Program Notes
Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
[NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.]
“I would say it’s no more than 500 people in the United States who cause a vast amount of the grief.”
“A crescendo involves everyone. The singularity seems to be this nerd idea of reaching some kind of Omega Point. It’s very much the Christian idea of the second coming. It’s apocalyptic, etc., a bit of a downer because everything comes to an end, but it’s incredibly unlikely.”
“The crescendo will throw off all the old religions. It will throw off the conspiracy theories. It will throw off crusty old corporate jobs. And replace them with self-sufficiency, direct communication with nature, with other human beings, with media, and the creation of opinions directly.
“So if you think of the computing, it’s not really computing, but the computing nature is doing all the time, it outstrips all our largest supercomputing grids.”
“So if we can’t do even one neuron [computer simulation] how are we going to upload consciousness exactly?”
“You’re here not because something put you here and fabricated you and guided the evolution and created the whole planet. It’s an emergent phenomenon and so are you. And you are an ongoing story, and the story is written in your genes, but it is also written in your mind. And you have responsibility for this amazing emergent phenomenon.”
“You don’t need religion for miracles. The fact that you exist in all this existence is stacked upon miracles, turtles all the way down. So if we grok that, we don’t need religious stories any more.”
“The virtual worlds and avatar spaces and multi-player games of now are the Keystone Cops of what virtual worlds will be in twenty or thirty years through AR [Augmented Reality], and big home holodecks, and stuff like that.”
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259 - The Great Crescendo Part 1
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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.
00:00:24 ►
Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I’d like to begin by first thanking Gary S., Omega Art and Music, Connie S., and Vipal P. for making donations to help offset the expenses here in the salon.
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And they all did so through purchasing a copy of my Pay What You Can audiobook, my novel, The Genesis Generation.
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And I also want to thank our fellow salonners who have been posting very kind comments about that book.
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You’re giving me the encouragement to continue working on the next volume of the series,
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which I hope to have completed by the end of this year.
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Now today, as you already know, we’ll be hearing part two of Bruce Dahmer’s Great Crescendo
00:01:03 ►
interview with filmmaker Matt Anderson for the documentary film series that he’s directing titled Fall and Winter.
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And you can see the trailer of that, by the way, at fallwintermovie, all one word, fallwintermovie.com.
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In the early part of this interview, as Bruce describes his view of one way the leaders of governments and corporations could maybe be better qualified before becoming eligible to fill their elected positions or appointed positions,
00:01:46 ►
well, he really swept me away with the very real possibility that a more closely utopian society such as that could really be feasible if only enough humans get fed up with the status quo and do the hard work of actually creating such a civilization. I guess that I could have shortened
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that little speech to simply say the headline, Bruce’s vision gives me hope. So now let’s find
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out what you think about it and here is Bruce Dahmer. What it comes down to in most societies, especially
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the United States, is there’s just a few individuals who create the problems. A politician
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that is a problem, a business person that is a problem, a financial instruments manipulator that is a problem.
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It comes down to a handful.
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And I would say it’s no more than 500 people in the United States cause a vast amount of the grief and the failures of…
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There’s probably a set of lobbyists on E Street in Washington
00:02:41 ►
that are the cause of the failure of the legislative agenda.
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There’s some lawyers.
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There’s certainly the politicians.
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There’s, you know, in many countries it may come down to a handful of people.
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So human civilization has to get a handle on this and say,
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we need adult supervision.
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We need elders.
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We need oversight. We need adult supervision. We need elders. We need oversight.
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We need screening.
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Because these people get into these positions,
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often they’re sociopathic or psychopathic
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by the measures that you can give.
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George W. Bush, perfect example.
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You know, on the surface, he was a charismatic guy.
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He motivated people.
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He was extremely good to me in person.
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I never have, but I’ve seen his speeches and I can see why people became really attached
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to this guy. But he’s a recovering alcoholic. Now all my friends in Alcoholics Anonymous,
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when they saw that W had been elected president, they basically cringed and said, oh, no.
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You know, W would never have been able to be screened to become a pilot, for example.
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He just couldn’t pass that psych test
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because as a fairly severe recovering alcoholic,
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he enters into what’s called a belief box.
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And the belief box, if you’re in recovery,
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is that safe space that if something
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comes in and disturbs you, you’re going to go back on the bottle. So you deny information.
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You deny truths that come in. And this characterized the presidency. And how many people died?
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Hundreds of thousands of people died, millions displaced, because this guy was in this position.
