Program Notes
Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
[NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.]
“What’s interesting is the difference, or the counter-ballast, between the dialogue of doom and the voices of hope, and the innovators of hope for the future. And it’s something that you could refer to almost as like a great crescendo.”
“I think that in this year of 2011 and heading into the auspicious year of 2012 and 2013 and beyond we are in the great crescendo of humanity.”
“I think in a sense it’s the dialogue, it is the control of the dialogue that is the problem here. It’s the battle of the airwaves. It’s the people we didn’t nominate to talk back to us and tell us what our culture is and what our future is and what our politics are. That is the problem. That’s the primary problem.”
“There can’t just be protests, it can’t be like the Sixties. You can’t be just against. You have to find out what you are for, not just what you are against. That’s the key to getting through the Crescendo.
“To some extent, the future is being made around us.”
Bruce Damer’s Web site
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‘Fall & Winter’ is a documentary that explores the origins of our global crisis in order to better understand the catastrophic transition we have now entered.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
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 as my virtual co-host today, I would like to thank Tyler, Andrew, Jakob, and Michael for buying a copy of my Pay What You Can audiobook, the novel The Genesis Generation.
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And also a great big thank you again goes out to our frequent donor, Mark C.,
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who’s also a longtime friend of the salon.
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Mark C., who’s also a longtime friend of the salon.
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Also, I’d sure like to thank our fellow salonners who have downloaded a free copy of my novel and helped to spread the word about it to their friends, as well as fellow salonners
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like Adrian out there on the East Coast, who my friends Chris and Kai tell me is a really
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big supporter of the salon and passes along the link to these podcasts at every opportunity.
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And most of all, I want to these podcasts at every opportunity.
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And most of all, I want to thank you for being here. You know, my long and forced hiatus seems to have caused some of our listeners to think that my days with the salon were over, when the truth
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is that I’m just now getting my second wind and will be with you for the indefinite future.
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And what an interesting future we seem to be heading into, don’t you think? And with that
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thought, I’d like to introduce today’s program, featuring a man of many talents and titles,
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one of which is that of a futurist. As I promised in my last podcast, today I’m going to play
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something new from one of our favorites here in the salon, my good friend Bruce Dahmer. In past
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podcasts, we’ve heard Bruce talk about elves, egos, and avatars, and about the EvoGrid, which Bruce Dahmer And then the other day he sent me several hours of an interview that he did with Matt Anderson
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Who is directing a documentary film series titled Fall and Winter
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And he just finished filming on the 15th of this month
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And if you want to see a trailer for that film you can find it at fallwintermovie.com
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Now since there are about 19 or so other futurists besides Bruce who
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are featured, it’s obvious that not a lot of the several hours of interviews with Bruce will make
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it into the final cut. And so Matt has very graciously allowed me to play the entire Damer
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interview for you here in the salon, which I plan to do in several parts. So right now, let’s join
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Bruce Damer and Matt Anderson,
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who are having a conversation about what Bruce is calling the Great Crescendo.
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And then I’ll be back with some more about a way that you can interact with Bruce
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in what we hope will grow into a global trialogue.
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And now, here is Bruce Dahmer.
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What’s interesting is the difference or the counter ballast
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between the dialogue of doom and the voices of hope
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and the innovators of hope for the future.
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And it’s something that you could refer to almost as like a great crescendo.
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And a crescendo is at the end of a symphony orchestra.
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It’s that last part of the
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last movement where all the instruments are playing at once so the cacophonous instruments
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the the screaming instruments are our voices are coming out as well as the harmonious and the
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hopeful and the highs and the lows everything’s happening at once And I think that in this year of 2011 and heading into the auspicious year of 2012 and 2013 and beyond,
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we are in the great crescendo of humanity.
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And what you’re doing in this film is you’re actually finding this out.
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You’re finding these voices.
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You’re finding extreme voices and points of view.
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You’re going to hot spots,
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but you’re also finding optimistic things for the future and people working on the great
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projects. And it’s a conundrum because it’s all happening at the same time. And you say,
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well, how can all this be happening at the same time? Shouldn’t it be just we’re all
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going to hell in a handcart or we’re all going into the Jetson future, right?
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Shouldn’t it be one or the other? One would think.
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But no, it’s all these voices at once, and it’s the mixture of them
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that creates the glory that is the human crescendo of the 21st century.
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Now, what in your perspective then happens after the orchestra’s done?
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Well, there could be often in symphonies you’ll find there’s a crescendo that ends a movement,
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but then there’s a quiet, serene, pastoral movement that follows it.
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And maybe that’s what we’re coming into.
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Maybe we’re coming into the big kettle drum phase afterwards.
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It really depends on, in a sense, the blend of voices in this time period.
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So, for example, if you watch the extreme news media,
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whether it be on the right or the left,
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that are very pessimistic and very doom-seeking
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because it gets eyeballs,
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let’s face it, and eardrums.
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So for them, I mean, the apocalypse is around the corner.
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It’s Tuesday afternoon.
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And if you watch that, you get worked up into this fury of a frenzy or you foam out of madness
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in a sense.
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But then you actually walk the streets.
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If you go to China and you see that they’re putting up all these wind farms
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and they’re deciding that coal is definitely not the best solution
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to generate cheap power and they’re investing,
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you go to Hyderabad, India and you find a place with clean,
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reworked water systems and incredible transportation, or Curitiba in Brazil,
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or streets in the former Eastern Bloc,
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where people are, sure, they’re workaholics now
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and they’re great consumers,
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but their lives are arguably a lot richer and better than they were.
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Their diets are arguably a lot richer and better than they were. Their diets are better.
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Back when I lived in Eastern Bloc near Prague,
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the streams, there was no sign of frogs.
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There hadn’t been an amphibian seen in 40 years
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because of chemical agriculture, centrally planned farming.
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And now there’s salamanders and frogs again.
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So you think something on the ground is getting better.
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Something’s getting better.
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No matter what is going across the airwaves,
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something’s actually getting better,
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and it’s getting better all over the planet.
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Like South Africa, we all watched the World Cup.
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What was fantastic was this soccer city
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with this fantastic African-designed
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sort of stadium and these streams of hundreds of thousands of people pouring into the stadium
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and Nelson Mandela showing up and everything. If you’d broadcast those pictures 15 years
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ago, 20 years ago, it was so different. I mean, here you have this for the moment harmonious society
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they’re a sport loving society
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Nelson’s a sport fanatic
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he’s the president
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now he’s the emeritus leader
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they’ve built some of the greatest sporting facilities
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in the world, the whole world is in South Africa
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and everyone’s celebrating
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what an outcome, I mean if you went back to 1988
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when there were battles
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in the townships,
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they would have said, you are mad.
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That is not our future.
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Our future is a bloodbath.
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And it didn’t happen.
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And all over the world it’s the same thing.
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These places suddenly become these glowing, developed,
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of course there’s rampant consumerism and there’s obesity and all these other things,
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but on the ground everything seems to be just creeping forward
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and getting better and there are good ideas.
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And I think in a sense it’s the dialogue, it’s the mess,
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the control of the dialogue that is the problem here.
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It’s the battle of the airways.
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It’s the people we didn’t nominate to talk
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back to us and tell us what our culture is and what our future is and what our politics
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are. That is the problem. That’s the primary problem.
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So how do you think that, well, two questions then. How do you shield yourself or how do you heal a culture
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that is in disrepair from that aggression and from that abuse of prodding
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from something like the media and that sort of thing?
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This is a tricky, this is because it’s a form of trauma.
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And so in a sense, if we go back to the birth of advertising,
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we talked about, I met some of the
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people who founded advertising and television in the United States in the late 1940s. And
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these are really seriously bad dudes. These were megalomaniacs, egotists, they were nasty
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to each other. That industry got off to a very bad start with these as their founders, and they continued.
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And people like Jay Shiat, you know, writing 10, 15 years ago,
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and one of the great founders of modern advertising, reinventors of advertising,
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saying advertising steals your future.
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It takes away your personalities.
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It critiques and shapes your view of yourself.
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It is one of the greatest destructive forces that has ever been produced by human beings.
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And you think that especially in North America, especially in the United States,
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if you take apart any commercial on TV, it causes often damage. It’s critical of a group. It creates self-criticism. It makes you
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desire things you shouldn’t be desiring. It creates guilt. All these things. And as each one of these
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comes over the transom, it’s like getting lobbed at by psychological bombs over and over and over again,
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and that creates a trauma.
