192 - Timothy Leary Live at the Stone

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary

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

“So to me, that Summer of Love [1967] was kind of a coming out party, a coming of age party, of the first wave, the first year of the baby boom [when the first boomers turned 21].”

“It’s kind of interesting that the military, and the police, and these bureaucrats, they live in a germ-free society. They live in shells of bureaucratic boot kissing.”

“I’m very much against addicts and drug fuck-ups.”

“At those moments in human history where it’s time for our species to confront a new reality, whether it’s going from four foot to two foot, or it’s to make love face-to-face or whatever, there’s a certain breed of human beings in every gene pool who come along at that time and make us feel comfortable. They explain, they personalize, they popularize what’s really happening. Now you know who these people are. They are the artists, the musicians, the playwrights, the poets, the myth makers, the wizards, the jugglers, the story tellers, the crazed scientist, the mischievous physicist, you know who they are. In every epic of human history these people come along.”

“So finally we catch on, it’s the governments that cause all the fuck-ups.”

“It doesn’t do any good to think for yourself if you don’t know how to think.”

“They say, never mind about politics or economics or religion, it’s language that controls society and that controls the individual. And who controls the language controls everything. … If you control the language, and the technology of the language, you control the mind.”

“The personal computer allows you to do exactly what these French philosophers say we gotta do, control your own screen.”

“The real message I get from the 20th century is learn how to be cyber-hip.”

“Literacy my friends is the oppressive chains of the educated middle class.”

More Timothy Leary Recordings (MP3 Format)
Download Instructions
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
Superintelligence Seminar – Recorded 5/19/85 TAPE 1

Superintelligence Seminar – Recorded 5/19/85 TAPE 2

Superintelligence Seminar – Recorded 5/19/85 TAPE 3

The Sordid Story of a DEA Informant
Halperngate (PDF)
by Jon Hanna

Halperngate II (PDF)
by John Beresford, M.D.

The Bad Shaman Meets the Wayward Doc (PDF)
by Erik Davis

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0743250451 http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0743250443 http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0679785892

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.

00:00:30 ►

And like a lot of our fellow salonners, I’m discovering that once again getting things done in the summertime just seems to take a little longer than at other times of the year.

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Maybe it’s just me, but I sure do slow down in the summertime.

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But two people who didn’t slow down this week are Douglas S. and Jorge H.,

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both of whom sent in really generous donations that most definitely help with the expenses here in the salon. Douglas S. and Jorge H. you know that I told you that today we would begin listening to a Timothy Leary workshop.

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Well, I’ve changed my mind.

00:01:08 ►

Not about the person we’ll be hearing from today,

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but I’m going to play a different talk than the one I told you about,

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which was his super-intelligence seminar that took place in May of 1985.

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But fear not if you had your heart set on listening to that seminar,

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because I’m going to post download links to that entire unedited seminar,

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along with the program notes for today’s podcast.

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And so if you’re a major Dr. Leary scholar, you can listen to it at your leisure.

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But the reason I’m not playing it here is that I think it’s way too slow for a podcast.

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Now, this may just be my own bias coming out here,

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but I started working on the first tape,

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and by the time I’d processed an hour of it,

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I realized that without the pressure of a time deadline,

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the good doctor often just rambled off in a dozen different directions

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and didn’t always complete one thought before moving on to another.

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And so a large part of what I heard was mainly just good-natured give and take

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between him and the workshop audience.

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Now, the way I produce these podcasts

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is to first go through a talk

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and edit out all of the dead spots

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where somebody in the audience

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might ask a long question that can’t be clearly heard,

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and so it’d sort of be a dead spot in the recording.

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Then I record my own comments and kludge it all together,

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lay in some background music by Chateau Hayouk,

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which I should point out again is compliments of my friend Jacques,

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who also appears as Paloka in my novel, by the way.

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Anyway, after spending a couple of hours editing out all of the parts that made no sense

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without some video to go along with it, I realized that I was intending to skip the final step of my

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process, which is to do a final listen-through of the finished podcast. And so I realized that

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if I didn’t even want to listen to it again, then why should I put it out as a podcast and force you to do it?

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Maybe I’m being a little too critical here,

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but the end result is that I found another talk by Dr. Leary

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that is, at least to me, much more interesting, exciting, and upbeat.

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And that’s what we’re going to hear right now.

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Hopefully you have enough interest in learning how we got to where we are today

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that the talk about personal computers in this lecture will be of some interest to you. So keep in mind that the talk we’re about

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to hear was given in July of 1987, and at that time not even a measurable percentage of people

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in this country even had a personal computer, and the web was still five or more years away.

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Now I happened to be in the personal computer business myself quite early on.

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In fact, my company was incorporated in 1980,

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Dynasty Computer Corporation, headquartered in Dallas, Texas.

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And within three years, we’d made the front page of the Wall Street Journal

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and had a feature article in Forbes magazine.

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So I am very familiar with the early history of the PC business,

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and I’m here to tell you that the good Dr. Leary was as far ahead of those times as any person alive back then.

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I know that it’ll be hard to believe when you hear him describing what he saw as future tech,

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but that is exactly what the best technical minds of the day were also predicting.

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But what Timothy Leary brought to the table that us geeks missed at the time was the importance

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that this new tech was going to have on our great work of waking up the human holon.

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Let me just give you one more little fact to illustrate how far ahead of the times Dr.

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Leary was.

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At the time he gave the talk we are about to hear, the total sales of IBM PCs, and that is the

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total of all sales from its introduction in 1981 through the summer of 1987, well, it was less than

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18,000. And the big name in home computers at that time was Apple. That’s right, only 18,000 PCs had

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been sold by then. So when you hear him trying to convince the audience that personal computers were really the coming thing,

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well, keep in mind the fact that outside of Northern California audiences,

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there probably weren’t more than one or two computer owners in the entire audience at most places where he was speaking.

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I know that thought is kind of laughable today, and yet this talk was given just 22 years ago this month.

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A lot sure has happened since then,

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particularly on the tech front, as you well know.

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Anyway, enough of my reminiscences.

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Now let’s join the audience at The Stone

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on a San Francisco summer night in 1987.

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Hey.

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You, yeah.

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Really, there’s no

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place in the world I’d rather be

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tonight, Friday night,

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July,

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than in San Francisco.

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The most sophisticated,

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cybernetic, psychedelic

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amplified people around

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now, we’ve got to have a bumper sticker

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or a label or a title

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for our little interaction tonight

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we could try this one

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about the cybernetic society of the 21st century.

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Or how about the emergence of the cybernetic person during the roaring 20th century.

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That’s you.

00:06:51 ►

Actually, the hook for this season’s series of involvements is, of course, the Summer of Love. It was 20 years ago this season, 20 years ago today, that the Beatles came out with that album that really swept the world

00:06:59 ►

and kind of told everyone that there was something new happening.

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So there’s a lot of kind of interest in, hey what’s happened in the last 20 years and there’s been a lot of

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reunions which I’ll tell you a little bit about in a minute and it’s so it’s

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a it’s nice to kind of check up on what’s happening. The question is of

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course why did the Summer of Love happen in the year 1967? Well a good reason for

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that actually that the so-called 60s celebration

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and movement did start. It became visible in the year 1967. I think there’s a good reason

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for that. It’s demographic and it’s arithmetic. See, the baby boom started in 1946. Now you to 46 and you get 1967 so to me that summer of love

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was kind of a coming out party

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a coming of age party

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of the first wave

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the first year of the baby boom

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of course it happened

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it started where else? it started right here in San Francisco

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it was January 14th

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1967 in Golden Gate Park

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when they had the first human be-in or love-in.

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Hey, what is that?

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No one had ever heard that concept before.

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That was a new one.

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And it was all very informal.

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Somebody asked me today, who organized it?

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I said, organize it?

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There ain’t no such thing.

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The word went out over the rock stations and word of mouth.

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It was all around the Bay Area. Without anybody realizing what was happening, I don’t know, 20, 30,000

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people suddenly showed up on a January day. That was pretty interesting. Everybody kind

00:08:33 ►

of looked around and said, hmm, this is a lot of people, a lot of activity, a lot of

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action going on here. It was perhaps, I think, May, was it, when the same thing happened

00:08:43 ►

in New York. They had another B in there.

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They had about 50,000.

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Hey, it started building up.

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This could become a habit.

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Then, June 1967, that album came out.

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Now, most of you remember where you were when you lost your virginity or your gains, your whatever

00:09:05 ►

you call it.

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You remember where you were when Columbus discovered America in 1492, remember that?

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Short-term memory loss.

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I think most of us remember where we were the first time you heard that album, you picked

00:09:24 ►

that album up and there are all those funny pictures.

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And when you start playing that, you realize this was a signal.

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This was a statement.

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This was a real basic positioning here.

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That this was not just another rock and roll record.

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It was not just love and June and Moon.

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This was a philosophic, a poetic, a social statement that something new was happening.

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It was a concept album.

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And above all, there were ideas in it.

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It made you think, and hey, what do they mean?

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How many millions of people spent, how many wasted, spaced out nights

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trying to decipher and decode the meanings of some of those lyrics.

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So I would say the 60s really started in 67. Now if it started in 67,

00:10:07 ►

let’s see what happened. Well okay, 68, within nine months this new movement of

00:10:15 ►

young people kind of celebrating individuality and indicating they

00:10:19 ►

wanted to change and Dylan was saying ain going to work on Maggie’s farm no more. Within nine months, they had gotten rid of the president, LBJ. He just tucked tail and ran back to Texas,

00:10:32 ►

man. And the people went clean for Gene, and Bobby Kennedy came out for the kids, and then

00:10:37 ►

68 was the Chicago Convention, kind of shook everything up. The Democratic Party has never been the same since then.

00:10:45 ►

And 69, Woodstock.

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Can you believe Woodstock?

00:10:49 ►

400,000 people on a weekend coming up to some farm in New York State.

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That became the third largest city in the state of New York.

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400,000 or 500,000 people, almost almost no sanitation no real good food

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taking God knows what kind of drugs

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day and night

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and you know there wasn’t one recorded act of violence

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isn’t that amazing

00:11:13 ►

can you imagine four hundred thousand

00:11:19 ►

horny teenagers today

00:11:20 ►

getting together with

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but it was kind of a lesson

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it was kind of a signal that hey this is something new then 70 72 73

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Watergate the 60s really really didn’t get going in those 70s and I think the

00:11:37 ►

60s peak in the year 1976 when we elected as our president, the ultimate hippy-dippy howdy-doody Jimmy Carter.

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He had a sleeping bag and he was quoting Bob Dylan and playing softball with Ralph Nader and talking about lust in his heart.

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Whoa, yeah.

00:11:58 ►

And, you know, in the grim Rambo,bull Ollie North 80s.

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It seems kind of pathetic.

00:12:09 ►

That guy was talking about love and peace.

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And he got Sadat and Begin to come over there.

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And he got them in Camp David.

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And he said, come on, on walk, give peace a chance.

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All you need is love, men like him.

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They didn’t let that happen very long.

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Now, this so-called movement, see, what was happening was, every summer, a new wave of

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kids became 21 and started joining the party.

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I think the whole thing ended in this country, in the year 1980, when we kind of hit that

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wall and elected as president president was it Nancy Reagan?

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no no it was Admiral Poindexter

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that’s where the buck stops

00:12:49 ►

yeah so

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but

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you know this movement that started here

00:12:58 ►

in San Francisco 20 years ago

00:13:00 ►

didn’t stop in America

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it kept moving around by 68 it was in France

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they called it L’été d’amour.

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You remember those riots there?

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They closed the country down.

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And it hit Spain as soon as the old general, Franco, died.

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Young peoples took over,

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and Hope and Playboy magazine was shown in public,

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and they legalized marijuana.

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You know, that idea, the summer of love,

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which has something to do with,

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we ain’t going to work on the assembly line Maggie’s farm for the military

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anymore. We’re going to work out a new

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way of life

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with individuality. It’s still

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going around. Can you believe, for example,

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the TV we’ve been

00:13:39 ►

seeing on news in South

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Korea? That’s

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something South Korea. You know, it’s in South Korea. And that’s something, South Korea.

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You know, it’s a standard 1960s scenario.

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Here are the college students in white shirts

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throwing flowers and rocks.

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And there’s the old Darth Vader, FBI, CIA, DEA.

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And there’s the old classics.

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Where’d they learn it?

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Well, you know where they learned it.

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South Korea is a cybernetic television culture.

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You can’t have these young kids watching television and playing rock and roll

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and listening to CD records from America and from England.

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Hey, they’re not going to let those old guys.

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So I don’t know what they call it in South Korea, but they got a name for it.

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And the interesting thing, you know, in South Korea, it’s not political.

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It’s not left or right.

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It’s generational. generational also how about this

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in Japan

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there’s a new generation

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that’s come up

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ten years later

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born starting around 55

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in Japan

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these people are called

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Shinrin

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Shinjinrui

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and the translation of that

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now you’re going to think

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I’m quoting from a Beatles album

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or from the poetry

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of Allen Ginsberg the new breed or new breed of human, now you’re going to think I’m quoting from a Beatles album or from the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the new breed, or new breed of human being.

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Now what’s this all, what’s this new breed about?

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Well, I read about this by the way in Fortune magazine.

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Hey, get over there.

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These, the young Japanese are not going to scrimp and save.

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They want to spend money.

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They want to enjoy life.

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They don’t want to work on Sony’s farm no more.

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They’re hedonic. Can you imagine Fortune magazine talking about hedonic? That means they want

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Haagen-Dazs or whatever. But the real triumph of the summer of love, to me, this season

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at least, is of all places Russia.