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people died, millions displaced, because this guy was in this position. And he was able to work with another group of people in a cycle of hubris that led to massive destruction,
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and rode the U.S. economy down with the destruction of financial institutions and laws
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and protections of citizens’ rights. So why on earth would we not screen our leaders? Why on earth do
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we not do this? And when we see there is a problem that’s developing, we remove them.
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There should be a council. There’s a council of people who are above reproach, like the old
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village elders, who look out and they say,
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okay, this person is a problem.
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There’s something going wrong.
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We will explain the truth of this.
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We’re truth seekers and truth tellers.
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And the institutions can act on this.
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So if you have a problem president,
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they don’t stay for four years.
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The problems are identified.
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The poor strategy is identified.
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I had personal experience with this because in January 2003,
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I was part of a Pentagon-sponsored workshop in Virginia on the Iraq War.
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And it was partially on the Iraq War and partially on how to move the United States off of petroleum dependency,
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which was considered certainly wrapped up in this Iraq operation.
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And we talked for a day about what is the justification for this.
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And our sponsor of our workshop was a major Pentagon thinker who had been there for 35 years
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and counseled the Joint Chiefs against this.
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five years and counseled the Joint Chiefs against this. So why is it that this person who was the sponsor of our workshop, who had been through Vietnam, was one of the most respected brains
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in the Pentagon, why isn’t he setting the policy? He should be setting the policy. So he should be
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brought in and say, all right, you have to give a pass-fail grade on this strategy, and if you say no,
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this is going to be damaging for these reasons, it doesn’t happen.
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And the politicians either can accept that or they’re out of office.
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We need elder adult supervision in our civilization.
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We also need to make sure we don’t traumatize our children early on, that they’re healthy.
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One of the great things about some of the countries in the world
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that prioritize early childhood,
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I mean, in Scandinavia, they’re prioritizing the health of the child in the womb
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and long maternity leaves, counseling on nutrition
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because they want the healthiest possible baby to be born
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and then the best education for that child.
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That should be the priority, period,
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and no exposure to religions that produce fear, guilt, and all those effects.
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Exposure to good moral codes but not necessarily religious codes.
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If religions are deemed too risky because their past record is not good.
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Many religions or many ways of teaching religion.
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So in the post-Crescendo
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period, if we are in the emerald and blue, the emerald and azure
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civilization, we will have gotten all this right.
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To run for public office or to seek to operate a corporation,
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and if we still have militaries, which we really don’t have need for or shouldn’t,
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anybody, it should be like you’re an airline pilot.
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You are screened and screened and screened,
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because there are going to be passengers,
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and in the lifetime of your career,
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you’re going to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of individuals
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that are back in the seats behind you
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that you are getting safely to their destinations.
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And society says, if you put your hand up and say,
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I’m going to run for president,
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or I’m seeking the CEO-ship of this corporation,
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then the entire mechanism goes into place.
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And it may be that you have gone to special schools
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that train you to do that,
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and that you come pretty stamped and pre-approved.
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And there would be elders and people who’ve known you your entire life
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that say, I believe that they’re ready.
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But you would also go through a test period.
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You may go through training for this. You may go through where you are elected to that post, but it’s
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only on an interim basis for a year. And then you’re evaluated and you may not have made
00:08:55 ►
the grade because the most important thing is to get the best leadership. If we do this,
00:09:00 ►
we have a secure future in our civilization. Yeah. But it seems like perhaps part of that Emerald Civilization
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is not to have the one leader,
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to not have the one charismatic Stalin or Bush or whatever,
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but to have dispersed.
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And just like you were talking about the guy who was hired by NASA
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to develop a robot to land on the moon,
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he said, well, why not make 100 little ones?
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And because the ones that don’t make it, it’s a diffused damage or, you know,
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in a better way.
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But in some cases you need, like human civilization, you can look back
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and you can say there were cases in which the merchants in the Agora
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managed to create a marketplace.
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And serving their own interests, they were doing quite well.
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But there were cases also where there was a major threat to that civilization
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and you needed the charismatic leader that could cross all bounds and unite
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and that wasn’t connected with the interests of the merchants
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who were bringing down civilization, perhaps.
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So human civilization does occasionally have need for these individuals,
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but they are there to be so carefully chosen.
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Now, of course, Alexander the Great,
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would he have ever gone through the screening process?
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We may end up with very dull, charismatic leaders,
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but I think it’s better.
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You can have the rare time where you have an individual
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who is a brilliant manager of affairs.
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It also is a motivator.
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I mean, you think perhaps in this country
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it might have been Roosevelt in the 1930s.
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Perhaps because of his disability, he relied upon others.
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And so he built this team that built all these institutions in the 1930s
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from Medicare to industrial partnerships with the government
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to building highways and all this other stuff.
