuses, and there’s no question that there’s a new generation of college students who are taking LSD thoughtfully, quietly, planfully.
00:04:03 ►
And I don’t want to use the word seriously
00:04:05 ►
not too seriously
00:04:07 ►
you stole me
00:04:08 ►
but with an attitude of
00:04:11 ►
spiritual ambition
00:04:13 ►
and of celebration
00:04:15 ►
and yes
00:04:16 ►
we’ll throw in a little pagan Dionysian stuff here
00:04:18 ►
spiritual ambition
00:04:19 ►
what a wonderful phrase
00:04:22 ►
and I don’t know if this is relevant here
00:04:24 ►
but I don’t want to legalize drugs.
00:04:28 ►
It’s none of the government’s business to legalize anything that we do privately in our homes, adults.
00:04:34 ►
Are they going to legalize masturbation?
00:04:37 ►
Are they going to, of course…
00:04:38 ►
Or your vegetable garden.
00:04:40 ►
Yeah, right. I know that if the right-wingers really took over, they would legalize only face-to-face lovemaking with your eyes closed in the dark in the missionary position.
00:04:54 ►
So, it’s none of their business. So, I don’t want the government to legalize anything I do that has to do with my own private genetic life. I must say, though, that all politics starts in the home.
00:05:07 ►
And the number one…
00:05:08 ►
Here I get one.
00:05:10 ►
Millennium madness ranting.
00:05:11 ►
I’ll rant for you here.
00:05:12 ►
Rant.
00:05:13 ►
I was hoping you would.
00:05:15 ►
We’ll shove him the rant button.
00:05:16 ►
Here we go.
00:05:17 ►
Buckle your seatbelt.
00:05:20 ►
By far the number one problem facing our species for the last 25,000 years has been the relentless, ruthless, perennial, almost invisible oppression of women and children by armed men.
00:05:43 ►
every 13 minutes or 13 seconds,
00:05:46 ►
a woman is beaten up by someone that they know,
00:05:48 ►
not to mention the abuse of children,
00:05:49 ►
so that they… When you get right down to it,
00:05:50 ►
it starts in the home and in the neighborhood.
00:05:56 ►
I’m 72 years old.
00:05:58 ►
I went through the 20s.
00:06:00 ►
I belonged to the first generation
00:06:02 ►
that was ever called a generation.
00:06:05 ►
Until the 1920s, they didn’t talk about generations.
00:06:09 ►
You don’t live for a hundred or a thousand years and there’s no kids coming along doing something different.
00:06:15 ►
The concept of a generation implies that young people are doing something different.
00:06:20 ►
Change.
00:06:20 ►
Yeah, and in the 20s, there was an incredible empowerment of young people.
00:06:26 ►
This is all based on McLuhan.
00:06:28 ►
McLuhan said, the medium is the message, the medium creates the reality,
00:06:32 ►
the medium creates the species, really.
00:06:35 ►
And I belong to the first generation of human beings
00:06:38 ►
who, as children in their own home, could listen to radio
00:06:44 ►
and could listen to events happening
00:06:46 ►
hundreds of thousands of miles away.
00:06:49 ►
Also, I was the first generation of kids that grew up where there was a telephone in the home.
00:06:54 ►
I’m talking about the average home.
00:06:57 ►
What that means is that my generation is a heroic generation.
00:07:00 ►
That’s why we got so involved.
00:07:02 ►
I can remember when I was 12 years old listening to
00:07:05 ►
Benny Goodman playing from the
00:07:07 ►
starlight roof of the Hotel Pennsylvania
00:07:09 ►
in downtown New York. Boy, did that
00:07:11 ►
work. Or Tommy Dorsey in the
00:07:13 ►
Palladium in Sunset Hollywood.
00:07:15 ►
Then I heard Franklin
00:07:17 ►
Roosevelt talk about
00:07:18 ►
we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
00:07:22 ►
I heard,
00:07:23 ►
I remember sitting with my mother listening to translations
00:07:25 ►
of Hitler I could hear Hitler’s voice announcing you know what he was planning so that that is
00:07:32 ►
following McLuhan I belong we belong my generation’s new species we the first globally hooked up
00:07:39 ►
species that’s why we were so involved World War II that’s why after World War II
00:07:45 ►
my generation
00:07:47 ►
was the first conquering group in history
00:07:50 ►
that instead of looting
00:07:51 ►
and raping
00:07:53 ►
and exploiting
00:07:54 ►
and occupying
00:07:55 ►
the defeated countries
00:07:56 ►
we turned around like good social workers
00:07:58 ►
we’re trapped by Benjamin Spock
00:08:00 ►
we helped them out
00:08:02 ►
Germany, yeah
00:08:03 ►
they’re screwed up kids
00:08:04 ►
oh those naughty Japanese well then we’ll help them out give them more yeah, they’re screwed up kids.
00:08:06 ►
Oh, those naughty Japanese.
00:08:08 ►
Well, then we’ll help them out, give them more self-respect.
00:08:15 ►
And all of our, the first time in history that the victors went all out to try to put the,
00:08:20 ►
and I’m proud of my generation and also proud of my generation because with Dr. Spock as our Bible our bible biblical prophet we did something that had
00:08:26 ►
never been done in world history we were taught by spark treat your kids as individuals so then
00:08:33 ►
the next generation they they’re called the baby boomers uh they grew up in the 50s and they’re a
00:08:41 ►
magical generation and a heroic generation because they were the first generation of human beings that grew up during the Chomsky window. You learn languages between three and twelve with television.
00:09:04 ►
having a psychedelic session, we didn’t use the word turn on and tune in.
00:09:05 ►
That came from the street.
00:09:09 ►
That came from the kids because they were the first generation that could dial and tune and turn on this alternative reality.
00:09:12 ►
Yeah.
00:09:13 ►
That also leads to the, again, each of these generations, my generation and the so-called
00:09:19 ►
hippie generation, were heroic.
00:09:21 ►
We were thrown into the future where no, no, there were no maps,
00:09:25 ►
there was no guidebooks. And I’m proud to say that my generation, right now, they’re
00:09:35 ►
pretty nasty, senile, grabbing, the worst thing in the world you want in government
00:09:39 ►
health care. Can you think of that? Is that a noxiemoron? I mean, it’s the ultimate sanity.
00:09:43 ►
You want politicians to be in charge of your care.
00:09:46 ►
But anyway, but the hippie generation
00:09:48 ►
was, again, a wonderful generation
00:09:50 ►
thrown out there in the future.
00:09:52 ►
Peace and love and stop the war in Vietnam
00:09:54 ►
and the various…
00:09:58 ►
It’s a humanism.
00:09:59 ►
And a belief that we really could make the world a better place.
00:10:03 ►
Well, they did, they did.
00:10:04 ►
And it is a better place.
00:10:05 ►
It caused a lot of trouble,
00:10:06 ►
because as soon as you get people free,
00:10:08 ►
then a lot of people don’t know how to handle freedom, but still.
00:10:12 ►
And now, of course, people are putting the…
00:10:14 ►
It’s true, the hippie generation,
00:10:16 ►
they were not very literate.
00:10:19 ►
They could spell M-I-C-K-Y-M-O-U-S-E,
00:10:24 ►
but it’s not known.
00:10:26 ►
Only if we sang it, we could get a hit start.
00:10:28 ►
The hippie generation is not known for great writers,
00:10:30 ►
and they tend to become passive, and they also know it all.
00:10:34 ►
Let’s see, if we look back, hippies, to be honest,
00:10:37 ►
were not very hip compared to the beatniks.
00:10:40 ►
And now we’ve got this new generation coming along
00:10:42 ►
of the children of the baby boomers
00:10:45 ►
I don’t know what you want to call them, generation X
00:10:47 ►
I spend most of my time now with kids under the age of 29
00:10:50 ►
they’re teaching me, they’re training me how to use these new languages
00:10:53 ►
and again, they’ve been thrown
00:10:56 ►
into another incredibly confusing future
00:11:01 ►
that a first generation of Americans
00:11:03 ►
kids that knew they were never
00:11:05 ►
going to have the money that their parents had, probably could never have a
00:11:08 ►
house, they’ve had to face the collapse of all the solidities, religious and
00:11:12 ►
political. And if you look at it that way, as we move towards the Millennium, I
00:11:17 ►
think all of us should try to kind of look at the last 80 years we’ve been
00:11:21 ►
through and celebrate. It is madness madness it’s madness because it’s unpredictable
00:11:29 ►
unknown dr spock was a boy scout i mean captain kirk they were puddling around with little baby
00:11:35 ►
stuff compared with what our three generations have gone through and i’m going to like urge
00:11:41 ►
anyone who listens to this invitation about the money of madness thing, if you’re older,
00:11:45 ►
you know, if you’re in your,
00:11:47 ►
I’m 70, if you’re 60 or 50,
00:11:49 ►
come on down,
00:11:50 ►
and let’s celebrate
00:11:51 ►
the three generations of Americans
00:11:53 ►
who have really heroically,
00:11:56 ►
and not knowing that whole point,
00:11:57 ►
you didn’t know what we were doing.
