Program Notes
Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
[NOTE: All quotes below are by Bruce Damer.]
“What Damasio is showing is that people who, in the lab, get a huge amount of cognitive stimulus all the time start to have no access to the emotional part [of themselves] at all. They can’t store to it, and they can’t retrieve from it. They become what he calls emotionally neutral.”
“So if ANY crisis arises you have the wrong people [in charge], probably, because the things that put them there, and the constituencies that wanted them there, create a person who is incapable of handling a real crisis.”
“If you want a future, you have to take charge of your own thoughts.”
A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You! by Bruce Damer
DigitalSpace’s Educational Spacewalk Simulation for
NASA’s upcoming Hubble Servicing Mission
Bruce Damer’s Personal Web Site
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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 ►
Well, it’s been two weeks now, I guess, since my last podcast,
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but my guess is that you’ve been as busy as I’ve been lately,
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and that you probably wouldn’t have had time to listen to another podcast anyway.
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How’s that for rationalization, huh?
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But there are some fellow saloners who found the time to make a donation to the salon,
00:00:45 ►
and so I want to thank Matthew N., Carl R., and Andy H. for their generous donations.
00:00:52 ►
And I also want to correct a thank you from my last podcast,
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in which I mispronounced one of our donors’ names,
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and that kind soul is Jared S., who I mistakenly called Jarrett.
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Sorry about that, Jared.
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And thank you, Matthew, Carl, and Andy, for your continuing support.
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And speaking of support, today’s program once again features Bruce Dahmer,
00:01:16 ►
whose development team at digitalspace.com created the virtual reality training simulations
00:01:23 ►
that the NASA crew used to train for the recently completed Hubble Telescope repair mission.
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And if you go to digitalspace.com, you’ll see a link on the front page to the spacewalk simulation,
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and you can go through some of the training yourself.
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And I might add that if you are a VR developer yourself, well, that site is also where you can download
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Digital Spaces DSS, which is the open source 3D platform that Bruce and company built to use in
00:01:54 ►
developing this application. And since it’s open source, you can also use it for free. So thank
00:02:00 ►
you, Bruce and friends. Anyway, when the Hubble mission flooded the news this week,
00:02:05 ►
I somehow remembered a couple of Bruce Dahmer’s talks that may be of interest to you.
00:02:11 ►
The first talk I want to play is one that Bruce gave in 2004,
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and in it there were several stretches where he showed a short video,
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and I had to cut those out because without the images to go along with Bruce’s commentary,
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it just didn’t work very well. Which means that this talk isn’t as long as it was in its original
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form, but I think there is an important message here, particularly for any of our fellow salonners
00:02:36 ►
who might be feeling a little bit overwhelmed and stressed out with information overload.
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So I’m going to play that right now,
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and then I’ve got another short conversation with Bruce
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that I’d like to play for you.
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But right now, here is the second talk that Bruce Dahmer gave
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at the MindStates conference that was held in Oaxaca, Mexico
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during the month of September 2004.
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What we’re going to do is that the subject of this talk is really very close to the work
00:03:08 ►
that Galen and I do and that the company, we have 16 people in our company and we’re
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kind of a ragtag group, work around the world and we do a lot of projects and the projects
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are all out of the edge of cognition.
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We seem to be getting hired all the time to do work at the
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boundaries of the ability of the human mind to function and
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extending those boundaries.
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And for example, one of the boundaries is what type of
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human mind?
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One of the scary properties of modern life
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is something known as kind of cognitive overload.
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And you probably, all of you probably experience this.
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It’s just one too many emails,
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one too many calls from your teenage kid
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that’s in trouble again,
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and one too many harassing comments by boss or something,
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and your brain gets to this sort of mush phase.
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And this is a property that was pretty rare in primate
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development and primate history to reach that phase.
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In fact, if you go to the forest in Africa,
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you find that the smart primates didn’t get cell phones.
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They’re in the forest.
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They stuff themselves on something,
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and then they lie around for two days,
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with an elbow, and who’s really smart gave them.
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Anyway, so primates spend a lot of time in their history
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lying around and recuperating and getting extra protein
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by finding bugs and insects
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on each other, and things like that.
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And so in a sense, we’re in a weird state.
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All of humanity is in this bizarre state
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where we’re subjecting our cognitive processes
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to things that,‘re subjecting ourselves
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to something that hasn’t happened to our species
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ever before, which is pushing our limit, our brain’s capacity
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to the limit and beyond.
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And there’s, you know, one would think, oh, that’s a great thing, you know,
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expand your consciousness and be able to do more email, you know,
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and more instant messaging and more texting.
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But there’s a huge social, societal price we’re going to pay for this.
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And I think most, you know, with due respect to most academics, people who research, they’re about
00:05:47 ►
5 to 10 years behind current trends.
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So by the time we start to study this stuff, it’ll be endemic throughout society.
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Back at the farm, if you’re ever in Northern California, please come and visit us.
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I have a barn, we have a barn, and it’s full of 600 vintage computers.
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And they all work.
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And they’re from 1973, and it documents the history of the beginnings of personal computing
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and digital community networks, whatever, everything.
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Everything, Cray supercomputers and Altair’s and Alto’s and all of it, from various garages
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in Silicon Valley.
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And it’s to document the invention and the culture that
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came out from the person from here and then the network.
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And in a sense, you can go and look back then and say, oh,
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it’s 1979, and the only people in the world who were sitting
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in front of a computer with a graphical display and doing
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email were people at Xerox PARC and a few other places. And they were living in that future. And you go back and talk to
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them and they kind of invented that lifestyle. And they never thought that a billion people
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would be doing that. Maybe two billion people on cell phones doing that in a similar interface
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that they invented. They couldn’t have conceived of it. So what all of this is coming to is a sort of giant,
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unplanned experiment that you’re all part of.
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And what I’d like to do is to show you two snippets of work
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that we do at the company.
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The first one, I’ll just explain this before you
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start it.
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No, no, let it go.
00:07:21 ►
This is astronaut training visualization for
00:07:24 ►
Johnson Space Center.
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I’ll let these guys talk a little bit.
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What they’re doing is they’re training for one of the most dangerous and important missions
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in NASA’s history coming up in the spring to replace a giant 600 pound gyro part that has gone bad on the station.
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If they can’t replace it, the station could end up with no
00:07:52 ►
ability to control its attitude and move itself around.
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And so these guys have been training for a couple years,
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or a year and a half, in the swimming pool in Houston
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called the New Trabantia.
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And these guys, there’s one guy whose feet are on this
00:08:07 ►
robot arm, and he’s just bringing down the broken gyro
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to the guy who’s now going to attach it to something on the
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shuttle cargo bay.
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Then they have to go over and unscrew the replacement gyro
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and stick it on the station, cable it up, spin it up, and
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see if it works. They don’t know what caused the broken gyro to stick it on the station, cable it up, spin it up, and see if it works.
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They don’t know what caused the broken gyro to grind into a hole.
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It was grinding and vibrating for 10-4 hours
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before it failed.
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And so basically,
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these guys are in a highly challenged
00:08:40 ►
cognitive environment.
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They have six or seven voice channels into their suit.
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They have six degrees of freedom. They’re suit. They have six degrees of freedom.
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They’re moving.
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They have so many things can go wrong.
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The sun is rising and setting.
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And they’re doing this procedure for 11 hours.
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It’s like 11 hour brain surgery.
