Program Notes
Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
[NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.]
“The EvoGrid at home will be your computer looking for signs of emergent protolife in the primordial digital soup.”
“[Life-like digital processes] are significant because they show us an insight into our own beginnings. They challenge religious beliefs, creationists’ beliefs, they show us that life may have emerged elsewhere in the universe in different environments. They will be, in a sense, one of the ultimate creations of the biosphere.”
“Perhaps Gaia, the biosphere, has a devious plan which is to allow one of its species, one of its offspring, to create a mechanism to create new forms of life.”
“The crescendo of human civilization really is going to be in people’s minds more than on the streets. It’ll be in the minds first.”
“The giving response that we have [when natural disasters occur], and through technology the fact that we can sort of be there virtually, and be in the environment that those people are in, and the crisis they’re in, the empathic response coming out of support is perhaps the healthiest thing that you see in the modern world when there’s a disaster.”
“Not only is no one running the world, but it probably isn’t possible for anyone to run the world. And once we come to that realization we become human again because we’ll say, ‘Look everyone’s human. Everyone is trying their best. Everyone is going from crisis to crisis, and we’ll stop believing in those conspiracy theories, which I also think will be a healthy thing.”
“So in a sense, it’ll be the geeks that inherit the Earth, but it’ll be enlightened geeks we hope.”
“We are a maintenance-heavy, hand-built civilization.”
“When you finally realize that the system is shaking underneath, reach for somebody and look them in the eye, and therein you will find your rescue.”
Bruce Damer’s DigiBarn Computer Museum
The Planetary Mood Ring Project
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And with me, at least virtually, is David M., who very kindly made a donation to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:00:38 ►
So, hey, thanks again, David. It’s good to have you with us here in the salon.
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Now, as I said in my very first podcast almost five years ago, psychedelic thinking isn’t about doing drugs.
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It’s about thinking.
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And if you want to know what it means to be a psychedelic thinker, to not just think outside of the box, but to not even acknowledge that any box exists,
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well, then all you have to do is to spend an hour or so with Bruce Dahmer.
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And that’s just what we’re about to do.
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What I’m going to play for you is the raw audio from a film that Bruce is participating in.
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So basically, what we’ll be hearing is a collection of short conversations caught with Bruce while Matt Anderson and his crew were shooting for their upcoming film, Fall and Winter,
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and his crew were shooting for their upcoming film, Fall and Winter,
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which is a feature-length documentary that investigates mankind’s enduring struggle with catastrophe.
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And it presents a unique and important insight from a whole vast array of individuals about the causes of and solutions to some of our current crises.
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And if you would like to stay informed about the film’s release date,
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you can join their mailing list at fallwintermovie, all one word, fallwintermovie.com.
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And that’s also where you can see a trailer about the film.
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So thanks to Matt Anderson and his crew,
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they have given their permission for me to play the entire recording of their interview with Bruce.
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Not all of which will make it in the movie, of course.
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And when Bruce told me about this interview the other night, I asked to hear it.
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And after listening to it, I knew that it was something that you’d want to hear, too.
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So I talked to Bruce, and he arranged with Matt for us to hear it now.
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And so keep in mind that this is unedited and taken from a film,
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so when you hear some funny squeaking sounds as Bruce is giving a tour of his farm,
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you may not know it, but that’s the sound of his pet pigs.
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However, if you go to damer.com, you’ll find hundreds of photos of his ancient oaks farm,
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At Damer.com, you’ll find hundreds of photos of his ancient oaks farm, which is also the home to the world-famous Digibarn Computer Museum.
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So let’s go there now and join Bruce Damer as he answers questions from Matt Anderson.
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Questions I should mention that you won’t hear because Bruce’s mic didn’t pick them up.
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But I think you’ll be able to figure out what the questions were on your own.
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So now, here is Bruce Dahmer.
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Computers, and we’re building new stuff and everything,
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and you have this very narrow window of opportunity to do something very cool.
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What would that be?
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What would the ultimate nerd project be? Well, the ultimate nerd project, when you describe this to a nerd,
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just to say, how did life start, if it wasn’t started by a creator or just somehow sailed in
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from interstellar space, how did life start from basic molecules, basic fit-together molecules that
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had some kind of function but not a whole lot going up to this incredible
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machine of the first cell you know how did the self-programming self-organization complexification
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happen in this great this gap and some people argue well it was impossible the machine could
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never have emerged this way but for a nerd it’s the ultimate challenge this is the ultimate programming software challenge
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in a sense software plus hardware and if we’re in this era where we’re kind of burning through all
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our resources what do you do you know when you have this peak of civilization you do sort of an
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ultimate thing the greeks in the peak of their civilization they came up with algebra and other
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exciting things and philosophy
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and then crashed and burned somewhat after that.
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Well, the Romans built great engineering works.
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But what do we do?
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Well, I think we take on the big questions and where did the cosmos start and how did life get started?
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So that was the idea that by the time I was in my 40s, there would be computing power enough,
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and I’d be able to get open source people together, and giant particle simulators going on grids,
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and science fiction writers poking their heads in now and then, proclaiming that it’s all,
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you know, they’ve already wrote about this, it’s already happened, and the evo grid was was born as a project yeah the the way the evo
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grid is being put together is so you start with one computer that is simulating say a hundred
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thousand atoms and the atoms are forming in the molecules and the molecules are in some kind of a
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digital primordial soup when you add another computer and another one and another one,
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you can simulate more and more spaces.
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So as you get more and more of these 100,000 atom molecule computing frames going,
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you start to look into each frame and say,
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well, what’s going on that’s interesting?
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Well, a little ball of atoms formed into a ball with an inside and an outside over in that frame,
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well, we’ll allow more of those frames to propagate. And so we’re kind of doing an automated
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selection, not a natural selection, an artificial selection to speed things up. And then over time,
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maybe it may take decades, but the frames get bigger and bigger.
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So there may be a frame with a trillion, a trillion atoms in it with all kinds of stuff going on,
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with little balls with insides and outside and little replicating virtual molecules and stuff like that.
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And that becomes a rich enough soup for what’s called a ratchet to occur.
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And ratchet’s like when you have a gear going and it has teeth,
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and once the gear goes one way, it can’t go back.
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So a ratchet would be a whole bunch of molecules get together
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and decide how they replicate.
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And so they’re now replicators.
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And you never will have a world without replicators.
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Replicators now dominate.
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So any free molecules that are around get sucked up into this replication process.
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And then that’s a ratchet, so your gear goes a little bit this way.
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Then there may be viruses in this replicant universe,
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and the viruses start to attach themselves to the replicators.
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And now viruses are going to be there forever.
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Now, is there life in
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there is that life maybe not it’s hard to say but something that’s biological is going on you know
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that’s biologically like uh so so that that’s the idea of the evo grid and millions of computers at
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home would serve as observers so a screensaver would be going on your computer that all this
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little bouncing balls,
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and some of those balls are really interesting, some of the patterns interesting.
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So your home computer tells the EvoGrid, I found something cool.
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Just like the SETI at home, which was looking skyward for signals from extraterrestrial intelligences,
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that was a grid of machines looking through signals. So the EvoGrid
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at home will be your computer looking for signs of emergent proto-life in the digital primordial
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soup. Some science fiction writers write about the mid-21st century that if an EvoGrid-like
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thing happened, you’d have something that various biologists and philosophers and mathematicians,
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who knows, or just ordinary Joes looking up at the screen, seeing the stuff moving around.
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That’s obviously, you know, you know life when you see it because the things are replicating
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and they’re evolving through natural selection, if that’s the process that emerged.
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they’re evolving through natural selection, if that’s the process that emerged.
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And they would say, gee, there’s kind of lifelike systems in here.