00:11:59 ►
Now you can kind of look back and realize
00:12:00 ►
what was going on.
00:12:02 ►
Let’s make this money of madness thing
00:12:03 ►
a reunion,
00:12:05 ►
a coming together
00:12:06 ►
of the three generations.
00:12:07 ►
Instead of the,
00:12:08 ►
it is true,
00:12:08 ►
the older people
00:12:09 ►
are now trying to grab
00:12:10 ►
all the money
00:12:10 ►
and the younger kids
00:12:11 ►
don’t have,
00:12:12 ►
they’re all overqualified
00:12:13 ►
and underemployed
00:12:15 ►
and the baby boomers
00:12:18 ►
are becoming kind of,
00:12:18 ►
you know, settled in.
00:12:19 ►
But I propose
00:12:21 ►
this Millennium Madness
00:12:22 ►
be an incredible celebration.
00:12:24 ►
We survived. Yeah, that’s the reason we be an incredible celebration. We survived.
00:12:25 ►
Yeah, that’s the reason to celebrate.
00:12:27 ►
80 years.
00:12:28 ►
We are survivors.
00:12:29 ►
Let me ask you one final question.
00:12:32 ►
The 60s seemed to be, if they were about one thing, about love.
00:12:37 ►
Peace and love.
00:12:37 ►
The peace and love generation.
00:12:40 ►
As I have grown older, and you’re sharing your age, I’ll share my age.
00:12:44 ►
I’m 45. Graduated from high school in 66 and college is that a year right there, okay?
00:12:51 ►
As I’ve gotten older and evolved
00:12:54 ►
tacos journalist
00:12:56 ►
Somebody’s still looking for answers and understanding
00:12:58 ►
I I know that that heart part the love and the peace is still very important
00:13:03 ►
I don’t mean to diminish it at all.
00:13:05 ►
But I’ve also come to understand the importance
00:13:07 ►
of
00:13:08 ►
more choices.
00:13:11 ►
Creativity. Imagination.
00:13:15 ►
Vision.
00:13:17 ►
And I look at computers
00:13:19 ►
and I know you’re interested in computers
00:13:22 ►
too. And I remember
00:13:23 ►
something Bucky Fuller once said about we have all the right technology, but for all the wrong reasons.
00:13:30 ►
And I’m wondering as you look…
00:13:31 ►
Well, they said that was, this is incredible hardware, but there’s no software to humanize it.
00:13:37 ►
Or the wetware up here.
00:13:38 ►
Well, yeah, the wetware is there. We have to learn how to operate it.
00:13:41 ►
There, that’s the question I’m asking.
00:13:44 ►
What are the right reasons to use computers? are we headed in the year two so what are we
00:13:49 ►
supposed to do with these machines what can we do as we learn to see them as extensions of our
00:13:55 ►
central nervous system to empower us to have more choices and more answers what are we going to do
00:14:00 ►
with them well this is my viewpoint uh i’m going to energetically and as passionately
00:14:07 ►
as I can articulate it in the next few years. The function of the 21st century is to learn
00:14:16 ►
how to operate our brains. We do not know how to operate our brains. We do not know
00:14:19 ►
how to turn them on or turn them off or dial, you know, left brain, right brain, we know a little bit about it, but we’re going to be able to use multimedia electronic appliances to communicate,
00:14:34 ►
to create new languages that are not just verbal and just English or Japanese. It’s
00:14:40 ►
going to be a, the very concept, when I say you must learn how to operate your brain,
00:14:47 ►
that concept is very new.
00:14:49 ►
I’ve never heard anyone say that before three or four or five years ago.
00:14:52 ►
Operate your brain.
00:14:53 ►
We’re not supposed to operate your brain.
00:14:55 ►
You don’t operate your heart, you don’t operate your liver,
00:14:57 ►
but the human brain is designed to design realities.
00:15:01 ►
And, of course, none of the educational or religious or political decisions
00:15:07 ►
want you to know that your job in life
00:15:10 ►
is to learn how to operate your brain
00:15:11 ►
and do that kind of thing, change everything.
00:15:15 ►
To invent your life and make it up as you go along,
00:15:17 ►
to design it as you should.
00:15:18 ►
Yeah, yeah.
00:15:19 ►
So that’s the encouraging…
00:15:22 ►
So we have to go from seeing ourselves as victims
00:15:24 ►
or a fact to taking responsibility for our lives.
00:15:26 ►
That’s a major attitude shift.
00:15:28 ►
That’s a 180.
00:15:29 ►
Thank you.
00:15:30 ►
Oh, yeah, that’s been my motto for the last month.
00:15:35 ►
Don’t become a victim.
00:15:37 ►
The number one industry in America today are all these victim industries.
00:15:42 ►
You can’t name an orifice in the body or a problem.
00:15:44 ►
They don’t have a
00:15:45 ►
a foundation
00:15:46 ►
or a government grant
00:15:47 ►
and those politicians
00:15:49 ►
and administrators
00:15:50 ►
and bureaucrats
00:15:50 ►
they’re trying to make us
00:15:51 ►
all victims
00:15:52 ►
every politician
00:15:53 ►
of course
00:15:54 ►
and all these new
00:15:56 ►
illnesses they’re inventing
00:15:57 ►
and every day
00:15:59 ►
you see some doctors
00:16:00 ►
found that
00:16:00 ►
cholesterol is good
00:16:01 ►
no it’s bad
00:16:02 ►
white sugar is good
00:16:03 ►
no it’s bad
00:16:03 ►
they’re trying to make us
00:16:04 ►
feel victimized.
00:16:06 ►
Don’t be a victim.
00:16:08 ►
Be smart, be alert, be shrewd.
00:16:10 ►
Avoid trouble.
00:16:12 ►
Street smarts.
00:16:13 ►
I’m not saying just wander around loving and believing everything,
00:16:17 ►
but I’m glad you brought that up because you triggered that off.
00:16:22 ►
I think that’s baseline.
00:16:23 ►
It’s a very fundamental kind of a concept.
00:16:27 ►
Well, listen, thanks for being available.
00:16:29 ►
Millennium Madness is coming up.
00:16:32 ►
Let’s get the dates and the times here.
00:16:33 ►
Saturday, May 29th at the Scottish Rite.
00:16:36 ►
Your friend Bob Wilson is going to be there.
00:16:39 ►
Good pal.
00:16:41 ►
Jack Harer, who wrote The Emperor Wears No Clothes.
00:16:44 ►
Paul Krasner.
00:16:45 ►
Paul Krasner and I go way, way back.
00:16:46 ►
He’s one of the funniest guys around.
00:16:48 ►
The original Yippies and one of my favorite troublemakers.
00:16:51 ►
Yep.
00:16:52 ►
Roy of Hollywood.
00:16:53 ►
You know Roy of Hollywood.
00:16:54 ►
Sure do, yep.
00:16:55 ►
And I want to repeat again,
00:16:57 ►
this is going to be a great celebration.
00:17:00 ►
And invite your parents.
00:17:01 ►
If you’re 18 years old, invite your hippie parents.
00:17:06 ►
And if you’re in the 40s, invite the grandparents, because instead of quarreling with each other,
00:17:14 ►
we should all glorify the three of us, three generations of…
00:17:20 ►
We’ve led the world. It happened here because of communication, and it’s a very, very positive message,
00:17:27 ►
which I think is going to get the new millennium going,
00:17:31 ►
get it going to a good start.
00:17:34 ►
Timothy Leary, thank you very much.
00:17:35 ►
Good.
00:17:39 ►
Before we move on to other thoughts,
00:17:41 ►
I would like to return for just a minute
00:17:43 ►
and say something about what Dr. Leary just said about what he considers to be the biggest threat to our species.
00:17:50 ►
Here’s what he said.
00:17:52 ►
By far, the number one problem facing our species for the last 25,000 years has been the relentless, ruthless, perennial, and almost invisible oppression of women and children by armed men.
00:18:06 ►
And it starts in the home.
00:18:09 ►
And I am in complete agreement with him on that point.
00:18:12 ►
But while it seems obvious that any child who is raised in a family where spousal abuse takes place
00:18:18 ►
is going to be emotionally scarred for life,
00:18:22 ►
but there are other, less obvious ways that we cause emotional
00:18:26 ►
and mental harm to our children. I saw one example when I was at the gym the other day and
00:18:31 ►
watched a very stern-faced father half-drag a crying, barefoot little boy behind him.
00:18:37 ►
The child couldn’t have been much over three, and he obviously didn’t want to be left in the
00:18:42 ►
child care room while his father worked out. And I heard his father yelling at him that men don’t cry and that it was time for him to start growing up.