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And what happens on space blocks like this is we
00:09:00 ►
do a 3D reconstruction from the swimming pool training
00:09:02 ►
in order so that they can sit in front of a computer
00:09:04 ►
and see it from another perspective and put themselves on the, make themselves into the gyro. do a 3D reconstruction from the swimming pool training in order so that they can sit in front of a computer
00:09:05 ►
and see it from another perspective
00:09:06 ►
and put themselves on the, make themselves into the gyro.
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What is the gyro seeing as I’m moving it?
00:09:12 ►
When does the sun rise and set?
00:09:14 ►
Because when the sun rises, it blinds you.
00:09:16 ►
So if you’re in the middle of undoing a fastener
00:09:18 ►
or something, you can’t see something.
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So these guys tend to get cognitively overloaded,
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and they get brain fuzzy after about three hours
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if they’re intensely communicating or whatever.
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Maybe if they’re 13 years old, they
00:09:33 ►
could do the whole procedure straight through.
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But these guys are in their 40s and 50s.
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And so their thresholds are getting lower and lower
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and lower.
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Taking the example of the New York Space Station, which
00:09:45 ►
was almost lost when the Progress Supply Ship was coming
00:09:50 ►
up, you remember this?
00:09:51 ►
And it slammed into the station and bounced off a module.
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The module seal was breached and it
00:09:56 ►
started to be depressurized.
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Well, the commander said, you know, I looked up at the monitor
00:10:03 ►
and there it was.
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And then I looked back and it was gone.
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It wasn’t there because he was seeing it come in and it was an automatic document.
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And he was in a total cognitive overload.
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He was in total fatigue.
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And he blacked out.
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He went into a stasis for about 10 seconds, a critical 10 seconds.
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He was overloaded.
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Brains stopped working.
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Blacked out, unconscious of it, but still sitting there.
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Came back, and then the ship was,
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they were in the middle of an emergency.
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So that’s exactly where human beings can go.
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If our technology around us and our social demands, that’s the condition
00:10:47 ►
that you can put somebody in. So it’s absolutely not his fault. I mean, of course, it’s like,
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Valentin, why did you do this? And I don’t know how to answer that. Because they had
00:10:58 ►
driven him so hard that he stopped functioning. He broke as a part. And every one of you in your offices at work or whatever,
00:11:08 ►
you’re kind of getting up to that threshold now and then,
00:11:11 ►
and maybe going into that threshold.
00:11:14 ►
And one of the things I was so fascinated by
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is because we work in the area of trying to help people deal with this,
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was what causes that cognitive overload
00:11:26 ►
and what what in a very simple model of the brain and then we were reading an
00:11:31 ►
article by Damasio some of this new work who many of you know is a brain
00:11:35 ►
researcher and he wrote this article was a total revelation to me it’s kind of
00:11:41 ►
like Alan’s talk yesterday morning was a big revelation to me. It’s kind of like Alan’s talk yesterday morning. It was a big revelation to me on where did my creativity go.
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While I’m writing federal contracts,
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that’s why it’s not.
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That little valve is completely stuck open,
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and nothing’s going through the creativity side anymore.
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But except these talks, perhaps.
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Damasio seems to be showing,
00:12:06 ►
this is something,
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we have friends in a clinical acupuncture practice
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in New York City,
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and they kept telling us,
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his name is Mark Warner Seen,
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and Mark wrote,
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probably was responsible more than anybody else
00:12:21 ►
for bringing Chinese acupuncture to the U.S.
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and writing about it and westernizing it.
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And he said, you know, our practice,
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we’re starting to get all these people whose adrenal systems
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are shot, who come in and the only thing that they can get
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is a nervous system reboot.
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So we give them pretty deep acupuncture
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to try to restart them.
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And a lot of them, it turns out, a lot of Orthodox Jews,
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including rabbis and whatnot, who
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are so wired and stressed out that they’ve all
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gone in to go to acupuncture.
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And I started reading up about this,
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and it turns out that there’s this whole booming field
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of clinical diagnosis of something
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called adrenal exhaustion, where people are tripped out on
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interrupts.
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So, for instance, they come in the morning, and you know what I’m talking about, and they
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start getting an email, and they go, great, that feels great, that email’s coming in,
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I exist, therefore I get an email, therefore I exist, etc., etc.
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And there’s a stimulus response, Pavlov’s dog, right therefore I exist, et cetera, et cetera. And there’s stimulus response.
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Pavlov’s dog, right?
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I exist, I exist.
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And what is happening is their eyes are darting around
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on the screen.
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And they’re sitting totally still.
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And their eyes are darting around.
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Now, they’re in rapid eye movement.
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And those darting of the eyes are driving the adrenal system
00:13:42 ►
to pump out a little bit of adrenaline.
00:13:45 ►
Because if you’re a primate in the wild and there’s a cheetah stalking you, you’re doing
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like this.
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And that is driving your adrenal system to get ready to run.
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If something is out there.
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Now if you’re sitting in an office doing this, you’re getting a wonderful high, but your
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body’s not moving.
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It’s all piling up in your body.
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And you hit a crash, like 2 or 3 o’clock
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in the afternoon, you dump.
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So where do you go? You go to Starbucks.
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Or somebody brings you coffee
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to pump it up again.
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And this continual
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cycle, then you’re in
00:14:19 ►
traffic on the way home, and nothing seems
00:14:22 ►
real.
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It’s like, nothing seems real. And you
00:14:25 ►
don’t know what’s happening to you. You go home, you have a fight with your spouse, but
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you don’t even remember the fight because nothing seems real. What’s happening? Well,
00:14:34 ►
you’re not really feeling much. Now, Damasio is powering all his research onto this area.
00:14:41 ►
What he’s finding is that, or what he’s claiming is that there’s sort of a two-speed
00:14:45 ►
brain. One part of your brain is the millisecond response of cognitive part of the brain. Just
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bang, bang, hey, I got the email back. Go fast. I can handle all this stuff. I can text
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like this. And your brain has a hunger for this stuff, this cognitive rapid response stuff, and you’re
00:15:06 ►
proud and it can just do things so quickly.
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And then there’s another part of the brain that does the emotional processing.
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And it turns out that the access to either store an emotional sense or retrieve it and
00:15:20 ►
use it is very slow.
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It’s like seconds or even minutes.
00:15:24 ►
The cognitive part is like, bam, bam.
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Now, we’re probably evolved to be that way.
00:15:30 ►
You know, we’re sitting around in our private community,
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and somebody hits somebody else, and everyone goes, oh.
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You know, they make to digest that.
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But if suddenly a troop of monkeys appears,
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and a scout appears, and they’re going to steal all the food
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and start hammering you, and they each have to do something.
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Boom, they’re reacting.
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Quickly, you go over there.
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So there are the two functions that we had to supply to survive.
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So what Damasio is showing is that people in the lab who
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get a huge amount of cognitive stimulus all the time
00:16:05 ►
start to have no access to the emotional part at all.
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They can’t store to it, and they can’t retrieve from it.
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They become what he calls emotionally neutral.
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That’s a very innocuous term.
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It’s a very scary result. Because if you become emotionally
00:16:27 ►
neutral and you’re driving home in your big SUV and you run over somebody, you’ll just
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keep driving. If you’re head of a company, right, and it’s like you’re frazzled and you
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have no connection to your emotions, it’s like, we need to lay off 10,000 people.
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Just I’ll do it.
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That’s how it’s my cognitive need to get a better result for the analysts who are hammering me.
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I’m just a numbers guy anyway.
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Let those 10,000 people go.
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No emotional connections.
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If you’re a president of a country and it’s like, let’s saturation bomb this area.
00:17:02 ►
Yeah, let’s do it.
00:17:03 ►
We see it on the screen and we see it. Yeah, let’s do it. We see it on the screen, and we see it.