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And the news media and reporting and some of the programs,
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violent programs, just disgraceful programming,
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is creating more and more and more mental trauma
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so that people become dull.
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They become inured to it.
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And when you have a traumatized society, what do you do with it? So an example of some of this is, you know, for those of us that
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don’t watch television and have minimal exposure to media, we end up getting into a much better
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state of mind. You know, if you go away on a camping trip for two weeks, you come back and
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you feel pretty good, don’t you? And then you turn on the media or you turn your email on and
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get back into your social network and you feel kind of this pull-down effect because you were
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lifted, you were liberated from all that for a while. But what do you do with a society that’s become traumatized? Well, the society
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actually has to make a decision about this. If you were in a dysfunctional family and one
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member of the family is beating up on the other member of the family, the family has to intervene
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because the damage is going to be permanent. So society actually has to make a decision on this.
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the damage is going to be permanent. So society actually has to make a decision on this. And the sooner that we shut this stuff down, the better. Now, we’ve all heard of ad busters and all these
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people doing great work. You know, you have revolution in the Arab world because they want
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to shut down dictatorships that are stealing their future. What if you had 10 million people marching
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to say, no, Fox News should not have a license to broadcast
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because it lies on the air repeatedly.
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Why is it able to do this?
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Because Ronald Reagan repealed a law in 1987 that prohibited lying on the air.
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So Fox News is trying to get into Canada, and Canada is a little bit of a different
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country, you know, in many ways,
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and you can talk a lot about that, but they’ve denied them the license because they’re basically
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saying, you know, you lie on the air, and you do a lot of other things that are unlawful in our
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country. You cannot broadcast here. You cannot set up a local station to broadcast here. You’re denied.
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Well, we as a population, we know that this is happening.
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We know the damage that they’re causing.
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If you had 10 million people marching on Fox, broadcasting wherever the heck it is,
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it would shake up a lot of people.
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It would really shake up a lot of people.
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If you have citizens deciding, this is traumatizing, this is damaging, it has to stop.
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You could actually stop it.
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Nuclear weapons were stopped.
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You know, the Arab countries are throwing off dictatorships that have been there for 40 years.
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And amazing things can happen.
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We could shut down this kind of media.
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We could roll it back.
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We could say, look, you know,
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television was called the great wasteland as early as I think the early 60s, right?
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That was when…
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But if you turn on your TV set
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and watched a program from 1970
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and watched the commercials
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and watched the documentaries
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and the sitcoms and the news,
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and then you compared it with what we have now,
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and maybe I’m a fuddy-duddy here,
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but I would probably feel a lot better
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from watching three hours of TV from 1970, original stuff.
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It would be funny, right?
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It would be very funny.
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Slinky toys and macaroni and cheese and Walter
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Cronkite and all this stuff and Hogan’s Heroes, you know. But I would have been entertained,
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fine. And if you gave me a psych exam after that, you know, I might be different. So why can’t we
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roll back and roll out of some of this stuff and say, it’s like bringing the best psychologists we have
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and say, what is unhealthful?
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In Singapore, they have laws against this kind of TV.
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They have very strict controls of what, you know,
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rampant violence on TV is not allowed in Singapore
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because they don’t want to expose young people,
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especially to the trauma of the horrors of people being
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gunned down and all these other terrible things. They just don’t allow it, period. We could.
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We could roll back that clock.
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One thing that occurs to me is that television, at least in this country, I mean, we have
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sort of talked about it in terms of America I guess because it’s the media monster
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I guess it to me is a byproduct of
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I mean it’s all owned not by television companies
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it’s owned by manufacturing companies
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and industrial if you will monster or GE
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owns 80% of the media or whatever
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so in that sense how do you stop
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it’s almost like a tentacle of a bigger beast. So in that sense, how do you stop?
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It’s almost like a tentacle of a bigger beast to me in a sense,
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and I’m wondering what your perspective on that and how it’s propaganda for something larger in a sense
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and a way of life that’s learned.
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This is a hard one to unravel,
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and a colleague of mine, Larry Lessig,
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who went from fighting the copyright battles
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and now he’s fighting corruption in government in the U.S.,
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which means the payola that happens between corporations and elected officials, right?
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That’s one of the things you have to unravel if you can.
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And they’re making some success here.
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They’re making progress.
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What they do is they run billboard and radio ads in the districts of Congress people,
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legislators who are in the pay of, say, the medical industry voting against health care reform.
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And they run these full billboards saying,
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did you know the person you elected and that promised to do X
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and that you overwhelmingly support this has been given $3 million by Cigna
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and is now voting against your legislation, and you have been disenfranchised.
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And they’re doing this, and it’s a grassroots, grinding, day-in, day-out struggle
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against this kind of corruption in government, where money is just buying laws.
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So that’s one aspect.
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I mean, this is a big machine to unravel.
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Once you get these big combines out of the legislating business,
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then you can get in and say, you know what?
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Nobody’s allowed to take any campaign money except for citizens
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spending $25 or public financing.
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Boom.
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All these corporations don’t have the same hold.
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You can run different candidates than you would
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because they don’t need to raise that kind of money,
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and they’re not in the sway of these interests.
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And suddenly you can change laws, and you can regulate,
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and you can get at them from that angle.
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There are other ways, which is the legal aspect.
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What if you could prove, and this is all detail here,
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but what if you could prove that certain television, TV shows,
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whatever, are causing trauma in people?
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Then you can approach it from lawsuits and damages.
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And this is how the cigarette business got regulated
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and shut down in a lot of places,
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and no smoking in public buildings first, etc., etc.
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So the law is part of it.
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Sheer public protests, boycotts, boycotts of these enterprises,
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continuous, highly organized consumer boycotts,
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ways to affect their stock price,
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ways to expose individuals within that organization who are doing hanky-panky
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and there’s plenty of sources for that
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these organizations are not all powerful
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and all seeing and perfect
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they’re full of fallible human beings
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they’re full of human beings who also don’t believe
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in what the corporation eventually does
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and it’s a mass effect
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they don’t believe it either
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so these things are crumbleable
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they’re incredibly fallible.
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So if you attack them, if you decide that General Electric or Mr. Rupert Murdoch or whatever were the problem and the targets,
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and you had a pretty well-funded, disciplined, multi-pronged attack, you can gradually whittle it down.
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Because a mass of two or three million individual citizens
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is going to move mountains.
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And we see this in the Arab world,
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we saw governments falling,
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we saw corporations like the one in India
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where there was the big chemical spill that,
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I can’t remember,
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they basically went out of business because of lawsuits. And initially it was like, well,
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we’ll just get away with it, and all these people have died. But no, no,
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Indians hired lawyers and went after, and they basically bankrupted
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the company. There are ways to bring these titans down. They’re absolutely
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not infallible. Well, that’s encouraging.
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And sometimes they bring themselves down. not infallible. Well, that’s encouraging. Sometimes they
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bring themselves down.
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As we saw
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in the financial crisis.
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They brought themselves
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down.
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And yet, that corruption
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corrodes. It corrodes
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and the judgment is lost.
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And ultimately,
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the truth will out.
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And I think that all these things,
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all these things that people look at now and they say,
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isn’t that terrible?
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It seems so obvious to us that this is a terrible thing that’s going on.
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And we think, well, it’s impossible that one day it will come to a head.
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Well, no, it will, because this is the nature of how the universe works. Something that is
00:20:06 ►
an untruth that goes on and on
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and on and builds this enormous structure
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to support itself
00:20:12 ►
eventually cannot sustain itself
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and it comes crashing down.
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And we keep using like the Soviet Union
00:20:18 ►
but certainly companies that
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promoted the sale of cigarettes
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they denied for decades
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and they had their paid off scientific stooges, but then the, it just couldn’t be
00:20:31 ►
sustained anymore. It was just the link, science found the link, the truth was out. And those
00:20:38 ►
companies, and of course they’re expanding their markets elsewhere, but, you know, we don’t,
00:20:44 ►
airbags, you know, the large automakers,
00:20:47 ►
you know, will never install airbags, it’s too expensive and everything, and yet the
00:20:51 ►
carnage on the highways, and if you look at the lives airbags have saved, it’s astounding,
00:20:57 ►
and now they’re all, because the dialogue changed, and the dialogue changed to safety
00:21:03 ►
is a value, and of course for companies like Volvo, that was always the case, and the dialogue changed to safety is a value.
00:21:07 ►
And, of course, for companies like Volvo, that was always the case.