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Somebody in the late 21st century might jam a nanofabricator on the end of the machine,
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and because you modeled chemistry, make the things in real, make the things in molecules
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and throw them into a beaker and see if they can survive in a chemical soup rather than a virtual chemical soup so that kind of bridge may happen now for humanity that’s
00:08:52 ►
a significant or moment if you will because then you’ve you know are these things an endangered
00:08:59 ►
species you know are you allowed to unplug all the computers and see them go extinct you know
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are they protected if they’re an alien life form, of course
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are they any danger to us? They probably are not. They’re
00:09:11 ►
little fragile entities that probably wouldn’t do too well
00:09:15 ►
in the terran biological world. They probably wouldn’t survive more than
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a time you can toot your horn.
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But they’re significant because they show us an insight into our own beginnings.
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They challenge religious beliefs, creationist beliefs.
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They show us that life may have emerged elsewhere in the universe,
00:09:40 ►
in different environments.
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They will be, in a sense sense one of the ultimate creations of the
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biosphere. After all this four billion years of
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trial and error and evolving us and perhaps Gaia
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the biosphere has a devious
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plan which is to allow one of its species, one of
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its offspring to create a mechanism to create
00:10:06 ►
new forms of life. Because the EvoGrid shows that you could simulate the evolution of life in other
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places. You could actually evolve life that can live in other places. So, for example, you want
00:10:18 ►
to put life on the Martian ice cap. You simulate the ice cap. you simulate the ice and the chemicals in it, evolve something that
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could live there. By the time your little probe drops down and puts those creatures onto the
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Martian ice cap, they’re rocking, they’re ready to go, they know how to live there. So, perhaps,
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is it a mechanism to propagate life? Is it a mechanism to understand where life can come from? Is it a mechanism to finally give up,
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force us to seriously give up our belief
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that something has created us and is running the show,
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so we take responsibility for our circumstance?
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Could this actually happen during, you know,
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if this film was about the chaotic dissolution of human civilization, would the EvoGrid, just like
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in any good holiday, any good Hollywood picture,
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would the EvoGrid suddenly work at the point of
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ultimate chaos when the whole system is coming,
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crashing down with that matter, would the fact that the EvoGrid
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had produced life,
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somehow shift the balance away from chaos and create an aha moment.
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You know, this would be what every science fiction writer would put into a script
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for a good Hollywood end-of-the-world thriller.
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Yeah, I think since, especially since World War II,
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when media has come flooding into our lives,
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ratchets are occurring in culture.
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So we talk about, Richard Dawkins talks about memes,
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memes being the idea that thoughts are like biology and that they inhabit minds,
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and if they’re good selected thoughts, then they will jump from mind to mind.
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The culture carries this ecosystem of ideas.
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And since the explosion of media and then interconnected media within that,
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suddenly you’re flooded with new ideas and a new religion may form.
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Say, for instance, old Presbyterianism or old Catholicism suddenly
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gets transformed in Brazil by African influences and becomes a brand new type of Catholicism
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that has a bigger appeal to a bigger audience. And that will never go away. That’s a ratchet.
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So that’s Catholicism 9.6 or something like that.
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And the Catholic Church can’t control that, and they have to accept that.
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So on top of all that come all kinds of evangelical religions that are very media savvy,
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and they’re now there forever.
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New Age religions, beliefs in technology, beliefs in singularities, all those sorts of things are also ratchets.
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And so those are now in the soup, and they’re embedded into people’s minds.
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And these things are happening faster and faster and faster.
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And in a sense, it’s creating the crescendo, because the crescendo of human civilization really is going to be in people’s minds more than on the streets.
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It’ll be in the minds first. So whatever unfolds is going to start with this huge soup, this primordial soup that has exploded,
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the Cambrian explosion of these ratcheted ideas and belief systems.
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Yeah, there’s a wonderful book.
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It was the 1968, I believe, Hugo Award winner,
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which is the top award in science fiction,
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by John Brunner, a book called Stand on Zanzibar.
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I picked it up the other day and reread it
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because it talks about the early 21st century Earth.
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And it talks about, you know, it’s 2005
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and there are six billion of us crowding the Earth
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and the hive mind is going crazy but doesn’t know until it’s too late.
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And the cover of Stand on Zanzibar is very foretelling for our time.
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It shows little cubby holes and in each cubby hole is groups of
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people so there’s hippies in one and there’s kind of evangelical believers in another and
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their business types and they’re kind of crazy people and and and everybody lives in their own
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reality bubble their own belief bubble you know delusional space or committed belief space, and they all live in these separate
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things.
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And so if you look at where we are now, that is exactly where we are.
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I mean, the culture wars in the United States for the last 10 years or so is the creation
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through intense media and intense radicalization of cubbyholes of belief of various communities
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that really they’re living cheek to jowl with their neighbors,
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but they are living in a completely different world.
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They see the world differently.
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They get their news from different sources.
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They go to different organizations.
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They vote differently.
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And they really have nothing in common with the people next door.
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Whereas if you roll the clock back 30, 40, 50 years,
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I think you’d find much more of a common belief system.
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And as we roll into the 21st century,
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there’s going to be thousands more of these,
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hundreds of thousands more of these belief bubbles that form and pop.
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I mean, people tell jokes about this part of Northern California
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where you meet somebody and you say, oh, people tell jokes about this part of Northern California where,
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you know, you meet somebody and you say, oh, you don’t say, how are you? You say,
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well, I haven’t seen you in a couple of months. What sex are you now? What religion are you now?
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What job do you have now? What, what world, uh, cosmological theories do you have now? Because people change so much.
00:16:06 ►
And it’s a joke that’s told about this, but in fact that is what is happening.
00:16:14 ►
And there’s a positive side to that in that people have become very malleable.
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So instead of staying in one church or one religion or one company or one worldview,
00:16:24 ►
they can be shifted out of that worldview and go to the next thing quickly.
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So they can get out of the cult or get out of the bureaucracy that they’re in
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or the military culture that they were raised in, etc.,
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and they can shift to new things.
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The downside, of course, is that they’re, especially in the United States,
00:16:42 ►
people are very suggestible, they’re very gullible,
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and they’ll believe just about anything if it appears in a blog on the Internet.
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They’ll just pick it up and take it up.
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So they’re, in a sense, when people are in that state, they’re radicalizable,
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and you can sort of see that in many groups in the U.S.,
00:17:00 ►
and certainly in the Muslim world, you can see how they radicalize young men. Well, the same thing happens in the U.S. and certainly in the Muslim world, you can see how they radicalize young men.
00:17:06 ►
Well, the same thing happens in the West.
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The West is mirroring that and doing the same thing.
00:17:12 ►
So in a sense, that flexibility of people being able to buy into whole new worldviews
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that may be cockamamie or may be sensible is an opportunity, but it’s also our biggest threat to our civilization
00:17:28 ►
and it’s radicalization of people to do harm to other people and to do harm to
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to their environment which is probably the number one threat to the the 21st century
00:17:40 ►
if if all of so human civilization perhaps you could look at as like a big jumbo jet flight.
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And in the past, you had everyone sitting in economy sort of thought the same thing. Everybody
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in business class thought the same thing. And there were the people who were working the aisles,
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the hostesses. And then there were the pilots who were kind of running the ship and kind of on task.
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And really a simpler set of classes of people.
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The business types taught business language and golf.
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And the economy folks were talking about their kids’ football games
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and the stuff they were building in their kids’ football games and, you know, the stuff they were building
00:18:25 ►
in their backyards and stuff. And in a sense, if you look, swing forward into this same kind of a
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jumbo jet in the 21st century, there’s a, instead of two or three religions, maybe not so closely
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held, there’s a hundred religions. So there are 300 people on the plane and there’s a hundred religions, so there are 300 people on the plane, and there’s a hundred religious groups and sects represented.