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Yeah, see that blob of blue stuff?
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Well, that’ll all be red stuff, and we’ll be OK.
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No emotional connection.
00:17:13 ►
Big danger for humanity here.
00:17:16 ►
Now, of course, there’s another interesting on the spectrum.
00:17:21 ►
And Daryl will run this next piece to sort of diverge
00:17:26 ►
back to the other part of our work.
00:17:28 ►
What if you’re a little kid,
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and what if you
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have autism?
00:17:34 ►
Let’s actually show you this game.
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What if you don’t even understand
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what a street crossing is?
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What if a room
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like this full of people like you would put you
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into immediate overload where you freeze? What if a room like this full of people like you would put you into immediate overload
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where you freeze?
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What if a house that you’re sitting in is on fire and starts to burn down and you freeze
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because the flames and smoke are too much information?
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A child with autism often reaches this cognitive overload threshold like that, just bang.
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What was discovered by Dorothy Strickland a few years back, and several other people
00:18:08 ►
we’ve worked with her, Gail’s worked with her for years, is that these kids in a computer
00:18:12 ►
game like this, they’ll fix it.
00:18:15 ►
This is a perfect world for them.
00:18:17 ►
They’ll look at this dog buddy’s face, they’ll follow the instructions, they’ll listen to
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the voice and the songs, and they’ll move around in the world.
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And they’re profoundly autistic.
00:18:27 ►
And they use the cursor keys.
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And they’ll learn things.
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And because an autistic child is not necessarily low IQ,
00:18:33 ►
they’ll also try to break the game and trick the game.
00:18:37 ►
But here we have Buddy saying, come on, let’s follow me.
00:18:40 ►
I’m going to show you how to cross the street.
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And Gail’s not playing this, but behind it,
00:18:44 ►
this is a soundtrack of continual stimulating sound
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that many of you heard when you came in.
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So you get the idea.
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And these children sit down in front of these games
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and they build a mental model of the world
00:19:01 ►
that you’re going to have to push the mute button.
00:19:09 ►
And they build a mental model of the world because for them, being in front of a computer screen isn’t necessarily a big cognitive stimulation.
00:19:18 ►
They’re going to do a thousand instant messages.
00:19:19 ►
For them, it’s a way to understand the world.
00:19:22 ►
For them, it’s a way to understand the world.
00:19:27 ►
So as with any powerful tool, this digital technology and immersive virtual worlds, which are like drug trips,
00:19:31 ►
let’s face it, and they do immerse people,
00:19:34 ►
it’s a huge, I call it a double-edged broadsword.
00:19:38 ►
It’s so powerful it can cut your head off
00:19:40 ►
or you could use it to go across a creek practically.
00:19:46 ►
This environment is so powerful.
00:19:48 ►
Because unlike virtual, unlike just instant messaging
00:19:51 ►
on telephones, you’re totally visually enveloped
00:19:55 ►
in these environments, even if it’s just
00:19:57 ►
on a small computer screen.
00:19:59 ►
So she’s looking left, right, and left.
00:20:03 ►
Good job.
00:20:04 ►
And now she can cross.. They’re going to cross. If she tries
00:20:10 ►
to go outside the lines, it will throw her right back onto the sidewalk in kind of a
00:20:14 ►
nice way. Never running for the road. Now you still have to look left, right, and left.
00:20:22 ►
So these kids will go through this game hundreds of times.
00:20:25 ►
They’ll initially try to break it, and then they’ll try to do it, they’ll actually try
00:20:29 ►
to make it, and then they get rewards at the end.
00:20:32 ►
There’s the reward.
00:20:35 ►
So whether it’s an astronaut who’s trying to keep from making such an incredible mistake
00:20:43 ►
on orbit, like slamming a controlled moment
00:20:46 ►
gyro against the US lab, which would be not only a big embarrassment and a career terminator
00:20:51 ►
for them, but it would cause other things.
00:20:56 ►
People would be killed and things like that.
00:20:58 ►
But they’re also trying to, we’re trying to help these autistic kids get overwhelmed with data to build models
00:21:06 ►
and actually function in the first place in the world.
00:21:10 ►
I think it would be interesting to show you, you have to turn the sound back up a bit.
00:21:17 ►
One of the things that people keep mentioning here is they keep mentioning Burning Man.
00:21:21 ►
Truthfully, Larry Hardy talks about regional burns and
00:21:27 ►
models for changing all of humanity, but to my mind, Burning Man is like 80% about people
00:21:32 ►
trying to come to a place where they reconnect with the emotional part of themselves, the
00:21:39 ►
creative part of themselves, because they’re so suffering and they’re so desiccated in the outside
00:21:45 ►
world in their job from that and they need to come to a place that maybe isn’t
00:21:50 ►
acupuncture that does a nervous system reboot but they need a place to to get
00:21:56 ►
sane again or try to find their way back to where they thought they were when
00:21:59 ►
they were humans and that that’s really what Burning Man is about. And if they can take some of that back,
00:22:07 ►
some of that rebalancing back into their lives,
00:22:09 ►
it can affect the world.
00:22:10 ►
But unfortunately, I think Burning Man
00:22:12 ►
is a symptom of the disease.
00:22:14 ►
It’s not necessarily a, if the whole pilot was Burning Man,
00:22:17 ►
of course, we need thousands of more Walmarts
00:22:21 ►
to supply these people, because there’s no ability.
00:22:24 ►
If Burning Man was half a million people and actually
00:22:27 ►
was in the entire Black Rock Desert, it would be one of the
00:22:30 ►
most egregiously consuming entities and leave the
00:22:34 ►
mountains of trash you can imagine because it’s just an
00:22:36 ►
unsustainable community.
00:22:39 ►
But it’s a tremendous place to try to walk back to becoming a
00:22:44 ►
human being again.
00:22:45 ►
And this year, we found that there was very little art
00:22:49 ►
on the client.
00:22:50 ►
I think that’s possibly due to the funding regime now
00:22:54 ►
that exists for art projects, which
00:22:57 ►
being in the federal procurement system, what you’re starting
00:23:00 ►
to see is people competing for dollars
00:23:04 ►
to get their art out there.
00:23:05 ►
To build a big piece, you get more, or how they measure it.
00:23:10 ►
It’s not that they’re burning up their own capital, their own cells, they’re actually
00:23:14 ►
getting funded to do things.
00:23:16 ►
Of course, things are good that they’re doing, but there’s conspicuous absence, like 90%
00:23:21 ►
absence of art, large pieces.
00:23:24 ►
Strange.
00:23:25 ►
And the man was very underwhelming
00:23:28 ►
in terms of its structure.
00:23:31 ►
It was a good theme.
00:23:32 ►
But the temple, David Best’s temple,
00:23:35 ►
we saw a couple pictures of yesterday, was tremendous.
00:23:38 ►
It was possibly the best one yet, I think so. In a sense, maybe Burning Man is us trying, well-off nerds from the Western Hemisphere
00:23:52 ►
or Western world, trying to reconnect with something that’s very old.
00:23:55 ►
Terence talked about a new, what did he call it, new primitive or new tribal.
00:24:01 ►
That’s kind of a theme that seems to grow from that. But in a sense, humanity is really being stretched here.
00:24:11 ►
And it’s almost as if a certain proportion of humanity becomes fully emotionally neutral.
00:24:19 ►
It’s like every vision of every science fiction cyberpunk come true because you’ve got, you know, the
00:24:27 ►
Neuromancer jacked into the metaverse or Orwell’s at the Canadian Forum, people just sort of
00:24:34 ►
drowns.