00:21:11 ►
And this is why people bought Volvos, but that was one example.
00:21:17 ►
But suddenly, around the 80s, 90s, safety became a quality.
00:21:20 ►
And somebody probably was behind that.
00:21:23 ►
Somebody probably mounted a campaign that made that happen and changed
00:21:25 ►
the entire industry. And now you’ve got six or seven airbags in a car, and they’re amazingly
00:21:30 ►
survivable. Crashes that used to leave horrendous injury are now very survivable. People walk
00:21:38 ►
away. How could anyone for years deny that this was necessary? How could anybody do that?
00:21:45 ►
They did, but then it flipped.
00:21:47 ►
One day the whole situation flipped and we got airbags.
00:21:51 ►
And in a sense, humanity needs airbags.
00:21:54 ►
The planet needs airbags installed.
00:21:57 ►
But I think we’re gradually getting them.
00:21:59 ►
We talked about when we run out of base earth metals.
00:22:04 ►
We talked about what about when we run out of base earth metals.
00:22:07 ►
You can always look.
00:22:13 ►
It’s the old half-empty cup of milk or half-full cup of milk.
00:22:18 ►
If you say, well, we’re running out of palladium and we’re running out of all these very valuable things,
00:22:21 ►
well, you know, we are, but it’s not the sky is falling, because guess where those
00:22:27 ►
things are? They’re in landfills. So come back in the year 2050, and there will be these great
00:22:32 ►
machines grinding their way through landfills, which have now become some of the most valuable
00:22:39 ►
real estate on the planet. And there are the Google of atoms sorting and searching algorithms as these little
00:22:47 ►
bits and pieces of tin can from 1950 and a bit of a palladium from a watch in 1978 and whatever
00:22:54 ►
are sorted in high speed through tiny conveyors and big cyclones, and this material is recovered,
00:23:02 ►
including the toxic sludge at the bottom, and it’s all reused.
00:23:06 ►
And we get rid of the landfills,
00:23:09 ►
and we have this ample source of incredible stuff.
00:23:13 ►
We just recycled it.
00:23:15 ►
So after the great crescendo, the orchestra and all the voices finish,
00:23:21 ►
and the sound echoes through the concert hall,
00:23:24 ►
and we’re left with the audience sitting there thinking,
00:23:27 ►
what’s next?
00:23:29 ►
Well, I think it really depends on the voices that come through.
00:23:34 ►
So if the dower oboes are still echoing and playing
00:23:38 ►
or the trumpets are sounding, you know,
00:23:42 ►
or the harp is playing, or a bit of all of it. So, for example,
00:23:49 ►
if a crescendo ends up with a big dislocation, so we have a food problem or we have a psychological
00:23:58 ►
problem that rolls through the world, then I think that people will humble down a bit. You know, for instance, if you’re
00:24:06 ►
sitting there watching your plasma TV and getting all hot and lathered about, you know,
00:24:12 ►
how you hate the other political side, and then suddenly the screen blips to dark, and
00:24:17 ►
there’s no power, and you come out and there’s no power for a month, well, you know, the
00:24:24 ►
world isn’t necessarily going to end
00:24:25 ►
because you’re going to go back to basics. You’re going to say, you know what, that person across
00:24:30 ►
the street looks as confused as I do, and they voted for the other damn party, but I’m going to
00:24:36 ►
go talk to him. I haven’t talked to him in two years. And he says, you know, I think there’s a
00:24:43 ►
problem upstream, and I was a power engineer.
00:24:46 ►
And let’s sit down and try to figure this out.
00:24:48 ►
And I’ve got a generator and we can run part of the neighborhood.
00:24:52 ►
And people, like here in the Santa Cruz Mountains,
00:24:54 ►
when there’s this people come together and they solve the problems.
00:24:58 ►
And they learn that they’re humans and that their neighbors are humans
00:25:01 ►
and that they were being fed a line.
00:25:04 ►
It’s almost like in Prague in Eastern Europe,
00:25:07 ►
we had the opportunity in the spring of 1990,
00:25:10 ►
because I was going to move there and set up a software lab,
00:25:13 ►
but we got a tour, a walking tour of Prague,
00:25:16 ►
with this fellow who was in the secret police.
00:25:20 ►
Given that it was only November of 89 when this regime fell,
00:25:24 ►
and the Czechoslovak regime was one of the most absurdly Stalinist,
00:25:29 ►
even into that period.
00:25:31 ►
And this guy was walking us around Prague,
00:25:34 ►
and we stopped by this crowd of people
00:25:37 ►
that was looking at some kind of vegematic product.
00:25:40 ►
Some guy came in from Germany and set himself up,
00:25:42 ►
and he was selling appliances, right? Kitchen appliances.
00:25:46 ►
And it was all very funny and stupid and kind of whatever,
00:25:49 ►
and everyone was completely, all the grandmothers and everything,
00:25:52 ►
looking at this thing that chopped your onions for you, right?
00:25:57 ►
And there’s a little bit of music playing on the street and everything,
00:25:59 ►
and this fellow looked up, he said,
00:26:02 ►
My God, it was all wrong.
00:26:06 ►
this fellow looked up, he said, my God, it was all wrong. And what he was saying is,
00:26:12 ►
everything that we were telling ourselves was wrong, that the West was waiting at the gates to come in and destroy our society, and that they were dens of iniquity, they were evil,
00:26:18 ►
they were this and that, and the communist world was this egalitarian universe and that we had to sustain ourselves because of this huge enemy
00:26:28 ►
and we were always in fear of them.
00:26:30 ►
All they were doing was creating vegematic things to cut up onions
00:26:35 ►
and they were listening to the Beatles and it ended.
00:26:42 ►
And none of them came running over the…
00:26:44 ►
They came over the border to buy cheap beer, and it was wrong.
00:26:49 ►
We were deluding ourselves.
00:26:51 ►
We were being lied to, and I was part of that.
00:26:54 ►
So that was a coming to truth.
00:26:56 ►
That was a crescendo that ended this end of the Cold War, and it was gentle.
00:27:03 ►
There was no huge nuclear confrontation.
00:27:06 ►
Nothing like that happened.
00:27:07 ►
So that crescendo ended very positively.
00:27:10 ►
The crescendo in South Africa ended positively.
00:27:14 ►
Maybe the crescendo in the Arab world,
00:27:17 ►
this incredibly tight confrontational moment
00:27:20 ►
where people want their future is going to end in troubles to come,
00:27:24 ►
but, I mean, it’s ending positively.
00:27:26 ►
So I think that when humanity as a whole hits this crescendo and all our voices are going,
00:27:33 ►
we’re going to come out of it just as we have in the past few times, and we’re going to
00:27:38 ►
come back to sanity, especially the United States, which really needs a sanity check.
00:27:44 ►
Come back and decide what our principles are.
00:27:47 ►
And every generation, all the kids that are connected with Twitter and Facebook
00:27:51 ►
and go to the festivals and are part of the same YouTube culture,
00:27:56 ►
they’re ready to create a world that’s one.
00:27:59 ►
They are trained, and we’re seeing that now.
00:28:01 ►
I mean, the streets of Cairo or Tripoli, I mean, you’re seeing this generation is one,
00:28:08 ►
and the kids that are here are one with them,
00:28:11 ►
and they are talking one-to-one with no filters with those people.
00:28:16 ►
And right here there was a brief break in the recording
00:28:20 ►
where I think that Matt had to change the disk drive or tape or something like that,
00:28:25 ►
and then it picks up right here.
00:28:28 ►
There are several ways.
00:28:29 ►
There’s a formula, and there’s some good examples of how to roll back the rate of destruction.
00:28:35 ►
One of them, which is pretty primary, and this comes from Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute.
00:28:44 ►
He says, look, if you decided, or if the Chinese government decided,
00:28:49 ►
we’re going to mandate hybrid vehicles, the whole fleet, everything,
00:28:53 ►
in a certain number of years,
00:28:55 ►
suddenly you have lower emission cars all over the world,
00:28:58 ►
you’ve stretched out your supplies of fossil fuels that much,
00:29:03 ►
and you probably end up with safer cars and cities are
00:29:06 ►
healthier to live in. One big change starts with one big mover, happens, huge saving of destruction,
00:29:16 ►
a huge amortization into the future. Second thing, you decide, and we talked about this earlier, to shut down all the rhetorical,
00:29:28 ►
upsetting, traumatizing media. We decide we’re going to go back to sanity. We do not want,
00:29:34 ►
this is what John Stewart was trying to do, get back to sanity. We have to remove these voices
00:29:39 ►
from the air, and we have to re-establish the laws that we had that said you cannot lie and slander
00:29:45 ►
on the air. You just can’t. Other countries had them. United States used to have them. Bring them
00:29:50 ►
back. Tone those people down. They’re doing a huge amount of damage. And that would go worldwide.