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You know, there’s this concept of perestroika, which means loosening up,

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and glasnost, which means, you know, opening up and restructuring.

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And I don’t know really what happens there because we don’t know really.

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But as I can decipher what’s coming, you know, through in the press and the various European press too, there is an attempt to get rid of the old guard World War II generals

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and they’re going to reward workers for what they do.

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They got Stalin and Marx spinning in their grave.

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There was a big kind of a convention in Russia.

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They brought in scientists and poets and artists from all over the world.

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And they had a large delegation from America.

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But you know who the star of the whole thing was?

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David Shep’s told me about this.

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Never mind, it wasn’t necessarily the liberal senators or the distinguished novelists.

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It was Yoko Ono.

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And there was a personal meeting between Gorby.

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I love the New York Post.

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That’s a right-wing, you know.

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They call him Gorby.

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Well, Gorby, Mrs. Gorby,

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met with Yoko Ono and said,

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isn’t it too bad that John couldn’t be here?

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And thanks for a good piece of chance.

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And, you know, I mean,

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now listen,

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Yoko Ono couldn’t get within 10 miles

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of the Poindexter White House,

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where they have music like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and, you know, Frank Sinatra and so forth.

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So the point I’m making here is that this movement that started here, which was a generational,

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which I think was an inevitable historic moment, movement, has been going on and is still going on.

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And every time, every place, you see a new generation of young people coming along, stressing

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freedom, individuality, loosening up the censorship, a downing military, you know that the thing

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is happening.

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I wish we could get back in this country, but I think we will.

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Now, I like, you know, I told you I’ve been having a few reunions in the last few weeks I’ve been around the country,

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having kind of reunions with some of the people from the 60s in San Francisco.

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I remember a few months ago, two months ago, there was Dr. Benjamin Spock, Tom Robbins, Ken Kesey.

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Kesey.

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And about three months ago,

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I had a reunion in Toronto, Canada with Abby Hoffman

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and Eldridge Cleaver.

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That was a hot one.

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Now, I’m sure most of you have seen Abby.

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I mean, you know that Abby is simply

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one of the greatest orators of all time.

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I mean, you turn the fast speed forward, boy,

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and you’ve got a rap.

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I mean, Abby taught rap.

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He’s got bandoliers of one-liners

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and cartridge belts of facts and figures.

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I mean, boy, he just…

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He knows how many helicopters

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the Honduras government is using in Nicaragua.

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He knows how many gallons of urine

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is being tested by the drug testers.

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Abby’s got it.

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There’s only one minor fault that Abby has.

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No one’s perfect.

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Abby doesn’t listen too well.

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But that’s cool because if he does all the talking, there’s less for me to do.

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If they had asked me a question about drugs and Abby would answer, that’s great.

00:18:48 ►

But then Eldridge got on the stage.

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And Eldridge, you know, I go back so far with Eldridge Cleaver.

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Gee, we’re more than like twins or genetic.

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We’ve been through lifetimes together.

00:19:00 ►

I knew Eldridge in 1968 when he was running for president.

00:19:07 ►

The Peace and Freedom ticket.

00:19:09 ►

He was running against Nixon.

00:19:17 ►

Now, I think Eldridge would have then and would now make a better candidate for president than most of them.

00:19:19 ►

You know, Eldridge can keep three ideas in mind.

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That’s three times more than Reagan can.

00:19:26 ►

So these three ideas are back in the 60s,

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and then I was with Eldridge over in Algeria.

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We had a lot of fun there.

00:19:33 ►

The three ideas he had were,

00:19:35 ►

there’s one enemy, and that enemy is racist, Christian, Wall Street,

00:19:40 ►

lacking, running dogs of capitalism.

00:19:42 ►

Got that? Yeah.

00:19:44 ►

And there’s only one good cause, and that’s Marxist Len capitalism. Got that? Yeah. And there’s only one good cause

00:19:46 ►

and that’s Marxist Lenin and all that.

00:19:47 ►

Got that? Yeah.

00:19:49 ►

And there’s only one solution

00:19:50 ►

and you’re either part of the solution

00:19:51 ►

or you’re part of the problem

00:19:52 ►

and that’s the barrel of a gun.

00:19:53 ►

That’s where democracy starts.

00:19:56 ►

Got it? Yes, sir.

00:19:58 ►

Well, now, Eldridge of Toronto,

00:19:59 ►

you know, he’s changed.

00:20:00 ►

He’s a born-again Christian.

00:20:01 ►

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

00:20:03 ►

And he’s also a right wing Republican

00:20:08 ►

he ran for Senate here in California

00:20:10 ►

so when he’s talking about this

00:20:13 ►

he’s saying the same things

00:20:14 ►

now the enemy is Marxist Leninist and so forth

00:20:16 ►

and you’ve got to line them up against the wall

00:20:18 ►

mother flubber

00:20:18 ►

and the cause is of course Christianity

00:20:21 ►

and still the barrel of the gun

00:20:24 ►

so you can imagine

00:20:24 ►

here’s poor Abbie Hoffman going crazy he can’t stand this The cause is, of course, Christianity and still the barrel of the gun. So you can imagine.

00:20:27 ►

Here’s poor Abbie Hoffman going crazy.

00:20:29 ►

He can’t stand this.

00:20:30 ►

He wants to get the microphone back.

00:20:32 ►

And finally he gets the microphone back.

00:20:35 ►

He says, Eldridge, it’s an impossibility.

00:20:36 ►

You cannot exist.

00:20:38 ►

There’s no such thing as a black Republican.

00:20:43 ►

You’re an oxymoron.

00:20:46 ►

Eldridge says, what do you call me now? You’re an oxymoron what do you call me now you’re an oxymoron

00:20:48 ►

you’re a contradiction in terms

00:20:49 ►

like military intelligence

00:20:50 ►

or working press

00:20:52 ►

there ain’t no such thing

00:20:53 ►

furthermore I read about this

00:20:56 ►

born again Christian shit

00:20:58 ►

I asked my mother about that

00:21:01 ►

my good Jewish mother said

00:21:02 ►

no way kid

00:21:03 ►

I wouldn’t do it again

00:21:04 ►

first time with you

00:21:04 ►

anyway that was a pretty good debate I asked my mother about that. My good Jewish mother said, Oh, no way, kid. I wouldn’t do it again the first time with you.

00:21:09 ►

Anyway, that was a pretty good debate.

00:21:12 ►

I’ve had wonderful times a hundred times soon.

00:21:15 ►

Boy, he’s really…

00:21:18 ►

If you want to ask questions,

00:21:20 ►

I know these guys are later in the question period.

00:21:21 ►

I’ll be glad to tell you more about it. The most interesting debates I’ve had this year

00:21:23 ►

have been with a man who for five years

00:21:28 ►

was the head of the DEA.

00:21:34 ►

Now, when they call me and say,

00:21:35 ►

would you like to debate this guy?

00:21:37 ►

Would I like to debate the head of the DEA?

00:21:41 ►

Would David like to debate Goliath?

00:21:48 ►

Peter Bensinger he’s by the way

00:21:49 ►

he’s a nice guy

00:21:49 ►

he’s a gentleman

00:21:50 ►

he’s

00:21:50 ►

I’m sure he’s an excellent administrator

00:21:52 ►

and he’s a Yale man

00:21:56 ►

but I won’t hold that against him

00:21:57 ►

and

00:22:00 ►

he’s actually very intelligent

00:22:02 ►

and a nice guy

00:22:03 ►

only one flaw on his thing is that he doesn’t know a damn thing about drugs.

00:22:09 ►

It’s kind of interesting, you know, that the military and the police and the bureaucrats,

00:22:13 ►

they live in a germ-free society.

00:22:17 ►

They live in shells of bureaucratic, you know, boot-kissing.

00:22:22 ►

You know, nobody had ever talked to Peter Benson,

00:22:25 ►

the head of the DEA.

00:22:27 ►

You know, he had 12,000 agents

00:22:30 ►

and 172 stations in 79 countries.

00:22:33 ►

No one had ever, you know,

00:22:35 ►

kind of challenged the insanity of his program.

00:22:38 ►

So when I would debate him, he’d say,

00:22:40 ►

hey, Timothy, sorry, but you can’t say that.

00:22:46 ►

I’d say, why? He’d say, well, Timothy, sorry, but you can’t say that. I’d say, why?

00:22:47 ►

He’d say, well, that’s against the law.

00:22:49 ►

I’d say, well, not against the law to say that.

00:22:53 ►

They call it debate, remember?

00:22:56 ►

But this innocence of the bureaucrat was played to my advantage at the beginning

00:23:01 ►

because, you see, he would say things like in front of thousand college students on a Friday night get it he would say boys and girls

00:23:10 ►

marijuana is the killer weed it is an assassin of youth it wasn’t before but

00:23:16 ►

now the marijuana you’re smoking is ten times stronger and everybody does what? I mean you couldn’t believe it so it wasn’t…

00:23:29 ►

and uh…

00:23:31 ►

you know…

00:23:37 ►

cocaine really works

00:23:40 ►

tooth that and in seconds your heart beats faster

00:23:45 ►

and you start to sweat

00:23:46 ►

and perspire

00:23:47 ►

and your body feels warm

00:23:49 ►

and you have this

00:23:49 ►

incredible ecstasy

00:23:50 ►

and

00:23:50 ►

and that’s

00:23:53 ►

when your heart’s going

00:23:53 ►

that’s physiological

00:23:54 ►

and you stand there

00:23:55 ►

and they say

00:23:55 ►

Peter

00:23:56 ►

have you ever had an orgasm

00:23:57 ►

maybe that’s against the law

00:24:05 ►

anyway

00:24:08 ►

and it’s amazing

00:24:11 ►

listening to the head of the DA

00:24:12 ►

talk about the drug situation

00:24:13 ►

he would

00:24:14 ►

it’s all

00:24:15 ►

mainly marijuana and cocaine

00:24:17 ►

he’s not worried about heroin

00:24:17 ►

for some reason

00:24:18 ►

he’s not worried about

00:24:20 ►

the real killers

00:24:21 ►

you know

00:24:21 ►

pills and all that

00:24:23 ►

he talked about killer weed

00:24:24 ►

and about kill, kill,

00:24:25 ►

kill, lethal cocaine. Hey, wait a minute. Let’s have some ballpark statistics here. Okay, let’s

00:24:34 ►

get the scoreboard out there, okay? They say there are 500 people a year that die from cocaine.

00:24:41 ►

Well, that’s fucked. I mean, that’s terrible. That’s stupid. It’s ignorant. There’s

00:24:45 ►

no reason for those 500 people to die. Bad education, you know. Oh, yeah, granted, there’s

00:24:51 ►

always going to be, in a country of 200 million people, there’s going to be 100 people that

00:24:55 ►

overdose on ketchup, so, but we can cut that rate down to 100 if you just had warnings on the

00:25:03 ►

package, you know., like the first thing

00:25:05 ►

if you’re going to educate people

00:25:06 ►

about drugs and cocaine

00:25:07 ►

is you should say

00:25:08 ►

there’s a total difference

00:25:09 ►

between smoking base and crack

00:25:14 ►

or shooting cocaine.

00:25:16 ►

That’s the flash.

00:25:17 ►

And sure, that’s like

00:25:20 ►

drinking a water glass full of tequila.

00:25:22 ►

Boom, no question.

00:25:24 ►

You get that hit and you reverberate.

00:25:26 ►

And your heart starts to do flips.

00:25:29 ►

Yeah, right, you’re feeling good.

00:25:30 ►

But in about a minute, it’s all over and then you want more.

00:25:33 ►

It’s like another water glass.

00:25:36 ►

You know, another chugga-lugga whole fifth of tequila.

00:25:39 ►

That’s stupid. That’s dumb.

00:25:41 ►

On the other hand, you know,

00:25:43 ►

tuning cocaine is an entirely different thing.

00:25:50 ►

You can tune a little cocaine, then for about three hours you have some energy and you’re feeling euphoric, and of course you’re a loud-mouthed, talkative, obnoxious, arrogant

00:25:54 ►

asshole, but you’re alive the next morning. And you’re no more obnoxious than the average

00:26:03 ►

drunk or born-again Christian so we got to live it yeah

00:26:11 ►

so what are you talking about then yeah that was cocaine is enough you want to

00:26:16 ►

talk about killing substances and killing lethal experiences that the

00:26:22 ►

American public is is exposed to,

00:26:26 ►

how about handguns?

00:26:27 ►

10,000 people a year are wasted from handguns.

00:26:32 ►

That’s against 500 with cocaine.

00:26:35 ►

Now, the thing about the handguns thing is that the victims,

00:26:38 ►

these guys with the guns aren’t putting gunpowder up their nose.

00:26:42 ►

They’re killing their wives, their girlfriends,

00:26:45 ►

or any stranger in the street.

00:26:47 ►

So, if you’re worried about

00:26:49 ►

health of America,

00:26:51 ►

think about that.

00:26:51 ►

Or how about 50,000 a year

00:26:54 ►

die from drunken driving?

00:26:58 ►

Yeah, and of course, again,

00:27:00 ►

it’s not the drunken driver

00:27:01 ►

usually that’s wasted.

00:27:02 ►

You know, did you ever hear

00:27:03 ►

that Al Davis, Al Franken, Tom Davis routine about the drunk?

00:27:07 ►

And Tom Davis comes in, he’s going to give you a lecture on drinking.

00:27:10 ►

And he said, number one, you should never drink.

00:27:13 ►

And number two, you should never drink and drive.