00:24:35 ►
And there’s no emotional life.
00:24:36 ►
And that can be achieved through this giant cognitive driving factor.
00:24:43 ►
And you can probably sense it in your cells.
00:24:46 ►
And I think if you don’t have access
00:24:49 ►
to the emotional part,
00:24:51 ►
the emotional mechanism,
00:24:52 ►
you can’t be creating.
00:24:54 ►
I really believe that.
00:24:56 ►
One of the things that Damasio gives
00:24:58 ►
as an example of this is he says,
00:25:00 ►
if you are in a state of emotional neutrality
00:25:03 ►
and you call someone on the phone,
00:25:06 ►
you’re going to ask them for a favor.
00:25:08 ►
And they start to say,
00:25:09 ►
you know, I’m having a terrible day, blah, blah, blah,
00:25:12 ►
and this is what’s happened to me, and whatever.
00:25:15 ►
A person who’s kind of present,
00:25:18 ►
what they do, what he claims people do
00:25:21 ►
is they do simulations.
00:25:23 ►
You become that person just for an instant.
00:25:26 ►
You simulate them in your own body,
00:25:28 ►
in your own emotional state of mind.
00:25:31 ►
And then you have what’s called an intuitive flash
00:25:35 ►
about whether you should ask them for that favor now or not.
00:25:39 ►
So if you don’t have the doors open,
00:25:42 ►
and you can’t simulate, i.e. you have no empathy for other
00:25:46 ►
people, you can’t simulate you have no intuition.
00:25:50 ►
And you have no intuition with social intuition.
00:25:53 ►
And you’re becoming, actually you’re becoming, you’re joining the continuum of autism in
00:26:00 ►
some sense, because everything is going to be about data and driving your goals and
00:26:07 ►
whatever. You’re kind of a cognitive autist at that point. You’ll just talk right over
00:26:13 ►
top of people. You don’t hear what people are saying. And talk about being difficult
00:26:20 ►
to raise a family, being difficult just to function. And in a sense, people who are also over-mediated,
00:26:27 ►
who are not only in this cognitively overstimulated
00:26:29 ►
state where they’re losing emotional connection,
00:26:31 ►
but they’re watching so much TV.
00:26:34 ►
And the TV and the reality TV is becoming their lives.
00:26:37 ►
They’re using reality-based TV to create temporary simulations
00:26:42 ►
in themselves so that they feel something.
00:26:47 ►
Like, is she going to get the guy?
00:26:52 ►
You know, it’s like, is Trump going to hire them? And they feel all wrapped up in it,
00:26:54 ►
but it’s being substituted for their own ability to do that.
00:26:58 ►
Because we’re story machines, and if we have a story being told,
00:27:01 ►
we’re willing to throw away our complete person and adopt that story.
00:27:06 ►
But when the story’s over and the TV’s off after six or eight hours of data or whatever,
00:27:11 ►
you’re left pretty empty from that experience.
00:27:14 ►
So what’s interesting is, you know, this conference is about mind states,
00:27:19 ►
but I think what you could do is look at the mind states out there that everybody’s in.
00:27:25 ►
They’re in an altered mind state.
00:27:27 ►
What is a non-altered mind state?
00:27:29 ►
But I think that you could say that a hunking big proportion
00:27:33 ►
of society is in an altered mind state that actually
00:27:36 ►
could be clinically diagnosable.
00:27:40 ►
And they’re popping Xanax or whatever they’re popping,
00:27:42 ►
Prozac.
00:27:43 ►
They’re medicating themselves,
00:27:45 ►
they’re mediating themselves,
00:27:46 ►
and trying to keep their sense that,
00:27:49 ►
am I still here, kind of thing.
00:27:52 ►
So everybody’s in a mind state that may be…
00:27:57 ►
And in a sense, we talk about saving the planet and whatnot,
00:28:00 ►
you can’t even start to think about it
00:28:03 ►
until you’ve solved this problem.
00:28:05 ►
Now, of course, the thing that can alter the mind and whatnot, you can’t even start to think about it until you solve this problem. Now of course the thing that can alter the mind state is, well maybe even not, if there’s
00:28:10 ►
an incoming asteroid, people would not really connect with that emotionally. Like, okay,
00:28:16 ►
don’t see it now. Maybe it’s just a TV show. But that way people would, would housing price
00:28:24 ►
crash and half the country
00:28:25 ►
be out on the street and foreclosures and bank
00:28:28 ►
fillers, would that wake people up?
00:28:29 ►
It might.
00:28:31 ►
Would it be global climate change?
00:28:33 ►
I mean, just physical discomfort for primates
00:28:35 ►
would probably wake them up.
00:28:36 ►
What you tend to find, and this is also in Damasio’s work,
00:28:40 ►
is that a person has become emotionally neutral
00:28:42 ►
and they’re just motoring along on their cognitive stimulation.
00:28:45 ►
When they have an accident or something,
00:28:47 ►
when their loved one dies,
00:28:49 ►
they have no buffer.
00:28:52 ►
It tends to either they have no connection with it
00:28:56 ►
and the family members can’t understand,
00:28:57 ►
or they plunge headlong into complete breakdown.
00:29:02 ►
Because now they’re overwhelmed with something in front of them
00:29:05 ►
that is undeniable.
00:29:06 ►
Now they’ve lost their, their cognitive state just goes bluey.
00:29:11 ►
And they’re now, in a sense, in an unprepared emotional state.
00:29:15 ►
They’ve not been using that mechanism for a long time.
00:29:17 ►
Suddenly there’s something to it, and they will crash.
00:29:21 ►
And that’s not good either. And so I think, I mean, this is a very positive view
00:29:30 ►
of the thing.
00:29:32 ►
But it’s all part of the giant unplanned experiment.
00:29:35 ►
And I think, I’m just trying to think of what I was going
00:29:38 ►
to conclude with.
00:29:39 ►
I was supposed to say something positive.
00:29:43 ►
Anyway, psychedelics, Yeah, there we go.
00:29:48 ►
So when you go to brain mania, you
00:29:51 ►
can go get acupuncture from the beams, from the seams.
00:29:55 ►
You can do a lot of things.
00:29:57 ►
And in psychedelic state, perhaps what you’re doing
00:29:59 ►
is you’re simply, because you’re putting your entire self aside and allowing yourself to be filled with something else.
00:30:08 ►
And the use of psychedelics may be the most powerful antidote
00:30:13 ►
to this growing critical problem for primates,
00:30:18 ►
on the primate brain.
00:30:20 ►
So perhaps if there is some kind of, where does society
00:30:27 ►
go from here?
00:30:28 ►
What if three-quarters of the American population
00:30:30 ►
is emotionally neutral and they’re driving, driving,
00:30:33 ►
driving, and there’s a breakdown?
00:30:36 ►
Well, maybe one of the solutions is the kinds of things
00:30:38 ►
that say the Shulgens are evolving, the pioneer,
00:30:42 ►
or you guys are evolving.
00:30:43 ►
Maybe that’s the only way back from this abyss.
00:30:48 ►
So just another kind of perspective
00:30:53 ►
on the overall mind states of the entire planet right now.
00:30:58 ►
That’s why it’s nice to come to Mexico,
00:30:59 ►
because fewer people are in this state.
00:31:03 ►
So why don’t we open it up to questions, comments,
00:31:07 ►
criticisms?
00:31:08 ►
I guess my comment is that
00:31:11 ►
as someone who’s involved in certain communities that
00:31:15 ►
are smaller, I find it more difficult still to relate.