00:18:51 ►
Well, with a role model like that, it isn’t hard to figure out what kind of a father that little boy will grow up and become.
00:18:58 ►
But an example that is closer to home is the way I often acted.
00:19:03 ►
Like many other misled fathers,
00:19:06 ►
I thought that if I worked like a madman for most of the year,
00:19:09 ►
it would be worth it if our family could take a spectacular summer vacation.
00:19:13 ►
And we did.
00:19:14 ►
And they are still among my children’s most treasured memories.
00:19:18 ►
But what I regret is coming home way too many nights,
00:19:23 ►
just completely exhausted. And all I wanted to do was to have a drink and be left alone.
00:19:29 ►
I hadn’t seen my wife and children since morning, and now I tried to tune them out in the evenings.
00:19:35 ►
I don’t mean to imply that it was like that every night, but it happened often enough to still be a clear memory for me.
00:19:47 ►
memory for me. Although I try to avoid looking back and playing the what-if game, I can’t deny the fact that I would give a lot just to have one of those evenings back again. And yes, my little
00:19:53 ►
lecture here is intentional because I know that there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of fellow
00:19:58 ►
salonners who have children, children of all ages. And I happen to think that nothing is more
00:20:04 ►
important, nothing is more important to the future of our species
00:20:07 ►
than our children, grandchildren, and the greats,
00:20:11 ►
if you’re so fortunate to live that long.
00:20:13 ►
They are the future.
00:20:15 ►
And as hard as it may be on some days,
00:20:18 ►
above everything else you do each day,
00:20:20 ►
the half hour of one-on-one time with them
00:20:23 ►
will probably do more for the world than anything else you can do. Okay, the half hour of one-on-one time with them will probably do more for the world
00:20:25 ►
than anything else you can do.
00:20:28 ►
Okay, no more lectures today.
00:20:30 ►
As you might have guessed, besides the fact that there was a lot of really good information
00:20:35 ►
in those few brief sound bites, I had another reason to play it as well, and that is I want
00:20:40 ►
to point out what mainstream America was like as recently as 1993.
00:20:46 ►
At that time, most of the people in this land still actually believed in the USA being the good guy and not looting other countries.
00:20:54 ►
With the exception of the Vietnam vets and their families, of course.
00:20:58 ►
We understood.
00:21:00 ►
But as it is becoming so painfully clear right now, that little bit of American lore was quite far from the truth.
00:21:08 ►
After all, with only around 5% of the world’s population, we consume over 30% of its resources.
00:21:15 ►
And now we discover that the gnomes behind the curtain are the Wall Street and international bankers, the financial wheelers and dealers.
00:21:23 ►
and international bankers, the financial wheelers and dealers.
00:21:26 ►
But don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere with this.
00:21:32 ►
I just thought it’s interesting to see how much and how quickly public opinion can change.
00:21:34 ►
Oh, and one more thing.
00:21:38 ►
For the record, I am not a member of the baby boom generation.
00:21:42 ►
I reported aboard at the tail end of the generation Tim Leary was in.
00:21:47 ►
And to save you looking it up on my website, I was born in 1942,
00:21:53 ►
just a few months before the first nuclear chain reaction and the discovery of LSD.
00:21:59 ►
And although I may be what my children sometimes call a dusty old fart,
00:22:03 ►
I’m still young on the inside, just like you, my friend, just like you.
00:22:09 ►
And now, I’d like to play part of another tape from the Tim Leary archive that is dated just two days after the Leary interview that we listened to.
00:22:14 ►
And it is another Michael Brenner interview, but this time with Robert Anton Wilson.
00:22:19 ►
And it more or less picks up where the conversation with Timothy Leary ended.
00:22:24 ►
So let’s join Michael Brenner and Robert Anton Wilson now and see what’s on their minds.
00:22:33 ►
I’m live from somewhere in Northern California.
00:22:37 ►
I know where, but I’m not telling.
00:22:39 ►
Robert Anton Wilson.
00:22:40 ►
Bob, good morning.
00:22:41 ►
Good morning.
00:22:42 ►
Nice to talk to you again.
00:22:43 ►
It’s been a while since we’ve chatted.
00:22:45 ►
And, you know, I was thinking this morning, probably the hardest part of this interview is introducing you.
00:22:50 ►
I know you as an author, of course, but you’re such a subversive, a rascal, a scoundrel, a troublemaker.
00:22:58 ►
I’m not sure how else to introduce you.
00:23:01 ►
Gorilla ontologist.
00:23:02 ►
A what?
00:23:03 ►
Gorilla ontologist.
00:23:08 ►
That’ll do. I want to thank you for getting up early. I suspect you did on this Sunday morning. And Millennium Madness is an event that’s
00:23:16 ►
coming up here in Los Angeles on Saturday, May 29th. And I know Tim Leary is going to be there
00:23:21 ►
and Paul Krasner, Jack Herrer, and of course you.
00:23:25 ►
One of the parts of this event, this Millennium Madness event, is the Cosmic Conspiracy Game,
00:23:32 ►
which I understand you wrote and have a lot of experience playing.
00:23:35 ►
Can you tell us a little about that?
00:23:37 ►
What is the Cosmic Conspiracy Game?
00:23:39 ►
Well, the Cosmic Conspiracy Game is a lot of fun.
00:23:42 ►
Every time I’ve organized one, everybody has agreed they had a lot of fun.
00:23:47 ►
But it’s also teaching a great deal about the way we make assumptions.
00:23:53 ►
Everybody in the game is lying and knows everybody else is lying,
00:23:56 ►
but still people fall into all sorts of traps.
00:24:00 ►
It teaches you how to be more aware of how uncritical our thinking generally is
00:24:05 ►
and how most of the reality we experience is based on our own uncritical thinking,
00:24:11 ►
our assumptions that we project outward and perceive as part of reality.
00:24:16 ►
Boy, you have no way of knowing this,
00:24:18 ►
but this dovetails perfectly with the conversation that we were just having here about victims.
00:24:25 ►
I’m getting so frustrated dealing with victims,
00:24:28 ►
people who call the show, Bob, and say,
00:24:31 ►
you know, my life is not working.
00:24:34 ►
I’m not having any fun.
00:24:36 ►
It sucks.
00:24:37 ►
But, of course, I have nothing to do with it.
00:24:40 ►
Yeah, well, being a victim is very popular these days.
00:24:43 ►
As a matter of fact, it’s been popular for 2,000 years.
00:24:46 ►
Is it getting worse?
00:24:47 ►
Are we more a victim than before?
00:24:50 ►
Well, we’ve got more reasons to explain it now.
00:24:53 ►
In Christianity, you were a victim because God is inscrutable,
00:24:56 ►
and we all have original sin anyway because Eve ate the apple,
00:25:00 ►
so let’s blame the women.
00:25:01 ►
But now we’ve got all sorts of other…
00:25:03 ►
Maybe it’s our genes.
00:25:04 ►
Maybe it’s our Oedipus complex.
00:25:06 ►
Maybe it’s our conditioned reflexes.
00:25:08 ►
Maybe it’s the social system is structured wrong.
00:25:10 ►
Maybe it’s the damn bankers.
00:25:12 ►
So we’ve got all sorts of reasons to feel victimized.
00:25:14 ►
Besides, we all belong to a minority.
00:25:18 ►
220% of the population belongs to at least one minority.
00:25:23 ►
So if it serves us to say I’m being oppressed
00:25:26 ►
because I’m in this minority, we often do that.
00:25:28 ►
Well, yeah, and it’s easy enough to prove.
00:25:30 ►
For instance, I’m a white male.
00:25:32 ►
Everybody is down on us.
00:25:34 ►
But we’re actually a minority.
00:25:36 ►
We’ve got a right to organize and fight for our rights
00:25:39 ►
and call ourselves victims.
00:25:41 ►
We’re an exploited minority.
00:25:43 ►
It’s not only a minority, it’s respectable to despise.
00:25:46 ►
I wonder if
00:25:47 ►
technology,
00:25:50 ►
the fact that it’s
00:25:52 ►
sort of faceless and
00:25:53 ►
monolithic and
00:25:56 ►
what am I saying, that we don’t really
00:25:58 ►
understand technology anymore.
00:25:59 ►
We’re using all these technical
00:26:01 ►
goodies and we don’t really, aside from
00:26:03 ►
knowing how to put the battery in or plug it into the wall,
00:26:06 ►
we’ve really got no idea what’s going on inside.
00:26:09 ►
Do you think that could exacerbate this problem of feeling like a target or a victim or an effect of life?
00:26:15 ►
Yeah, absolutely.
00:26:16 ►
People remain ignorant, and then they feel that the environment is hostile because they don’t know how to deal with it.
00:26:24 ►
I am happy to say my daughters are both excellent automobile mechanics.