00:27:17 ►

He says, however, there are times when you’re way, way out in the country

00:27:22 ►

and you’ve just been thrown out of a party by the host.

00:27:25 ►

So what are you going to do? You’ve got to drive, right?

00:27:28 ►

And he said, well, the rules are, number one, don’t drive and puke at the same time.

00:27:33 ►

And number two, drive a big American car.

00:27:40 ►

So anyway, that’s the alcohol situation.

00:27:44 ►

So anyway, that’s the alcohol situation.

00:27:50 ►

Then you get, what, a quarter of a million people down here from cigarette smoking.

00:27:54 ►

So anyway, way, way down the list of public health situations. You’ve got AIDS.

00:27:55 ►

You’ve got nuclear bombs.

00:27:56 ►

You’ve got polluted water.

00:27:58 ►

I mean, you know, cocaine and marijuana.

00:28:00 ►

Oh, I forgot all about marijuana.

00:28:03 ►

You know, I’ve got to confess to you up in front, you know, I forgot all about marijuana. I’ve got to confess you up in front, I’m pretty brain damaged.

00:28:09 ►

Twenty

00:28:10 ►

seven years aloft, you tend to lose a few

00:28:16 ►

billion neurons, but

00:28:17 ►

there are three real side effects of taking a lot of

00:28:24 ►

psychedelic drugs.

00:28:29 ►

One is long-term memory gain.

00:28:31 ►

You’re overloaded.

00:28:34 ►

You’re confused by too much.

00:28:38 ►

And the second is short-term memory loss.

00:28:40 ►

And the third is, I forget.

00:28:45 ►

But I haven’t forgotten about the deaths from marijuana.

00:28:47 ►

Okay.

00:28:47 ►

The deaths from marijuana.

00:28:49 ►

Would you wire

00:28:50 ►

the Smithsonian Institute?

00:28:52 ►

Let’s get the public health.

00:28:53 ►

Get the United Nations.

00:28:54 ►

UNESCO.

00:28:54 ►

How many deaths

00:28:55 ►

from marijuana?

00:28:57 ►

Oh, here they come.

00:28:58 ►

Oh, here they are.

00:28:59 ►

Yeah.

00:29:00 ►

Okay.

00:29:01 ►

In the 25,000 years

00:29:02 ►

recorded history,

00:29:03 ►

the people have used

00:29:03 ►

in every climate,

00:29:04 ►

have used marijuana as a sacrament, as a religious experience, as a hedonic experience, as a Saturday night flash, as an adjunct to creativity.

00:29:18 ►

And for 25,000 years, there have been 12 known deaths from marijuana.

00:29:24 ►

We’ve got to be scientific here,

00:29:25 ►

okay? There’s an undisputed case of two or possibly four people that smoked a little

00:29:31 ►

too much marijuana and got the giggles and laughed themselves to death. And then there’s

00:29:38 ►

a case of two or possibly four people that had bad hearts and they had too much marijuana and they got the munchies

00:29:45 ►

and they ate themselves to death.

00:29:50 ►

And a case of either two or three

00:29:51 ►

or possibly four honeymoon couples

00:29:53 ►

that got a little marijuana,

00:29:54 ►

got carried away

00:29:55 ►

and fucked themselves to death.

00:29:58 ►

A lot of fun with that.

00:30:00 ►

By the way,

00:30:00 ►

I’m talking about drugs.

00:30:01 ►

I must make it very clear

00:30:02 ►

that there’s only one place where I agree with the Reagan White House.

00:30:08 ►

It’s a fruit-loopy, nitwit, ring-ding, brain-damaged group of people in that White House.

00:30:15 ►

They can’t even remember.

00:30:17 ►

But there’s one place where I agree with Nancy Reagan.

00:30:20 ►

You’ve got to tell your kids to say no.

00:30:22 ►

and you’ve got to tell your kids to say no.

00:30:25 ►

I’ve got a 13-year-old son and I’ve got two teenagers, 14, 15.

00:30:30 ►

And my wife and I do not want our kids taking drugs.

00:30:35 ►

And God knows they’re much more prevalent today

00:30:37 ►

than they were in the 60s or 70s.

00:30:40 ►

Everything’s so young right now.

00:30:42 ►

14, they’re watching X-rated films

00:30:44 ►

that I never saw until I was 40 years old.

00:30:47 ►

So there is a definite problem here.

00:30:50 ►

And the kids are so depressed by nuclear war and all that stuff.

00:30:55 ►

And there’s no hope in the country anymore.

00:30:57 ►

So there are a lot of reasons why any parent is concerned or anyone is concerned about kids taking drugs.

00:31:04 ►

On the other hand, the Reagan White House is such a pit bull

00:31:08 ►

nasty. We tell our kids, say no thank you.

00:31:15 ►

You know,

00:31:17 ►

yeah,

00:31:19 ►

you know, to Nancy Reagan, the world, America’s

00:31:23 ►

filled with good-looking, slick, intelligent, faggot, Nicaraguan-loving dope dealers

00:31:34 ►

that are pressing all sorts of magnificent drugs on their kids, you know.

00:31:38 ►

Would it were so, huh?

00:31:44 ►

so definitely when it comes to your kids

00:31:48 ►

we don’t want our kid drinking booze

00:31:51 ►

we got an open bar there

00:31:52 ►

anytime he wants we could

00:31:54 ►

we talk to him about it

00:31:55 ►

we don’t want him to

00:31:56 ►

for good reasons

00:31:57 ►

we got the keys to the car

00:31:59 ►

and the kitchen shelf there

00:32:00 ►

we don’t want him taking the keys to the car

00:32:02 ►

if I had a gun

00:32:03 ►

so forth. So,

00:32:15 ►

you know, it’s rather disturbing to me that of all the mothers or grandmothers in the world that have no right to be talking to young people about drugs, it’s Nancy Reagan. You know,

00:32:20 ►

her two children, I know both of her two children, and you know,

00:32:23 ►

Patty Davis and Ron Jr., they admittedly took a lot of drugs successfully.

00:32:29 ►

And she was never around very much,

00:32:31 ►

and she never obviously did the thing that any parent has to do

00:32:34 ►

or any friend has to do,

00:32:35 ►

and that is to sit down and eyeball and be honest

00:32:39 ►

and share it as a problem

00:32:41 ►

and put all the support of the family and siblings and friends

00:32:45 ►

and church and school or God knows what,

00:32:47 ►

you can’t call in the National Guard.

00:32:49 ►

That’s the one thing you can’t do, Nancy,

00:32:50 ►

because that’s what she wants to do.

00:32:52 ►

So anyway, that’s the say no thing.

00:32:55 ►

My position on drugs is,

00:32:57 ►

it seems very commonsensical,

00:32:59 ►

it’s pro-choice for an adult.

00:33:02 ►

If you’re an adult American,

00:33:03 ►

this is not communist China, if you’re an adult American, this is not communist China,

00:33:06 ►

if you’re an adult American,

00:33:08 ►

you can decide whether you can access your own brain

00:33:10 ►

or who or what you put in your body.

00:33:13 ►

That’s such common sense.

00:33:14 ►

And there’s no way a government can stop it.

00:33:17 ►

So that seems obvious.

00:33:19 ►

And of course, it’s the same crew

00:33:21 ►

that are going after women,

00:33:23 ►

you know, want to control what women do with their

00:33:25 ►

reproductive structures and want to poke their noses up ladies’ fallopian tubes.

00:33:30 ►

They’re the same guys that are bringing us them.

00:33:32 ►

Yeah, so pro-choice is the American way there.

00:33:36 ►

I must, now I got to really be tough here.

00:33:43 ►

I’m very much against addicts and drug fuck-ups.

00:33:51 ►

And I think we’ve all been through it with friends.

00:33:54 ►

And, you know, it’s been hard on all of us going through the last 10, 15, 20 years

00:33:58 ►

to see dear friends just screw up with alcohol or with drugs.

00:34:04 ►

Of course, you can always know who these people are,

00:34:06 ►

the ones that are going to self-destruct.

00:34:07 ►

You knew them in kindergarten.

00:34:08 ►

You knew them in high school.

00:34:10 ►

You know them all.

00:34:10 ►

You know who they are.

00:34:11 ►

They’re hell-bent on having a flame out.

00:34:13 ►

They can use booze.

00:34:14 ►

They can use sex.

00:34:14 ►

They can use gambling.

00:34:15 ►

And, of course, they’re going to have a flame out.

00:34:17 ►

Drugs is a really good way to go right now.

00:34:19 ►

So I do feel that we have to intervene

00:34:21 ►

with every emotional and psychological and spiritual

00:34:26 ►

and every energy we can muster to just intervene and keep addicts, you know, get them.

00:34:33 ►

But, you know, the position there is that they’re like diabetics, you know,

00:34:36 ►

because they can’t handle booze and the reason they should ban white sugar,

00:34:40 ►

if you follow my logic.

00:34:42 ►

if you follow my logic.

00:34:48 ►

The interesting thing that puzzles me and kind of irritates me

00:34:50 ►

that when the press and the government

00:34:54 ►

want to have drug experts

00:34:57 ►

dragged on the scene

00:34:58 ►

to tell us all about drugs,

00:34:59 ►

it’s the fuck-ups.

00:35:01 ►

It’s the addicts that are always on television

00:35:03 ►

telling you about their 30 years

00:35:04 ►

of lying in the gutter.

00:35:07 ►

They had some guy who was married 30 times

00:35:10 ►

and his marriage never lasted more than one night

00:35:11 ►

and he writes a book on marriage, right?

00:35:15 ►

Or it’s like the Pope talking about sexual conduct.

00:35:19 ►

You know, it’s pretty weird.

00:35:23 ►

It’s the problem of television

00:35:25 ►

Andy Warhol predicted it

00:35:26 ►

everyone now knows how to be a spokesperson

00:35:28 ►

so they stick a microphone in front of you

00:35:31 ►

and you speak not for yourself

00:35:32 ►

but you speak for everybody

00:35:33 ►

the kid will say

00:35:34 ►

well kids today don’t like parents who

00:35:37 ►

what do you mean kids

00:35:38 ►

I mean you don’t

00:35:38 ►

it’s that predatory pronoun

00:35:41 ►

they say you or we instead of I.

00:35:50 ►

So, David Crosby, the cover of People Magazine.

00:35:52 ►

I’ve known David for 27 years.

00:35:53 ►

We all know David.

00:35:58 ►

Gee, he’s not an expert on drugs, I’ll tell you that.

00:36:00 ►

No one’s perfect, David.

00:36:03 ►

And he’s on cover of People Magazine.

00:36:07 ►

He says, you, you have only four choices.

00:36:09 ►

You will end up in jail.

00:36:10 ►

You will end up dead.

00:36:12 ►

Or you will end up in a mental hospital.

00:36:15 ►

Or you will kick like I did.

00:36:17 ►

Yeah.

00:36:25 ►

That reminds me, by the way, of a wonderful series of debates I had with another old opponent of mine, G. Gordon Liddy.

00:36:30 ►

Gordon Liddy is a very interesting person.

00:36:32 ►

One thing that you may not know about Gordon Liddy is he’s a

00:36:34 ►

comedian. He’s like Buster Keaton.

00:36:36 ►

He’s a stand-up.

00:36:38 ►

He stands up there and says some of those

00:36:40 ►

incredible things, and if you get serious about it,

00:36:42 ►

he might be frightening you, but

00:36:43 ►

he’s really a comic actor.‘ve seen Miami Vice and I’ll give you an

00:36:49 ►

example of Liddy as you know he’s a very powerful powerful debater because he

00:36:54 ►

every time he comes on he gets starting his thing he fumbles with a microphone

00:36:58 ►

and he said I always have trouble with microphones he immediately and then I

00:37:03 ►

remember I was debating him, and

00:37:07 ►

I was talking about this thing about, see, Gordon Liddy has never had an unauthorized

00:37:11 ►

thought in his life. And he’s like Ollie Pitbull North. If his master tells him to stand in

00:37:19 ►

the corner around his head, he will do it, as ordered. And he has never indulged in drugs

00:37:25 ►

well Wes

00:37:28 ►

there was one time

00:37:28 ►

when

00:37:29 ►

I was commanded

00:37:31 ►

by my military

00:37:32 ►

surgeon

00:37:32 ►

to take a

00:37:34 ►

anesthetic painkiller

00:37:35 ►

while I was in a

00:37:36 ►

military hospital

00:37:36 ►

the pain left

00:37:39 ►

I could feel

00:37:41 ►

the pleasure

00:37:41 ►

and I

00:37:43 ►

requested my

00:37:44 ►

surgeon officer please sir hold back the drugs I’d rather have the pain feel the pleasure and I requested my surgeon officer

00:37:45 ►

please sir

00:37:45 ►

hold back the drugs

00:37:47 ►

I’d rather have the pain

00:37:48 ►

than the pleasure

00:37:49 ►

I was talking about

00:37:54 ►

Liddy is an easy debater too

00:37:56 ►

on drugs

00:37:57 ►

he didn’t know anything about it

00:37:58 ►

but I was talking about

00:38:00 ►

you know

00:38:00 ►

these people that set themselves up

00:38:02 ►

as experts

00:38:03 ►

I was going on about

00:38:04 ►

Dennis Hopper who’s been a long term friend of mine Dennis you know how many of that set themselves up as experts. I was going on about Dennis Hopper,

00:38:05 ►

who’s been a long-term friend of mine.

00:38:07 ►

Dennis, you know, how many of you have seen Blue Velvet?

00:38:10 ►

Remember that?

00:38:10 ►

Yeah, okay.