00:31:19 ►
It’s even more difficult because I’ve been a psychedelic
00:31:22 ►
because I’ve joined up with these communities,
00:31:24 ►
more difficult to relate to that three quarters
00:31:26 ►
of the general population that’s still within this mind
00:31:28 ►
state of disassociation.
00:31:30 ►
And I’m wondering how Burning Man, or something
00:31:32 ►
like the Moon Tribal, or something like the Mind States,
00:31:34 ►
I think that’s why I’m here.
00:31:35 ►
And I’m wondering how other people can relate to this.
00:31:38 ►
How is this essentially helping us?
00:31:39 ►
Because what it’s doing is it’s creating
00:31:41 ►
these small semi-urban or closet urban tribes, which allow
00:31:45 ►
us to express ourselves in these small micro environments,
00:31:49 ►
but really still hyper-disassociate ourselves
00:31:52 ►
from progressive society.
00:31:54 ►
And although that may be healthy,
00:31:55 ►
I don’t necessarily want to be integrated into the Allergy TV.
00:31:59 ►
At least for myself, and I can’t speak for everybody else here,
00:32:02 ►
is that I was hoping that psychedelics would help me integrate better into a larger sense of society, to communicate with more
00:32:09 ►
people into the fewer people. And as much as I’d like to embrace my freedom, I think
00:32:15 ►
that part of embracing that is also to disassociate yourself with a greater sense. And I feel
00:32:21 ►
like that’s the great danger here. That’s the great danger of things like brain man
00:32:25 ►
and moon tribe or mind states.
00:32:27 ►
And as much as I love all of you,
00:32:30 ►
if it presents a danger to us, if we can become really
00:32:32 ►
inclusive and insular, excuse me,
00:32:35 ►
and then kind of think everything’s all right,
00:32:37 ►
and we still have to wake up in the morning,
00:32:39 ►
and we still have to wake up in the morning to do our work,
00:32:41 ►
and figure out how am I going to relate to that guy who
00:32:43 ►
wants to tell me about the last episode of Friends?
00:32:45 ►
When I just had this seriously dope experience
00:32:47 ►
in the middle of the desert, how am I going to really do that?
00:32:50 ►
I’m interested here, instead of necessarily talking to him,
00:32:53 ►
don’t get me wrong.
00:32:53 ►
The great thing, the great thing, my fixer, great thing.
00:32:57 ►
How are we trying to communicate with the rest of the people?
00:33:00 ►
I no longer maintain this kind of, like you said,
00:33:04 ►
unsustainable or unsustainable economy of psychedelics.
00:33:08 ►
My sense about this whole thing is that there’s going to be some huge crisis in the next decades.
00:33:17 ►
And a lot of people are going to be dumped into a very confused and old novels will be discredited and people will be really
00:33:27 ►
hurting. And I think that if you guys can build yourselves up and the loving energy
00:33:33 ►
that you have and the insights that you have and get ready to help some people, because
00:33:38 ►
we’re all going to hit the wall, but the people who are in the state of wired into all that media and all that cognitive dissonance,
00:33:49 ►
the plunge for them is going to be very far.
00:33:52 ►
And I think it may not happen in our lifetimes, but it might.
00:33:58 ►
I’m concerned about competition among primates.
00:34:02 ►
Project yourself back, let’s say, 10 years ago.
00:34:05 ►
And let’s say you were going to enter the same field you did,
00:34:09 ►
but with current technology today.
00:34:13 ►
Do you think you could compete and be successful
00:34:17 ►
without having to immerse yourself in all the email
00:34:21 ►
and interactive structure?
00:34:24 ►
Yeah, you know, what I asked this morning,
00:34:26 ►
I’ll have to tell you guys something personally.
00:34:28 ►
I’m the principal investigator on a giant proposal for NASA,
00:34:33 ►
and I wrote an email to these people, I said,
00:34:36 ►
to our prime, well, it’s Raytheon and people like that,
00:34:40 ►
and I said, guys, the reporting requirements
00:34:44 ►
are so brutal for this thing.
00:34:46 ►
Monthly, I mean, full-cost accounting, monthly reports.
00:34:50 ►
Okay, the whole thing.
00:34:51 ►
And we have two universities and two giant companies and three NASA centers
00:34:55 ►
that I’ve, in my exuberance, signed up for this proposal.
00:35:00 ►
And I said, this is going to kill me.
00:35:04 ►
And can somebody else lead this thing?
00:35:07 ►
We would be very happy to be a little supportive role,
00:35:10 ►
but even if I can find the best contract manager,
00:35:13 ►
and if any of you can do this,
00:35:15 ►
anybody know what GMA means?
00:35:17 ►
Raise their hand, please.
00:35:20 ►
But the truth of the matter is,
00:35:22 ►
I’m probably going to back out.
00:35:23 ►
I’m going to say, I will sub to anybody, but I don’t want the responsibility.
00:35:29 ►
It will kill me.
00:35:31 ►
And all you guys will get paid your salaries,
00:35:34 ►
and I’ll be a piece of jello at the end of this thing.
00:35:37 ►
And I won’t have painted a picture, or, you know,
00:35:40 ►
Gail won’t be able to reach me at all because I’ll be getting back-to-back reports every day.
00:35:47 ►
And yes, we may go back to the moon, but I’ll be probably dead from the process.
00:35:52 ►
So anyway, that’s a decision you have to make, actually, is how much you take on.
00:35:59 ►
And the rest of the story is that Bruce has now disbanded his team of VR creators and is pursuing
00:36:06 ►
his PhD and the EvoGrid. In fact, in early August, Bruce and I plan to get together for
00:36:13 ►
some more brainstorming, and one of the things we plan on doing is to record another interview
00:36:18 ►
for the salon, and that will be when we’ll get an update on what Bruce is currently focusing
00:36:23 ►
on, namely the EvoGrid.
00:36:26 ►
But since the talk we just heard got shortened due to my cutting out the bits where he had shown a couple of videos,
00:36:32 ►
I thought I would slip in a little bit of a conversation that Bruce and I had back in 2006.
00:36:38 ►
I’m only going to play a little bit of this late night conversation,
00:36:42 ►
but I think that a few of the things that Bruce was talking about
00:36:46 ►
are even more relevant today.
00:36:48 ►
And keep in mind that when this conversation took place,
00:36:52 ►
little Georgie Bush was still in the White House,
00:36:54 ►
which brings me back to my mother’s mantra that
00:36:57 ►
everything has changed, but nothing is different.
00:37:01 ►
And now I’d like to invite you to join Bruce and me
00:37:04 ►
for a little late night discussion.
00:37:17 ►
In strategizing, because people, even the people that aren’t really paying close attention,
00:37:24 ►
I think people are sensing something coming in the form of a correction of some kind.
00:37:28 ►
Do you see different strategies for people in different age groups,
00:37:32 ►
or is there a generic overview that people need to be thinking of?
00:37:37 ►
I think that every time I go to Costco or Trader Joe’s
00:37:42 ►
and I get all these lovely products and I come back and everything, I just have this deep sense that this can’t go on.
00:37:52 ►
One, that it’s such a gift.
00:37:56 ►
It’s a tremendous thing and joy.
00:37:58 ►
This is tremendous.
00:38:00 ►
All these products come and they’re perfect and they’re priced well and how can we conceive
00:38:07 ►
of a planet 50 years like this?
00:38:13 ►
And it’s really hard to say where the correction will come, but a correction can come in many
00:38:21 ►
ways, and I think the correction is already happening.
00:38:26 ►
And the correction is happening, the initial cracks are psychological.