00:29:56 ►
Some countries don’t need this. They’ve already got this in place and they already have this.
00:30:01 ►
Another one, look at this concept, and this may be controversial, but saved births.
00:30:09 ►
China just announced that since 1980 in the establishment of the one child per family
00:30:15 ►
policy, they have saved 400 million births. And they celebrate this. Well, why? Because if they
00:30:22 ►
had 400 million extra people,
00:30:29 ►
China would not have been able to undergo the modernization it has.
00:30:31 ►
It would be like India.
00:30:37 ►
It would be 2 billion people plus and chronic poverty, perhaps famines.
00:30:41 ►
They’re going all the time, never quite able to pull themselves out. Because of the one-child policy, which most Chinese comply with,
00:30:47 ►
you have the parents and all their attention on that one child, all the education going into the
00:30:51 ►
one child, the wealth of the families is focused on the inheritance of that one child, you have a
00:30:58 ►
build-up of the whole population, your pressures on the environment are less on resources and on cities and everyone’s living better
00:31:07 ►
if we had a one child per family policy or social norm
00:31:12 ►
in many parts of the world
00:31:14 ►
especially the developed world
00:31:16 ►
we will reduce the pressures on the future
00:31:18 ►
and people will live better in the future
00:31:20 ►
there will be fewer people but they will live better
00:31:24 ►
and it could be that some families have two children but in general most families are conservative better in the future. There will be fewer people, but they will live better. And it
00:31:25 ►
could be that some families have two children, but in general, most families are conservative
00:31:29 ►
and they try to stay. Maybe they have one child and they adopt a child that needs a
00:31:34 ►
home. You know, just the right thing to do. That would be an enormous, enormous positive.
00:31:40 ►
These are large things. These are very large. Another big positive thing we can do, apart from investing in renewable energy,
00:31:49 ►
which is now happening, it’s back since the 70s,
00:31:54 ►
is look at the food production system.
00:31:58 ►
And this has been a focus of your film.
00:32:01 ►
But what if outside of buildings, outside of buildings now, you have fuel cells, these great cubes that
00:32:07 ►
sit and they run on natural gas and water supplies and they power buildings and they’re much
00:32:13 ►
cheaper than buying off the grid. And it’s a fuel cell as it was developed for NASA for use
00:32:20 ►
going to the moon and on the shuttle on the space station? What if we develop the technology of the food cell,
00:32:27 ►
where basic elements come in,
00:32:30 ►
and think hydroponics or the creation of tofu baths, similar to that,
00:32:37 ►
and power comes in, stock comes in, and out come foodstuffs.
00:32:44 ►
Could it be algae produced?
00:32:46 ►
Could it be fermentation of materials,
00:32:50 ►
of basic materials to produce things?
00:32:52 ►
Cheese is a food cell product already.
00:32:58 ►
Bread is a food cell kind of a product.
00:33:01 ►
But could we create such a thing
00:33:03 ►
so that you can place this object
00:33:07 ►
down and get good quality, no pesticides, herbicides, food produced locally, it doesn’t
00:33:15 ►
have to be transported. You can grow textured proteins or you can actually grow meat cells.
00:33:24 ►
You can grow textured proteins or you can actually grow meat cells.
00:33:27 ►
You can take all the cattle off the land.
00:33:31 ►
And cattle on the hoof will be a premium type of thing. Like an Angus steak will be something that will be expensive
00:33:35 ►
because the ranchers are now paying a lot for fuel
00:33:39 ►
and people don’t want to live that lifestyle.
00:33:41 ►
It’s damaging to the land anyway.
00:33:43 ►
They will still be there, but it will be a premium business. So the food cell, the coming of this way to make food
00:33:49 ►
and to replace highly damaging foodstuffs with much more sustainable, less damaging
00:33:56 ►
foodstuffs. And if you go into a grocery store now, you will see substitutes for milk, substitutes for meats,
00:34:07 ►
substitutes for seafood that used to be caught in the wild.
00:34:12 ►
All of these things are replacement products that are less damaging to the environment
00:34:17 ►
and they’re easier to produce and they have less toxins in them.
00:34:22 ►
And so that is a gradual replacement.
00:34:25 ►
Many of them are food cell type.
00:34:28 ►
They’re manufactured.
00:34:31 ►
So in bringing this back to all of the basics,
00:34:35 ►
if you look at the International Space Station,
00:34:37 ►
which has just been completed as we sit here,
00:34:40 ►
it can house six people long term.
00:34:44 ►
They recycle their urine to drinking water.
00:34:47 ►
They maintain their air.
00:34:49 ►
They’re completely self-sustained as far as power, but certainly not foodstuffs.
00:34:54 ►
And perhaps the next phase for NASA and for the partners in the program
00:34:57 ►
is to create this idea of what can we do to make food from the matter
00:35:03 ►
that’s floating around in the station, from trash, from our own wastes?
00:35:08 ►
Can we generate edibles and consumables?
00:35:12 ►
If they can learn how to do it there, then they can bring the technology here.
00:35:17 ►
So in a future, in a bright post-Crescendo future,
00:35:21 ►
if you have cleaner air air fewer people are the dystopian vision of the
00:35:28 ►
future is a world of 12 billion you know we just can’t imagine you know the
00:35:34 ►
strain that’s on the system now and the psychological strain what if the future
00:35:39 ►
is a world of six and a half billion it’s the same number of people we have
00:35:42 ►
now isn’t this better or five, a little bit of pressure released on the environment.
00:35:48 ►
The cars are cleaner, the air is cleaner in the cities.
00:35:52 ►
We’re not in a panic about running out of fossil fuels because we’ve stretched them out
00:35:56 ►
and we’re just using them better. Our food supplies
00:36:00 ►
are varied and very, very reliable, so no matter what
00:36:03 ►
climate change does to outdoor agriculture production,
00:36:09 ►
our pressure is off the seas, so the seas are bouncing back
00:36:12 ►
and fish populations are coming back.
00:36:16 ►
And because there are fewer births, we’re focusing a lot more on kids.
00:36:21 ►
We focus on their education, and we also focus on protecting them from
00:36:27 ►
trauma from media, so we’ve cut that out. We said, you know what, these programs, you
00:36:33 ►
can study them in college. They’ll be part of a trauma media studies 101 where you can
00:36:41 ►
actually watch these things, but they’re kind of put away in the vault,
00:36:50 ►
because, and anybody who hasn’t seen these shows, and never been raised with them,
00:36:57 ►
watches a television show of, you know, 2011, and says, oh my god, I can’t even, I have to turn it off, I can’t, I cannot, I, you know, I’m mesmerized, but I have to turn away, because this thing is so
00:37:03 ►
upsetting, because if you haven’t been desensitized to this and you watch this,
00:37:08 ►
and you’re horrified by what you’re seeing,
00:37:10 ►
you’re horrified by an ordinary television commercial of 2011.
00:37:14 ►
So they’re kept in a vault as an example of what not to do to a society.
00:37:20 ►
And so all of those things are gone.
00:37:21 ►
And you have a world that’s maybe a little bit like Denmark,
00:37:28 ►
with the windmills going and the sanity of the population.
00:37:37 ►
There are places that you can go that are like this already,
00:37:40 ►
that perhaps are living in this more positive, balanced, post-Crescendo world.
00:37:47 ►
I mean, Europe is an example, Scandinavia, etc. There are places that are already there,
00:37:53 ►
the future is already happening. Denmark is aiming at 20-25% of their power from wind,
00:38:00 ►
you know, within a generation. And they will do it. And they have yutlan. You know, they’re going to do it because they have the wind.
00:38:08 ►
But these places exist.
00:38:11 ►
There’s Curitiba in Brazil.
00:38:12 ►
There’s Hyderabad in India.
00:38:14 ►
There are these model cities that really work.
00:38:17 ►
You know, under tough circumstances of shanty towns and people migrating in,
00:38:21 ►
the cities are well architected enough
00:38:24 ►
and have these
00:38:25 ►
innovative ways of trading trash for transit tickets. And so the people then become mobile
00:38:31 ►
who are in the shanty towns and then they find jobs. And there are people who are really
00:38:37 ►
designing intelligently to support the populations. You know, what’s interesting in Thailand, Thailand’s a great example because Thailand has had a population explosion.