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And there’s a doctor who quit medicine and is now an alternative healer.
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The pilot has all kinds of different thinking than they did before, although pilots tend to be a lot more straight up.
00:19:02 ►
But in the business section, there’s a billionaire who started a company like Google
00:19:07 ►
who wants to change the world and probably has the power to do it.
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And then there are people who are getting ready to wreck the world with financial instruments
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that shouldn’t be allowed, toxic financial instruments they’re designing.
00:19:20 ►
But there’s probably, in the 300 people on the plane,
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But there’s probably, in the 300 people on the plane, there are probably 290 completely separate cosmological, economic, and world views represented.
00:19:36 ►
And everybody, of course, is wired, and they’re connected into virtual communities.
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They’re playing multi-user avatar space games on board.
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They’re tied into hundreds of streams.
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They’re all publishers. They’re all
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publishing their views. And there are those who probably have gone through the psychedelic realms
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of thousands of psychedelic substances. There are those who consume vast amounts of new writing.
00:20:00 ►
There are those who are producing films like you guys. And then there are those who are
00:20:04 ►
trying to represent the world to the rest and have vast channels on the Internet where they have millions of viewers, but they just look like your ordinary 21-year-old guy just sitting there.
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So, I mean, that is where we are.
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And it looks like the same passengers, maybe a little less formally dressed and carrying way too much hand luggage,
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but that’s a 21st century airliner versus a 1965 airliner, for example.
00:20:35 ►
And so, yeah, the very good question is, the next question is,
00:20:38 ►
what happens if the airliner gets into heavy turbulence, for example, or there’s a real emergency.
00:20:46 ►
Well, truthfully, it’s hard to say, but in the mid-’60s,
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we’ll wait until the car goes by.
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So in the mid-’60s, what would happen if this airliner hit really serious turbulence
00:20:59 ►
or, God forbid, it was only on one engine, they had to make an emergency landing?
00:21:04 ►
Well, chances are, and I was alive in the 60s, but not an expert on it,
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but I think that pretty much the captain would come on and they would give instructions
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and everybody would pretty follow suit.
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I mean, people would be in the state of panic or whatnot,
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but they would listen to what’s going on
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and they would just pretty much sit tight and anticipate their fate,
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but wouldn’t really be doing much.
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But in our 21st century airliner, soon as the announcement would come out
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that we’ve just had some bad turbulence and we only have one engine left going
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and we’re going to have to find a landing spot.
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Well, there would be utter panic, of course, as there should be, and people would have
00:21:51 ►
their different responses.
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The true religious believers of some sort would maybe try to prepare for the second
00:22:00 ►
coming or prepare for something and they would be serenading the rest of them about
00:22:06 ►
that there would be the guy that is now who is doing the financial instruments would be trading
00:22:13 ►
trillions of dollars in in stocks causing the world economic collapse because he would be pulling out
00:22:19 ►
everything at at once there would be another there would be a gal there starting a Facebook group called
00:22:26 ►
We’re About to Crash, getting thousands of inputs.
00:22:30 ►
There would be Twitter tweet channels going constantly about this.
00:22:36 ►
And the entire world would be focused upon this group of people.
00:22:39 ►
There would be instant documentaries being made
00:22:42 ►
and filmed on board the plane as it went through and you know a
00:22:45 ►
billion people would tune in and psychically and mentally tune into this whole circumstance and
00:22:51 ►
derive their own meaning from it and you know hopefully the plane makes a safe landing and
00:22:56 ►
but millions of people would jump into the plane as avatars to also experience the crash and they
00:23:02 ►
would be there in an augmented reality sense this
00:23:05 ►
is talking about the 2020s here because they want to experience the crash and of course there’ll be
00:23:10 ►
people who don’t want to be on the plane who just simply go into world of warcraft 10.0 and and just
00:23:16 ►
tune out you know and they’re if they’re if their bodies are destroyed by the crash well then their
00:23:22 ►
avatar will turn into a bot and be embodied in the game forever,
00:23:27 ►
and they’ll be marked there as a player who has passed to the beyond,
00:23:32 ►
but they will continue to live in World of Warcraft.
00:23:34 ►
So, I mean, that’s a 21st century version of this.
00:23:42 ►
An interesting, I lived in Eastern Europe from about 1990 to 1994,
00:23:47 ►
setting up technology labs with old, with retiring nuclear bomb scientists, etc.,
00:23:55 ►
in the city of Prague, and it was interesting seeing that transition.
00:24:00 ►
But what was clear at that time, about 1990 or 91,
00:24:03 ►
was the Soviet Union was undergoing a kind of real collapse.
00:24:08 ►
And just a couple of years ago, when the United States started to have its little economic problems,
00:24:13 ►
there was this Russian guy, I can’t remember his name, who was a teenager at that time.
00:24:19 ►
And he talked about the collapse gap.
00:24:22 ►
He talked about the collapse gap.
00:24:25 ►
Now, of course, you remember the missile gap of the 60s and the cave or the mineshaft gap of the film,
00:24:30 ►
of the Peter Sellers film, Dr. Strange Glove.
00:24:35 ►
Well, he was claiming, this Russian guy was claiming,
00:24:39 ►
that there’s a collapse gap and that the Soviet Union was really ready,
00:24:42 ►
rockingly ready for collapse.
00:24:45 ►
People used public transportation.
00:24:46 ►
They grew their own food in their countryside plots.
00:24:51 ►
They were used to deprivation and suffering.
00:24:53 ►
So they were rockingly prepared for collapse.
00:24:55 ►
When collapse came, gosh darn it, they went through it fine.
00:25:00 ►
And so he talked about the United States and the West being, you know, woefully unprepared for collapse and that they need to close the collapse gap and become ready for that collapse.
00:25:11 ►
That we’re really, really way out there.
00:25:13 ►
You know, we’re expecting our Doritos to arrive from across the country on large 18-wheel trucks.
00:25:20 ►
You know, if they don’t, then we’re hosed because we’re in Tucson and there’s nothing grown there.
00:25:26 ►
So no countryside plots, no battered buses to take us out to work our countryside plots
00:25:33 ►
and put our mushy potatoes in our flats and suffer through the winter with no heat.
00:25:40 ►
I mean, that’s not for us.
00:25:41 ►
I mean, that’s not for us.
00:25:45 ►
So in a sense, the West, especially the United States,
00:25:51 ►
it would be a very dramatic collapse victim.
00:25:59 ►
So a question would be with the lifetime World of Warcraft Grandmaster,
00:26:00 ►
if that’s what they’re called,
00:26:04 ►
if they were plunked down on a farm and said, you put in these radishes because you’re going to need to start eating in the spring.
00:26:09 ►
You need radishes first.
00:26:11 ►
Would they understand what a seed is and how to hold it, et cetera?
00:26:16 ►
Well, James Burke, a video journalist, science journalist of the 70s,
00:26:21 ►
made a great series called Connections.
00:26:24 ►
And many of you old-ers will remember this, but in one of the series, the very beginning,
00:26:30 ►
he’s on a farm somewhere in the United States, and he’s walking up to the front door, and
00:26:36 ►
you can see him coming up, this very erudite Englishman, but he’s describing the post-crash
00:26:43 ►
situation of there’s no electric power and people
00:26:46 ►
are starving in the cities and those in the know are going to come to one place and it’s this place
00:26:52 ►
it’s a farm and if they’re lucky enough they’ll come to the front door of the farm they’ll find
00:26:57 ►
that the farmers have gone they fled so now they’re in possession of the tools of potentially of survival but then they go into the
00:27:07 ►
the barn they find a milking machine well that needs electricity they find tractors well they
00:27:12 ►
they’re not going to start without a big supply of fuel and so they’re rummaging around and if
00:27:17 ►
they’ve not lost all hope they go up to the attic of the barn and they find this device the plow
00:27:24 ►
and if they’ve read their history they know that if you attach a plow to an animal,
00:27:29 ►
hopefully a large animal, not a chinchilla, you can break soil
00:27:33 ►
and you can start to create fields and you can start to create crops.