00:26:28 ►
They never feel victimized by garages because they usually fix their own cars.
00:26:33 ►
If they can’t, they take it to somebody they know they can trust
00:26:36 ►
because they’ve watched them and they see he’s not cheating.
00:26:39 ►
If people learn how to handle technology, they’re not victims anymore. You know, Robert, I read your book, The Cosmic Trigger, about nine or ten years ago as I was backpacking through the Sierras.
00:26:53 ►
And on a solo backpack trip, it was one of those I really want to get away, and I’m taking The Cosmic Trigger with me.
00:26:59 ►
What a trip that was to read it in that context, that situation.
00:27:03 ►
What a trip that was to read it in that context, that situation.
00:27:13 ►
And something from that book that’s occurring to me now as we talk about this is that passage about, and again, it’s been a decade, so you might have to help me out.
00:27:26 ►
That passage about discovering that even though looking at like a Playboy foldout, a Playboy centerfold or a Hustler magazine picture of naked women.
00:27:27 ►
That arouses men.
00:27:31 ►
In other words, their perception of even a picture of a woman,
00:27:35 ►
and you talk about using a magnifying glass and seeing,
00:27:37 ►
my God, it’s just dots of ink on a page,
00:27:43 ►
and yet here the physical body gets aroused as if it were a real woman out there.
00:27:46 ►
What was the conclusion to that?
00:27:50 ►
What was that proving or illustrating?
00:27:53 ►
It’s my variation of the old Buddhist parable
00:27:56 ►
about the guy who sees the snake and drops dead of a heart attack.
00:28:00 ►
Another guy comes along and sees a rope and walks right over it.
00:28:05 ►
The Buddha comes along and sees energy that his mind is organizing into a rope.
00:28:08 ►
It’s true.
00:28:12 ►
We’re all subject to the same psychological laws.
00:28:18 ►
I get turned on by sexy photos myself, but I know the funny photos.
00:28:27 ►
That’s relatively benign in spite of the fact that both feminists and Christian fundamentalists find it appalling.
00:28:31 ►
It’s relatively harmless to be aroused by a photograph.
00:28:37 ►
But people are aroused by words and ideas that are just as symbolic.
00:28:40 ►
And sometimes words and ideas will drive them to commit murder.
00:28:42 ►
Sometimes it will drive them to mass suicide. I guess it’s the power of imagination that I’m looking for here. The idea that
00:28:48 ►
as we were talking about earlier on the show here this morning, that
00:28:51 ►
reality is really more a function of perception than anything objective.
00:28:57 ►
Yeah, reality is the temporary
00:28:59 ►
resultant of the perpetual struggle between rival gangs of people who think
00:29:03 ►
they can define reality for everybody else.
00:29:07 ►
Well, it’s hard enough just to define it for ourselves.
00:29:10 ►
But getting back to the news photos,
00:29:13 ►
I didn’t think that one up.
00:29:15 ►
That was pointed out by a friend of mine named Mal Eclipse,
00:29:19 ►
the younger, the omnibenevolent polyfather of virginity and gold
00:29:23 ►
and high priest of the head temple of the discordant society.
00:29:27 ►
If you take the sexiest photo and use high enough magnification
00:29:31 ►
and stare at the part that you find most exciting,
00:29:35 ►
it dissolves into a bunch of dots.
00:29:38 ►
That’s really a mystical experience.
00:29:40 ►
You’re practically a Buddha at that moment
00:29:42 ►
when you realize you’re being turned on by your own imagination.
00:29:45 ►
And a few minimal clues provided by the photographer.
00:29:50 ►
Increasingly, I have felt that even though my 60s values about peace and love, I still feel strongly about those values.
00:30:03 ►
I still feel strongly about those as values.
00:30:07 ►
Increasingly, I’m seeing that the way I… How can I say this?
00:30:08 ►
The direction in which I’m evolving also has a lot to do with
00:30:11 ►
supplementing peace and love with critical thinking,
00:30:16 ►
with more choices, with creativity,
00:30:19 ►
and not stopping with that one right answer,
00:30:21 ►
but again, recognizing that imagination is a very creative process in a very real way I mean it’s not just fantasy or
00:30:30 ►
illusion that we’re talking about when we talk about imagination yeah well
00:30:35 ►
peace and love is I’m all for them but if you don’t have any if you don’t have
00:30:40 ►
a critical intelligence you’re going to be victimized over and over until you
00:30:44 ►
lose all your peace and love
00:30:46 ►
and turn very bitter
00:30:47 ►
and probably become a paranoid.
00:30:50 ►
There’s an old Sufi story about a Sufi
00:30:52 ►
who taught a snake not to kill.
00:30:55 ►
And he came back a year later
00:30:56 ►
and the snake was all beat up
00:30:57 ►
and really a terrible, tragic case.
00:31:00 ►
And he said, what happened?
00:31:01 ►
And the snake told him, I became nonviolent.
00:31:04 ►
And the Sufi said, wait a minute, I told you not not to kill i didn’t tell you not to hiss ah that’s very nice this
00:31:12 ►
millennium madness 93 uh coming up may 29th at the scottish right is apparently the first of
00:31:19 ►
a series of annual events that will sort of count down the 90s as we approach this new millennium,
00:31:26 ►
the third millennium, the 21st century.
00:31:31 ►
Are you more of an optimist or a pessimist?
00:31:35 ►
How do you control your pessimism?
00:31:36 ►
And what do you think about these next seven years as we approach the year 2000?
00:31:44 ►
There’s such incredible change happening.
00:31:46 ►
My big hope is that in 2001 we’ll find that black monolith
00:31:50 ►
and we’ll get close enough to find on the bottom of it it says Rosebud.
00:31:54 ►
Is that what the crop circles are?
00:31:56 ►
Well, okay, yeah.
00:31:58 ►
The crop circles will eventually spell out the word Rosebud.
00:32:00 ►
Rosebud.
00:32:02 ►
No, I avoid pessimism by the simple fact that
00:32:05 ►
I find so many things to do.
00:32:08 ►
The only people who have the real
00:32:09 ►
leisure to be pessimist
00:32:12 ►
are people who have given up and don’t do anything.
00:32:14 ►
They can sit around and concentrate all day
00:32:16 ►
on how miserable they are and how hopeless
00:32:18 ►
the world is. But if you keep busy
00:32:19 ►
doing things, you don’t
00:32:22 ►
have time to be a pessimist.
00:32:23 ►
I asked your friend Timothy Leary once a few years back if he was optimistic, and he looked
00:32:28 ►
at me like I was crazy, and he said, well, yeah, but what choice do I have?
00:32:33 ►
Exactly.
00:32:34 ►
Who passes exams?
00:32:37 ►
People optimistic enough to think that they are smart enough to memorize the data.
00:32:42 ►
Who gets jobs?
00:32:42 ►
People who think they’re attractive and smart enough to win the data who gets jobs people who think they’re attractive and smart enough to
00:32:45 ►
win the interview game uh who gets the best sex partners those who are optimistic enough to think
00:32:51 ►
they’re very attractive the pessimists lose all the time it’s very fashionable to be a pessimist
00:32:58 ►
in literary circles especially but they never tell you if you really make a consistent career
00:33:02 ►
out of being a pessimist you’re going to be a loser all the time.
00:33:05 ►
Who wants that kind of life?
00:33:09 ►
Well, hooray for that.
00:33:10 ►
Who wants to be a pessimistic loser all their life?
00:33:14 ►
And dear Bob Wilson was anything but pessimistic right up to the end, I’m told.
00:33:19 ►
As you know, some corporation made me take two of Wilson’s podcasts down already,
00:33:24 ►
but I’ve been looking around, and hopefully we’ll come up with some more public domain recordings
00:33:28 ►
of the wit and wisdom of Robert Anton Wilson.
00:33:32 ►
I know a lot of you are looking for it, and we’ll get it out there as soon as we can find some.
00:33:38 ►
And now, at the risk of sounding like one of those Ginsu knife commercials where they keep saying,
00:33:43 ►
but wait, there’s more. Well, I would they keep saying, but wait, there’s more.
00:33:46 ►
Well, I would like to say, but wait, there’s more.
00:33:50 ►
Now I’m going to play the first 20 minutes or so of a talk that Dr. Leary gave at Cornell University
00:33:57 ►
on April 23, 1984.
00:34:01 ►
And I guess I’d better give what might be called a spoiler alert. If you’re a member of
00:34:07 ►
almost any religion, you are most likely going to be offended by some of what Tim has to say to
00:34:13 ►
this young audience, particularly if you’re a Christian. So you may want to just skip the rest
00:34:19 ►
of this podcast rather than get mad at someone whose opinion on religion wasn’t, let’s say, very friendly.
00:34:26 ►
So you’ve been warned.
00:34:28 ►
Now, Dr. Leary.
00:34:34 ►
Good evening.