00:38:49 ►
We went to Thailand with a friend of ours from years ago who was there in the Peace Corps, 1971.
00:38:57 ►
He took us to the point in Bangkok where the edge of the town used to be. We had to drive like an hour from where we were
00:39:05 ►
in built-up Bangkok in toward the city
00:39:08 ►
to find the edge of town in 1971.
00:39:12 ►
And it’s shocking when you think of it.
00:39:14 ►
But the king of Thailand, who’s a revered leader,
00:39:18 ►
his whole thing was long-term thinking.
00:39:21 ►
He said, we need to improve every sector of our society
00:39:26 ►
by a couple of percent a year in measurable improvement.
00:39:30 ►
That goes from water quality to children’s education and literacy.
00:39:34 ►
Every sector must grow and improve,
00:39:37 ►
but we also have to keep ahead of our population growth.
00:39:40 ►
And they’ve done it.
00:39:41 ►
I mean, Thailand, you know, the canals are cleaner than they were
00:39:47 ►
and all around them was raging wars. You know, there was the Vietnam War on one side and Cambodia
00:39:55 ►
and then you had Myanmar and Burmese juntas and generals on the other. But Thailand developed and
00:40:02 ►
grew and grew and grew because of this long-term thinking.
00:40:06 ►
And orchid projects to royal projects, you know, to help displaced people and hill tribes people,
00:40:15 ►
to the development of different industries, the jewelry industry, the electronics industry,
00:40:20 ►
it was all done with some thinking.
00:40:22 ►
Now, of course, Thailand has problems. It has political problems and et cetera, et cetera, but it really has come a long way, you know,
00:40:29 ►
in those, since the dark days of the Southeast Asian wars. And they just did it incrementally.
00:40:38 ►
One thing that comes to mind when you’re talking about this technology that will help manage and improve things a lot
00:40:45 ►
a lot of it has to do with um some like changing regulations saying we can’t have destructive media
00:40:52 ►
we can’t have these sorts of things but to me it seems like that’s going to happen if there’s a
00:40:58 ►
participatory democracy there’s a participation in this regulation coming from society itself and i
00:41:03 ►
feel like at least in this country particularly,
00:41:05 ►
but probably most other places in the world too,
00:41:07 ►
there’s tactics of coercion, of intimidation, of panic, brainwashing,
00:41:14 ►
all these things that have allowed the population to not seize
00:41:18 ►
and take control of their destiny.
00:41:20 ►
And maybe there’s something about that dynamic you can say
00:41:23 ►
from traveling around the world.
00:41:24 ►
and maybe there’s something about that dynamic you can say from traveling around the world.
00:41:33 ►
The level to which people participate in their own governance and their own lawmaking certainly varies all over the world, but what it really comes down to is just a small group.
00:41:39 ►
There’s a small group of people who are manipulating the levers of power and doing what we would consider
00:41:46 ►
disenfranchising or not positive productive behavior because they’re feathering their own
00:41:53 ►
nests and they’re they’re doing things at the expense of others but there’s usually a small
00:41:59 ►
group of people who are opposing them and it’s it’s the drama that plays out on the stage of these two groups. And the rest of
00:42:06 ►
us are pretty much just sitting eating our popcorn or not paying attention. Because frankly, I mean,
00:42:13 ►
it’s a lot of energy. It takes a lot to engage in that. So Larry Lessig and his group at Change
00:42:19 ►
Congress or Fix Congress, they’re fighting corruption in the U.S. political system by saying,
00:42:26 ►
you can’t use payola, you can’t go and if you are a big industrial combine X,
00:42:33 ►
go and buy a politician to get a law change because you’re disenfranchising the population
00:42:40 ►
that may or may not have elected that person and you’re wrecking the future for your own short-term gains.
00:42:48 ►
And so he’s one very smart guy with a very dedicated group
00:42:52 ►
that has entered that stage and saying,
00:42:54 ►
we’re using all the tactics we know.
00:42:56 ►
We’re going to run billboard campaigns in your district.
00:42:59 ►
We’re going to run radio commercials.
00:43:01 ►
And we’re going to hit you right at home to say,
00:43:04 ►
well, you accepted $3 million
00:43:06 ►
from this large health care company to vote against the health care reform that your constituents
00:43:12 ►
actually voted you in to enact. And you’re just, you know, you’re engaging in a crime, which is
00:43:19 ►
what this is. And so those people have the power, they have to have a little more support from the public.
00:43:26 ►
You know, if there were, if there was a rally on Washington for something like an abstract thing
00:43:32 ►
like payola and government, I mean, I think some people would turn out for it. If there were three
00:43:37 ►
million people marching on Washington behind Larry Lessig, it would make an impression. It doesn’t
00:43:43 ►
have to be the whole population.
00:43:47 ►
Boycotts, consumer boycotts,
00:43:49 ►
massively effective on companies.
00:43:53 ►
You have no idea the panic that is induced by stockholders and board members
00:43:57 ►
if they think that this is happening.
00:43:59 ►
The power of new media.
00:44:01 ►
There was a woman who had a Maytag, I don’t know if you heard this,
00:44:06 ►
she had a Maytag washer, right? And she had 40,000 followers on Twitter. She was just
00:44:12 ►
a very good Twitter person. And her Maytag experience was so poor. You know, we’ve all
00:44:20 ►
seen the ads, like the Maytag repairman does nothing to do because these things never
00:44:26 ►
break. Well, she Twittered this whole thing for weeks about trying to get her laundry
00:44:31 ►
is piling up. And all these people, she basically wrecked the Maytag brand in about a month.
00:44:41 ►
And they didn’t even know where this was coming from. And suddenly they have this incredibly bad reputation.
00:44:47 ►
So the power of this media and the power of an ordinary person
00:44:51 ►
that gets a following to move things,
00:44:54 ►
and we see this in Egypt, we’ll see this more and more.
00:44:57 ►
We’ll just say, suddenly there’s a person who, through tweets,
00:45:01 ►
has brought down a big thing, or brought down a politician or something
00:45:07 ►
of course there’ll be a lot of noise there and there will be a lot of false positives i mean
00:45:11 ►
you remember the bp oil spill the guy that got the twitter address it was like bppr america or
00:45:18 ►
something and then he was putting out these statements about b, and people thought it was the official BP feed, right?
00:45:27 ►
But he actually shifted this whole dialogue.
00:45:29 ►
He shifted, he woke up BP in some way that, you know,
00:45:34 ►
he was making statements that everyone thought BP was being insensitive,
00:45:38 ►
so he would Twitter, tweet something that, of course we’re insensitive,
00:45:42 ►
you know, we’re a large oil company, and, you know, what do you expect?
00:45:48 ►
So, you know, this is the wild card.
00:45:51 ►
This is the joker in the hand that we’re going in the future with,
00:45:55 ►
this power to move.
00:45:56 ►
And this is the power outside of the corporate-controlled media.
00:46:00 ►
Now, this has been talked about for, you know, 15, 20 years now,
00:46:04 ►
but we see it again and again and again happening.
00:46:07 ►
And so you can have your Fox News, and you can have…
00:46:10 ►
And I lump the left wing in with this too.
00:46:17 ►
People who…
00:46:18 ►
Anyone who basically characterizes another group of people in some way
00:46:24 ►
and also uses panic, fear, uncertainty, and doubt,
00:46:27 ►
FUD, the FUD factor.
00:46:29 ►
People who are using that technique,
00:46:31 ►
I lump them all together.
00:46:32 ►
It doesn’t have to be if they’re left, right, right,
00:46:34 ►
wing, center, it doesn’t really matter.
00:46:37 ►
What really matters is real experience
00:46:39 ►
of people on the ground, on the street,
00:46:41 ►
and their lives.
00:46:42 ►
That’s what matters the most
00:46:44 ►
because that’s the reality,
00:46:45 ►
and that’s what the future we’re going to live in, are those people. So if somebody is tweeting and
00:46:51 ►
saying, you know, I’m in a desperate circumstance, I’ve been foreclosed, you know, you have no idea
00:47:01 ►
what this is like, and suddenly you get this one tweet in the wilderness, and it blows away all of the reporting
00:47:07 ►
and all of the mumbo-jumbo about financial this and that.