00:38:13 ►

Anyway, Dennis, you know, was one of the worst drug abusers in history.

00:38:18 ►

I mean, the Guinness Book of Records, he’s right up there.

00:38:20 ►

I mean, he didn’t screw around.

00:38:22 ►

Have you ever, now, because all AA people, all people that kick, you know,

00:38:26 ►

since they can’t do it, they like to talk about it.

00:38:32 ►

Man, I was the worst man.

00:38:35 ►

Oh, man, a quart of tequila a day, man.

00:38:39 ►

Hey, man, give me that fountain pen.

00:38:40 ►

See that fountain pen?

00:38:42 ►

Two lines like that every ten minutes, man.

00:38:45 ►

That’s bad.

00:38:48 ►

And at midnight, man,

00:38:52 ►

we’d all take acid, man, and hold hands

00:38:55 ►

and we’d feel love, man.

00:38:57 ►

But at two o’clock in the morning, man,

00:38:59 ►

we were at our dealer’s house with a gun in our hands.

00:39:03 ►

I said, hey, Dennis,

00:39:04 ►

watch those pronouns, man.

00:39:08 ►

Don’t say we, say I.

00:39:11 ►

Like Dennis,

00:39:12 ►

I was never at my dealer’s house at 2 o’clock.

00:39:14 ►

And I never had a gun in my hand.

00:39:16 ►

Now, if you want to talk about guns,

00:39:17 ►

talk to my friend over here, G. Gordon Liddy.

00:39:23 ►

Gordon Liddy walks up and said,

00:39:24 ►

once again

00:39:25 ►

my esteemed but brain fried opponent

00:39:28 ►

has erred both in logic and fact

00:39:33 ►

I do not own a gun

00:39:35 ►

no shit

00:39:37 ►

Gordon Liddy

00:39:38 ►

that’s like the Pope doesn’t have a rosary

00:39:39 ►

I mean Gordon Liddy that again

00:39:41 ►

as a seven time fel felon, federal law,

00:39:46 ►

and a next convict, I’m forbidden by law to own a gun.

00:39:53 ►

Mrs. Liddy, however,

00:39:55 ►

at last count, Mrs. Liddy had 37 guns, machine guns,

00:40:02 ►

and I get down the list of the whole 37.

00:40:02 ►

Liddy had 37 guns, machine guns,

00:40:04 ►

down the list of the whole 37.

00:40:08 ►

And if Mrs. Liddy chooses at night to put

00:40:10 ►

three or four of these guns on my side of the bed,

00:40:12 ►

and some pinko liberal faggot

00:40:16 ►

Nicaraguan lover

00:40:18 ►

comes through the window and I blow him out the way he comes,

00:40:20 ►

well, that’s a hard guy

00:40:22 ►

to debate with, I mean, really.

00:40:23 ►

well, that’s a hard guy to debate with, I mean, really.

00:40:31 ►

Okay, now, remember I told you about the roaring 20th century and the cybernetic 21st century?

00:40:35 ►

I’d like to tell you a little bit about how I see the roaring 20th century.

00:40:40 ►

You see, you’ve got to realize I’ve got an advantage on you here.

00:40:44 ►

I’m 67

00:40:45 ►

years old, see? That means

00:40:47 ►

I’ve been around

00:40:49 ►

for seven decades.

00:40:52 ►

And I tell you,

00:40:53 ►

they’ve been

00:40:57 ►

I don’t think

00:41:00 ►

any question we’re talking about the seven

00:41:01 ►

most exciting decades in human history.

00:41:04 ►

Boom, boom, boom.

00:41:06 ►

One wave after another.

00:41:07 ►

And I’ve been trying to search them.

00:41:08 ►

And I’ve been involved in them.

00:41:11 ►

So I don’t think in decades.

00:41:12 ►

You know, people talk about the 60s.

00:41:14 ►

Take the long view.

00:41:15 ►

Centuries.

00:41:15 ►

Yeah.

00:41:18 ►

And there’s a certain logic to the 20th century.

00:41:19 ►

You’ve been around it long enough.

00:41:22 ►

See, what happened in the 20th century started naturally around 1900. Any Apple computer people here,

00:41:27 ►

they can check my mathematics. But around the year 1900, there were three cybernetic,

00:41:36 ►

psychedelic, far out philosopher physicists who presented a new version of reality, which happens to be the correct view of reality.

00:41:49 ►

You know, you had Newtonian physics where there was this solid general motors world of force and momentum and energy and work and action and reaction, conservation and all that.

00:42:01 ►

Sorry, sorry, Newton. I mean, Newton’s great.

00:42:01 ►

and conservation and all that.

00:42:03 ►

Sorry, sorry, Newton.

00:42:04 ►

I mean, Newton’s great.

00:42:07 ►

But, Isaac, you’ve got to face the fact that Einstein said at first,

00:42:10 ►

everything is relative.

00:42:11 ►

That means that there’s no absolute space and time

00:42:13 ►

and that I’m moving at a certain rate

00:42:15 ►

and a certain direction.

00:42:16 ►

You are too.

00:42:17 ►

So that you and I can have

00:42:18 ►

very different perspectives,

00:42:20 ►

but it all depends on your viewpoint.

00:42:23 ►

Oh, that’s heavy duty.

00:42:26 ►

Because there goes the solid world of the Bible and of all the fundamentalist religions. It’s gone if you let

00:42:32 ►

Einstein run it around loose. And imagine, for example, at the turn of the century, a typical

00:42:38 ►

American. Remember that painting by Grant Wood, American Gothic, where you have that guy with a

00:42:43 ►

pitchfork, you know, and his wife there.

00:42:45 ►

We’ll call them Mr. and Mrs. Wood,

00:42:47 ►

Farmer Wood.

00:42:48 ►

And they can’t handle his eye.

00:42:49 ►

What’s this Jewish guy

00:42:50 ►

talking about everything is relative?

00:42:51 ►

We know it’s not.

00:42:52 ►

He’s making a lot of,

00:42:53 ►

well, anyway, that’s that.

00:42:55 ►

Then, though, comes Max Planck.

00:42:57 ►

He says, hey,

00:43:00 ►

the reality from galaxies,

00:43:02 ►

stars, now to atoms and quarks

00:43:03 ►

is all made up,

00:43:06 ►

not of solid pieces, it’s all temporary.

00:43:12 ►

Temporary clusters of clouds of probability off on, quanta, that means bits, that the whole, you know, every time you put yourself, you’re going to fall through a screen of quantum information energy

00:43:18 ►

that’s just bubbling around all the time.

00:43:21 ►

And I know that sounds like a bad acid trip, but it happens to be the way the

00:43:25 ►

universe is wired at the moment. Now, can farmer wood handle that? You’re getting a headache.

00:43:33 ►

Although it is true that they’re bending light waves and stars around Mercury and they’re getting

00:43:37 ►

the, you know, the atomic bomb going. So these guys are, you know, there’s no question of it.

00:43:41 ►

Pretty soon we realize that they’re not screwing around. And then Heisenberg,

00:43:46 ►

Renner Heisenberg comes along with a real capper.

00:43:47 ►

He says,

00:43:50 ►

everybody’s reality is subjective,

00:43:53 ►

that your reality is determined by your sense organs,

00:43:54 ►

which are limited, of course,

00:43:57 ►

and by the instruments you use to magnify or extend the sense organs,

00:43:59 ►

like microscopes, telescopes, so forth,

00:44:02 ►

and by the maps or the models that you use. So you have to face the fact,

00:44:04 ►

Mr. and Miss America, you’re making

00:44:05 ►

your own round.

00:44:07 ►

That can’t be handled.

00:44:10 ►

Get them back to Germany, right.

00:44:12 ►

And the problem was, too, that, you see,

00:44:13 ►

these physicists,

00:44:15 ►

they couldn’t communicate. Why?

00:44:17 ►

Because they had to use a real

00:44:19 ►

paleolithic caveman device,

00:44:22 ►

chalk on blackboard,

00:44:24 ►

so nobody could really understand what these guys

00:44:26 ►

were talking about. Okay, here’s the situation. We know there’s a new reality called quantum reality.

00:44:33 ►

It works. There’s no question that that’s how the universe and that’s how atoms, that’s how it’s

00:44:39 ►

put together. But how are we going to persuade, convince, for us, ourselves, and Farmer Brown

00:44:46 ►

and Mrs. Brown, how can we exist in this world, which seems so cold and hallucinatory and

00:44:51 ►

bizarre and weird and German and Jewish?

00:44:54 ►

Well, at those moments in human history, where it’s time for our species to confront a new

00:45:00 ►

reality, whether it’s going from four foot to two foot, or whether it’s to make love face to face rather than, you know, whatever.

00:45:07 ►

There’s a certain breed of human beings in every gene pool that come along at that time and make us feel comfortable.

00:45:14 ►

They explain, they personalize, they popularize what’s really happening.

00:45:18 ►

Now, you know who these people are.

00:45:25 ►

they are the artists, the musicians, the playwrights, the poets, the myth makers, the wizards, the jugglers, the storytellers, the crazed scientists, the

00:45:31 ►

mischievous physicists, you know who they are. At every epic in human

00:45:36 ►

history these people come along and Homer, blind Homer, tell us about the, you

00:45:41 ►

know, go through the wine dark cement training, go out beyond the pillars of Hercules.

00:45:45 ►

Oh, yeah, ride Homer.

00:45:46 ►

Let’s get on our boats and go out there.

00:45:48 ►

Yeah.

00:45:49 ►

So, okay, it has been the obligation of all art and all poetry and all communication

00:45:55 ►

in the 20th century to package, popularize, commercialize, market quantum physics.

00:46:01 ►

Now, I start, of course, with the painters.

00:46:04 ►

All modern painting, when you come to think of it, is exactly quantum, relativistic, and indeterministic. Expressionism, you write your own thing, change the Newtonian reproductive representational picture.

00:46:21 ►

Quantalism, that’s pixels, you know, Surat.

00:46:24 ►

Just painting away the eye and the retina and the computer graphic screen, you know, sees things.

00:46:28 ►

Dada, surrealism.

00:46:30 ►

Salvador Dali, you know,

00:46:32 ►

straight, straight Einsteinian physics.

00:46:35 ►

He has that, you know, that thing about the persistence of memory,

00:46:38 ►

the melting watches, remember that?

00:46:40 ►

That’s right out of Einstein.

00:46:41 ►

So, well, Farmer Brown saying,

00:46:43 ►

well, mother, these guys are making a lot of money,

00:46:46 ►

so there must be something in that.

00:46:48 ►

And, you know, so then, of course, the writers,

00:46:52 ►

all the writers, 20th century,

00:46:54 ►

it’s stream of consciousness, subjective,

00:46:57 ►

gonzo journalism, call it what you want.

00:46:59 ►

It’s all, you know, writing.

00:47:00 ►

You’re not chiseling on a marble.

00:47:01 ►

You’re giving your own point of view.

00:47:03 ►

Of course, the real popularization

00:47:05 ►

and personalization of quantum psychology

00:47:08 ►

occurred about the year 1920

00:47:09 ►

when a group of really genius

00:47:12 ►

auditory engineers

00:47:13 ►

and acoustic scientists

00:47:15 ►

came along of Afro-American descent.

00:47:18 ►

I’m talking, of course, about jazz music,

00:47:20 ►

which is perfectly, classically, quantitistic.

00:47:24 ►

Even before jazz, music, symphonic orchestras, you know,

00:47:29 ►

and there’d be a director, get it?

00:47:32 ►

And there’d be 15 violins, and they’d all be reading the same notes

00:47:35 ►

and playing the same way, and a soloist would read the line, sing the line.

00:47:39 ►

It’s real factory, industrial, assembly line stuff.

00:47:43 ►

And then Susan marching back, here comes jazz.

00:47:47 ►

Improvisation.

00:47:47 ►

Don’t talk to me, Heisenberg.

00:47:49 ►

There’s Heisenberg on the clarinet.

00:47:50 ►

He’s showing us how to make your own music.

00:47:52 ►

And everybody’s syncopating.

00:47:56 ►

And you’ve never heard it played the same way before.

00:47:58 ►

And we can do it together.

00:47:59 ►

It’s not that I’m a crazed solo person

00:48:01 ►

going on in my psychedelic canoe up there.

00:48:05 ►

You’re listening and you’re going along with it

00:48:06 ►

and then you take your improv and we merge them together.

00:48:10 ►

I mean, that’s quantum physics put right out there for our ears to hear it.

00:48:14 ►

Hey, and then of course radio came along.

00:48:17 ►

None of us can realize what radio did

00:48:19 ►

when Farmer Brown and Mrs. Brown got that little appliance

00:48:25 ►

and they started dialing and tuning realities,

00:48:28 ►

invisible realities,

00:48:30 ►

coming through the sky like wizardry.

00:48:34 ►

And they loved it.

00:48:37 ►

You know, here’s Farmer Brown

00:48:38 ►

and he’s digging along here

00:48:40 ►

and he’s listening, he’s eavesdropping,

00:48:43 ►

saying, Hitler and Nuremberg

00:48:44 ►

stirring up World War II. And Mrs. Brown, or Mrs. Wood, here and he’s listening he’s eavesdropping say hitler at nuremberg’s turn up world war ii

00:48:45 ►

and mrs brown she’s or mrs wood she’s crying because she’s listening at the moment it’s

00:48:51 ►

happening it’s like hearing shakespeare history being made she’s listening to king of england

00:48:55 ►

giving up his throne for the woman he loved boohoo see for the first time in history millions

00:49:02 ►

millions of people could tune in on the same things going on at the same time.