00:27:38 ►
But without any electricity, without any fuel, all those skills have been long since lost.
00:27:44 ►
I mean, these skills exist in India and they exist in Africa and places like that,
00:27:49 ►
but not in the West.
00:27:50 ►
So even the farmers don’t have those skills anymore.
00:27:55 ►
And so the sheer effort to generate enough foodstuffs just for one family,
00:28:00 ►
let alone for a community, without the accoutrement of modern civilization, which is
00:28:06 ►
good, cheap power sources and skills and knowledge. If they’re not there, it’s fairly hopeless. I mean,
00:28:14 ►
you can imagine if the 99 city-dwelling nerds or World of Warcraft grandmasters that arrive at this
00:28:22 ►
farm, is one going to be able to make it you know after
00:28:26 ►
all the foraging is done at the local Costco so one of one of the interesting things that here
00:28:33 ►
at the Digibar Museum is we can see we have a cornucopia a veritable Cambrian explosion of
00:28:41 ►
digital farms that have evolved through our culture and our need to play games
00:28:47 ►
and have fun and get work done of thousands of computers.
00:28:52 ►
And all of these are well within a human lifetime, certainly well within mine.
00:28:57 ►
The oldest working machine here is the Link from 1962.
00:29:01 ►
So this is an amazing development over the last 25 or 50 years.
00:29:07 ►
So if there was an apocalypse, there’d be
00:29:11 ►
mountains of this stuff everywhere, and with nothing to power
00:29:15 ►
them, nothing to interconnect them, what would we do with them?
00:29:19 ►
Well, we possibly wouldn’t even know what they were. After a time
00:29:24 ►
there’s a great book called A Canticle for Leibowitz,
00:29:27 ►
and it’s about a sort of post-End of the World scenario,
00:29:31 ►
and they find technology and they find a shopping list,
00:29:35 ►
which I think says pound pastrami back by three,
00:29:39 ►
and nobody knows what this is, so it becomes a canticle.
00:29:42 ►
It becomes a religious phrase, pound know, pound pastrami, back by three. So it’s hard to say what all this will mean to people. Hopefully,
00:29:52 ►
this crescendo of technology is nature’s way of saying, okay, guys, you got to get new tools
00:29:58 ►
and connect your minds in new ways. If you’re going to do this thing of growing your civilization ever faster and putting more ideas into your minds,
00:30:07 ►
you need these tools to help you get through that
00:30:11 ►
crescendo or understand the crescendo or experience the crescendo
00:30:15 ►
or come down off of the crescendo. And it’s this
00:30:20 ►
kind of technology that is both the two-edged sword of both
00:30:23 ►
the tool for survival and understanding,
00:30:26 ►
but it is also the huge, enormous distraction from understanding and from maybe important
00:30:34 ►
things we also need to be doing to survive. So it’s the tool and the distraction from the
00:30:40 ►
important things. So it’s ironic in that sense. So in a sense, all of these, if one was to
00:30:49 ►
believe in a technological singularity coming from the future through the purple ring opens
00:30:56 ►
in the sky and the Terminator 10,000 machine comes in, this would be an ideal bomb shelter for that
00:31:02 ►
because as the machines from the future arrive, if you’re hiding behind your little Macintosh portable, you’re going to be saved and spared because they’re going to think, oh, it’s our ancestors.
00:31:15 ►
It’s the nursery.
00:31:17 ►
Let these carbon units survive.
00:31:19 ►
Something like that. but all joking aside, I think that what will happen in this crescendo to come
00:31:29 ►
isn’t going to be something simple.
00:31:31 ►
It’s going to be something very complex and very hard to figure out.
00:31:35 ►
But I think Hollywood films really give us a good point of view on this.
00:31:40 ►
In a Hollywood film, everything sort of starts out,
00:31:44 ►
and you learn about the characters and
00:31:45 ►
the drama for a while. It’s a little bit slow and then things start to happen and people start to
00:31:50 ►
be pushed from one crisis to another. There’s a lot of great films that use this formula.
00:31:55 ►
And then there’s this moment where all of it comes together. So somebody who met somebody
00:32:01 ►
who has certain knowledge, the robot android is able to sit down at the terminal and call the spaceship down or
00:32:07 ►
Sigourney Weaver is able to somehow get out of the tunnel
00:32:12 ►
with the alien chasing her at exactly the right moment. It’s
00:32:16 ►
always that way and I think that human beings are going to go through
00:32:20 ►
that kind of a drama and they’re going to use every piece of technology they have
00:32:24 ►
every idea they have, to get through this drama, this crescendo.
00:32:30 ►
And the crescendo may not be necessarily the end of the world,
00:32:32 ►
but it’s going to be a test, an enormous challenge to civilization
00:32:36 ►
and to people’s basic sense of humanity.
00:32:40 ►
Beyond any religious apocalypse, it’s going to be so much grander and stranger than any religious prediction
00:32:47 ►
or New Age prediction or things like that.
00:32:51 ►
It’s going to be this very weird, trippy experience, actually,
00:32:56 ►
a trip that all of humanity goes on,
00:32:58 ►
where we wake up and we say,
00:33:01 ►
we can’t believe that this is happening to us.
00:33:04 ►
We finally realize
00:33:05 ►
that it it’s taken on a life of its own and we can’t track it we don’t
00:33:09 ►
understand it no one’s driving there are no conspiracies it’s just the time wave
00:33:14 ►
is now in force and there’s a diet the system dynamic is pulling and pushing
00:33:20 ►
and it’s faster than then we can we’re on the back of it riding, it’s faster than we can possibly track.
00:33:28 ►
So think of it sort of like when the roller coaster finally,
00:33:31 ►
you’ve been through a few little humps and bumps,
00:33:33 ►
and the roller coaster finally is tipping over that final enormous downward plunge,
00:33:41 ►
and on the other side you know not what is there,
00:33:44 ►
but it’s probably one of those 360 loops
00:33:46 ►
so when humanity reaches that point we’re all going to see where we’re going that we’re going
00:33:53 ►
somewhere interesting we’re all going to have to use every tool and every sense and sensibility we
00:33:58 ►
have to go as a group down that and into the unknown of that big spiral loop and hopefully gaia nature our
00:34:08 ►
minds the universe will allow us the the the benefit of the doubt and say we’re not just
00:34:15 ►
going to dump the roller coaster cart you know off into the landfill of civilizations we’re going to
00:34:22 ►
allow these guys if they keep their cool and don’t
00:34:25 ►
jump out, when they come out the other side, they’ll be enlightened in some way. They’ll come
00:34:30 ►
into a new world. They’ll be able to shed off a lot of the stuff that they really shouldn’t have.
00:34:36 ►
Because when you’re in that roller coaster and you’re going down, you’re kind of shedding off
00:34:41 ►
mentally. You’re blowing off, like, I don’t care about the shopping list or what so-and-so said to me last week.
00:34:49 ►
This is just too profound.
00:34:51 ►
I’m just going to let it all go.
00:34:53 ►
And I think it’s the letting all go moments like that
00:34:56 ►
that are going to be what is important in that experience.
00:35:01 ►
And if we come out of that in one piece, we’ll be an enlightened civilization.