00:34:35 ►
My name is Chris Langone.
00:34:36 ►
I’m president of the Cornell Civil Liberties Union,
00:34:39 ►
and I’d like to welcome you all to tonight’s speaking event.
00:34:41 ►
The Cornell Civil Liberties Union meets on Tuesdays in Loft 2 of Willard Strait Hall. We were the first student chapter of the American Civil
00:34:48 ►
Liberties Union, and we were founded 27 years ago. We serve the campus community in many
00:34:52 ►
ways. We publish a newspaper on liberty, which I see many of you are reading. We’ve helped
00:34:57 ►
with rallies, the March 4th Pro-Choice Rally, and we’re currently campaigning to prevent
00:35:03 ►
the reinstatement of the death penalty in the state of New York. We’re Choice Rally and we’re currently campaigning to prevent the reinstatement of the death penalty in the state of New York.
00:35:06 ►
We’re also working on a community bill of rights for all members of the Cornell community.
00:35:10 ►
Another thing the Cornell Civil Liberties Union does is it brings speakers to campus to talk about civil liberties issues in many different aspects.
00:35:18 ►
Last year we brought up Jello Biafra, lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, who spoke on censorship in rock music.
00:35:24 ►
And just last week we brought up Bobby Seale to help commemorate the takeover of Willard
00:35:29 ►
Strait Hall.
00:35:30 ►
Tonight’s speaker, the most dangerous man in the world, Dr. Timothy Leary. Thank you.
00:35:56 ►
I’m very happy to be back at Cornell.
00:36:00 ►
It’s always been a favorite hangout campus of mine.
00:36:07 ►
In the 60s, you had that theme song, High Above Cayuga’s Water. was my number one most valuable poet of the century.
00:36:34 ►
I think it’s a real honor for me to be here at the invitation of the ACLU chapter,
00:36:41 ►
and it’s a wonderful tribute to your university that the first campus ACLU chapter was formed here. So how about a round of applause for
00:36:49 ►
ACLU?
00:36:58 ►
I’d like to
00:37:00 ►
start by
00:37:02 ►
paying tribute to a man who
00:37:09 ►
start by paying tribute to a man who played a great part in the events that brought us all together here tonight, a man who will go down in history as certainly a legend.
00:37:12 ►
I’m talking, of course, about Abby Hoffman.
00:37:16 ►
I had the, I think Bobby Seale was here last week, probably told you,
00:37:20 ►
that about three weeks ago, Abby and Bobby and I came together in Nashville, Tennessee,
00:37:25 ►
Vanderbilt University, for a little reunion.
00:37:28 ►
And at that time, it was very shocking to me to see that Abby was in physical and psychological,
00:37:37 ►
he was pretty wounded.
00:37:39 ►
You know, Abby was a manic depressive, and when he was in manic gear, he invented rap.
00:37:45 ►
I mean, he laid down smoke tracks.
00:37:51 ►
You clocked him at r. p.m. That’s revelations per minute, and he was smoking.
00:37:59 ►
But on this occasion, Abbey was pretty almost unresponsive, which was, you knew Abbey.
00:38:04 ►
You’ve seen him,
00:38:05 ►
he was just the energy capital of the world, until he got to the microphone.
00:38:10 ►
And to Abbey, of course, the microphone was the golden lotus flower of desire.
00:38:16 ►
And when they waited that mic in front of him, suddenly he pulled himself together
00:38:19 ►
and he laid down the most powerful, logical, driving, spellbinding lecture, speech, oration I’ve ever heard him give.
00:38:30 ►
And at the end he said, we may have been young, and we may have been silly, and we may have been idealistic, and we may have been too romantic, but God damn it, we were right.
00:38:40 ►
And everybody, even at a conservative school like Vanderbilt,
00:38:45 ►
oh yeah, right.
00:38:49 ►
Of course, Abby was
00:38:51 ►
one of a large group,
00:38:54 ►
a team of many men and women
00:38:57 ►
and really millions
00:38:59 ►
of young men and women
00:39:00 ►
in the 60s and 70s
00:39:01 ►
who stood up and stopped the most powerful government in the
00:39:06 ►
world from a foreign war in Vietnam, who shook up this country by basically returning to
00:39:14 ►
individualism and giving pride to minority groups and giving pride to the tremendous
00:39:20 ►
effect upon the male-female relationship.
00:39:23 ►
I was watching the news tonight.
00:39:26 ►
I was really delighted and amazed
00:39:29 ►
at the spirit of Abby Hoffman in that period,
00:39:33 ►
although it’s been very quiescent on this campus
00:39:35 ►
and in America for the last eight years
00:39:39 ►
of the Reagan-Rambo-Ollie North regime.
00:39:43 ►
That spirit of the students of the 60s and 70s
00:39:48 ►
was on the nightly news.
00:39:50 ►
Did you see the students in China?
00:39:54 ►
Can you believe it?
00:39:55 ►
Maoist China, which is the most locked down,
00:39:57 ►
uptight dictatorship in world history.
00:39:59 ►
And there were 100,000 students out
00:40:02 ►
in the last three or four days.
00:40:03 ►
And that’s playing for the heavy blue chips.
00:40:05 ►
You know, you don’t fuck around with a regime like that.
00:40:09 ►
Boy, I got a thrill.
00:40:11 ►
And of all places, in Moscow, Red Square,
00:40:15 ►
just yesterday, again, a large crowd,
00:40:18 ►
20,000, and you saw the faces.
00:40:21 ►
My God, they were like the faces of the 60s,
00:40:23 ►
young, glowing, inflamed with some passion for freedom.
00:40:28 ►
In the Soviet Union, I mean.
00:40:31 ►
Now guess where they learned that, huh?
00:40:33 ►
Guess where they caught on to that?
00:40:35 ►
Guess where this notion of youth power and student power
00:40:38 ►
and freedom and civil liberties, you know,
00:40:42 ►
right here in Cornell 20 years ago, and I was very proud,
00:40:46 ►
and I think Abby Hoffman would be proud to
00:40:48 ►
have seen that.
00:40:50 ►
Of course, Abby was not the, as I said,
00:40:52 ►
the only one in the last
00:40:54 ►
few weeks I’ve seen. Bobby Seale
00:40:56 ►
in San Francisco
00:40:58 ►
is a wonderful group of people, like Ken Kesey
00:41:00 ►
and Augustus Stanley Owsley.
00:41:02 ►
I understand his son is in the room here.
00:41:04 ►
Hope to see you later, Starfart.
00:41:10 ►
Grateful Dead.
00:41:12 ►
I could go on listing the people
00:41:14 ►
that kept the spirit going in the 60s.
00:41:19 ►
Now, I was asked by Chris,
00:41:22 ►
the chairman of the ACLU group,
00:41:23 ►
to kind of stir people up a little here tonight.
00:41:30 ►
Be a little too apathetic.
00:41:31 ►
I used to say, the campuses are seething with rest.
00:41:41 ►
So I’ll be glad to oblige.
00:41:43 ►
I’m not going to give you a sermon.
00:41:42 ►
so I’ll be glad to oblige it is
00:41:43 ►
I’m not going to give you a sermon
00:41:44 ►
I’m not going to give you
00:41:45 ►
a Sunday night
00:41:46 ►
locker room pep talk
00:41:47 ►
about going out there
00:41:48 ►
and winning one for the yipper
00:41:50 ►
but
00:41:55 ►
I’m going to
00:41:58 ►
perform philosophy
00:42:00 ►
now that may
00:42:02 ►
be a little surprise
00:42:03 ►
when I combine
00:42:04 ►
that verb and that noun.
00:42:06 ►
Philosophy in the past has not been performed.
00:42:10 ►
In the industrial society, where everyone has their little pigeonhole and their little duty to perform,
00:42:16 ►
philosophy is taught by professional philosophers, just like the professional accountants in ivory towers.
00:42:23 ►
like they’re professional accountants in ivory towers.
00:42:30 ►
In feudal societies, in feudal organizations, in feudal countries,
00:42:34 ►
which, by the way, are still a majority in the world today, I would say perhaps 60% of the people living on this planet today
00:42:38 ►
live in societies which are basically feudal.
00:42:42 ►
You know, it comes down from God.
00:42:46 ►
Philosophy is not taught. Philosophy is enforced. You know, the ITO committee claims to have one billion
00:42:54 ►
followers of the Islamic persuasion who will gladly go out and perform an assassination
00:43:00 ►
for him. The function of a performing philosopher is not to try to sell you on any
00:43:08 ►
brand name of philosophy. I have no dogma. I have no favorite cause here. I have one
00:43:14 ►
cause, and that’s the goal of a performing philosopher, is to encourage you and inspire
00:43:20 ►
you and empower you, to the extent I can, to think for yourself and question authority.
00:43:33 ►
Now,
00:43:34 ►
the way I’m going to try to do that tonight is I’m going to try to,
00:43:40 ►
it’s all the language.