00:49:07 ►

FDR declaring World War II and so forth.

00:49:09 ►

Also, for example, there was a radio program in the 20s and 30s called Amos and Andy.

00:49:14 ►

You ever hear of that? Amos and Andy?

00:49:16 ►

My God.

00:49:18 ►

Everybody would stop on Friday night for a half hour.

00:49:20 ►

The theaters would close and everyone would get around the radio.

00:49:23 ►

And these two black guys in the fresh air taxi company and the fellow

00:49:25 ►

Osbury Guston and all that. What it meant

00:49:28 ►

was they were all listening to the same thing at the same

00:49:30 ►

time. Never in human history had more

00:49:32 ►

than a hundred or maybe a thousand or a few thousand

00:49:34 ►

people attended to the same signal.

00:49:36 ►

Now you have millions of them doing it.

00:49:38 ►

So that meant that we were, what you’re doing

00:49:40 ►

here is you’re creating a new species of people

00:49:42 ►

that are harnessed by electromagnetic

00:49:44 ►

quantum physical stuff that old Eisenberg and…

00:49:47 ►

Yeah, yeah.

00:49:50 ►

Who would have believed that farmer Grant Wood and his wife, who are down-to-earth practical

00:49:57 ►

farm folk, would accept as reality shimmering, shivering, jittering little figures projected

00:50:04 ►

on a screen called movies.

00:50:07 ►

Well, I’ve got to tell you,

00:50:09 ►

not only do they accept it,

00:50:12 ►

Farmer Grant would love to.

00:50:15 ►

See, for the first time, think about it.

00:50:16 ►

Living in his Kansas or Iowa farm,

00:50:18 ►

he’d never been in the room

00:50:19 ►

with a real glamorous, good-looking, well-dressed woman.

00:50:23 ►

And here’s Clara Bow with her lips big as this,

00:50:26 ►

and she’s licking her lips and looking right at,

00:50:28 ►

who know you, yeah,

00:50:29 ►

no Farmer Brown’s flipped out of his mind.

00:50:32 ►

And here’s Mrs. Wood,

00:50:34 ►

she’s looking at Rudolph Valentino,

00:50:36 ►

and put the eye on her.

00:50:37 ►

I mean, boy, turns out that human beings

00:50:40 ►

love quantum, cybernetic, speed of light information.

00:50:46 ►

Don’t talk to me about chiseling on a marble thing,

00:50:49 ►

or don’t talk to me about books.

00:50:50 ►

Human beings, the human brain turns out,

00:50:53 ►

is a quantum Einsteinian Heisenberg instrument.

00:50:57 ►

It’s been designed over four and a half billion years

00:50:59 ►

with a hundred billion neurons.

00:51:01 ►

Each one has the computing capacities of a big, big

00:51:05 ►

Macintosh. And we have a hundred billion of them there and it is waiting to have this

00:51:10 ►

equipment turned down and booted up and activated and that’s what the

00:51:14 ►

quantum physical roaring 20th century is all about. You got World War II and

00:51:19 ►

then you got, then of course you got television. Wow, television. Who would believe in your own home,

00:51:26 ►

you’ve got the little appliances,

00:51:28 ►

quantum, physical,

00:51:29 ►

Max Planck appliance,

00:51:31 ►

and you just dial and then suddenly

00:51:33 ►

there you’ve got optics and color and so forth.

00:51:37 ►

People took to that,

00:51:38 ►

the average American family,

00:51:41 ►

seven hours a day watching the boob tube.

00:51:46 ►

You know, that’s scary. all of us have really pondered

00:51:48 ►

and wondered and worried

00:51:49 ►

about hey

00:51:49 ►

is DNA code going to finally

00:51:51 ►

leave us in the lurch

00:51:52 ►

are we going to become

00:51:53 ►

a race of vidiots

00:51:54 ►

where there are me-boy tentacles

00:51:57 ►

you know glued to the junk food

00:52:00 ►

coming out of ABC

00:52:01 ►

I mean is that

00:52:02 ►

four and a half billion years

00:52:04 ►

going to lead to that

00:52:04 ►

you remember coming out of ABC? I mean, is that four and a half billion years going to lead to that?

00:52:10 ►

You remember 1984 by George Orwell?

00:52:14 ►

His worst nightmare was that Big Brother would have a screen in which he could watch you

00:52:17 ►

in your living room or your bathroom

00:52:19 ►

or your bedroom.

00:52:20 ►

Oh, he could always kind of get around the corner.

00:52:23 ►

But what Orwell never dreamed

00:52:25 ►

of was that in America and throughout most of the world today, people voluntarily line

00:52:30 ►

up in front of the boob tube and become vegetables. Scary, isn’t it? Well, that was a scary situation,

00:52:38 ►

but it always happens in the history of evolution of life on this planet. You know, life’s been

00:52:43 ►

around for, you know, trillions of galaxies and trillions of go-arounds.

00:52:47 ►

So the life planning situation is not a novice here.

00:52:51 ►

When it’s time for something to happen, it happens.

00:52:54 ►

And the thing that really turned the 20th century around

00:52:57 ►

and saved us from becoming a nation of boob dudes happened.

00:53:01 ►

This gave birth to it, not in a manger in Bethlehem,

00:53:04 ►

but in a garage in Silicon Valley,

00:53:07 ►

where St. Stephen I and St. Stephen II

00:53:10 ►

brought forth the ultimate home quantum cybernetic appliance,

00:53:18 ►

the personal computer.

00:53:20 ►

And they called it Apple. I love that.

00:53:22 ►

I talked once to Steve Jobs,

00:53:24 ►

and another time I talked to Steve Wideniak

00:53:27 ►

and I said,

00:53:28 ►

when you call it the apple,

00:53:30 ►

were you thinking about, you know,

00:53:32 ►

that scenario in the Bible

00:53:33 ►

about, you know,

00:53:34 ►

where heavy-duty Jehovah says to Adam and Eve,

00:53:39 ►

you know,

00:53:40 ►

y’all can do anything you want in paradise here,

00:53:43 ►

but there are two rules and regulations.

00:53:49 ►

See that fruit of that tree? That’s a controlled substance.

00:53:52 ►

Y’all are not supposed to have an apple from that tree.

00:53:56 ►

That’s a tree of knowledge.

00:53:58 ►

Get it?

00:53:59 ►

As soon as God got in his squad car, you know.

00:54:04 ►

It was Eve who went over to the Apple

00:54:06 ►

and like the logo of the great company

00:54:08 ►

took that bite out

00:54:09 ►

anyway

00:54:10 ►

that was 1976

00:54:13 ►

when the Apple

00:54:15 ►

came on just exactly when we needed it

00:54:19 ►

the timing is almost precise

00:54:21 ►

when you think about it

00:54:22 ►

of course the psychedelic drug movement of the 60s and 70s helped

00:54:27 ►

because you can’t take a species

00:54:33 ►

which has a hundred billion neurons packing around in the skull

00:54:37 ►

but who are imprinted and socially conditioned

00:54:41 ►

to package knowledge in the form of marble tablets that

00:54:45 ►

God put down, what was it, 15 commandments

00:54:48 ►

and lost five or whatever you know

00:54:49 ►

00:54:50 ►

the printed book, you know they’re used to all that

00:54:53 ►

and they’re used to talking and thinking in lettered

00:54:56 ►

words and they got all this equipment

00:54:57 ►

up there, I mean how are you going to get them

00:54:59 ►

to boot up the circuits of their brain and get

00:55:01 ►

them used to dealing

00:55:03 ►

with bytes and bits and kilowatts

00:55:07 ►

of all sorts of information.

00:55:09 ►

How are you going to get them ready

00:55:10 ►

for the computer, you know?

00:55:12 ►

How are you going to get them…

00:55:12 ►

You don’t have the IBM.

00:55:14 ►

They just become robots.

00:55:15 ►

How are you going to get people

00:55:16 ►

to really harness up their nervous system

00:55:19 ►

to the computer?

00:55:19 ►

Well, obviously,

00:55:20 ►

there are a lot of receptor sites

00:55:22 ►

in the human brain

00:55:23 ►

and every neuron has got a little lock there that can be opened by a certain chemical key.

00:55:30 ►

And what you saw in the late 60s and 70s was an inevitable and historic thing

00:55:35 ►

that people have got to get used to the fact that the universe,

00:55:39 ►

according to quantum physics, is psychedelic.

00:55:42 ►

And it’s moving and changing, and it’s multi-level.

00:55:45 ►

I’ll talk about all the states, Einstein, yeah.

00:55:48 ►

So, and it was interesting too, when we first started studying psychedelic drugs, I’m not

00:55:57 ►

talking about the body drugs, the euphorins and the pep pills, I’m talking about psychedelic

00:56:00 ►

drugs which expand consciousness, you know, overload it and so forth and confuse it and all that.

00:56:06 ►

When we were first doing our research at Harvard,

00:56:08 ►

you know, we had no language to discuss it.

00:56:10 ►

We went through the textbooks of Hinduism and Buddhism,

00:56:13 ►

and everybody did.

00:56:13 ►

They were all running around with the Tibetan Book of the Dead

00:56:15 ►

and any, you know, half-baked yogi and occultist

00:56:19 ►

came along with some new…

00:56:20 ►

We sat down and listened to it.

00:56:22 ►

Gurdjieff, Crowley, you name it.

00:56:24 ►

We wanted to find out, well, hey, what’s going on

00:56:26 ►

here? Because Western psychology has no

00:56:28 ►

words for this stuff. And eventually, we

00:56:29 ►

finally caught on. We started

00:56:32 ►

working with art engineers that

00:56:34 ►

work with light. Remember, we

00:56:36 ►

would have anatomical

00:56:37 ►

movies of cells going around. Then we’d play

00:56:40 ►

some rock and roll, and then we’d have some slide projections

00:56:42 ►

of your mother on top of it.

00:56:43 ►

Trying to get some feeling

00:56:45 ►

for the multiplicity

00:56:47 ►

and the complexity

00:56:47 ►

and the

00:56:48 ►

I’m sure they’re

00:56:49 ►

good computer terms

00:56:50 ►

for the enhanced

00:56:51 ►

high resolution quality

00:56:53 ►

of the human brain stuff

00:56:54 ►

but

00:56:54 ►

00:56:56 ►

this whole new

00:56:57 ►

art form

00:56:59 ►

of special effects

00:57:00 ►

and Lucasfilm

00:57:01 ►

and Kubrick

00:57:03 ►

and so forth

00:57:03 ►

you know

00:57:03 ►

it’s all part of this same roaring 20th century,

00:57:07 ►

getting us ready to deal with reality,

00:57:09 ►

what it really is, which is clusters of on-on bits.

00:57:12 ►

So, how long have I been talking, huh?

00:57:19 ►

I don’t know.

00:57:20 ►

You want a little more?

00:57:22 ►

Should I go on?

00:57:22 ►

Should I go on?

00:57:23 ►

Yeah, yeah, all right.

00:57:24 ►

Well, uh… You want a little more? Should I go on? Should I go on? Yeah, all right.

00:57:36 ►

Now, one thing that you know and I know,

00:57:39 ►

that there’s no one today,

00:57:42 ►

if I’m wrong, please correct me,

00:57:44 ►

but can you tell me one politician,

00:57:47 ►

one statesman, one columnist, one writer who can give you a clear blueprint of what to do for the next 15 years?

00:57:52 ►

Oh, Benjamin Franklin, bring down lightning, I can go for that.

00:57:58 ►

You know, you’ve got the four-letter words of the Republicans,

00:58:03 ►

Dole, Bush, Kemp, and Bork.

00:58:08 ►

You got the seven dwarfs of the Democrats,

00:58:11 ►

and those guys just don’t understand.

00:58:13 ►

It’s a whole new ballgame,

00:58:14 ►

and the first time anyone comes around

00:58:16 ►

and tells things kind of in a, you know,

00:58:18 ►

really, it’s going to happen,

00:58:19 ►

people are ready to listen.

00:58:20 ►

I’ll tell you, there’s a hunger.

00:58:22 ►

There’s an absolute void.

00:58:24 ►

People are desperate to listen. I’ll tell you, there’s a hunger. There’s an absolute void.

00:58:31 ►

People are desperate for some scientific, logical, common sense blueprints of what we can do and what’s going to happen.

00:58:41 ►

And I’m looking around, and I’ve run into one set of interesting speculations where, naturally, in science fiction,

00:58:43 ►

but not science fiction of the future. See, you think about the science fiction

00:58:45 ►

that we used to read in the 60s and 70s,

00:58:47 ►

that was really pretty conservative.

00:58:49 ►

You had the princes of Dune,

00:58:52 ►

and you know, and Princess Leia.

00:58:53 ►

Give me a break, you know, Lucas.

00:58:56 ►

And it was kind of a futile situation.

00:58:58 ►

The Empire strikes what?

00:58:59 ►

The Empire?

00:59:00 ►

What are you talking about, man?

00:59:01 ►

And Heinlein, he was an old,

00:59:03 ►

they were all kind of engineer types, and

00:59:05 ►

yeah, there was a lot of hardware, and beam me up, Scotty,

00:59:08 ►

but Captain Kirk was a government employee

00:59:10 ►

to me, I mean.

00:59:12 ►

Another Marine out there, you know.

00:59:15 ►

Point of making is that

00:59:15 ►

there was no sociology, no economics, no

00:59:17 ►

culture, you know, they were still going around playing

00:59:19 ►

World War II games. There’s a new genre

00:59:22 ►

of fiction, it’s called cyberpunk. How many of you

00:59:24 ►

know about that?