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But he was also a brilliant and charismatic leader
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that could cut across all the boundaries.
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And they were trying to get him throughout the 1930s.
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I mean, Supreme Court challenges, this and that,
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they were trying to get him.
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And then he ended up, he was so adept
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that he led the U.S. through World War II, most of it.
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I mean, this is an amazing history of
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an amazing individual. And so, if you can get in terms of Rome, in ancient Rome, I think
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it was Claudius. Augustus was also a great leader. And Claudius, who was the kind of
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village idiot of the palace, who was put into power by the Praetorian Guard
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on a whim because everyone else was dead.
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They all killed themselves off, and here he was.
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And he had been in the shadows,
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but he was actually a brilliant mind.
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He had a lisp, everything, but he led Rome,
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and he built the port at Ostia,
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and he had good governance. And he wasn’t very charismatic, but he led Rome and he built the port at Ostia. He had good governance and he wasn’t very charismatic,
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but he led Rome and each one of these brilliant leaders
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overcame and repaired the damage of the previous Caesars.
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And so you always had this back and forth going on,
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but ultimately Rome fell because of this succession problem
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and they had a series of incredibly poor, incredibly destructive leaders,
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and then the whole civilization crashed.
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So in some sense, you need them.
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You can’t live without them, but they can really do you in
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if they’re the wrong people, especially a sequence of the wrong people.
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Right. Well, okay. Interesting. I mean, I have a million directions I would love to go and stuff. I’m trying to sort of prioritize to not keep you all day.
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I’m here for you all day. to talk about a bit is the, is, well, let’s start with the singularity concept
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and maybe what are sort of alternatives or parallels to that same vision.
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Maybe define what that vision is from your perspective
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or what it’s at root about and this and the other.
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Well, the singularity, from what I understand, came from Werner Wenge.
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The idea that somehow some blend of all the world’s tweets
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and databases and technology and people in them
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create this collective being that wakes up.
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Or that technology goes so quickly
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and that we become cyborgs with subcutaneous chips
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and we get morphed so rapidly
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that we become one with the machine or something like that.
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It seems to be, it’s a bit of an apocalypse,
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it’s a bit of a science fiction idea of the turning on of consciousness of everything,
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which is kind of a cool idea.
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But it flies in the face of how technology is actually built,
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which is piece upon piece of legacy stacked up.
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And the Internet is one gigantic piece of handwork.
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It’s a piece of constant maintenance to keep it going.
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There’s nothing intelligent and autonomous and self-healing about the Internet
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or about your latest cell phone.
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It’s a huge labor of human caring,
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and the upgrades to your smartphone are worked on,
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and there’s still problems.
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It’s a big handwork thing.
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Nothing’s autonomous.
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So the singularity idea is nonsense.
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It’s a science fiction idea.
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It came from science fiction.
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It is science fiction.
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The crescendo
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idea is different. It’s saying that in this time where we feel a quickening or an intensifying
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of everything, it isn’t going to one point. It’s that all the voices are singing at once.
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They’re all experiencing more and more extreme states of consciousness,
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of extreme sports, of extreme tech, of extreme saturation with media,
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of extreme job changes, body changes, just information.
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Terence McKenna called it novelty.
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Just more and more and more of it, and more voices coming out.
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And this is glorious.
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This is a glorious period if you can get through it.
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If you can not burn out on it, which is a danger.
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And a crescendo involves everyone.
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The singularity seems to be this nerd idea of reaching some kind of omega point.
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It’s very much the Christian idea of the
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second coming, apocalyptic, etc., etc. So it’s a bit of a downer because everything
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comes to an end, but it’s incredibly unlikely. In fact, there’s no, in the singularity movement,
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and I do talks every year at the Singularity University,
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I’ve done two, three years in a row now,
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and I come in with the contrarian view,
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and what I point out is, if this is the belief,
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who is working on this problem?
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And who can show, certainly Ray Kurzweil can’t show,
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how do you get from Microsoft Office installed on your computer to an intelligence that is talking to you and to which you are uploading your every memory and desire?
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Microsoft Office ain’t going to get you there.
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Microsoft isn’t building this.
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And Office in the year 2029, is this going to be bigger, you know, load slower, and cost, you know, cost about
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as much, and take up, you know, 100 times the disk space. That’s, office will still be office.
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You know, it may be 3D in front of your head in augmented reality, but you’ll be, you know,
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still writing letters. And so, who is making this thing happen? Nobody is the answer. It’s a complete idea
00:17:07 ►
drawn from the air that appeals to a certain, as we said, it’s like a religious idea almost.