00:35:06 ►
Maybe we’ll learn about sustainability. We’ll learn about tolerance. We’ll learn about how the
00:35:11 ►
ego is tricking us into doing things all the time as individuals. And we’ll make it. And it may be
00:35:19 ►
that we need to go through the roller coaster test to do this. Well, if this bus is a metaphor for where humanity is headed,
00:35:29 ►
just like our metaphor of the aircraft,
00:35:33 ►
I think there’s going to be some bumps in the road,
00:35:36 ►
but every journey is a wonderful new experience.
00:35:41 ►
And if humanity realizes that we’re on the same bus, we’re all on the same boat,
00:35:46 ►
we’re all on the same flight, this is going to come when the road gets bumpy or the steep
00:35:55 ►
slopes appear leering up in front of you. We’re all going to realize when natural disasters happen
00:36:03 ►
like the Asian tsunami or the recent earthquake in Haiti,
00:36:07 ►
I mean, everybody, the people who have an empathic response think, oh, my goodness,
00:36:13 ►
what would it be like to be in those people’s shoes?
00:36:16 ►
And there’s an outpouring of support.
00:36:19 ►
And that’s good because in the end, when things are really kind of going crazy,
00:36:26 ►
and it may be a weather, that the weather is just crazy,
00:36:28 ►
or that there hasn’t been a rain in the monsoon in South Asia,
00:36:32 ►
and we’re realizing this is the big one, guys.
00:36:35 ►
This is Mother Nature saying,
00:36:37 ►
okay, system’s disturbed enough that I don’t think I’ll send any rain to South Asia this year.
00:36:42 ►
Well, that kind of response is going to have to be enormous
00:36:45 ►
as a billion-plus people will be at risk.
00:36:49 ►
And I think that the giving response that we have,
00:36:52 ►
and through technology, the fact that we can sort of be there virtually
00:36:57 ►
and be in the environment that those people are in
00:37:00 ►
and the crisis they’re in,
00:37:01 ►
the empathic response coming out of support
00:37:04 ►
is perhaps
00:37:05 ►
the healthiest thing that you see in the modern world when there’s a disaster.
00:37:09 ►
So if the disasters get very large, if our technology brings us empathically into the
00:37:17 ►
lives and experience that those people are in, and we respond with care and giving, humanity
00:37:23 ►
is on a good road.
00:37:26 ►
If we allow ourselves to be mongered into fear by the powers that be
00:37:34 ►
or somebody to convince us that there is an enemy out there,
00:37:38 ►
or that our security is at risk, and allow us to be cut off from our technology
00:37:45 ►
or to deny other truths that are coming in,
00:37:49 ►
then we’re really in trouble.
00:37:50 ►
But I think that the tendency is for monolithic power,
00:37:55 ►
for, if you will, the powers of old,
00:37:58 ►
the powers of the conspiracy theorists
00:38:00 ►
that there are these cabals that run the world.
00:38:03 ►
Well, in fact, not only is no one running the world,
00:38:07 ►
but it probably isn’t possible for anyone to run the world.
00:38:11 ►
And once we come to that realization, we may become human again
00:38:14 ►
because we’ll say, look, everyone’s human.
00:38:17 ►
Everyone is trying their best.
00:38:20 ►
Everyone is going from crisis to crisis.
00:38:22 ►
And we’ll stop believing in those conspiracy theories, which I think will also be a healthy thing. jumping from World of Warcraft to Twitter to etc., etc., will have such malleable minds and be so potent
00:38:48 ►
and so able to absorb information and able to communicate it clearly out
00:38:52 ►
that they’re getting all the tools that they need to deal with these crises
00:38:57 ►
and if they keep with them their humanity and their empathy,
00:39:02 ►
and I think that you can see this, you know, the burners,
00:39:06 ►
the people who go to Burning Man,
00:39:07 ►
the people who make all these wonderful festivals all over the world,
00:39:10 ►
people who create communities,
00:39:12 ►
the people who cross geographic and religious boundaries
00:39:15 ►
to talk to each other through technology,
00:39:18 ►
they are the hope of the future.
00:39:20 ►
They are getting the tools.
00:39:21 ►
They’re getting also the mental development to weather this thing just fine.
00:39:26 ►
And in fact, I think that in a way, you know, if it’s 2029 and the apocalypse of some sort is really happening,
00:39:34 ►
some of those younger people who use their AR interfaces, they’re in their augmented reality interface walking down the street.
00:39:42 ►
And us old fogies are in a huge panic about the end of the
00:39:46 ►
world they’re going to look out from their ar interface saying you’re nuts you know you’re from
00:39:52 ►
the older generation you believe all these bizarre things well we’re seeing what is going on we see
00:39:57 ►
all the information it isn’t the end of the world we’re talking to everybody right now. And you guys are in your own isolated pocket
00:40:05 ►
realities running around saying the sky is falling. Well, guess what? You know, it’s not.
00:40:12 ►
And we’re not going to be, you know, led over a cliff by you old fogies. So in some sense,
00:40:18 ►
that’s an optimistic view that the younger people will say, you know what we need to grab the steering wheel
00:40:25 ►
and start driving because these old fogies are getting ready to send armies across the border
00:40:31 ►
to get their water supplies and they’re getting ready to shut down our precious augmented reality
00:40:37 ►
grid due to fear and we’re not going to allow it we’re setting up our alternate net we’re going to
00:40:42 ►
put a bot net on their net we’re going to set up our alternate net and say sorry we’re just on we’re setting up our alternate net. We’re going to put a bot net on their net. We’re going to set up our alternate net and say,
00:40:46 ►
sorry, we’re going to unplug you guys.
00:40:50 ►
So perhaps one of the best scenarios for the crescendo, if you will,
00:40:55 ►
would be the young people saying,
00:40:58 ►
ah, no, get serious.
00:41:01 ►
We’re not doing that.
00:41:02 ►
We’re not going to go down that crazy route.
00:41:04 ►
We’re unplugging you guys. We’re sending you into the corner for a while.
00:41:08 ►
You can sit there.
00:41:09 ►
But the world isn’t coming to an end because we’re not allowing you guys to take us there.
00:41:15 ►
And we’re communicating with everyone who matters,
00:41:18 ►
which is all the other young people who are inheriting the future.
00:41:21 ►
And we’re not going to allow you guys that think you’re in a position
00:41:26 ►
of power which you’re actually not we’re not allowing you guys to take that future away from us
00:41:31 ►
okay well we’re sitting on the bus it’s in a bus here at our farm and it’s called no further
00:41:39 ►
and it’s called no further because of a bus of history that was just parked up the road here called Further,
00:41:47 ►
which was Ken Kesey’s bus that was occupied by the Merry Pranksters and driven by Neil Cassidy out east in 1964
00:41:57 ►
that kind of launched the 60s and a big part of the psychedelic, if you will, alternative thinking movement back in 1964.
00:42:06 ►
So when we got this wonderful bus, we thought of calling it no further,
00:42:10 ►
the trip that never stops.
00:42:13 ►
So the bus doesn’t move, but you can move in and out of it
00:42:16 ►
and get on the bus and experience new things.
00:42:20 ►
And some of the new things that were experienced on buses in the 60s and even till today came from wise, strange crackpots like Timothy Leary,
00:42:31 ►
who admonished all peoples, especially young people in the 1960s, to think for yourself, do not trust authority.
00:42:40 ►
And I think that that is good for all time.
00:42:43 ►
And I think that that is good for all time. And then there was Terence McKenna, the late Terence McKenna,
00:42:47 ►
who sort of picked up a little bit from where Larry left off
00:42:51 ►
in talking about boundary dissolution
00:42:54 ►
and how through the use of the psychedelic medicines, if you will,
00:43:00 ►
you can dissolve the boundaries of your ego, of your thought patterns,
00:43:05 ►
of the rigidity of your mind, and then you can be enlightened
00:43:09 ►
and open up and see civilization for what it really is
00:43:13 ►
and for what people are really trying to sell you or not sell you.