00:59:28 ►

It’s an inevitable movement.

00:59:30 ►

When you think about it,

00:59:31 ►

it was time for a new generation

00:59:34 ►

of young people to write science fiction

00:59:36 ►

that had been up through the 60s and 70s

00:59:38 ►

and listened to rock and roll.

00:59:39 ►

They weren’t going to go for Captain Kirk

00:59:41 ►

and they weren’t going to go for

00:59:42 ►

Obi-Wan Kenobi’s.

00:59:45 ►

So the cyberpunk writers, Norman Spinrad is one, there are a lot of them, Bruce

00:59:52 ►

Sterling, but the man that really has kind of caught all of our attention is a man named

00:59:57 ►

William Gibson in Vancouver who wrote a book called Neuromancer. And it’s a science fiction book about the world.

01:00:06 ►

It could be in 20 years.

01:00:07 ►

It’s a real down, gritty street wisdom.

01:00:10 ►

And the hero of the book is like a punk hustling kid

01:00:13 ►

who’s a computer hacker and cowboy.

01:00:15 ►

And he can go into cyberspace and he’s rustling AI stuff.

01:00:18 ►

And he’s got a drug habit here.

01:00:22 ►

He’s fooling around with it.

01:00:23 ►

And he’s down in the streets of Tokyo

01:00:25 ►

hustling and stuff.

01:00:27 ►

And I’ve read three of Gibson’s books

01:00:30 ►

about ten times each.

01:00:31 ►

He wrote Neuromancer, Count Zero,

01:00:33 ►

and a collected book

01:00:34 ►

called Burning Chrome.

01:00:36 ►

And a certain philosophy is there

01:00:39 ►

if you can…

01:00:39 ►

Because Gibson would laugh.

01:00:41 ►

Hey, man, I’m just writing, you know,

01:00:43 ►

amusing stuff for you to read.

01:00:44 ►

He would decline and deny the role of prophet.

01:00:47 ►

But he really is laying down a theology and an economics.

01:00:51 ►

And one thing I’ve learned from Gibson’s stuff is, you know,

01:00:53 ►

see, the world in Gibson’s books 20 years from now, you don’t hear much about America.

01:00:59 ►

And they’re vaguely Russian, because vaguely Russian America, they became second-class countries.

01:01:04 ►

And, you know, they spent all their money on arms.

01:01:06 ►

So that finally, the world is really run by Germany and Japan and Switzerland,

01:01:13 ►

who kind of stepped in at one point, apparently, and said to Russia and America,

01:01:19 ►

hey, we can’t allow this.

01:01:20 ►

You see, we can’t go around building up arms and blowing things up.

01:01:23 ►

You can’t blow up America because we own it. Nuclear war is bad for consumer business. And funny

01:01:33 ►

thing, you see, I’m naming you former Axis countries. Kind of interesting. The worst

01:01:37 ►

thing that can happen to a country is to win a war. You know that. World War II, boy, yeah,

01:01:42 ►

tell me about it, Ollie, and Poindexter, tell me about it, yeah. We won World War II boy yeah tell me about it Ollie and Poindexter tell me about it yeah we won World War II

01:01:46 ►

who’s we?

01:01:47 ►

Russia and America

01:01:48 ►

it’s kind of funny isn’t it

01:01:51 ►

and poor England

01:01:52 ►

had the poor luck

01:01:53 ►

to be dragged along

01:01:54 ►

and be a victor

01:01:55 ►

because the victors

01:01:56 ►

number one

01:01:57 ►

their military leaders

01:01:58 ►

were not discredited

01:01:59 ►

Eisenhower

01:02:00 ►

and Haig

01:02:01 ►

right

01:02:01 ►

all those Russian generals

01:02:03 ►

with acres of medals.

01:02:05 ►

Anytime you see a grown man dressed up in a uniform with ribbons,

01:02:08 ►

you know you’ve got a psychotic case on your hands here.

01:02:15 ►

And it doesn’t help that the turkeys are armed to the teeth

01:02:18 ►

with a pit bull mentality.

01:02:22 ►

That’s the problem with Russia and America,

01:02:25 ►

that they’re simply spending all their energies in war and military and CIA and the KGB.

01:02:31 ►

Meanwhile, the poor losers.

01:02:33 ►

Okay, Germany, Japan, and Italy, their military leaders were discredited.

01:02:38 ►

Hitler is not a joke.

01:02:40 ►

I mean, he’s an absolute abhorrent.

01:02:41 ►

The name Hitler, you’re never going to get on a uniform, you know that.

01:02:44 ►

Or dreams of tomorrow, the bulls, get out of here, Adolf.

01:02:48 ►

Germany went right to work making consumer goods.

01:02:51 ►

We didn’t allow them to have guns.

01:02:53 ►

That’s a good one.

01:02:53 ►

We bombed all their factories.

01:02:54 ►

They started new factories.

01:02:56 ►

Same thing happened in Japan.

01:02:58 ►

We wouldn’t let them have any military.

01:02:59 ►

We totally discredited that whole Tojo dreams of Nipponese empire.

01:03:03 ►

No, sir, we’re not worried about that.

01:03:05 ►

We’re going to conquer the world with consumer goods.

01:03:08 ►

You Americans and Russians have forgotten how to,

01:03:10 ►

because you know, if you’ve forgotten,

01:03:11 ►

the individual human being doesn’t care about

01:03:13 ►

big nuclear guns and tanks.

01:03:15 ►

The individual human being wants things to enhance

01:03:17 ►

his intelligence and make him feel good

01:03:20 ►

or make her a little smarter

01:03:21 ►

or make life a little more comfortable

01:03:22 ►

or give a little class or fashion

01:03:24 ►

or a sense of consumer gourmet.

01:03:26 ►

I’m in control of my life and I’m not a victim of the Soviet or the American faction.

01:03:32 ►

And I’m trying to tell you, you know, you get the picture.

01:03:34 ►

Now, in this world of the future that Gibson’s vaguely talking about, it’s like a vague blueprint.

01:03:41 ►

You have to fit in your own picture.

01:03:43 ►

It’s really quite liberal in the sense that,

01:03:47 ►

and the Italians too, Mussolini, give me a break.

01:03:50 ►

The Italians are notorious bad soldiers, you know, sometimes.

01:03:54 ►

Yeah, yeah.

01:03:56 ►

They’re credible soldiers in an individual thing,

01:03:59 ►

but they’re not good at lining up for some cause.

01:04:01 ►

And I don’t blame them, it’s a great thing.

01:04:04 ►

What? Well, go for that. That’s an old motto, I’ve heard that before.

01:04:09 ►

So, and the Italians are doing fine, you know, and oh, they can’t run a country,

01:04:14 ►

they have a government, the government is changing all the time, good, that means the

01:04:16 ►

bureaucrats are changing all the time, but somehow Italy is working without the

01:04:19 ►

bureaucrats, it’s amazing. So finally we catch on, it’s the governments that cause

01:04:24 ►

all the fuck-ups. If you get the military

01:04:26 ►

and the government out, and the old…

01:04:29 ►

It’s so corny.

01:04:32 ►

It’s the psychedelic, cybernetic,

01:04:34 ►

hedonic law

01:04:35 ►

of supply and demand.

01:04:38 ►

People want certain things. It’s kind of

01:04:40 ►

healthy for them.

01:04:40 ►

And it’s very liberal because, see,

01:04:43 ►

the big companies,

01:04:45 ►

the international,

01:04:47 ►

multinational combines,

01:04:48 ►

they don’t run things that are just kind of

01:04:48 ►

keeping everything moving.

01:04:49 ►

They don’t care

01:04:50 ►

what drugs you take

01:04:52 ►

or how you fuck

01:04:53 ►

or what kind of magazines

01:04:55 ►

as long as you’re

01:04:55 ►

a good consumer.

01:04:57 ►

The main thing I’m saying

01:05:02 ►

is, of course,

01:05:03 ►

the old motto of 1776 and 1966 of think for yourself and question authority, T-F-Y-Q-A.

01:05:18 ►

But it doesn’t do you good to think for yourself if you don’t know how to think and if you’re using marble tablets to

01:05:26 ►

think or if you’re using the alphabet of 26 meaningless letters to think uh there’s a french

01:05:33 ►

school of philosophy called semiotics and uh they come out with some interesting by the way do you

01:05:38 ►

know that the french and many of you in the audience come from silicon valley but the french

01:05:41 ►

have a of a computerized telephone system called Minitel. See, apparently,

01:05:48 ►

interesting, we learned from the French. The French didn’t have a telephone system in a long time.

01:05:52 ►

De Gaulle would not allow it. You know why? For many reasons. Number one,

01:05:55 ►

the French man felt that if he had a telephone at home and he went off to

01:05:59 ►

work or went to visit his mistress, his wife would use the phone

01:06:03 ►

to do you know what. So as a good

01:06:06 ►

man, he could go out of the house. He didn’t want his wife to have a telephone. Secondly, when a bell

01:06:12 ►

rings, you have a servant ring it. So if the bell would ring, you’d pick it up, being your servant.

01:06:17 ►

Also, you couldn’t control information if you had a telephone. Same thing in Moscow. There’s no

01:06:22 ►

telephone book in Moscow, a city of 10 million people.

01:06:27 ►

But anyway, now, since Gestang, they now have a mini-tel system where most every home has a telephone,

01:06:34 ►

which is computerized in a little screen, and people are going crazy doing networking,

01:06:39 ►

you know, these computer networks, and being very French.

01:06:42 ►

But 40% of all of the telephone bills and all the computer time that’s racked up

01:06:47 ►

is in, they call it, message rows, I mean, sex messages.

01:06:51 ►

So the French are a little ahead of us in this computer thing.

01:06:58 ►

And in the philosophy, too.

01:07:00 ►

The French semiotic people, people like Marcel Foucault,

01:07:03 ►

have taught me something very interesting.

01:07:06 ►

They say, never mind about politics or economics or religion,

01:07:12 ►

it’s language that controls society and controls the individual.

01:07:16 ►

And who controls the language controls everything.

01:07:19 ►

Parents control the language, therefore they control the kids.

01:07:22 ►

The literate, educated, control the illiterate and the uneducated. The rich have the language, they they control the kids. The literate, educated, control the illiterate and the uneducated.

01:07:25 ►

The rich have the language, they can control the poor.

01:07:28 ►

Those that have access to television, radio, printing presses,

01:07:35 ►

if you control the language and the technology of the language,

01:07:38 ►

you control the minds.

01:07:39 ►

It makes a lot of sense.

01:07:41 ►

That’s the downside.

01:07:43 ►

The good side is that if you can learn how to use

01:07:47 ►

the knowledge technology,

01:07:49 ►

the language technology,

01:07:50 ►

then you are armed with defenses

01:07:53 ►

that it’s the ultimate revolutionary tool,

01:07:56 ►

a new language.

01:07:57 ►

Rock and roll was a new language.

01:07:58 ►

Amplified sound was a new language.

01:08:00 ►

And of course,

01:08:01 ►

we owe it to Jobs and Wozniak

01:08:03 ►

and the Silicon Valley people.

01:08:05 ►

The personal computer allows you to do exactly what these French philosophers say we’ve got to do.

01:08:10 ►

Control your own screen.

01:08:13 ►

Now here, everyone’s sitting there watching seven hours a day screens

01:08:17 ►

and going off to movies, MGM, ABC.

01:08:21 ►

Come on, they’re controlling our minds.

01:08:24 ►

The solution is not to turn it off

01:08:25 ►

because then you’ve given them

01:08:27 ►

the Einsteinian quantum physical power.

01:08:31 ►

We’ve got to learn how to change the screens.

01:08:34 ►

And that’s where personal computers come.

01:08:35 ►

That’s where new software comes.

01:08:38 ►

And unless you can control us on the screens

01:08:42 ►

in your own TV, in your own home,

01:08:44 ►

you know, okay. Then you’re going to TV, in your own home, you know.

01:08:45 ►

Okay.

01:08:46 ►

Then you’re going to have, see, within two or three or four years, compact discs.

01:08:51 ►

Interactive compact discs where you can store dozens of films or videotapes or, Dan, rather, the news.

01:08:58 ►

Throw in your X-rated home movie you made last night.

01:09:01 ►

You’re going to have all this digitized sound in your CD library. Where?

01:09:06 ►

You can make your own news. You can make your own ten best items of the week. You are the

01:09:12 ►

director, the producer, the editor of your own screens. And that’s just as obvious and

01:09:16 ►

logical to me as when Gutenberg produced a book, then we, the human individuals, could

01:09:22 ►

write, which was illegal under feudalism.

01:09:25 ►

The same thing is happening.

01:09:27 ►

So the real message that I get from the 20th century is learn how to be cyber-hip, cybernetic.

01:09:34 ►

Learn how to deal with electrons.

01:09:36 ►

And, of course, the keyboard is finished.

01:09:38 ►

We owe it to the Macintosh and those guys at Xerox PARC.

01:09:41 ►

You don’t get rid of that Phoenician alphabet keyboard using gloves and mice and joysticks and so forth

01:09:48 ►

literacy

01:09:49 ►

literacy my friends

01:09:51 ►

is the oppressive chains of the educated middle class

01:09:55 ►

yeah

01:09:55 ►

literacy

01:09:57 ►

you got to get away from those books

01:09:59 ►

and controlled by the printing press

01:10:01 ►

and the highfalutin intellectual

01:10:03 ►

I’ve written enough books to destroy several forests and trees in Canada.