00:38:33 ►
It’s the stand on Zanzibar book cover that you see from 1968 where all those people are
00:38:37 ►
in those little cubby holes in their own little world of, this is my reality and I’m afraid
00:38:43 ►
of that next cubbyhole that
00:38:45 ►
person is, and there’s seven billion people crowded on the planet and there’ll be more
00:38:48 ►
soon.
00:38:50 ►
But it’s these realities where everything becomes cultish.
00:38:55 ►
Every group lives in an existing cult, and they don’t even have to be in Jonestown and
00:39:02 ►
next to the Poison Kool-Aid, they have to be next to the media stream that
00:39:07 ►
reinforces their memetics for that cult belief, and gradually going crazy.
00:39:12 ►
They don’t have to be in the mansion, you know, in the Heaven’s Gate mansion.
00:39:16 ►
They don’t have to be there.
00:39:17 ►
They can be anywhere and be in that cult.
00:39:20 ►
And whether they’re extreme Islam or extreme Christianity or fearful left-wing liberals who are often even the most extreme and radical of all of them.
00:39:36 ►
And harder to work with and deal with because there’s no fun and no humor in them.
00:39:42 ►
They’re apocalyptic.
00:39:47 ►
Not in the Christian sense,
00:39:51 ►
but the extreme left are the ultimate harbingers of the apocalypse.
00:39:53 ►
But they don’t have any common sense,
00:39:55 ►
and they have no traditions to fall back on.
00:39:58 ►
Apocalypse management traditions.
00:40:02 ►
So in a sense,
00:40:12 ►
the preconditions for the correction are the slow madness of the population, especially in the United States.
00:40:13 ►
It’s way ahead of the scheme.
00:40:16 ►
If you went to southern Italy into a little town on the coast, you wouldn’t find this
00:40:20 ►
kind of madness.
00:40:21 ►
You’d find a little bit of it, but basically people living the way they were.
00:40:25 ►
But as soon as you go to the Anglo-Saxon countries, insane people.
00:40:30 ►
And when the Indians, the native peoples, there was a comment by one of the chiefs in
00:40:36 ►
New England, I don’t know who made it, was they saw the French coming with, oh, they’re
00:40:40 ►
kind of cool guys, and Italian explorers, oh, hi, are you doing? And then the Anglo-Saxons showed up.
00:40:47 ►
It was like they took one look at these people’s faces,
00:40:49 ►
and they thought, big trouble.
00:40:52 ►
Big trouble with these people.
00:40:54 ►
They are miserable.
00:40:55 ►
They are never going to be satisfied with anything.
00:40:57 ►
There’s something wrong with these people.
00:40:59 ►
They just knew it, like, these are bad dudes.
00:41:04 ►
So is it the Anglo-Saxon brain? They just knew it like, these are bad dudes.
00:41:05 ►
Is it the Anglo-Saxon brain?
00:41:07 ►
But of course you have Beslan in Moscow and the paranoia.
00:41:13 ►
The paranoia is sort of cultural, so Russian paranoia is intense, but they’ve always been
00:41:19 ►
in it.
00:41:20 ►
But you have the new European paranoia.
00:41:25 ►
How’s the European madness factor now?
00:41:28 ►
The European madness factor in 1939 was pretty intense.
00:41:33 ►
They blew it out of themselves in six years
00:41:36 ►
and decided they didn’t want to go back there.
00:41:39 ►
Certainly Yugoslavia was an expression of that madness factor.
00:41:44 ►
Africa’s always the land of genocide, and it was for five million years, and probably
00:41:50 ►
always will be.
00:41:52 ►
But how is it doing in all these places?
00:41:54 ►
And yet, when we went to Southeast Asia, you’re sitting there in Singapore and you’re looking
00:42:00 ►
out at all these beautiful glass towers, and this perfect society that has beaten all the
00:42:04 ►
culture out of itself, and they know that.
00:42:07 ►
But one of the things you look out at, you look at Thailand, you look at Vietnam, which
00:42:11 ►
was the state Vietnam was in, and you say, wait a minute, we’re watching the Southeast
00:42:17 ►
Asian Games in there in Hanoi, there’s this brand new stadium, there’s a laser light show,
00:42:21 ►
and all the countries from Southeast Asia are in Hanoi doing this high tech, their own local regional games, except for Burma.
00:42:30 ►
And you realize they’ve come a long way.
00:42:32 ►
Geez, they’ve come a long way.
00:42:35 ►
And then you go to Bangkok, I went with my friend from the Peace Corps who lives there
00:42:39 ►
part of the year, and he took us to the spot in Bangkok where the border, where the end
00:42:44 ►
of Bangkok was in 1972.
00:42:46 ►
He says, this is where Bangkok ended.
00:42:50 ►
Now we’ll drive two hours to get to the current edge of Bangkok where I have funded an elementary
00:42:56 ►
school and I have a little apartment above the school.
00:42:59 ►
This is how much Bangkok has grown.
00:43:01 ►
It’s eight, ten times the size that it was. And you see how despite that they’ve stayed ahead and they have cleaner water and better
00:43:09 ►
schools and the king basically has managed, he said we need to improve a certain percentage
00:43:16 ►
a year in every category, we don’t have to make big jumps.
00:43:20 ►
And that whole region how much better off it is.
00:43:23 ►
So the positivity is, there’s so many incredibly positive things all ramping up at the same
00:43:30 ►
time as this kind of mania, the same time as the consumption of all the resources and
00:43:36 ►
the transformation of the gas state of the atmosphere.
00:43:39 ►
You know, I’m getting ready for some really interesting climate that we haven’t seen in
00:43:43 ►
a while. I read somewhere that we worry about Katrina, but South Florida, like Tampa Bay and all those sorts of things,
00:43:52 ►
and the Okefenokee itself, carved by super hurricanes.
00:43:57 ►
That whole coastline.
00:43:58 ►
And you’re looking at something with an 80-foot storm surge that is taking the top 40 feet of soil off.
00:44:07 ►
The thing is channeling through South Florida and it kind of runs out of steam, but that’s
00:44:11 ►
the violence of it.
00:44:12 ►
So you’re looking at 230, 240 mile an hour hurricanes.
00:44:17 ►
And those are old.
00:44:19 ►
Those are 15,000 years ago or 8,000 years ago.
00:44:23 ►
But we’ve had a nice calm weather period for a long time.
00:44:27 ►
And we think Katrina’s bad.
00:44:30 ►
That’s just a harbinger of things to come.
00:44:32 ►
Yeah, and when you put that much energy more into the atmosphere
00:44:35 ►
and you shift things around,
00:44:37 ►
it’s almost like the party is over.
00:44:40 ►
You know, here’s all your fossil fuels, burn them up.
00:44:44 ►
You know, here’s all your fossil fuels, burn them up. You know, here’s a nice stable climate period.
00:44:48 ►
And maybe our CO2 emissions are preventing another cooling period.
00:44:53 ►
But, you know, here’s optimal everything.
00:44:56 ►
You know, we’ll give you everything.
00:44:58 ►
The planet will give you everything it’s got.
00:45:00 ►
All the forests and all the, you know, it’ll allow you to genetically engineer all your crops
00:45:07 ►
and produce the green revolution in the 70s, which prevented mass starvation.
00:45:13 ►
But it’s all of this stuff at once where women have fewer kids,
00:45:17 ►
so the population growth rate is slowing.
00:45:19 ►
That’s a good sign.
00:45:21 ►
But China’s burning billions of tons of coal in the atmosphere. That’s a good sign. But China’s burning billions of tons of coal in the atmosphere.
00:45:25 ►
That’s a bad sign.
00:45:27 ►
So all of this, and you have the internet, you have open flows of communication, good
00:45:31 ►
sign.