00:43:41 ►
We are, as the French semioticians tell us,
00:43:43 ►
we’re in shackle by our language.
00:43:45 ►
We’re imprisoned by our language, by ideas.
00:43:48 ►
And so what I’m going to try to do is to,
00:43:50 ►
with as much clarity as I can summon here,
00:43:55 ►
zap on and to laser and to warm up and to buzz and to tickle
00:43:59 ►
and to stimulate the shackles of language
00:44:02 ►
that are tying you to any particular religion or any particular political party,
00:44:07 ►
even to try to question your enslaving commitments to your country,
00:44:14 ►
and God knows, possibly even to your gene pool, and possibly even to your parents.
00:44:19 ►
Now, in other words, if I don’t make fun of any of your favorite deeply held convictions,
00:44:28 ►
yeah, you call me back during the question and answer period, and you can get your money back.
00:44:35 ►
Now, as I make fun of these sacred cows, let me make this point,
00:44:41 ►
because I hope to kick some ass here tonight.
00:44:45 ►
But they don’t know
00:44:48 ►
any better
00:44:48 ►
see
00:44:49 ►
there’s no anger here
00:44:50 ►
they don’t know
00:44:52 ►
I’m telling you
00:44:53 ►
literally
00:44:53 ►
rationally
00:44:54 ►
they don’t know
00:44:55 ►
any better
00:44:55 ►
the Ayatollah Khomeini
00:44:56 ►
he just doesn’t know
00:44:57 ►
any better
00:44:58 ►
than to try to get
00:44:58 ►
a billion
00:44:59 ►
Islamic people
00:45:01 ►
to go out
00:45:01 ►
and kill
00:45:02 ►
this fellow
00:45:03 ►
that wrote
00:45:03 ►
a little silly book about a hallucination
00:45:06 ►
he had about his sacred Allah
00:45:08 ►
I mean, the guy has no sense of humor
00:45:10 ►
and to the extent anyone follows him
00:45:14 ►
they have no sense of humor, but on the other hand
00:45:15 ►
he’s doing the best he can and it’s our job
00:45:18 ►
not to attack or in any way get down to that level
00:45:20 ►
but to use
00:45:22 ►
the information power that we have now
00:45:24 ►
to gently get people to dis level, but to use the information power that we have now to gently get people
00:45:27 ►
to disidentify with that.
00:45:29 ►
Now, it is true that if you take on this role of urging people to think for themselves and
00:45:35 ►
question authority, you all can get in trouble that way.
00:45:41 ►
And that’s part of the game
00:45:46 ►
you know
00:45:46 ►
most people
00:45:47 ►
who don’t want to change
00:45:48 ►
most people are doing
00:45:49 ►
the best they can
00:45:50 ►
they’ve been entrapped
00:45:51 ►
by their parents
00:45:51 ►
and their language
00:45:52 ►
and by the language
00:45:53 ►
of their society
00:45:53 ►
they don’t
00:45:54 ►
you know
00:45:55 ►
and they’re discouraged
00:45:56 ►
from thinking for yourself
00:45:57 ►
that’s the key
00:45:57 ►
how many of us
00:45:59 ►
in our growing years
00:46:00 ►
were encouraged
00:46:01 ►
to think for ourselves
00:46:02 ►
and question authority
00:46:03 ►
and come out with new ideas
00:46:04 ►
you know
00:46:04 ►
the aim of the game until Dr. Spock came along in 1946, which created the 60s, by the way.
00:46:09 ►
Dr. Spock was the first person that told parents, hey, your job is to teach your kids to be individuals
00:46:20 ►
and to encourage your kids to be individuals and to treat your kids as individuals
00:46:25 ►
oh jeez when he said that that’s the most subversive statement you can make talk about
00:46:32 ►
anarchy forget it when you teach kids to be individuals you’re undercutting every religion
00:46:38 ►
and every organization and every political uh dogmatic system. Throughout all history, it mattered whether you’re left, right, Christian, Jewish,
00:46:47 ►
everybody who had an organization agreed
00:46:51 ►
you had to take kids and get them to align. Kids are little wogs, little animals, you’ve got to get them
00:46:55 ►
with a carrot and a whip, you’ve got to get them to conform and join the
00:47:00 ►
pack.
00:47:05 ►
Now, what I’m going to do is I’m going to remind you about the three stages that we have gone through as human beings
00:47:13 ►
and that you have gone through as individuals
00:47:16 ►
and show how your ability to think for yourself has been limited in each of these
00:47:20 ►
and why, at this moment in world history, as we leave the industrial society and move on to the
00:47:27 ►
post-industrial society, it’s not only your pleasure
00:47:32 ►
to think for yourself, it’s your duty.
00:47:33 ►
You gotta think for yourself in the information age.
00:47:36 ►
Now let me remind you that in the past, as I suggested,
00:47:40 ►
it has been very perilous if you tried to think for yourself.
00:47:43 ►
We’re told that human society started
00:47:45 ►
25,000 years ago
00:47:48 ►
in a tribal society
00:47:50 ►
in a tribal society
00:47:51 ►
you weren’t encouraged to think for yourself
00:47:55 ►
all of the thinking was done by a man
00:47:59 ►
naturally with a man
00:48:00 ►
with a big long beard
00:48:01 ►
the head of the tree was a shepherd
00:48:02 ►
and he had that big crook
00:48:04 ►
you know what big crook.
00:48:06 ►
You know what that crook was for?
00:48:09 ►
To hook any young black sheep that was wandering off to think for herself, right?
00:48:12 ►
Now, I make fun of the notion
00:48:17 ►
that we all, the people in the past,
00:48:20 ►
have worshipped a God who is a shepherd.
00:48:24 ►
Can you believe they still say that?
00:48:26 ►
In the last, this weekend, today, this Sunday,
00:48:28 ►
there are probably several, 20, 30 million Americans
00:48:31 ►
who listen to someone in a platform like this saying,
00:48:34 ►
the Lord is my shepherd.
00:48:38 ►
Well, no shit, sure.
00:48:43 ►
If the Lord is my shepherd, what does that mean I am?
00:48:46 ►
Ba, ba, ba.
00:48:54 ►
Now, there’s nothing wrong with that.
00:48:56 ►
See, when we were little babies, baby in arms, you couldn’t think for yourself.
00:48:59 ►
And I, some big, you know, smart ass like me can’t probably think for yourself.
00:49:03 ►
Hey, what can you do?
00:49:03 ►
But you are a little sheep
00:49:05 ►
and a nice cuddly thing.
00:49:07 ►
And it’s nice to have that period.
00:49:09 ►
And when I tell you to, you know,
00:49:11 ►
you got to grow out of it.
00:49:14 ►
You can’t spend,
00:49:15 ►
I want grown men and women walking around
00:49:17 ►
saying, cuddle me, shepherd God.
00:49:19 ►
I mean, and I’m not attacking that aspect of us
00:49:25 ►
there’s still hungers
00:49:26 ►
we all hunger for a daddy and a mommy
00:49:28 ►
that’s going to do all the thinking for us
00:49:30 ►
and take care of us
00:49:31 ►
that’s healthy
00:49:32 ►
I mean give into it now and then
00:49:33 ►
you know
00:49:34 ►
get into a hot tub with your boyfriend or your girlfriend
00:49:36 ►
do it if you want
00:49:37 ►
but anyway
00:49:38 ►
you got to grow up a little bit
00:49:40 ►
now the tribal society ended as and we moved into a new level of human
00:49:51 ►
civilization as we always do when you change the language and change the
00:49:55 ►
technology for packaging thoughts and communicating. You see the limits of a
00:50:00 ►
tribal society are just like the limits of your home, are limited by the sound of the human voice.
00:50:06 ►
And the guy that ran the tribe could tell you where to go and when to go, but you limit it to your valley.
00:50:12 ►
And in the next valley, there was another guy, another shepherd with another god doing the same thing.
00:50:18 ►
When they invented writing, that changed the whole situation and a new dimension of humanity developed.
00:50:23 ►
That changed the whole situation and a new dimension of humanity developed.
00:50:26 ►
See, when you read and write, you can write those things down and send your people in the galleys across the Mediterranean
00:50:28 ►
or camels across the desert,
00:50:31 ►
and immediately you’ve got long-distance communication.
00:50:34 ►
And that created the feudal state.
00:50:36 ►
It made it wonderfully powerful because the feudal kings
00:50:41 ►
and the feudal sultans had the power,
00:50:43 ►
an incredibly magic power of reading and writing.
00:50:46 ►
Now, we are all concerned today about reading and writing and literacy.
00:50:50 ►
Listen, don’t kid yourself.
00:50:52 ►
Literacy has always been a technique through which the power holders control.