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It sounds cool to people so that they’re into it. But so does Trek sound cool and you go
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to the con and you live in the world of Star Trek. It’s living in the world of the singularities,
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living in one of these science fiction-y fantasy worlds.
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And then everything is colored by that.
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So you live in a Star Wars world.
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You live in the world of a religious group, the world of Scientology.
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For a while it’s very cool and reassuring and stimulating
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and comes with social interactions and groups.
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But after a while, the tears are showing through
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and there’s sky showing through the structure.
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So the crescendo is an alternative.
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It’s saying celebrate all voices, all approaches, all inventions, all fanaticism.
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Come at this thing as an anthropologist
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and look down, look down from your spacecraft
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and look at all the crazy extremes that are going on
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and say, this is astounding that the biosphere,
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after four billion years of evolution, has produced this.
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This thing is so complex and so colorful and so crazy
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and it may not return.
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This may be a unique time.
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Study it and
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be amazed.
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And when you
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accept everything equally, when you
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accept the viewpoint of the
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Islamic extremist,
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when you get into their
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shoes and you see the world from
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how they do,
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watch the videos they watch on YouTube, get enraged,
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and you step into the world of the right-wing fundamentalists in the U.S.,
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you’ll find a very similar kind of person watching very similar kinds of things,
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getting the same kind of angst and anger.
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Experience what they do.
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Be completely empathic with them. Then step into the world of
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the person building a kite that can generate electricity at high altitude and their excitement,
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their vision for the future. Step into all these shoes, all these shoes to saturate and absorb
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yourself with all the voices. Then you’ll understand where it is going and you’ll understand how to explain things
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to all those people.
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Because if you have, like Spock,
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if you’ve done a mind meld
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and you’ve internalized the state
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of all these different people
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and all these voices,
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you will be wise
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and you will be able to guide.
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And that’s what it comes down to.
00:19:47 ►
That’s good advice. That beautiful nice um great well i guess you also have to accept the singularity singularity
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view of course and it’s cool it is it’s cool and you go in there and now of course in the
00:20:00 ►
singularity university they’re not really teaching anything to do with the singularity and ray is not
00:20:04 ►
around right it’s just everyone talking about the stuff they’re not really teaching anything to do with the singularity, and Ray is not around. Right, right.
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It’s just everyone talking about the stuff they’re working on.
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So at the beginning when they were setting it up, I said,
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don’t call it Singularity University.
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You’ll be tarred and feathered with this crackpot thing.
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And I tried, I sent emails and tried to convince and said,
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anything, call it, you know, nonularity or un and said, anything, call it, you know,
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you know, nonularity or unularity,
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anything, just don’t call it that.
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Because, you know,
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there’s a certain attraction to it,
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but then it will always be, you know,
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thought of as this crackpot thing.
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And poor Ray, I mean,
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Ray now has this following of people that are just after him
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because he’s brought it on himself.
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I mean, he’s not a scientist.
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He’s not an objective thinker.
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He just comes up with these notions.
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And he got savagely taken down at Stanford about three or four years ago
00:20:58 ►
on his sort of curves going and all this stuff.
00:21:02 ►
He was invited to present at Stanford.
00:21:05 ►
He got just cut apart.
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And he switched to life extension work.
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And the sign, and this is also important
00:21:14 ►
if we look at the people who influence society.
00:21:18 ►
So, you know, he’s won national medals of honor
00:21:21 ►
and everything for his work.
00:21:22 ►
But if you see people who get into this mode,
00:21:25 ►
there’s a fellow who was promoting the idea of a face on Mars for a while.
00:21:30 ►
Yeah, yeah.
00:21:31 ►
Yeah, and I remember I had an involvement with this
00:21:34 ►
because he called me at one point wanting to speak at our contact conference.
00:21:39 ►
It was called Contact, and it was serious planetary scientists,
00:21:43 ►
anthropologists looking at the ideas if you did
00:21:46 ►
contact an extraterrestrial civilization with a signal or something what would you do and
00:21:50 ►
these people have been meeting for 25 years looking at this really cool group of people
00:21:57 ►
you know science fiction writers come to the meeting really really cool he wanted to present
00:22:01 ►
at it i said one i can’t give you permission because jim finero runs this
00:22:06 ►
meeting you have to call him i i doubt if you’re going to be able to present because you’re making
00:22:11 ►
claims that frankly don’t aren’t substantiated by anything you know just by your imagination
00:22:18 ►
and he was pretty miffed about that and then i was on the phone to Art Bell, because Art, we were getting ready to do a
00:22:25 ►
show on avatars, because I’d written the book Avatars, and Art wanted to do, he said, get your
00:22:31 ►
coffee pot going, because this is all night, coast to coast. And we were getting ready to do the show,
00:22:37 ►
maybe in the next day or so, and then Art, unfortunately for me, he pops up a web site, and it’s one of the earlier Mars orbiting craft that NASA
00:22:47 ►
had deployed, you know, to do more planetary surface exploration, and they had taken a
00:22:53 ►
shot of this rock outcropping that Hoagland was, you know, the face on Mars. So Art said,
00:23:00 ►
I got to go, I got to go, because the face on Mars scam has broken,
00:23:09 ►
and now I’ve got to take this down.