01:10:08 ►

I’ll plead guilty, but yet…

01:10:10 ►

And by the way, when you learn how to move electrons around on screens

01:10:14 ►

and move and store compact things,

01:10:16 ►

you can still read, you can still curl up on the beach and read to your heart’s desire.

01:10:22 ►

You’re not giving anything up.

01:10:23 ►

You’re adding a tremendous dimension to your mind and your skill.

01:10:28 ►

Okay, now, boys and girls,

01:10:30 ►

is that a locker room pep talk or what?

01:10:34 ►

Okay.

01:10:37 ►

How many of you want to hear about Hunter Thompson?

01:10:42 ►

He’s a local boy.

01:10:43 ►

He does a column on Mondays.

01:10:44 ►

Well, I love Hunter Thompson. You know, I’ve never met Hunter. I’ve never love Hunter Thompson.

01:10:46 ►

You know, I’ve never met Hunter.

01:10:47 ►

I’ve never met Hunter Thompson in all these years.

01:10:51 ►

But the mad programmers of this…

01:10:54 ►

What?

01:10:56 ►

Anyway, I was in a deal in Seattle, Washington about two months ago

01:11:00 ►

in which they had…

01:11:02 ►

I don’t know who thought this up.

01:11:03 ►

It was like a debate or a tribate between Abbie Hoffman, Hunter Thompson, and myself.

01:11:07 ►

Now, I’ve read all of his books many times.

01:11:08 ►

I love his books.

01:11:10 ►

I follow his exploits as Ambassador Duke in Dunesbury.

01:11:14 ►

He called me a couple of times, although we never met.

01:11:17 ►

I’d get phone calls late at night, about three in the morning,

01:11:19 ►

from someone who said it was Hunter Thompson wanting dangerous drugs.

01:11:24 ►

And I had to tell him to fuck off.

01:11:26 ►

But I don’t think that could have been Hunter.

01:11:31 ►

Anyway, I met him in Seattle.

01:11:35 ►

I’ll never forget.

01:11:36 ►

He came down from the plane.

01:11:39 ►

And man, he had a paper bag in one hand.

01:11:41 ►

He had that cigarette with a holder.

01:11:42 ►

He had that baseball hat.

01:11:43 ►

And he said, let’s get drunk, Timmy.

01:11:46 ►

And then Abby came off the plane with a bandana like a rustler.

01:11:51 ►

I look at these two guys.

01:11:52 ►

And for the first time in my life, I felt like the squarest guy in the house.

01:11:55 ►

And out of my league.

01:11:57 ►

We’re talking major troublemakers here.

01:12:02 ►

There was a press conference.

01:12:03 ►

The press conference.

01:12:04 ►

I showed up. and then Abby showed up

01:12:06 ►

and finally Hunter showed up and he started drinking whiskey

01:12:08 ►

and the press was taken very seriously

01:12:11 ►

and said well Mr. Thompson

01:12:12 ►

what do you think of the college students today

01:12:16 ►

generation of swine

01:12:19 ►

well Mr. Thompson what do you think of the college students

01:12:23 ►

20 years ago

01:12:24 ►

generation of swine Well, Mr. Thompson, what do you think of the college students 20 years ago?

01:12:27 ►

Generation of swine.

01:12:31 ►

When it came time for the lectures, 8 o’clock,

01:12:32 ►

boy, they loved, you know,

01:12:36 ►

Hunter Thompson is an extremely popular person in this country among young people.

01:12:39 ►

He’s a fabulous, like Robert Anton Wilson, fabulous.

01:12:42 ►

You don’t really realize how popular and wonderful he is.

01:12:44 ►

Anyway, it’s an enormous crowd.

01:12:47 ►

And about time to go, 10 of 8, I said, hey, let’s go.

01:12:49 ►

And I went down to Hunter’s room.

01:12:52 ►

And Hunter’s on the phone talking to someone named Tony.

01:12:54 ►

Telling Tony to get his ass over there.

01:12:55 ►

Something about an 8 ball, so I couldn’t follow that.

01:13:00 ►

Then it turned out that Hunter had suckered Abby Hoffman into a $100 bet on the Houston Sonics or the Rockets basketball game.

01:13:04 ►

And shit, it’s only

01:13:06 ►

in the second quarter

01:13:07 ►

these guys are not going to show up at that lecture

01:13:10 ►

but I think good

01:13:11 ►

because the only chance I’m going to have to talk

01:13:14 ►

is if I get there first so I went to the studio

01:13:15 ►

get me over there

01:13:16 ►

beautiful backstage thing and I got out

01:13:20 ►

there and said well I’m like the warm up

01:13:21 ►

for the Joan Rivers show

01:13:23 ►

I’ll tell you what I have in my mind.

01:13:25 ►

After about 20 minutes, they come in and

01:13:27 ►

Abby gives this incredible talk.

01:13:31 ►

Stem winding

01:13:31 ►

and kicking ass at the CIA.

01:13:34 ►

Then Hunter got up there

01:13:35 ►

and Hunter, kind of mumbling, he said to me,

01:13:38 ►

Hey Tim,

01:13:39 ►

has Tony come?

01:13:41 ►

I said, what? Tony, you know.

01:13:44 ►

Tony.

01:14:05 ►

I don’t know. He said, what? Tony, you know, Tony. I don’t know. He said, go outside and see if Tony’s in the back room. I walked up there in the back room. Well, Tony had definitely come because the air was all blue with some resinous smoke. I said, is there a gentleman named Tony here? The guy said, come here. He took me down this hallway and he pressed a small envelope

01:14:07 ►

in my hand

01:14:07 ►

and he pushed me

01:14:08 ►

into a men’s room.

01:14:12 ►

Well,

01:14:13 ►

you know,

01:14:14 ►

I’m basically a scientist.

01:14:19 ►

And furthermore,

01:14:21 ►

as an older person,

01:14:22 ►

I thought it was my duty

01:14:22 ►

to protect young fellows

01:14:24 ►

like Hunter Thompson from any dangerous substance.

01:14:27 ►

So I did make a kind of a scientific test of it and keep bounding back into the room.

01:14:34 ►

And then Hunter left and Hunter came back and that was the end of the debate.

01:14:38 ►

It was just boom.

01:14:39 ►

But Hunter is really one of those people that is greater in person than his reputation, which is great.

01:14:48 ►

There’s no excuse for a human being in the 21st century to accept any helplessness or impotence or passivity,

01:14:56 ►

blaming it on genes or whatever.

01:14:58 ►

It’s up to you. You’ve got to take pilot control of your own life. Now, if that isn’t a fucking pep talk,

01:15:07 ►

locker room spellbinding

01:15:08 ►

rabbi priest talk,

01:15:12 ►

go for it.

01:15:13 ►

I’ll see you in 20 years.

01:15:14 ►

Thank you and good night.

01:15:22 ►

Ladies and gentlemen,

01:15:23 ►

the 21st century man, Timothy Leary. So, baby, I introduce to you The after number of your teeth So, baby, I introduce to you

01:15:46 ►

So, baby, I introduce to you

01:15:48 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:16:00 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:16:03 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:16:10 ►

Yeah, I can still remember the first time I heard Sgt. Pepper.

01:16:17 ►

It was on vinyl and at a going-away party three days before my friends and I left for a tour of duty in Vietnam.

01:16:20 ►

But that’s a story for another day.

01:16:23 ►

And no doubt you have a story about that album yourself.

01:16:26 ►

Although a good many of our fellow salonners weren’t even born yet when Sgt. Pepper hit the streets

01:16:29 ►

so I guess you’ll just have to take the word of us dusty old farts

01:16:33 ►

that that album probably did as much to change the world of music as Elvis did

01:16:38 ►

but enough looking back

01:16:40 ►

our job is to keep moving forward

01:16:42 ►

so let’s press on

01:16:44 ►

now if you’ve been listening to the most excellent podcast of the Dope Fiend back, our job is to keep moving forward, so let’s press on.

01:16:47 ►

Now, if you’ve been listening to the most excellent podcasts of the Dope Fiend, which you can find at dopefiend.co.uk,

01:16:52 ►

you know that there is a raging debate going on

01:16:56 ►

about the current potency of cannabis. So I know that you picked up on

01:17:00 ►

what Dr. Leary was saying about 17 minutes or so into his talk, where

01:17:04 ►

he told the audience about the then-current DEA scare tactic

01:17:07 ►

about the increased potency of pot.

01:17:11 ►

I guess it doesn’t occur to these knuckle-draggers in the government

01:17:14 ►

that if the potency is higher, we use less,

01:17:17 ►

just like most people don’t drink whiskey in the same quantities as they do beer.

01:17:22 ►

But wasn’t it interesting to see that about every 20 years or so,

01:17:25 ►

they recycle their bogus arguments about cannabis?

01:17:29 ►

I guess that’s what frustrates me the most about this insane war

01:17:32 ►

on people who use plants instead of patented pharmaceuticals.

01:17:36 ►

It’s the fact that these ignorant drug warriors think that we’re as stupid as they are.

01:17:41 ►

But my question is, hey, what happened to all of those young people in the 80s that

01:17:45 ►

Dr. Leary was just talking about? Did they get sucked into the system too? Well, I think we know

01:17:52 ►

the sad answer to that question. So that leaves you and me to pick up the pieces and keep the

01:17:58 ►

show on the road. And in fact, that’s what I’ll be doing for the next two weeks or so, going on the

01:18:04 ►

road. So I’m afraid that you won’t two weeks or so, going on the road.

01:18:09 ►

So I’m afraid that you won’t be hearing from me again here in the salon until the middle of next month.

01:18:15 ►

Unless, of course, you happen to be fortunate enough to be able to attend the Oracle Gathering that is going to take place from July 31st through August 2nd.

01:18:19 ►

And there I’ll be conducting a little workshop from 7 to 9 on Saturday night,

01:18:24 ►

just before the main event begins,

01:18:26 ►

which is a night filled with music, dancing, and a few other surprises.

01:18:31 ►

And if all goes well, I’ll be playing part of that workshop in a future podcast.

01:18:37 ►

So for the next few weeks, you shouldn’t expect much activity from me

01:18:40 ►

on Facebook or thegirlreport.com or on my new website,

01:18:44 ►

which you can find at www.genesisgeneration.us.

01:18:50 ►

And I’m not going to be able to be checking my email at all,

01:18:53 ►

but since I’m already about six months behind in my email,

01:18:56 ►

that won’t make a whole lot of difference, I guess.

01:18:59 ►

But I do want to thank our fellow Saloners

01:19:02 ►

who have either sent or offered to send

01:19:04 ►

some lost McKenna recordings.

01:19:07 ►

I most definitely will get back to each of you as soon as I can, hopefully next month sometime,

01:19:12 ►

but I do intend to take you all up on your offers,

01:19:15 ►

and over time we should be able to hear a whole bunch of new McKenna material.

01:19:22 ►

Now, as much as I dislike doing this,

01:19:32 ►

Now, as much as I dislike doing this, I’m going to have to point out that there may be some confusion brewing about where I’ll be making public speaking appearances in the coming months.

01:19:41 ►

To be exact, there are only two places where I’ll be speaking, and one is the Oracle event, which you can learn more about by going to Oracle Gatherings.

01:19:44 ►

That’s gatherings, plural, oraclegatherings.com.

01:19:45 ►

And the other festival I’ll be attending is the Symbiosis Gathering, and I’ll say more about that at the end of

01:19:50 ►

today’s podcast.

01:19:52 ►

But the event I will definitely not be at is one that several salonners have asked about

01:19:58 ►

because apparently the promoters are using the psychedelic salon’s name in their ads.

01:20:03 ►

Now, I know that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery,

01:20:07 ►

but it can also breed confusion.

01:20:10 ►

Now, back in June of 2005,

01:20:12 ►

just before I posted the first podcast from the salon,

01:20:16 ►

I did a Google search on the phrase psychedelic salon in quotes.

01:20:20 ►

And on June 10th of 2005, there was not a single hit on that phrase.

01:20:25 ►

And so I decided to use it as my title.

01:20:28 ►

And just now I did the same Google search

01:20:30 ►

and discovered that there are now over 17,000 instances of that phrase being used on the web.

01:20:36 ►

Now, don’t get me wrong.

01:20:38 ►

I’m not at all upset by the widespread use of the phrase.

01:20:41 ►

In fact, since I’m a lawyer myself, I could easily have trademarked it.

01:20:44 ►

use of the phrase. In fact, since I’m a lawyer myself, I could easily have trademarked it.

01:20:50 ►

But my personal opinion is that no one should be allowed to have the exclusive use of common words.

01:20:55 ►

And so I didn’t worry about some big company trying to edge me out and take over the name.

01:21:00 ►

But it never occurred to me that somebody I knew would appropriate for their own fundraising purposes. And so I was really taken aback when I started receiving emails with

01:21:05 ►

links to an announcement for a MAPS fundraiser that is titled Book Launch and Psychedelic

01:21:11 ►

Salon.

01:21:12 ►

Now, since my own book hasn’t exactly taken off yet, it really hurt my feelings to see

01:21:18 ►

that Rick Doblin was using the salon to push somebody else’s book to raise money for MAPS.

01:21:23 ►

And I know what you must be thinking.

01:21:25 ►

Old Lorenzo is just getting cranky and doesn’t want to help maps.

01:21:28 ►

Even though they never bothered to ask,

01:21:30 ►

it was okay to mislead some people into thinking

01:21:33 ►

that they would be attending a live session of the salon.

01:21:36 ►

And I’m sure that general grumpiness is part of it.

01:21:39 ►

But since Rick and I have been associated since even before he started maps,

01:21:43 ►

I thought that at least he’d give me the courtesy of a heads-up, but that didn’t happen.