00:45:32 ►
The internet carries manic, crazy, paranoid belief systems to local groups that become
00:45:41 ►
radicalized.
00:45:42 ►
That’s a bad sign.
00:45:44 ►
So it’s like everything. So what
00:45:46 ►
is the correction? I think the correction is an intensification of all those
00:45:50 ►
things at once to some kind of a breaking point or a series of breaking
00:45:55 ►
points or a breaking point that triggers a mass psychological effect. So you know
00:46:03 ►
that’s a very common theme in science fiction.
00:46:06 ►
So if you explore this, what could make people sort of go bonkers and do bad things?
00:46:13 ►
Nazi Germany was a good example.
00:46:17 ►
A system was manipulated, a paranoid population, a fearful population who had good reason to be afraid, manipulated them into doing really, you know, very rapidly, doing an incredible, amazing job of producing a
00:46:31 ►
lot of material and getting a booming economy going, and getting a military class rebuilt
00:46:38 ►
at the same time, strategically, and then creating a pogrom, and creating a kind of blind following of a leadership
00:46:47 ►
that was going to take you right over the precipice.
00:46:50 ►
And I don’t think that will ever happen in the U.S., because the U.S. is so diverse.
00:46:57 ►
You know, you’ll have Santa Cruz will break off, and, you know, it’s so diverse.
00:47:01 ►
But I think that, in a sense, it’s hard to really see the correction.
00:47:08 ►
If it’s an asteroid strike, I mean, that’s sort of an easy one.
00:47:12 ►
If it’s just gradually being, the correction probably is we find it harder decade after decade to produce enough food,
00:47:21 ►
or we just find things just don’t work as well.
00:47:24 ►
Things just start to break apart.
00:47:27 ►
Well, the infrastructure is already starting to crumble in many places in this country.
00:47:31 ►
Right, although, on the other hand, they’re building all new infrastructure.
00:47:35 ►
But I think we come to the point where, gee, those wonderful years of stable energy prices,
00:47:42 ►
which we’re really dependent on, now we have these huge
00:47:45 ►
surges and drops.
00:47:46 ►
We have, say, the Saudi oil production wiped out by insurgency.
00:47:49 ►
Suddenly there’s a massive economic chaos.
00:47:53 ►
So we have economic chaos that the world experienced in the past that we haven’t for a while.
00:48:00 ►
The former Soviet Union was an example of maybe what can happen when an entire system breaks down.
00:48:07 ►
You go to the former Soviet Union and you find guarded compounds
00:48:11 ►
with wealthy people in them and incredibly crumbled infrastructure
00:48:15 ►
in a lot of places and a falling down,
00:48:18 ►
but you have a rising up at the same time.
00:48:22 ►
Or South Africa where you have high-tech, booming economy
00:48:26 ►
in some sectors, in the other sectors it’s massive corruption
00:48:29 ►
and a breaking down of the idea of government.
00:48:33 ►
And they’re all competing for each other.
00:48:35 ►
Can you win before we win the other way?
00:48:40 ►
Or it’s almost like, can we win against a global pandemic,
00:48:44 ►
bird flu, before it comes for us?
00:48:48 ►
And so I almost see like there are these two forces coming up together, like hands coming together.
00:48:56 ►
And one of them is getting a little bit ahead, and you get higher and higher and higher, and you have a smaller margin for error.
00:49:05 ►
Everything now is very high up, and the stakes are very, very high up.
00:49:08 ►
So it’s like pushing to one side or another and something breaks apart.
00:49:13 ►
But it’s very hard to see where it’ll come from.
00:49:16 ►
But the psychology of people to deal with the crisis, that’s the real thing.
00:49:23 ►
Do you have level-headed, objective-thinking people?
00:49:27 ►
For instance, if you had in the abstract, you had an asteroid coming in, 200 mile or
00:49:33 ►
20 mile across, none of the people who are currently in government are currently probably
00:49:40 ►
running agencies of any kind or suitable for dealing with that crisis.
00:49:49 ►
And ultimately, but of course, they won’t relinquish their jobs,
00:49:51 ►
but they’re not suitable. You need an utterly different kind of person to get that job done.
00:49:58 ►
So if any crisis arises, you have the wrong people, probably,
00:50:04 ►
because the things that put them there
00:50:06 ►
and the constituencies that wanted them there
00:50:10 ►
create a person that’s incapable of handling a real crisis.
00:50:15 ►
And so you’re never going to be able to say,
00:50:18 ►
gee, okay, we’ve got a real job to do now, step aside,
00:50:22 ►
we’re going to find the best people in society.
00:50:23 ►
It won’t happen happen so the crisis
00:50:25 ►
won’t get handled so it’ll be if it’s a asteroid strike which it probably won’t be but if it was a
00:50:31 ►
medical you know a pandemic you know it will the system will fail us our leadership will fail us
00:50:37 ►
is like katrina but on a large scale and i think that’s where you have the correction because
00:50:44 ►
nature gives you a certain amount of time to react.
00:50:46 ►
Say if it’s a pandemic, you have weeks to really do it the right way.
00:50:52 ►
You didn’t react.
00:50:53 ►
The stakes were already very high, and you just lost a third of your population.
00:50:58 ►
And now there’s no one to maintain highways anymore.
00:51:00 ►
Because it killed just a third of the maintenance guys guys and they count for more than you do.
00:51:05 ►
They kept the sewers running.
00:51:08 ►
So it really is going to come down to leadership.
00:51:11 ►
The second aspect is if you have a radicalized population that’s very paranoid, they can
00:51:17 ►
be led, they can be misled very easily.
00:51:20 ►
And so in that circumstance, and this is what happened in Nazi Germany,
00:51:31 ►
radicalized population, a guy can step right into that and then truly create damage.
00:51:35 ►
So I think in a sense that the correction may come from, you know,
00:51:41 ►
this utter failure of leadership to respond to crisis because they can’t. And then instead of drawing in a strong, powerful leader
00:51:46 ►
that is also fair and whatnot, get you through it, you get failure.
00:51:52 ►
Failure of the system, and then the radical, true radical system.
00:51:55 ►
George Bush and Comey are not these people.
00:51:58 ►
They’re not the true dangerous people.
00:52:01 ►
Those people are yet to come.
00:52:04 ►
They’re maybe kids right now, or they’re in their teens, but the truly dangerous individuals
00:52:11 ►
are out there.
00:52:13 ►
One of the things, in a subsequent podcast I can tell you more about how you deal with
00:52:18 ►
those kinds of people, because it’s been something that I’ve made a practice of trying to sense
00:52:22 ►
those people’s presence. Because people who have truly caught the whole, they’ve caught the energy thing, their charisma,
00:52:34 ►
we talk about Terence McKenna’s charisma and other people, where they’ve taken charisma
00:52:39 ►
and they’ve turned it not to artistic means or whatever other means, they’ve turned it into true manipulation,
00:52:49 ►
true psychotic manipulation.
00:52:51 ►
You know those people when they’re in your presence.
00:52:54 ►
And I’ve got this kind of empathic sense in me that I can pick them up, and I can’t keep
00:53:00 ►
them out.
00:53:01 ►
So they come, whatever they have comes in, even if they don’t notice I’m there.
00:53:05 ►
And I’ve noticed that with these types of individuals.
00:53:10 ►
And so you’ve got to know who these people are for real.
00:53:13 ►
I was going to say, that sounds like part of the strategy is being careful who you listen to
00:53:19 ►
and really evaluating what your leaders are saying and make your own decisions and don’t be swayed.