00:50:57 ►
See, if I can read and write,
00:50:59 ►
and I can write down those little Phoenician shells and a piece of papyrus,
00:51:02 ►
messages, and send them to my agents over in Athens or across in Tunis. And I’ve got an advantage on you that don’t
00:51:10 ►
know that. Writing was originally a code that helped get organizations together over distances.
00:51:18 ►
And the reason Johnny can’t write is for four or five thousand years they didn’t fucking want him to read and write
00:51:25 ►
because they’d lose the power.
00:51:27 ►
And even today,
00:51:28 ►
you know,
00:51:28 ►
the slaveholders
00:51:30 ►
in the Confederacy
00:51:31 ►
before our Civil War
00:51:33 ►
would not let the slaves
00:51:34 ►
read and write.
00:51:35 ►
Obviously, why?
00:51:37 ►
Now,
00:51:38 ►
when reading and writing started,
00:51:41 ►
that changed our concept
00:51:42 ►
of religion
00:51:43 ►
and changed our concept
00:51:44 ►
of human beings. No longer was
00:51:45 ►
a human being a little sheep. In the new order of feudalism, there’s God and then there’s God’s
00:51:50 ►
lieutenants on earth. There’s the sultan or the king and divine rights kings and all that.
00:51:56 ►
And don’t worry about reading, about thinking for yourself, boys and girls. It’s all being done for
00:52:01 ►
you up there in the castle of the du or the Cardinal they got a big computer
00:52:06 ►
up there
00:52:06 ►
it’s called
00:52:06 ►
an illuminated manuscript
00:52:07 ►
and they got
00:52:10 ►
the nerds
00:52:11 ►
the hackers
00:52:11 ►
up there
00:52:11 ►
they were monks
00:52:13 ►
you know
00:52:13 ►
they knew the machine language
00:52:14 ►
which is called Latin
00:52:15 ►
they do all the thinking
00:52:18 ►
they’ll tell us
00:52:19 ►
what you have to do
00:52:19 ►
now
00:52:23 ►
just as you know
00:52:24 ►
I’m going to quote you back
00:52:26 ►
some of the language of this period.
00:52:29 ►
Remember when I talked about
00:52:30 ►
we all want a daddy and a mommy God?
00:52:32 ►
Can you believe there’s a prayer
00:52:34 ►
still used in America?
00:52:37 ►
It says,
00:52:39 ►
Our Father,
00:52:41 ►
who art in heaven,
00:52:44 ►
hallowed be thy name.
00:52:48 ►
Yeah?
00:52:49 ►
Thy kingdom come.
00:52:52 ►
What? What’s this shit about kingdom?
00:52:55 ►
Kingdom?
00:52:57 ►
Our foremothers and forefathers, was it, ten years ago,
00:53:03 ►
came to this country to overthrow kings
00:53:05 ►
and royalty
00:53:06 ►
and monarch
00:53:06 ►
get out the fuck out of here
00:53:07 ►
Gord III
00:53:08 ►
and now you’re telling me
00:53:10 ►
God is a king
00:53:11 ►
his kingdom will come
00:53:13 ►
his will
00:53:13 ►
thy will be done
00:53:15 ►
yeah
00:53:15 ►
what are you
00:53:16 ►
some fucking
00:53:17 ►
mafia capo up there
00:53:18 ►
for thine
00:53:23 ►
is the power
00:53:24 ►
and the glory.
00:53:26 ►
Yeah, I’ll get down on my knees, boss.
00:53:27 ►
Don’t worry about me.
00:53:29 ►
Can you believe that shit?
00:53:32 ►
Or how about Moses comes down from the mountain,
00:53:35 ►
got all the wisdom there, all you need to know,
00:53:38 ►
chipped in marble.
00:53:39 ►
Can you believe that?
00:53:40 ►
See, there’s no invitation for word processing.
00:53:44 ►
Chip it in marble.
00:53:47 ►
Those ten commandments, they’re not ten suggestions, boys and girls.
00:53:53 ►
I’m not encouraged to take those ten ideas and bring them to your discussion group.
00:54:00 ►
Paramount number one.
00:54:02 ►
I mean, we all need principles.
00:54:04 ►
We all need algorithms. We all need algorithms.
00:54:05 ►
We need coaching.
00:54:06 ►
I mean, I’m not against looking to the past to find navigational hints,
00:54:11 ►
but shit, it’s all about…
00:54:13 ►
Commandment number one.
00:54:15 ►
I am the Lord thy God, and thou shalt have no other gods before me.
00:54:20 ►
Well, he can’t stand the competition, huh?
00:54:25 ►
Insecure bastard.
00:54:34 ►
Thou shalt not make no grave an image.
00:54:36 ►
Thou shalt not take my name in vain.
00:54:38 ►
Oh, Jesus.
00:54:41 ►
Paranoid asshole.
00:54:42 ►
I mean,
00:54:44 ►
get down.
00:54:49 ►
Boy, the Bible the Bible is the word of God
00:54:51 ►
the Bible is written by God
00:54:53 ►
no man or woman dare change it
00:54:55 ►
well let’s listen to this
00:54:56 ►
Genesis third chapter
00:54:58 ►
I’m the Lord thy God
00:55:00 ►
and I made everything here
00:55:02 ►
on the first day
00:55:03 ►
I made the stars and on the second day I made the heavens and the planets on the third day I made the Lord thy God and I made everything here on the first day. I made the stars on the second day.
00:55:06 ►
I made the heavens and the planets on the third day.
00:55:08 ►
I made the earth on the fourth day.
00:55:10 ►
I made the oceans on the fifth day.
00:55:13 ►
I made the earth and the creepy crawly things on the sixth day.
00:55:16 ►
Boy, I put you, Adam, in this ultimate destination resort.
00:55:22 ►
The Garden of Eden.
00:55:23 ►
Yeah, I did it.
00:55:21 ►
Ultimate destination resort.
00:55:23 ►
The Garden of Eden.
00:55:24 ►
Yeah, I did it.
00:55:30 ►
Ultimate club Mediterranean proprietor, okay?
00:55:32 ►
All right, boy.
00:55:34 ►
You’re my favorite, see?
00:55:36 ►
You’re a human being, see?
00:55:37 ►
Just get down on your knees.
00:55:39 ►
As long as you’re on your knees, you’re my favorite, see?
00:55:40 ►
Because you’re made in my image.
00:55:44 ►
Kind of scary thought thought I feel sorry
00:55:47 ►
for y’all alone here
00:55:48 ►
so I’m going to take
00:55:48 ►
one of your ribs
00:55:49 ►
and make a woman
00:55:50 ►
she’ll be your help
00:55:51 ►
she’ll know her place
00:55:53 ►
she’ll follow you around
00:55:53 ►
the Bible is not
00:55:56 ►
a women’s liberation tract
00:55:57 ►
as you’ve probably gathered
00:55:58 ►
now y’all can do
00:56:03 ►
what you want here
00:56:03 ►
in the Garden of Eden
00:56:04 ►
go for it boy, just stay here forever
00:56:06 ►
there are just two food and drug regulations
00:56:09 ►
y’all see that tree over there
00:56:16 ►
that’s the tree of eternal life and immortality
00:56:18 ►
life extension, you know, cloning
00:56:20 ►
cryonics
00:56:21 ►
the fruit of that tree
00:56:25 ►
is a controlled substance.
00:56:28 ►
Y’all can’t eat that
00:56:29 ►
because you’ll get to be immortal
00:56:30 ►
and live like me.
00:56:31 ►
You won’t be afraid of death
00:56:32 ►
and it won’t have you running scared
00:56:33 ►
and that’s going to be bad.
00:56:34 ►
And y’all see that tree over there?
00:56:36 ►
The fruit of that tree
00:56:38 ►
is a controlled substance.
00:56:41 ►
That is the tree of knowledge.
00:56:45 ►
Isn’t that cold blooded
00:56:48 ►
I mean how clear
00:56:50 ►
can they make it
00:56:51 ►
that you are not to touch
00:56:52 ►
of the tree of knowledge
00:56:53 ►
lest the blinders fall from your eyes
00:56:54 ►
you begin thinking
00:56:55 ►
for yourself
00:56:56 ►
now I’ve always been amused by the
00:56:59 ►
by the fact that
00:57:00 ►
they always laid the blame on Eve
00:57:03 ►
it was that naughty oh women is terrible that naughty-wiggling Eve that got poor straight arrow Adam and all that trouble.
00:57:11 ►
And on the flip side, I think we must, those of us who believe in the title Homo sapiens sapiens,
00:57:18 ►
we are the species that are equipped with this enormous computing machinery, 100 billion neurons up there.
00:57:24 ►
Each neuron has the knowledge processing capacity
00:57:27 ►
of a big mainframe computer.
00:57:29 ►
And it was a woman, Eve,
00:57:31 ►
was the first person to get off her knees
00:57:33 ►
and stand on her feet.
00:57:35 ►
You know, they’d try the fruit.