00:47:13 ►
What really matters is what happened to this person
00:47:15 ►
and the pain that they’re going through.
00:47:18 ►
So, for example, a story about I’ve been foreclosed
00:47:22 ►
and my life is ruined,
00:47:26 ►
if that person gets angry enough, they could create a movement
00:47:29 ►
and the power of those words, that I’ve been foreclosed,
00:47:33 ►
and the anger is directed all over the place,
00:47:36 ►
but there’s also a productive, if there’s a productive aspect to it,
00:47:40 ►
like I don’t ever want to get into a circumstance
00:47:43 ►
where I’m having to pay a mortgage for 30 years
00:47:46 ►
it makes no sense
00:47:48 ►
one, I’m 60 years old
00:47:50 ►
and two, this whole system just doesn’t work
00:47:54 ►
it’s a system of usury
00:47:55 ►
to extract money out of people
00:47:59 ►
we need to invent a new way to house ourselves
00:48:02 ►
we learned our lesson
00:48:04 ►
we’re not going to go back into this again.
00:48:07 ►
And so that could start a movement
00:48:08 ►
of alternative financing of housing.
00:48:14 ►
And when I went to Eastern Europe in the early 90s,
00:48:17 ►
I explained to people this idea of mortgages,
00:48:19 ►
and they thought I was crazy.
00:48:21 ►
They said, you’re crazy.
00:48:23 ►
Why would you indenture yourself like a slave
00:48:26 ►
to make these payments which seem to be pretty high
00:48:30 ►
to this organization,
00:48:32 ►
and they take all the interest in the beginning,
00:48:34 ►
and you’re able to deduct that, but big deal,
00:48:38 ►
and you work for 15, 20, 30 years,
00:48:41 ►
and because you have to move,
00:48:43 ►
you never get it paid off off you always go to another place
00:48:46 ►
why would anybody sign up for that program
00:48:48 ►
and I said well how do you get a home
00:48:50 ►
well we have some land
00:48:52 ►
left by our grandparents
00:48:54 ►
we go looking for bricks
00:48:55 ►
and the fellow that
00:48:57 ►
I stayed with near Prague
00:49:00 ►
he had this dog eared
00:49:02 ►
handyman’s book of how to build a house
00:49:04 ►
that had been passed
00:49:05 ►
around probably to about 300 people. And he read it cover to cover. It was in English, actually,
00:49:11 ►
English and German. And then he learned from that book how to build a house, and it took them 15
00:49:15 ►
years because there was no building supplies stores or nothing like that. You actually
00:49:21 ►
stole it from the government construction sites and things like this.
00:49:25 ►
Now that’s not a way to get into a house either,
00:49:27 ►
but in a sense it’s better because the people built it themselves
00:49:32 ►
and it wasn’t a thing of usury.
00:49:37 ►
So somebody could change the world just by tweeting their story.
00:49:42 ►
And if it’s a powerful story and people organize around it,
00:49:44 ►
but then there can’t just be protest.
00:49:46 ►
It can’t be like the 60s.
00:49:48 ►
You can’t be just against.
00:49:49 ►
You have to find out what you are for,
00:49:52 ►
not just what you are against.
00:49:54 ►
That’s the key to getting through the crescendo.
00:49:57 ►
So there’s one instrument that’s left at the end
00:50:00 ►
that has a positive note.
00:50:03 ►
That’s great.
00:50:05 ►
That makes me think,
00:50:06 ►
maybe one more question
00:50:07 ►
before we take a break,
00:50:08 ►
but it makes me think about
00:50:11 ►
this Buckminster Fuller quote
00:50:12 ►
saying that in his lifetime
00:50:14 ►
the literacy rate had gone,
00:50:17 ►
I forget by what fold,
00:50:18 ►
but basically when he was born
00:50:20 ►
almost nobody was literate.
00:50:21 ►
And in his lifetime,
00:50:23 ►
the majority of the population of the planet is literate.
00:50:26 ►
And that removed the need for managers and religious leaders
00:50:30 ►
and all these people, these roles that we’ve lived with
00:50:33 ►
for thousands and thousands of years.
00:50:35 ►
Is that what we’re seeing now as a transition from
00:50:38 ►
now people are educated enough or able to educate each other and themselves enough
00:50:42 ►
where we don’t need these leaders leading a blind mass.
00:50:45 ►
Is that something you think?
00:50:47 ►
I think we are seeing that.
00:50:49 ►
We are seeing, you know, it’s Timothy Leary’s old adage,
00:50:54 ►
you know, don’t trust authority, think for yourself.
00:50:58 ►
Now, of course, what you see,
00:51:00 ►
this is this mass effect of people who can become wise to things. They become wise
00:51:07 ►
to the tricks of the commercial world, the propaganda world and the commercial world.
00:51:13 ►
So they don’t quite buy that. They’re empowered. They work as a freelance agent at home. So
00:51:19 ►
they learn how to run themselves as a business. They’re not tied to a job. Or they know that
00:51:24 ►
they can go from startup to startup.
00:51:26 ►
It’s a little bit less stable a life, but it’s more empowering.
00:51:29 ►
They’re more of a pioneer.
00:51:31 ►
They’re empowered all over the place.
00:51:33 ►
They could be a minority, they’re empowered.
00:51:36 ►
They’re a female, they’re empowered.
00:51:38 ►
They’re a kid, they’re empowered.
00:51:39 ►
They have more communication tools in their hand at age 15
00:51:44 ►
than NASA’s engineers in mission control in 1969.
00:51:49 ►
You know, this kid is carrying around a way to get information
00:51:53 ►
from a global data bank.
00:51:56 ►
That’s empowerment.
00:51:57 ►
That’s a tremendous empowerment.
00:51:59 ►
So what I think you’re seeing is, you know,
00:52:02 ►
in the most positive view, the death rattle of those who used to
00:52:08 ►
enforce by hegemony. So the death rattle of religion, all controlling religion. You see
00:52:17 ►
this in the Catholic Church, you know, in the scandals that all countries have risen
00:52:22 ►
up and said there was abuse. This organization traumatized the whole population.
00:52:27 ►
And throwing it off, changing laws, bankrupting the dioceses,
00:52:33 ►
you know, this is a major change.
00:52:34 ►
And so the Catholic Church is having to finally adapt.
00:52:38 ►
You know, and this is a very top-down organization.
00:52:42 ►
So, you know, yes. And so the noise level, the shrill pitch of the former
00:52:51 ►
hegemists is reaching a fever pitch because you’re completely losing control. And of course,
00:53:01 ►
at the same time, you have conspiracy theory. Now, what’s interesting thing about conspiracy theory
00:53:06 ►
is that is actually part of disempowerment as well.
00:53:10 ►
So you get this marriage between those who believe the most bizarre things,
00:53:15 ►
which the conspiracy theorists, their ultimate belief system
00:53:20 ►
is that you have these all-powerful, top-down, secretive organizations that have
00:53:25 ►
done, that run the world, and have done all these almost impossible feats. They, in a
00:53:33 ►
sense, are hearkening back to a time that never was, perhaps, when there were more all-powerful
00:53:40 ►
organizations that controlled top-down. Like the Soviet Union, which really was able to
00:53:45 ►
control the information.
00:53:46 ►
It took enormous energy, so much energy that the whole thing crumbled.
00:53:50 ►
But they’re hearkening back to these mythical times, and in a sense, the conspiracy theorists,
00:53:58 ►
I believe in a sense they hope that this is true, because of course, if it’s not, then
00:54:02 ►
they’re made out to be fools. The largest fools, you know, bury your backside for a little paddle
00:54:09 ►
because you’ve just made an incredible fool of yourself if this is not true.
00:54:15 ►
So they are, in a sense, hoping for this to be.
00:54:17 ►
But then on the other side, you have the demagogues and the media people
00:54:23 ►
struggling to come to terms with the fact
00:54:26 ►
that they can’t control the situation.
00:54:29 ►
Nobody is in control.
00:54:30 ►
And what they are doing is they’re raising the level
00:54:34 ►
to a fever pitch, the dialogue, the voice level,
00:54:39 ►
because the whole system is so out of control
00:54:43 ►
that they feel in this grave state of panic.
00:54:47 ►
So in some sense, the conspiracy theorists
00:54:49 ►
and those on the other side
00:54:51 ►
that would like to create the conspiracies
00:54:53 ►
are our partners, in a sense.
00:54:56 ►
But I hope and wish that it is a death rattle
00:55:00 ►
because we just don’t need either of this.