00:43:18 ►
So McKenna was very wise to this,
00:43:20 ►
and his hope was that younger people would dissolve these boundaries in any way that they
00:43:26 ►
could early in their lives so that they really don’t trust authority and do think for themselves
00:43:32 ►
and so it’s these kind of enlightened beings as guided by leary and mckenna perhaps and many many
00:43:41 ►
others like eckhart tolle or other people who are going to inherit the earth.
00:43:46 ►
So in a sense, it’ll be the geeks that inherit the earth, but they’ll be enlightened geeks, we hope.
00:43:53 ►
The collective hypnosis for the greater good, perhaps.
00:43:58 ►
Burning Man, which started in San Francisco on a beach in the 80s and then moved to the desert in 1990
00:44:05 ►
has been this wonderful collective, not only boundary dissolution,
00:44:10 ►
because when you’re in the desert for a week and you’re a little bit sleep deprived
00:44:14 ►
and you’re surrounded by bizarre art cars and people all painted up
00:44:19 ►
and performance and people making, God forbid, eye contact,
00:44:23 ►
you start to get transformed.
00:44:26 ►
And you end up on this, in a sense, on a group high
00:44:29 ►
or a group transcendence at Burning Man.
00:44:32 ►
And as more of these festivals are held every year in more countries,
00:44:36 ►
and there’s just a vast spread of this right now,
00:44:40 ►
you find especially young people and some of us old fogies
00:44:44 ►
are getting in touch with a new kind of way of being with other human beings
00:44:48 ►
that is going to serve us well in the future.
00:44:51 ►
And it’s all about that old eye contact thing.
00:44:54 ►
If you can make eye contact with another human being in a deep and profound way,
00:44:59 ►
you’re on the road to being able to trust that person,
00:45:03 ►
being able to care for that person,
00:45:05 ►
being able to figure out a way forward with that person, to have a good marriage, to raise good kids.
00:45:12 ►
So if we forget how to do that, we’re in real trouble as a species.
00:45:16 ►
But all these festivals are a place to do that. And so in a sense, they’re a species response to maybe some of the toxicity of sitting in front of alarmist media
00:45:30 ►
or being too isolated on the net
00:45:32 ►
or having a lousy job and a mean boss or something like that.
00:45:38 ►
So these festivals are the revitalization of humanity.
00:45:43 ►
And they’re so full of wonderful young people that they are exploring their sexual boundaries,
00:45:50 ►
their creative boundaries, everything you name.
00:45:54 ►
And in these festivals, there is no religion.
00:45:57 ►
There is no culture wars.
00:45:59 ►
There’s just this group good feeling.
00:46:02 ►
And that is what we’re going to have to be seeking in the future if we’re going to survive just as creatures.
00:46:29 ►
If I was 16 now, I would be less concerned with impressing other people and fitting in.
00:46:43 ►
Certainly, I would go to university, but not because I’m trying to meet some minimum standard and fit in and get slotted into that thing, that career or whatever.
00:46:46 ►
I wouldn’t even listen necessarily to my peers.
00:46:51 ►
I would say, you know, life has got to be more than that.
00:46:53 ►
It’s got to be more than saying, how do I slot myself into the world that it currently is?
00:46:57 ►
It’s got to be about something more powerful.
00:47:01 ►
You go back to, say, when you were 12 or when you were 10
00:47:04 ►
and you had
00:47:05 ►
a really powerful experience say of looking at a dandelion or nature or had some powerful internal
00:47:11 ►
urge those are your guidelines or you you made a paper mache thing and it looks so cool one of the
00:47:19 ►
things you should know when you’re 16 is that if you go on the track of getting the college degree and
00:47:25 ►
and and getting into a career track or whatever those powerful magical moments come fewer and
00:47:32 ►
fewer and fewer as you get older and you start losing perspective that you even have them and
00:47:38 ►
then when you’re really much older you’ll say wait a minute i’m not alive anymore. I can’t taste the food that I’m eating.
00:47:45 ►
I don’t sense anything anymore. Well, why? Because you’ve been in the regimented track.
00:47:52 ►
So when you’re 16, look back at when you were 12, 10, 8, 4 years old at the most intense,
00:47:59 ►
exquisite, sensual experiences, ideas, passions that you had, and make those the touchstones for your life,
00:48:07 ►
that you want to continue to have those kind of experiences going forward, and that anything that
00:48:12 ►
threatens those, or that you feel deep inside that, gee, if I go into chartered accountancy and
00:48:18 ►
work my way up through the firm, I might become kind of robotic like the other partners in the
00:48:23 ►
firm, and check in with yourself and say, would I ever paint a painting? Would I ever tell an interesting story? Well, probably after 20 years of that, no, unless you’re really good at segmenting your life.
00:48:44 ►
where the other 16-year-olds are, the 20-year-olds,
00:48:46 ►
and see how they’re expressing themselves and how they’re keeping their youthfulness
00:48:48 ►
and they’re keeping the spontaneity and the power in themselves,
00:48:53 ►
the power to express and the power to take in.
00:48:56 ►
Go and experience that because you don’t want to lose access to that
00:49:00 ►
because if you’ve lost access to that,
00:49:02 ►
you’ll become the android that believes the conspiracy
00:49:05 ►
theory you’ll become the reactionary talking head that is trying to sell something you’ll just become
00:49:12 ►
that if you stay in the wonder that you already had as an as a child as you become an adult you
00:49:19 ►
keep a steely grip upon that wonder and ever seek it out,
00:49:25 ►
you’ll stay alive and you won’t fall into the abyss of so-called civilization.
00:49:32 ►
And you’ll, of course, be the envy of all your friends
00:49:36 ►
who did take that investment banking job
00:49:39 ►
and now are facing a large mortgage and whatnot.
00:49:43 ►
They’ll envy you, they won’t understand you
00:49:46 ►
until you get them to come to the same festival
00:49:49 ►
and find the things that they had when they were young again
00:49:52 ►
and get a little bit reborn.
00:49:55 ►
Because in the end, when civilization is shaky and rocky,
00:50:00 ►
truthfully, it is all the structures of the investment banks
00:50:04 ►
and the governmental agencies
00:50:07 ►
and the pulpits of religions. Those are the things that are going to come crashing down,
00:50:12 ►
because those are the things that are patently unsustainable. They don’t feed people.
00:50:19 ►
And in the face of shock, they shatter. The people who have resilience, who are able to have emotional resilience
00:50:27 ►
and passion about who they are and know who they are,
00:50:30 ►
are the ones that aren’t going to rush off behind the preacher
00:50:34 ►
that says the world is coming to the end.
00:50:37 ►
Those are the people that are going to have, stay with it, emotional resilience.
00:50:41 ►
And the festival goers are going to be really prepared for
00:50:45 ►
collapse. They’re going to be collapse ready.
00:50:52 ►
So let’s take a, this is a viewpoint of our community. It’s kind of an emerging village,
00:51:00 ►
just an old, just an old 19th century farm converted into a cyber hippie future visionary spot for people to visit
00:51:11 ►
and grow our own food and raise pigs and soon chickens
00:51:17 ►
and start to increase the percentage of the food that we eat from our own land.
00:51:23 ►
increase the percentage of the food that we eat from our own land.
00:51:30 ►
But surprisingly, just over this ridge here, if we look up here,
00:51:36 ►
is Silicon Valley and all of its wonders and the Google lights and all those people who are building the interconnected cyberspace.