00:57:37 ►
The blinds would fall from her eyes.
00:57:39 ►
She said,
00:57:40 ►
Hey, Adam, you gotta try this.
00:57:43 ►
And so the first human being that thought for herself
00:57:48 ►
was a woman. And thank God for Eve.
00:57:58 ►
You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:58:07 ►
Thank God for Eve.
00:58:10 ►
That seems like a perfect place to take a break for this week,
00:58:13 ►
but I promise to play the rest of this talk in my next podcast,
00:58:17 ►
and I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of it myself,
00:58:20 ►
so I promise that you won’t have to wait too long.
00:58:24 ►
I did find it interesting to hear
00:58:25 ►
Dr. Leary talking about how distressed he was about Abby Hoffman, particularly his mental state,
00:58:32 ►
and he obviously knew what he was talking about because just five years later, poor Abby was found
00:58:37 ►
dead after taking a whole bunch of phenobarbital. And depending on who you listen to, it was either
00:58:43 ►
a suicide or an accident.
00:58:45 ►
Either way, it was a tragic loss for all of us
00:58:48 ►
to whom Abby Hoffman had been an inspiration
00:58:50 ►
for so many years.
00:58:53 ►
But there was a part of this last talk we just heard
00:58:55 ►
that I hope our younger saloners
00:58:57 ►
will take another listen to.
00:58:59 ►
At around four minutes or so into this last piece
00:59:02 ►
where he talks about Abby being a part
00:59:04 ►
of a large group of young people
00:59:06 ►
who in the 1960s and 1970s
00:59:09 ►
stopped the government in its tracks.
00:59:12 ►
And what I suggest
00:59:13 ►
you give some thought to
00:59:14 ►
is the fact that there is a good chance
00:59:17 ►
that your parents or grandparents
00:59:18 ►
were part of those times.
00:59:21 ►
I realize that most of my
00:59:23 ►
idealistic young friends have now
00:59:24 ►
grown old in their thinking
00:59:26 ►
and have lost the fire that once burned in them.
00:59:29 ►
But I’m sure that the spark hasn’t died.
00:59:32 ►
Personally, almost every one of my friends my age are just like me.
00:59:36 ►
We may be quiet and laying low, but you would be amazed at how many psychonauts
00:59:41 ►
and psychonaut friendlies there are in this world.
00:59:44 ►
We’re everywhere.
00:59:45 ►
But we have become so cautious, and rightfully so,
00:59:49 ►
that it’s very difficult to find the others, as Terrence McKenna advised.
00:59:53 ►
But that seems to be changing now, now that the Internet is waking up.
00:59:57 ►
So if you’re still riding alone out there on the edge of the tribe,
01:00:01 ►
well, hang on. Reinforcements are on the way.
01:00:04 ►
Can you tell I’m in a good mood today?
01:00:07 ►
You know, those talks we just heard were recorded over 15 years ago.
01:00:12 ►
One of them even farther back than that.
01:00:14 ►
And yet it seems that while everything has changed,
01:00:18 ►
nothing is really different.
01:00:20 ►
Hopefully we’re going to experience something completely different in the years ahead, no matter what the politicians do.
01:00:27 ►
But we’ll have to wait and see, huh?
01:00:30 ►
Well, this has gone on a bit longer than I thought it would, but I still have a couple of short announcements before I go.
01:00:37 ►
First of all, I am extremely pleased to report that the project to digitize the Stolarov and Shulgin papers is well underway.
01:00:44 ►
that the project to digitize the Stolarov and Shulgin papers is well underway.
01:00:49 ►
Two weeks ago, the Shulgins, along with Tanya, Greg, and John Hanna,
01:00:52 ►
got together with the Stolarovs to go through some of Myron’s papers,
01:00:59 ►
and the upshot of that was John driving home with about 20 cases of records to sort through and prepare for scanning.
01:01:02 ►
And while the team has only just begun this huge project, I think we can all
01:01:06 ►
take heart in knowing that this valuable information isn’t going to be lost. So my hat is off to the
01:01:12 ►
archiving team, and I’ll be sure to give you updates as the work progresses. The other archiving
01:01:19 ►
project underway is the digitization of some papers that Gary Fisher wrote, but that have
01:01:24 ►
never made it to the internet. In a week or so, I’ll be sending the papers to one of our fellow
01:01:29 ►
slaughters who has a good scanner and OCR software, and he’s going to scan them and
01:01:34 ►
pass them through the OCR program. Then what will remain to be done is the cleanup work
01:01:40 ►
that optical character recognition software requires. And I am very happy to report that we also have enough volunteers to cover that project
01:01:49 ►
as well.
01:01:50 ►
So our efforts at preserving some of the tribe’s history seems to be humming along nicely.
01:01:57 ►
Also, I guess I made a mistake last week in saying that my novel is only going to be released
01:02:03 ►
as an audiobook because it
01:02:05 ►
hasn’t been worked on by a professional editor yet. Well, that is true, but it is also true that
01:02:11 ►
I already have an editor who I’ve worked with in the past, and even when I get the money to pay
01:02:17 ►
him, I’m still not planning on publishing a paperback edition at any time in the near future.
01:02:23 ►
There are a number of reasons for this, but the main one is that I’ve been working on
01:02:26 ►
this book for over six years now, and I simply want to get away from it for a while.
01:02:31 ►
So thank you so very much to the dozen or more people who have volunteered to do the
01:02:36 ►
edit for me, but for now I think it best just to put that aside for a little while.
01:02:42 ►
And plus I’ve got to finish recording the audiobook yet, too.
01:02:46 ►
On another front, I haven’t
01:02:48 ►
mentioned the Psychedelic Salon Quarterly
01:02:50 ►
lately, but the first edition
01:02:52 ►
is shaping up quite nicely.
01:02:54 ►
I’ve seen the titles of some of the
01:02:55 ►
submissions, and I’m really looking forward
01:02:57 ►
to reading this journal.
01:02:59 ►
Once it’s online, I’ll be announcing it here,
01:03:02 ►
of course, but a little website
01:03:03 ►
has now been set up to
01:03:05 ►
support this effort, and you can find it at psychedelicsalonquarterly.com, and that’s all
01:03:11 ►
one word. So you might want to check that site from time to time for news about the quarterly,
01:03:16 ►
as well as other news from our community. And speaking of our community, I want to remind you
01:03:22 ►
about the great podcast on the Cannabis Podcast Network over at dopefiend.co.uk.
01:03:29 ►
There you’ll hear Bebe’s Bungalow, hosted by the lovely Black Beauty, whose silken voice you heard at the beginning of this segment.
01:03:37 ►
And hers is only one of a group of programs that I listen to regularly over there.
01:03:42 ►
In fact, the Dope Fiend’s weekly podcasts are my primary source of news and information about cannabis.
01:03:48 ►
It’s a podcast, in my humble opinion, that shouldn’t be missed.
01:03:52 ►
And then, of course, there’s the David Frost of podcasters, my friend KMO,
01:03:58 ►
who I think is one of the best interviewers around.
01:04:00 ►
And although he’s not on the same network, he’s associated with it as I am, and
01:04:06 ►
you can find KMO at the Sea Realm
01:04:08 ►
podcast, so I’ll put links to
01:04:10 ►
that up in our program notes.
01:04:12 ►
Anyhow, I just want to make sure you’re not missing
01:04:13 ►
some of those good podcasts over there.
01:04:16 ►
And one more thank you I’ve been
01:04:18 ►
remiss in not saying often enough
01:04:20 ►
is to the good folks over at the
01:04:22 ►
Conversations Network.
01:04:23 ►
They’re the ones who made their Levelator software available for free.
01:04:28 ►
And I’ve mentioned them before in other podcasts,
01:04:30 ►
but I can’t thank them enough for providing this valuable podcasting tool.
01:04:35 ►
And if you want to see how the Levelator works,
01:04:37 ►
in addition to the great information about it on the Conversations Network website,
01:04:43 ►
you can also see the Levelator in action
01:04:45 ►
in Cody and Sancho’s podcasting tutorial on YouTube,
01:04:49 ►
which I highly recommend to any of our fellow slauners
01:04:52 ►
who are thinking about starting your own podcast.
01:04:55 ►
Their tutorial will get you on the fast track to podcasting
01:04:58 ►
and without spending much, if any, money.
01:05:01 ►
So check that out if you have the bug to add your voice
01:05:04 ►
to the global
01:05:05 ►
conversation that ultimately is going to do more to make a positive change in the world than all
01:05:11 ►
the talking heads in radio and television combined. Well, that’s enough for today. So I’ll close,
01:05:18 ►
as always, by reminding you that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are
01:05:23 ►
freely available for you to use in your
01:05:25 ►
own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:05:31 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom
01:05:35 ►
of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org. And that’s also
01:05:40 ►
where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:05:49 ►
Be well, my friends.