00:55:06 ►
They’re very destructive. most definitely um but but then you sort of the address for a second there’s a
00:55:15 ►
something about mythologizing or hearkening back to this other time so it also seems like in a sense
00:55:22 ►
what is the mythology we’re entering?
00:55:26 ►
What is the new mythology that is not listening to the preacher at the pulpit or whatever?
00:55:30 ►
What is the new mythology of our culture then?
00:55:33 ►
Because we will have to have a myth, I would assume, or a mythology to some degree.
00:55:38 ►
What do you think would be the change between the old and the new?
00:55:41 ►
I think sitting here on the west coast of North America where of course we’re like Manhattanites
00:55:47 ►
there’s that famous poster of Manhattan that shows Manhattan
00:55:51 ►
Central Park, Fifth Avenue, whatever
00:55:53 ►
and there’s a sliver of New Jersey
00:55:55 ►
and then there’s two palm trees and that’s California
00:55:58 ►
and then there’s like a blob saying Asia
00:56:01 ►
this is the New Yorker’s view of the world
00:56:04 ►
so sitting out here in, you know, the edge of the West,
00:56:08 ►
we think of the crescendo, the post-crescendo,
00:56:13 ►
the emerald civilization, that’s what you might call it.
00:56:16 ►
It’s sort of the emerald civilization,
00:56:19 ►
the azure and emerald civilization,
00:56:21 ►
where you have clean air and water, where you have, you know, people.
00:56:22 ►
an emerald civilization where you have clean air and water,
00:56:24 ►
where you have people.
00:56:31 ►
It’s almost like taking to extremes the Na’vi in Avatar or living in harmony with nature and having a little bracelet
00:56:36 ►
where it connects them with the net so that they can both live in a high-tech world
00:56:41 ►
but live with very much planted on the ground.
00:56:44 ►
I mean, those are very extreme visions.
00:56:47 ►
But I think every one of us grew up with science fiction films
00:56:52 ►
showing electric cars and happy, socialized people
00:56:56 ►
wearing funny jumpsuits in these 70s and 60s sci-fi or 80s sci-fi.
00:57:03 ►
And we think of it, it’s calm and there’s no wars
00:57:06 ►
and there’s, you know, maybe no currency
00:57:09 ►
and everybody gets food by, you know,
00:57:12 ►
putting their finger on a glass plate or, you know, who knows,
00:57:15 ►
all these, the Federation of Star Trek and whatnot.
00:57:18 ►
I think that that’s probably pretty unrealistic.
00:57:21 ►
But I think that the trend, certainly the trend is that all over the world, I mean,
00:57:28 ►
you fly, you know, I’ve been to China pretty frequently. You go to China and the media would
00:57:36 ►
have you think that, you know, you’re entering this place of gulags and slave labor camps and everything.
00:57:45 ►
And that’s the last thing.
00:57:46 ►
I mean, certainly maybe that’s there.
00:57:49 ►
But when you go to China, you see 24-, 25-, 26-year-old bright faces
00:57:54 ►
where they’re learning constantly.
00:57:58 ►
The working population is very low.
00:58:00 ►
Everyone helps everyone else.
00:58:02 ►
You go through security at the airport, and it’s far nicer than here.
00:58:06 ►
There are never any lines at airports.
00:58:09 ►
They have 60 security desks to check the passport, 60 in parallel.
00:58:14 ►
You just choose the one you want.
00:58:16 ►
When you have the numbers, people are polite, they’re courteous,
00:58:23 ►
and the level of service is higher
00:58:26 ►
the aircraft, the interiors are better
00:58:28 ►
the food preparation and presentation is better
00:58:31 ►
the positivity of the people is there
00:58:35 ►
certainly they live differently
00:58:39 ►
but their attitude is so refreshing
00:58:42 ►
it’s almost like, to some extent,
00:58:45 ►
when you go from the United States to Canada,
00:58:47 ►
you find the same thing.
00:58:48 ►
You find this refreshing, oh, thank goodness,
00:58:50 ►
I’m out of that.
00:58:51 ►
Paul, I’m into a place where there are no fighter jets in the skies
00:58:56 ►
and no screaming people on TV
00:58:58 ►
and where there’s a health care system, etc., etc.
00:59:01 ►
So to some extent, the future is being made around us.
00:59:06 ►
The future is in little places like Canada,
00:59:08 ►
or big places like Canada.
00:59:10 ►
It’s in the bright eyes of a girl in China
00:59:16 ►
who’s trying to learn English,
00:59:17 ►
and she’s working in a hotel,
00:59:18 ►
and you connect with her,
00:59:19 ►
and you give her information about a school,
00:59:23 ►
and then you give her $100,
00:59:27 ►
and that pays for her entire school,
00:59:28 ►
you know, for learning English.
00:59:30 ►
I mean, that’s the future.
00:59:32 ►
That’s the crescendo future.
00:59:33 ►
I go to Pakistan.
00:59:36 ►
You know, Pakistan is a hot zone. You know, Pakistan in the media is, you know, is Armageddon, you know, happening.
00:59:43 ►
I go to Pakistan because I work with a company that has software engineers.
00:59:47 ►
There’s over 200 software engineers in Islamabad.
00:59:51 ►
And it’s amazing.
00:59:53 ►
These people are profoundly good at what they do.
00:59:57 ►
Many of them are devout Muslims, but they’re Twitter Muslims.
01:00:00 ►
You know, they’re very high tech.
01:00:03 ►
They’re not proselytizing the religion. They’re simply
01:00:06 ►
good human beings. Their religion gives them strength. It gives them work ethic. It gives
01:00:12 ►
them clarity of deciding what’s good and bad. It’s all the good things that religion are giving them.
01:00:19 ►
They’re engineers, sure, but for every one of them that’s working in software there’s 60 or 70 people that benefit
01:00:25 ►
so their immediate family, the family in the village etc
01:00:29 ►
that one salary benefits all those people
01:00:32 ►
they are at the forefront of helping
01:00:35 ►
a very troubled part of the world move into a positive future
01:00:38 ►
they’re building products that are used by Swiss banks
01:00:41 ►
they’re used by the Library of Congress
01:00:44 ►
they’re proud of their work.
01:00:46 ►
It’s world-class work, and it’s being exported all over the planet.
01:00:49 ►
So even from a place like Pakistan, there’s this goodness.
01:00:54 ►
There’s this cycle of goodness that’s going on.
01:00:56 ►
So the future of Pakistan is being made in little pieces of Pakistan.
01:01:02 ►
And you just have to recognize that.
01:01:04 ►
We talked about South Africa.
01:01:06 ►
We talked about Brazil, about India.
01:01:08 ►
And to some extent,
01:01:10 ►
one of the biggest places where the big problems are
01:01:12 ►
is the United States.
01:01:16 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:01:18 ►
where people are changing their lives
01:01:20 ►
one thought at a time.
01:01:24 ►
And I’m going to have to agree with Bruce that some of the biggest problems holding back a more promising future right now are to be found right here in the United States.
01:01:33 ►
But I’m going to let you chew on that for yourself and see what you come up with.
01:01:38 ►
Personally, one of the main things I’m taking away from what Bruce just said is that, and I quote,
01:01:44 ►
to some extent, the future is being
01:01:47 ►
made around us, unquote. And if you’re a regular over at the growreport.com forums or on the
01:01:54 ►
virtual vapor lounge or the Dope Tribe’s new international online call-in radio program,
01:02:00 ►
Planet London Radio, which you can find over at justintv, j—U-S-T-I-N dot TV, well, then
01:02:06 ►
you’re already well aware of the conversations buzzing all around the planet where the future
01:02:11 ►
is not only being created, but is also looking like it can actually be quite enjoyable once
01:02:16 ►
we get through this great shift that is now underway, or as Bruce says, the great crescendo.
01:02:22 ►
Also, I hope that if you can, you’ll be attending the Breaking Convention Psychedelic Conference
01:02:27 ►
that’s being held at the University of Kent at Canterbury in the UK this coming weekend.
01:02:32 ►
Although I can’t get there myself, I’m sure that we’ll not only have some first-hand reports
01:02:36 ►
about the conference, but that the organizers may also be able to maybe send us a few recordings
01:02:42 ►
of some of the talks that we can play here in the salon.