01:21:48 ►

And so I now feel compelled to lay out the entire story,

01:21:52 ►

dirty laundry and all, for everybody to hear.

01:21:55 ►

There’s hardly a week that goes by in which somebody doesn’t send an email asking

01:21:59 ►

why I haven’t done any promotion for MAPS since my last podcast of one of Rick’s talks back in September of 2005.

01:22:07 ►

Well, there’s a good reason for that.

01:22:09 ►

And although I’ve kept my silence here in the salon for all these years,

01:22:14 ►

I feel that now I must make very clear that I am no longer supporting maps

01:22:18 ►

and that I have no affiliation with them at all.

01:22:22 ►

In fact, my wife and I even stopped making our nominal donations to

01:22:26 ►

them after Rick dismissed

01:22:28 ►

a critic some years ago by saying he didn’t need

01:22:30 ►

that person’s support because the guy was only

01:22:32 ►

donating $100 a year.

01:22:34 ►

Well, that really turned me off, but

01:22:36 ►

it isn’t the reason I no longer support

01:22:38 ►

them.

01:22:39 ►

My reason for no longer supporting MAPS is

01:22:42 ►

that they continue to fund and support

01:22:44 ►

a DEA informant,

01:22:46 ►

who, in fact, is probably more responsible for the disappearance of LSD on the street than anybody else I know.

01:22:53 ►

And that DEA informant, that turncoat, that government snitch, is Dr. John Halperin.

01:22:59 ►

I don’t know about you, but there is no way I want to be associated in any way, shape, or form with a DEA informant.

01:23:07 ►

And by the way, this isn’t just my opinion.

01:23:10 ►

I know for a fact that most of the top-tier speakers who were scheduled to attend another conference that MAPS is planning

01:23:16 ►

all backed out because Halperin was also on the program.

01:23:19 ►

And it was only after Rick promised that Halperin wouldn’t be there in person,

01:23:24 ►

but would only be piped into a small side room through a video link,

01:23:28 ►

that they even agreed to speak again.

01:23:30 ►

And if you want to read all the glory details of Halperin’s involvement with the government,

01:23:34 ►

which resulted in 95% of the acid supply drying up

01:23:38 ►

and the main chemist being put in a prison cage for two life sentences,

01:23:43 ►

well, I’ll post links to several lengthy articles about it

01:23:47 ►

that were written by John Hanna and by Eric Davis.

01:23:51 ►

But even after all of the grief that Halperin has brought to our community,

01:23:55 ►

MAPS continues to give him large sums of money

01:23:57 ►

that generous people have donated to them.

01:24:00 ►

And I simply cannot go along with that.

01:24:02 ►

And so for several years now,

01:24:04 ►

I have very quietly been avoiding the whole scene.

01:24:07 ►

And had they not used the salon to bait and switch people into another plea for money,

01:24:12 ►

I would have continued to be silent about my feelings about MAPS.

01:24:15 ►

I know that a lot of good people are associated with that organization, and I wish you all well.

01:24:21 ►

Of course, I do hope that the ultimate mission of MAPS is never realized,

01:24:26 ►

because I also don’t think that it’s right to try and get a patent on the medical delivery of LSD and MDMA and other substances,

01:24:35 ►

and that’s what Rick hopes to get an exclusive on.

01:24:38 ►

To me, the desire to patent the use of our sacred medicines is as obscene as those corporations who are filing patents on our genes.

01:24:46 ►

Or like Amazon’s claim that they alone have the right to one-click buying on the web.

01:24:51 ►

As if some grammar school child couldn’t have come up with that idea.

01:24:55 ►

Okay, enough ranting.

01:24:57 ►

As far as I’m concerned, this chapter is now closed.

01:25:00 ►

So please don’t try to engage me in an email or other discussion about maps.

01:25:05 ►

I’m moving on now. Case closed.

01:25:08 ►

Well, I guess that since I’m already on some kind of a heavy trip or something here,

01:25:13 ►

I should also mention something that a number of our fellow slaunters who have been listening to my novel,

01:25:18 ►

The Genesis Generation, have had some problems with.

01:25:22 ►

In it, one of the characters tells about five of her friends who recently died,

01:25:27 ►

three of which involve the use of our sacred medicines.

01:25:31 ►

And the question, of course, is whether or not this is based on fact.

01:25:35 ►

And, sadly, yes it is.

01:25:39 ►

Now, I’m not going to get into it here in the salon, at least not for now,

01:25:42 ►

because there’s enough discussion about drug safety in my book. But what I do want to point out is that, yes, there is most definitely

01:25:50 ►

some physical danger involved if you don’t use these medicines properly. And all it takes,

01:25:55 ►

of course, is a little reading at arrowwood.org and some common sense. You see, two of those deaths

01:26:01 ►

involved using a psychedelic in water and drowning.

01:26:09 ►

It seems obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many experienced psychonauts still use these substances in bathtubs, jacuzzis, and swimming pools.

01:26:13 ►

And if you want my opinion, anybody who mixes psychedelics with large pools of water is just plain stupid.

01:26:20 ►

And that little comment will probably cost me a few friends too, but that’s just the way I feel.

01:26:26 ►

And one of the other deaths I mention in the book involved mixing several different substances with alcohol

01:26:32 ►

and then the woman passed out on her back and drowned in her own vomit.

01:26:36 ►

Not a particularly nice way to begin the next phase of one’s eternal existence.

01:26:42 ►

So even though I extol the virtues of a psychedelic experience,

01:26:46 ►

I hope that you don’t think it’s all fun and games.

01:26:49 ►

This great work is serious business.

01:26:51 ►

But, of course, I doubt that many of us would be involved in this work

01:26:55 ►

if it also wasn’t a lot of fun.

01:26:57 ►

So, hey, just be sensible and think before you swallow,

01:27:01 ►

because once you take the red pill, there’s no turning back.

01:27:05 ►

But speaking of fun, in a few days, my wife and I will be heading north on our way to the Oracle Gathering,

01:27:11 ►

which is going to be held at Dragon’s Spear Park in Washington.

01:27:15 ►

And if you go to Oracle Gatherings, that’s gatherings plural, oraclegatherings.com,

01:27:20 ►

you’ll find a listing of over 30 musicians and DJs who will be performing that weekend.

01:27:26 ►

Also, there is going to be a communiversity featuring around, I guess, about 20 or so different workshops,

01:27:32 ►

not to mention the artists and performers who are also going to be participating.

01:27:37 ►

As you can tell from my general grumpiness today,

01:27:40 ►

I really need to get away and recharge my batteries with some input from what promises to be a fantastic gathering,

01:27:47 ►

and I’m really looking forward to seeing a lot of my friends there again.

01:27:51 ►

Now, if you can’t make that event, there is one more festival that I’ll be attending this year,

01:27:56 ►

and if you can make it, I think you’ll find that you are in the right place at the right time.

01:28:01 ►

And I’m speaking about the 4th Annual Symbiosis Gathering,

01:28:07 ►

which will take place near, but not in, I should add,

01:28:10 ►

but near Yosemite National Park in California.

01:28:14 ►

And it’s going to take place from September 17th through the 21st.

01:28:17 ►

And they also have a packed agenda.

01:28:21 ►

For starters, you’ll be able to hear an incredible amount of music.

01:28:23 ►

In fact, you can go to their webpage, and you’ll find that there are over a hundred musicians and DJs listed, along with links to their MySpace and Facebook pages

01:28:30 ►

where you can get to know them a little better before you go to the festival. Also, there’s going

01:28:34 ►

to be quite a few workshops and lectures there as well. I’ll be giving a presentation there myself

01:28:40 ►

sometime around five o’clock on Saturday, but you’ll also be hearing a little from me all day long

01:28:45 ►

as I will be the emcee for the day.

01:28:48 ►

And just to give you a little idea

01:28:49 ►

of who some of the other speakers will be,

01:28:52 ►

they include Daniel Pinchbeck, Starhawk,

01:28:55 ►

the famous physicist Freehoff Capra,

01:28:57 ►

and Allison and Alex Gray, among many others.

01:29:00 ►

And you can see the full program at their main website,

01:29:03 ►

which is www.symbiosisgathering.com.

01:29:14 ►

And I’ll put the links to both the Oracle and Symbiosis Gatherings along with the program

01:29:19 ►

notes for this podcast. So between now and the end of September,

01:29:25 ►

I hope to be able to meet a lot of our fellow salonners in person.

01:29:29 ►

And I know that if you’re going to Burning Man,

01:29:31 ►

you must be saying,

01:29:32 ►

what the fuck?

01:29:33 ►

Why did Lorenzo cancel on us,

01:29:34 ►

but is going to these other festivals?

01:29:36 ►

Well, it isn’t because I don’t love you,

01:29:39 ►

and it isn’t because I don’t enjoy the Burning Man festival.

01:29:42 ►

But going to the Burn is a very expensive undertaking,

01:29:45 ►

and when I first planned on going there,

01:29:47 ►

I had the fantasy of my new novel becoming a bestseller overnight.

01:29:53 ►

Obviously, I’d been using too much of my own medicine.

01:29:56 ►

Now that reality has firmly taken hold,

01:29:59 ►

I’ve been forced to realize that, for a while at least,

01:30:01 ►

I’m only going to be able to attend festivals

01:30:03 ►

where I can get some of

01:30:05 ►

my expenses paid if I sing for my supper, so to speak. I wish things were otherwise right now,

01:30:10 ►

but I’m sure you’ll understand, particularly since almost everybody I know is also having to

01:30:15 ►

tighten their belts a little right now. But if you’re being forced to stay close to home this

01:30:21 ►

summer, well, there’s one new little spot on the web where I hope you’ll want to spend a little

01:30:26 ►

of your time, and that is my new dig-like site for the Genesis Generation.

01:30:31 ►

Now, this isn’t meant to replace any of the forums over at thegrowreport.com.

01:30:36 ►

That’s still the main place I go to get to know the tribe.

01:30:39 ►

And of course, our comments section at the Notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog are

01:30:44 ►

always full of interesting thoughts.

01:30:46 ►

But I have another reason for starting yet another website.

01:30:50 ►

As you probably remember, a couple of years ago, EROC X1 set up a nice MySpace page for us.

01:30:57 ►

And within months, it was going strong.

01:30:59 ►

Then, one morning, when I went there, it was all gone.

01:31:03 ►

I’d essentially been disappeared by the MySpace sensors.

01:31:07 ►

So all of the work that went into that effort was wasted.

01:31:11 ►

Now, today a lot of slauners are going to Facebook

01:31:13 ►

and finding the people who have joined the Fans of Lorenzo page that Tom Barbalet set up for us.

01:31:20 ►

And gradually more and more slauners are finding the others who live nearby

01:31:24 ►

through little connections like that.

01:31:26 ►

But I have this sinking feeling that one day the Facebook people might do the same thing to us that the MySpace goons did and just delete me.

01:31:35 ►

So, the purpose of this new site is to give us a place that has no advertising whatsoever, not even those ubiquitous Google ads.

01:31:44 ►

This is a private site and no one

01:31:46 ►

can take it away from us.

01:31:47 ►

Now if you use Digg, you already know that you

01:31:49 ►

can form groups of your friends and

01:31:51 ►

these groups can be public or private.

01:31:54 ►

You can set them up for yourself and

01:31:55 ►

you don’t have any webmaster help

01:31:57 ►

required to get it going.

01:31:59 ►

Now it’s probably going to take a few

01:32:01 ►

years for this to grow into a place that you

01:32:03 ►

visit regularly,

01:32:10 ►

but I wanted to move the discussion of the wide range of topics that I covered in my novel to its own site and not clutter up the other established discussion boards.

01:32:16 ►

So, if you’d like to join us, all you need to do is surf over to www.genesisgeneration.us

01:32:25 ►

and click on the Genesis Generation Salon link.

01:32:31 ►

From there, you may have a little learning curve if you’ve never used Digg,

01:32:34 ►

but it isn’t all that complicated, and I think that in time you’ll find it to be a good place

01:32:39 ►

to more or less keep your own list of webpages that interest you,

01:32:43 ►

and hopefully they’ll be of interest to some other

01:32:46 ►

salonners and

01:32:47 ►

that you can get your own private conversations

01:32:50 ►

going about some of the topics that we find

01:32:52 ►

so interesting here in the salon.

01:32:54 ►

Well, as you can see

01:32:56 ►

I’m running out of steam because

01:32:57 ►

I’ve got a lot of packing to do and

01:32:59 ►

so I’ll be leaving you now for a few weeks

01:33:02 ►

and if all goes according to plan

01:33:04 ►

we’ll be back together here in the salon again around the middle of August.

01:33:07 ►

Until then, I hope you’re having a joyous summer,

01:33:11 ►

and if you’re able to make it to the Oracle Gathering on the 31st,

01:33:14 ►

be sure to come up and introduce yourself.

01:33:16 ►

Don’t be shy.

01:33:17 ►

After all, the main reason I’m going is to be there to meet as many of our fellow salonners as possible.

01:33:24 ►

Well, that’s going to do it for now,

01:33:26 ►

and so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you that

01:33:29 ►

this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon

01:33:32 ►

are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects

01:33:35 ►

under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.

01:33:40 ►

And if you have any questions about that,

01:33:41 ►

just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

01:33:45 ►

which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:33:48 ►

And don’t forget to surf over to genesisgeneration.us and say hello.

01:33:54 ►

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

01:33:59 ►

Be well, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

192 - Timothy Leary Live at the Stone – 1987″

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Program Notes

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