00:51:42 ►
They’re all just over the valley, 20 minutes minutes drive and you’re in the center of it.
00:51:47 ►
So it’s possible to have a lifestyle where you’re very tied in and very connected
00:51:55 ►
and adjacent to all of the wonders of this technological civilization,
00:52:00 ►
but you’re kind of a little held outside of it
00:52:03 ►
and you’re able to grow some of
00:52:05 ►
your own food and live in nature. It’s not possible for a large number of people to do this because
00:52:11 ►
there isn’t the land, but it’s possible for some of us to do it and maybe show the others how they
00:52:18 ►
could, in a sense, bring all of this into their urban environment and create urban gardens and sustainable homes and
00:52:25 ►
whatnot by bringing the farm into the city like community supported agriculture does and that’s
00:52:32 ►
all just a wonderful positive movement and here in the Monterey Bay in the Santa Cruz Mountains
00:52:37 ►
organic farming began about 50 years ago and it’s in this area that the great movement
00:52:45 ►
of growing things naturally,
00:52:49 ►
of sustaining whole communities,
00:52:50 ►
of farmers’ markets,
00:52:52 ►
kind of got kick-started in the 60s.
00:52:55 ►
And we now see that spread all over the world.
00:52:59 ►
So healthier living,
00:53:00 ►
people are connected to farms,
00:53:02 ►
where their food comes from.
00:53:04 ►
Just a wonderful,
00:53:05 ►
wonderful trend. And living here in the Monterey Bay, you realize that there’s so much food produced
00:53:11 ►
here and there are reliable rainfalls and that we feed all the nerds of Silicon Valley, you know,
00:53:18 ►
plum heirloom tomatoes every day because we can. So this part of Northern California is, I think, in a sense,
00:53:27 ►
a model for the future because it’s a highly intelligent, techie people who have enlightenment,
00:53:34 ►
who are not held in the sway of authority necessarily. They get a little bit greedy
00:53:40 ►
for investor dollars now and then, but really when it comes down to it, they’re very
00:53:45 ►
individualistic and they’re sharing in the hippie kind of a way. So Silicon Valley plus the farming
00:53:51 ►
culture and the organic culture of the coast here and inland is just a tremendous model.
00:53:57 ►
And of course, the festival culture, Burning Man came out of this area. You know, here in the little
00:54:02 ►
town of Boulder Creek, you may be driving along and
00:54:05 ►
you’ll see a burner car drive past. So, you know, perhaps a model for the sustainable future and
00:54:12 ►
enlightened future might be right in your own backyard. You know, you might be living in
00:54:17 ►
Portugal and you might find a community that’s like this. You might be living in Russia.
00:54:22 ►
You might be living in Australia. You might be living in australia you might be living in ghana
00:54:25 ►
and find a community that is doing these kinds of similar things growing their own food being
00:54:32 ►
connected to the world thinking for themselves and so maybe finding this kind of community where
00:54:39 ►
you live and putting some time into it putting some serious energy into those communities
00:54:45 ►
is the way that you move to the future.
00:54:48 ►
Yeah, the checklist I had about 15 years ago was to go around and look for little communities
00:54:55 ►
where you could get an old farm or house and some land and raise your own food, your own animals,
00:55:04 ►
some land and raise your own food, your own animals,
00:55:09 ►
and have a nerd life, have a high-tech life,
00:55:12 ►
but also have a connection with the land and increasingly raise more of what you eat.
00:55:16 ►
Hey, guys.
00:55:18 ►
There you go.
00:55:20 ►
So this fit the bill, and it was near Silicon Valley,
00:55:24 ►
and it was spring fed and and full of
00:55:27 ►
fruit trees and about 100 years old and and keeps me healthy keeps gail and healthy
00:55:33 ►
and keeps us optimistic about the future so we don’t watch tv but we get movies on our big screen
00:55:41 ►
and we’re on high speed networks and doing our virtual worlds and our other work.
00:55:46 ►
But at the same time, we have a connection with other beings like these guys.
00:55:54 ►
It really keeps me in balance.
00:55:56 ►
When I come in from an hour of mucking their stalls or working in the garden,
00:56:05 ►
I really feel better.
00:56:08 ►
So I take things a little less seriously.
00:56:11 ►
They’re going on online or in the company,
00:56:14 ►
and I’m a little bit more of a balanced human being and a little bit saner.
00:56:18 ►
I think the sanity thing really is important to keep that sanity thing going.
00:56:23 ►
really is important to keep that sanity thing going.
00:56:31 ►
Yeah, I think having sort of a hand solidly on this ground really allows me to probe the future and reality a little bit better.
00:56:38 ►
Part of my life is in virtual worlds,
00:56:40 ►
and it’s putting my mind out in space to try to think of ways
00:56:44 ►
to put people on asteroids
00:56:46 ►
for nasa for example but you know if you if you don’t have this kind of a grounding you can really
00:56:53 ►
get deluded you can sort of think all things are powerful possible all things are possible
00:57:00 ►
if we put our minds to it well not not necessarily. Things are not easy, things are hard actually.
00:57:06 ►
So trying to put people on an asteroid is very hard
00:57:10 ►
and shouldn’t be considered trivial
00:57:13 ►
or helping the Earth reformat itself by our civilization is a hard thing.
00:57:22 ►
One of the things you learn about in doing the farm thing like we are
00:57:27 ►
is how fast nature takes back its own.
00:57:30 ►
So, for example, stuff starts to rust.
00:57:33 ►
Things are breaking all the time.
00:57:35 ►
Every square inch of this land has had some maintenance done to it,
00:57:39 ►
whether a pothole fixed or water is recoursed.
00:57:44 ►
And it is constantly a battle against the chaos of nature
00:57:48 ►
and entropy to keep even one place like this going and so that it’s true that if suddenly
00:57:54 ►
there were no people human civilization would vanish in in a relative instant it’s very fragile
00:58:01 ►
and you really learn that when you have to maintain acreage like this
00:58:05 ►
and take care of things yourself, not just commute to a job.
00:58:10 ►
We are a maintenance-heavy, hand-built civilization.
00:58:15 ►
And that is sort of at the fundamental core of what you learn
00:58:18 ►
by coming out into an environment like this.
00:58:21 ►
And you sort of become a little bit more respectful
00:58:23 ►
of what it’s going to take to survive as a civilization.
00:58:27 ►
We’re not in a virtual world.
00:58:29 ►
We’re in a high-maintenance, high-challenge world that nature’s given us.
00:58:41 ►
So as we can see, in the recent storm, Mother Nature decided she wanted to reclaim this greenhouse.
00:58:49 ►
And it’s leaning over precipitously, so I had to brace it up here with this ladder.
00:58:55 ►
And it’s a good example of how you’re constantly in a maintenance mode.
00:59:03 ►
And civilization is like this.
00:59:04 ►
It’s a carefully hand-built, lovingly maintained thing.
00:59:09 ►
And if we lose our minds and we start to kind of go crazy,
00:59:14 ►
we’re going to find out really quickly how the toilets stop flushing
00:59:18 ►
and that we actually have to get back to basics
00:59:20 ►
and figuring out how to keep the planet from leaning over in such a precipitous
00:59:26 ►
manner.
00:59:28 ►
The culture of Silicon Valley, well, it gives us a can-do attitude that we can invest billions
00:59:34 ►
and invent things to change the world, etc.
00:59:37 ►
But it’s of limited scope.
00:59:39 ►
I mean, all the Googles in the world are not going to really do a thing for humanity in the spirit of humanity.
00:59:46 ►
They feed our need for information and maybe connectedness, but they fall short.
00:59:52 ►
Google doesn’t produce food.
00:59:53 ►
It doesn’t raise babies.
00:59:56 ►
It doesn’t comfort the sick and the weary.