01:02:46 ►
And if you’re like me, you aren’t in a position to do much traveling right now,
01:02:50 ►
but still want to engage in the personal dialogue with some of the people you’ve heard here in the salon,
01:02:55 ►
well, we’re going to experiment with something that you could think of as maybe a delayed Q&A session with them.
01:03:03 ►
Now, should this actually take off and be a big hit, I’ll of course claim credit for it myself.
01:03:08 ►
However, the truth of the matter is that this was actually Bruce Dahmer’s idea,
01:03:12 ►
and I personally think that it’s an excellent step in the right direction,
01:03:16 ►
namely, finding the others and hearing their voices.
01:03:20 ►
Now, our working name for this new format is A Global Triologue,
01:03:24 ►
and here’s how we think it could work.
01:03:27 ►
The idea is that each topic begins with a question from you or one of our other fellow saloners
01:03:33 ►
and the most direct way to ask your question is to go to Bruce’s website damer.com, D-A-M-E-R.com
01:03:40 ►
and then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the link labeled Contact.
01:03:45 ►
And that will take you to a comment form that Bruce personally checks every day.
01:03:50 ►
Also, I plan on starting a thread on the Psychedelic Salon Forum over at thegrowreport.com,
01:03:55 ►
which is the most friendly and flame-free site I know of.
01:03:59 ►
And I’ll pass those questions on to Bruce as well.
01:04:02 ►
Now, for the questions that we picked to trialogue,
01:04:01 ►
I’ll pass those questions on to Bruce as well.
01:04:04 ►
Now, for the questions that we picked to try a log,
01:04:08 ►
we hope that we can get you to record your questions so that your voice is added to the salon as well.
01:04:11 ►
And if that can’t be arranged, we’ll have somebody read it for you.
01:04:14 ►
And from your question, Bruce will proceed,
01:04:16 ►
and hopefully we’ll be able to find some sound bites from previous podcasts
01:04:20 ►
where another speaker also had something relevant to say about your question.
01:04:24 ►
And with
01:04:25 ►
luck and a little editing, I think we can even use multi-part questions. In fact, they may even be
01:04:30 ►
the best way to go if we really want to make it feel like a trialogue. Now, we’ve already received
01:04:36 ►
two interesting questions that we’ll begin with, and we’re hoping that this will grow into a
01:04:40 ►
frequent and regular feature of the salon. I’ve only mentioned this briefly in passing over at the Grow Report forums and on another
01:04:48 ►
thread actually, and that’s where the first questions came from.
01:04:52 ►
Interestingly, one of the comments was something along the lines of fearing that Bruce maybe
01:04:57 ►
would get too many geek questions and that may detract from the direction of the past
01:05:02 ►
programs.
01:05:03 ►
Well, I think I have an answer for that as well.
01:05:05 ►
So if you really want to geek out with a question
01:05:08 ►
and it doesn’t seem to work here in the salon,
01:05:10 ►
I also have another podcast channel that I began several years ago.
01:05:14 ►
However, I only got around to producing one program for it.
01:05:18 ►
And you can find that at www.matrixcast.com.
01:05:26 ►
And there you’ll find a podcast of a long conversation that Bruce and I had back in 2007 when we were on this farm together.
01:05:33 ►
And one of my favorite quotes from that conversation is,
01:05:37 ►
Stars are temporary interruptions in dust’s normal life cycle of just hanging around.
01:05:44 ►
Nice thought, huh?
01:05:45 ►
So if you have a question that you’d like to ask Bruce,
01:05:48 ►
please go to damer.com and let us hear from you.
01:05:52 ►
Also, hey, let’s not forget that this coming Sunday, April 3rd,
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is what has come to be known as Terrence Day,
01:05:58 ►
when we celebrate the life and work of the Bard McKenna,
01:06:01 ►
who left the planet on that day in the year 2000.
01:06:05 ►
Hmm, now that I think of it, it seems just like yesterday when that happened,
01:06:09 ►
and yet, how can 11 years have gone by since then?
01:06:13 ►
Hmm.
01:06:14 ►
Anyway, I know that on that day, Bruce will be hosting a gathering at his farm
01:06:18 ►
when friends and fans of Terrence get together each year.
01:06:21 ►
And for my part, I’ll be calling into justin.tv slash Planet London Radio,
01:06:26 ►
which airs from 7 p.m. till midnight in London time and 5 to noon here in Southern California.
01:06:32 ►
And that’s this Sunday, April 3rd. It’s really a great place to hook up with some of the people
01:06:37 ►
you know from the forums and from some of the great podcasts over at dopefiend.co.uk,
01:06:43 ►
where I’m proud to admit that I’m also a member of the dope tribe
01:06:46 ►
myself and I hope that you can join us for what has now become a regular Sunday event.
01:06:52 ►
In closing today I’d like to pass along an interesting thought that I heard this past week
01:06:58 ►
and follow that with a song titled Don’t You and it was written and is performed by my friend and our fellow
01:07:05 ►
salonner, Encore.
01:07:07 ►
Now, the thought is something that my teacher said the other day, and it has really caused
01:07:11 ►
me to do some serious thinking about myself.
01:07:14 ►
It goes like this.
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Ultimately, there are two things that human beings never regret about their lives.
01:07:21 ►
One is having had courage, and the other is being themselves and not someone else.
01:07:28 ►
As simple as that sounds, it can hold profound implications for you, or at least it did for me.
01:07:34 ►
You see, when I think of courage, I don’t necessarily think of somebody running into a
01:07:40 ►
burning building and saving a child or something like that. To me, that’s heroism, and it is something different from courage,
01:07:46 ►
which, again, for me, maybe not for you, but for me it implies a serious thought process
01:07:52 ►
as opposed to an immediate response to a critical situation.
01:07:56 ►
To me, courage means getting up on a cold winter morning and going to school,
01:08:00 ►
no matter how irrelevant it may seem at the time.
01:08:04 ►
Courage can be found in the people who each day go to a job that they hate but they need
01:08:08 ►
in order to fulfill some financial obligations they have or to support a family that may
01:08:12 ►
not even appreciate their sacrifice.
01:08:14 ►
But you do it anyway because it’s the right thing for you to do at the time.
01:08:18 ►
There are a lot of ways to display courage in your life.
01:08:22 ►
And the second part is even more elusive, being true to yourself.
01:08:27 ►
I once had a friend who is much like the character Ricky in Trailer Park Boys, the
01:08:31 ►
off-the-wall comedy series out of Newfoundland that came out a few years back. My friend once
01:08:37 ►
said, everybody wants to be like me, but nobody wants to be around me. Well, that’s not what I
01:08:43 ►
call being true to yourself. In my book, it’s just being called a jerk.
01:08:47 ►
Not that we haven’t all been attracted to big jerks from time to time.
01:08:51 ►
It happens to all of us.
01:08:53 ►
But being true to yourself holds a different meaning for each and every one of us.
01:08:57 ►
And I actually have no advice as to how it can be done.
01:09:00 ►
For me, I just try to be the best me I can and try not to please everybody, just myself.
01:09:06 ►
And with all of my faults, biases, and incomplete and bad information, I find myself constantly
01:09:13 ►
adjusting to find the right balance between being true to my inner picture of who I am and
01:09:18 ►
not being an inconsiderate jerk in the process. It’s a fine line indeed and not one that I always succeed in walking,
01:09:26 ►
but I try and I’m sure that you do too. So have courage my friend and be the best you possible. Hey there, don’t you tell me a thing
01:09:57 ►
Don’t you tell me you’re playing the game
01:10:02 ►
Don’t you scream that this dream
01:10:05 ►
has got you again
01:10:08 ►
listen
01:10:13 ►
don’t you hear it again
01:10:16 ►
don’t you feel
01:10:18 ►
that shadowy
01:10:20 ►
pain don’t you
01:10:22 ►
wish that this
01:10:24 ►
time was not your only friend?
01:10:30 ►
Don’t you feel you wanna feel this real again?
01:10:39 ►
Don’t you feel you wanna see me see your only friend, your only friend? piano solo Hey there, you’re lying again
01:11:31 ►
You are playing that same old game
01:11:36 ►
You are trying to tell the same from insane
01:11:52 ►
Say now you were somehow you are not God in the wire and how you are
01:11:56 ►
that man with the golden hand
01:12:00 ►
in his world of sand
01:12:03 ►
In this world of sin Don’t you feel you wanna feel this real again
01:12:11 ►
Don’t you feel you wanna see me steal your only end
01:12:22 ►
Your only friend. © transcript Emily Beynon And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:13:08 ►
Be well, my friends.