00:53:24 ►
evaluating what your leaders are saying and make your own decisions and don’t be swayed.
00:53:30 ►
Yeah, and if you don’t, if you want a future, you have to take charge of your own thoughts.
00:53:37 ►
And if you’re having thoughts about, you know, I hate these people or I’m afraid of that,
00:53:44 ►
and other people, wouldn’t you, would you think that, would you want everyone in the world,
00:53:46 ►
including the people who are actually running your sewer system,
00:53:50 ►
or people who are running your local government to have the same thought in their head?
00:53:54 ►
You’d say, no, I don’t want people having the thoughts like I do.
00:53:56 ►
It would be terrible.
00:54:01 ►
It would be terrible if everybody was in the state of mind I’m in.
00:54:03 ►
Nothing would get done.
00:54:06 ►
And you don’t want that.
00:54:10 ►
But yet, maybe other people are in that state of mind.
00:54:11 ►
What are they going to do?
00:54:15 ►
Physicians that influence having that kind of state of mind that you have?
00:54:17 ►
That’s the advice.
00:54:18 ►
Take charge of your own thoughts.
00:54:20 ►
Yeah.
00:54:23 ►
Because you can sort through your own thoughts if you really put your effort in. It’s almost like when you’re in an airplane
00:54:25 ►
and the next passenger over from you is drunk and asleep.
00:54:31 ►
And there’s a person there who’s all frantic about some business deal.
00:54:36 ►
And it’s like a microcosm of humanity in a big jumbo jet.
00:54:39 ►
You’re flying across the Pacific.
00:54:40 ►
And everybody hopes and believes that the pilot and the co-pilot are there, they’re
00:54:47 ►
sensible, they’re reasonable and rational.
00:54:50 ►
Not like every other passenger.
00:54:52 ►
And even the service staff are like, someone’s pissed off at somebody and it’s like this
00:54:58 ►
crazy mad thing going on.
00:55:01 ►
And then there’s two sensible people talking but you you think that the pilot
00:55:11 ►
they’re not having crazy thoughts or they’re not drinking or they’re not you know and and you hope
00:55:18 ►
but do you how can you completely expect that and then if if all of the passengers are nuts
00:55:26 ►
maybe some of the pilots are going to be nuts i How can they insulate them? Who’s insulating them and protecting them? So if they’re our leadership, who’s watching over the leadership to say, we don’t want
00:55:32 ►
people who are nuts in any way to be our leaders?
00:55:36 ►
No one’s watching over that.
00:55:39 ►
People are just, if everybody’s nuts, they’re going to put nuts into leadership.
00:55:43 ►
And then the whole aircraft is coming down somewhere.
00:55:49 ►
So, yeah, in the well, in the first online community, the phrase was, you own your own words.
00:55:56 ►
If you type something and put it in, you own it.
00:55:58 ►
And it goes out to people and it hurts somebody or whatever, you own it.
00:56:02 ►
And you really own your own thoughts, too.
00:56:01 ►
and hurt somebody or whatever.
00:56:02 ►
You own it.
00:56:04 ►
And you already own your own thoughts, too.
00:56:08 ►
Because every thought you have that is unpleasant or whatever,
00:56:09 ►
or untrusting or fearful,
00:56:12 ►
goes into the ether and becomes part of the whole picture.
00:56:13 ►
You become what you think about.
00:56:15 ►
You become what you think about.
00:56:18 ►
And so anyway, we’ll leave it there.
00:56:24 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:56:30 ►
And I guess I should say once again that it’s been about three years since that conversation took place,
00:56:36 ►
and so maybe we’ll pick back up on some of these topics this summer when we record another late-night talkabout.
00:56:44 ►
Again, I’m going to have to cut my own
00:56:46 ►
remarks a bit short today, and I’ll tell you why in just a minute, but first there are a couple of
00:56:51 ►
other quick things that I’d like to mention. One is the fact that while many of our fellow
00:56:57 ►
salonners lament the fact that they feel as if they’re all alone out there at the far edges of
00:57:02 ►
the tribe, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of psychedelic people nearby.
00:57:07 ►
You just haven’t found them yet.
00:57:09 ►
And keep in mind the wording here.
00:57:12 ►
As Terrence often said, find the others,
00:57:15 ►
which implies that it is up to you to find the others.
00:57:19 ►
You can’t wait for them to find you.
00:57:22 ►
Now, I don’t have any better ideas about how to go about doing that than you
00:57:27 ►
might have, but just to give you an idea of what I would consider an out-of-the-way place to find
00:57:32 ►
the others came in a brief note that I received on Facebook. It was from Carl S. and read,
00:57:40 ►
Hey Lorenzo, I love the Psychedelic Salon. It’s my favorite podcast to listen to on my bike ride to work here in Shanghai, China.
00:57:49 ►
Keep up the good work.
00:57:51 ►
So, let’s face it, if there is a psychonaut in Shanghai, there’s got to be one in your neck of the woods too.
00:57:59 ►
On another note, you’ll probably recall that in my last podcast, I mentioned that Arrowwood is trying to raise the funds necessary to scan more than a dozen boxes of documents from the Myron Stolaroff archive.
00:58:12 ►
So far, that effort has received a little over $100 from a couple of our fellow salonners, and on behalf of the Stolaroffs, I want to thank you.
00:58:26 ►
of the Stoler Offs, I want to thank you. In fact, I’m going to make a quick run up to Lone Pine to see Myron and Jean this weekend, and I’ll report back to you about that visit in my next podcast.
00:58:32 ►
Which reminds me that I need to let you know about my schedule for the next few weeks. As you know,
00:58:38 ►
I’m in the final stages of recording my new novel as an audiobook, and to be honest, that project is Thank you. and that will be followed on June 10th with my fourth anniversary podcast.
00:59:06 ►
Yep, that’s right.
00:59:07 ►
It will have been four years since you and I first started getting together here in the salon.
00:59:12 ►
And for my June 10th podcast, I’m going to play the first chapter of my novel.
00:59:17 ►
Hopefully, I’ll also have the rest of the book recorded and available for purchase online.
00:59:22 ►
But the first chapter is already complete,
00:59:29 ►
recorded, edited, and even if the rest of the book isn’t quite ready yet, I’ll definitely podcast that first chapter on that day. My idea, of course, is that if the first chapter doesn’t
00:59:35 ►
grab you enough to spend $12 to hear the rest of it, well, you just saved yourself a few bucks.
00:59:41 ►
It’s sort of my version of try before you buy. And once I’ve got that
00:59:46 ►
project tied up, I’ll be back on the forums. Right now, I only have time to visit the growreport.com
00:59:52 ►
forums a couple of times a week, and then mainly as a lurker. But I plan on getting back in the
00:59:58 ►
loop soon, and the same goes for Facebook, email, and the phone. I can’t even allow myself to think about how many little things are slipping through the cracks right now
01:00:08 ►
while I’m in this writing vortex.
01:00:10 ►
But I’ll eventually get back to the default world, so please don’t give up on me.
01:00:15 ►
But even if you aren’t hearing back from me,
01:00:18 ►
I want you to know that I truly appreciate the cards, emails, and music you’ve been sending.
01:00:23 ►
I do read them and listen to the music, which is excellent, by the way. Thank you. living in some interesting and exciting times, and I hope that all of the interest and excitement in your life
01:00:46 ►
is all positive and fun.
01:00:50 ►
Well, that’s it for today,
01:00:52 ►
and so I’ll close by reminding you that
01:00:54 ►
this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:00:57 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects
01:01:01 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license. And if you have any questions about that, Thank you. So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:01:26 ►
Be well, my friends.