01:00:01 ►
It doesn’t do a lot of these things.
01:00:04 ►
So it’s really not the be-all and end-all.
01:00:06 ►
It’s just another tool.
01:00:08 ►
And in a sense, we can’t invent our way or spend or invest our way out of problems
01:00:15 ►
that we need to treat with the human heart and human connectedness and human caring
01:00:21 ►
and good old-fashioned manual labor, which is required to hold up a civilization.
01:00:27 ►
And so I think as more people sort of spin off into cyber realms,
01:00:33 ►
virtual worlds and their Facebook presence and whatnot,
01:00:36 ►
they will become more and more separated from the ground of the real world.
01:00:42 ►
And therein they’re walking on a tight rope over over a precipitous chasm
01:00:47 ►
and perhaps what will happen at some point in the future like any good hollywood thriller
01:00:53 ►
is they’ll they’ll be a little unsteady on their balance bar and they’ll suddenly look down and
01:00:59 ►
realize that they’re a hundred miles in the air uh in cyber realm, in this world of stimulus response and tasks and messages
01:01:08 ►
and online presences and identities, and they’ll realize how precarious they are. But being still
01:01:16 ►
human beings, the only way they’ll be able to stabilize themselves on this type route is to
01:01:21 ►
look forward and see that there’s another person who’s just realized that the rope has shifted and they’ll reach out a hand and and hold the hand of that
01:01:30 ►
person and then thereby stabilize and save themselves and i think that that’s probably a
01:01:36 ►
good metaphor for this whole thing is look out for when you finally realize that the system is shaking underneath, reach for somebody and look them in the eye,
01:01:47 ►
and therein you will find your rescue.
01:01:55 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:01:57 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:02:03 ►
You know, it’s really interesting
01:02:06 ►
how things seem to come together
01:02:08 ►
sometimes. I’m sure that
01:02:10 ►
you would agree that it
01:02:12 ►
was good advice we were hearing just now when
01:02:14 ►
Bruce recommended reaching out
01:02:15 ►
for someone’s hand if things seem to be
01:02:18 ►
falling apart on you during this
01:02:19 ►
great shift in our species
01:02:21 ►
consciousness that is now well underway.
01:02:25 ►
But what struck me as I was listening to that statement just now
01:02:28 ►
was a conversation I had this morning when Charlie Grobe stopped by.
01:02:33 ►
As you know, besides being one of the world leaders in medical research involving psychedelics,
01:02:39 ►
Charlie is also the director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
01:02:44 ►
at Harbor UCLA Medical Center.
01:02:47 ►
And what he told me I found quite alarming.
01:02:49 ►
And that is the fact that in the past 12 months, the number of incidents involving teenagers attempting suicide has risen very dramatically.
01:02:58 ►
And he also told me that he thinks that perhaps these disturbed young people may be our canaries in the coal mine,
01:03:06 ►
and that we are about to see increasing numbers of our friends, neighbors, and relatives
01:03:10 ►
who are approaching serious mental distress due to all that’s going on right now,
01:03:16 ►
particularly on the economic front.
01:03:18 ►
So now is our moment.
01:03:20 ►
These are the times that the worldwide psychedelic community can show what it’s made of
01:03:25 ►
by first reaching out our hands to catch one another and then becoming the foundation of
01:03:31 ►
strength to give a hand to others who are having trouble coping with rapid and unsuspected change.
01:03:38 ►
As I told Charlie this morning, once you’ve been in a few tight spots while working with the
01:03:44 ►
medicine, nothing in the
01:03:45 ►
default world is even going to come close to those weird scrapes that we’ve had in entheospace.
01:03:51 ►
Hey, once you’ve played ball with the machine elves, there shouldn’t be anything you can’t get
01:03:56 ►
through. Now getting back to Bruce for a minute and his visit to the UK this summer, right now
01:04:04 ►
there is still nothing definite,
01:04:06 ►
but it’s beginning to look like instead of setting up a stand-alone event the weekend that he’s there,
01:04:12 ►
he may be able to hook into the Budafield Festival.
01:04:16 ►
And that takes place from the 14th to the 18th of July.
01:04:20 ►
And I hope to be able to give you more specifics about that soon.
01:04:23 ►
and I hope to be able to give you more specifics about that soon.
01:04:29 ►
Also, Bruce will be attending, but not speaking at,
01:04:34 ►
the upcoming MAPS conference that’s going to take place in San Jose, California from the 15th to the 18th of April.
01:04:37 ►
And he asked me to tell you that if you see him there,
01:04:40 ►
please be sure to come up and introduce yourself
01:04:42 ►
because he’d really love to meet you.
01:04:45 ►
Now, I’ve just got a couple more things to cover before I let you go, but first I want to thank
01:04:50 ►
Joe Moore who interviewed me in his Occult Sentinel podcast. I’ve mentioned this podcast
01:04:56 ►
before in conjunction with some of the people that you probably know like Jesse Miller of the
01:05:01 ►
Mystic Mind podcast, and that interview with Jesse, by the way, is his
01:05:06 ►
number 25 show, and I’m in the most recent one, number 28. Also, if you’ve noticed, I haven’t
01:05:13 ►
been able to solve my problems with our notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog. For some reason that I
01:05:19 ►
can’t figure out, the files have been corrupted because I can no longer even log in as the administrator.
01:05:26 ►
I’m completely locked out of my own blog.
01:05:28 ►
Not much of a geek, I guess I am.
01:05:30 ►
So if you’re an expert or if you know someone who is an expert on WordPress and SQL,
01:05:36 ►
I can certainly use some advice.
01:05:39 ►
So what I’ve done is I set up a separate email account
01:05:43 ►
where any possible response won’t get drowned out by the other incoming messages.
01:05:48 ►
And that address should be easy for you to remember in case you’re talking to somebody who can help.
01:05:54 ►
It is help at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:05:59 ►
So I think you can remember that one.
01:06:01 ►
And I really would appreciate you passing that along to any of your friends that might be able to help out.
01:06:07 ►
Now, one other thing.
01:06:09 ►
In the past, I haven’t mentioned the annual celebration of the Terrence Day Boundary Dissolution Parties,
01:06:15 ►
mainly because, for the most part, they’ve been kind of underground.
01:06:19 ►
But since next Saturday, April 3, 2010, marks the 10th anniversary of Terrence’s death, which
01:06:25 ►
has now become known as Terrence Day.
01:06:28 ►
It seems like it’s
01:06:29 ►
time to bring these celebrations of the
01:06:31 ►
great bard’s life out into the public
01:06:33 ►
a little bit more. And as
01:06:36 ►
you know, there’s no prescribed format
01:06:37 ►
for these celebrations. For my part,
01:06:39 ►
I’m going to publish a new Terrence
01:06:41 ►
McKenna podcast on that day.
01:06:44 ►
And I know some of my other friends have more ambitious plans and they’re going to publish a new Terrence McKenna podcast on that day. And I know some of my other friends have more ambitious plans, and they’re going to be having
01:06:49 ►
multimedia parties celebrating Terrence Day.
01:06:52 ►
So if you’re planning something that you’d like the world to see, well, I’ll be happy
01:06:56 ►
to post photos, videos, and audio clips either in a podcast or at least on our Program Notes
01:07:03 ►
blog once some brilliant salonner figures out how to
01:07:06 ►
fix it of course but no matter where you are next saturday even if you aren’t attending an
01:07:11 ►
organized terence day event i hope that you’ll at least give a smile to a stranger in the memory of
01:07:17 ►
terence mckenna well that’s about it for today and so I’ll again close this podcast by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:07:38 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find through psychedelicsalon.org.
01:07:48 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:07:54 ►
Be well, my friends.