00:23:12 ►
And I said, Art, you get them going up and down.
00:23:14 ►
He said, yep, I get them going.
00:23:18 ►
I build them up, and when they come down, I get them coming down.
00:23:21 ►
I said, does that bother you sometimes?
00:23:23 ►
He said, well, sometimes.
00:23:25 ►
And then we hung up the phone.
00:23:28 ►
Now the interesting thing was for art,
00:23:32 ►
and this is a good example of influence in our civilization.
00:23:36 ►
So shortly after that, the Heaven’s Gate thing happened.
00:23:41 ►
And if you remember, it was someone who came on Art Bell’s show that claimed that they saw that there is a spacecraft going along next to a comet
00:23:46 ►
that’s coming toward the Earth,
00:23:48 ►
and big things are going to happen.
00:23:50 ►
And these people, these 39 people in a house in San Diego,
00:23:54 ►
took the Kool-Aid, and they committed suicide
00:23:57 ►
because of some crazy leader.
00:24:00 ►
It was like a Jonestown massacre, but in suburban San Diego.
00:24:04 ►
Now, it shook Art Bell so much that he brought this guy back on.
00:24:08 ►
He was so shook up.
00:24:10 ►
And the guy said, well, I just made it all up.
00:24:13 ►
And Art just bit into him.
00:24:15 ►
He savaged this guy on the air.
00:24:19 ►
Here’s a good one.
00:24:20 ►
So I’m your age, 23, 24, 25.
00:24:29 ►
Here’s a good one. So I’m your age, 23, 24, 25. I, like you, wondered, is there a conspiracy running the world? Could there be? And I had my golden opportunity when I was about 24
00:24:34 ►
years old. I was in Los Angeles in graduate school and I hung out with this guy who was
00:24:39 ►
in the neighborhood I played chess with, who was an international financier. And he’d worked with, boy, I can’t remember.
00:24:49 ►
He’d worked with Onassis. He’d worked with Onassis on his ship. And this is the fellow
00:24:56 ►
who married Jacqueline Kennedy. And he was a global financier. And he was a real character.
00:25:04 ►
and he was a global financier and he was a real character.
00:25:07 ►
Aristotle Onassis.
00:25:10 ►
And one of the deals we were in,
00:25:14 ►
they were all weird deals of government, military-issued debt which had to be sold for pennies on the dollar
00:25:17 ►
and it was from the government of Indonesia or the military of Indonesia.
00:25:20 ►
Weird stuff.
00:25:21 ►
Giant pearls from Iran.
00:25:24 ►
Doré gold bars. They’re stored in warehouses
00:25:27 ►
that used to belong to some government, right? And these were the deals that this fellow was
00:25:32 ►
involved with. So one day we went out to this house in Inglewood, California, and there was
00:25:38 ►
this guy, this Turkish guy with his whole retinue, with his family. He was a bald guy,
00:25:41 ►
with his whole retinue, with his family.
00:25:45 ►
He was a bald guy, and his name was Kojak, of course,
00:25:47 ►
out of the old character on TV.
00:25:52 ►
And Kojak had all these briefcases full of this stuff,
00:25:56 ►
which my mentor was looking through and trying to make deals with.
00:25:58 ►
And these deals are, they’re as shady as you can come, right?
00:26:01 ►
But they’re fun.
00:26:03 ►
They’re fun and bizarre and strange.
00:26:05 ►
And I got a chance to ask Kojak,
00:26:08 ►
and I’d heard a rumor that this fellow Kojak
00:26:11 ►
has had a career as an assassin,
00:26:13 ►
hired by governments to off other governments.
00:26:16 ►
This is what you see in Hollywood, right?
00:26:19 ►
So I thought, this is my opportunity to ask this man
00:26:23 ►
if there is a conspiracy,
00:26:26 ►
because he works for governments and offs other governments, right?
00:26:30 ►
How much more conspiratorial can you get?
00:26:34 ►
And he’d worked on the government of Chile.
00:26:36 ►
He had helped assassinate an elected, duly elected government on behalf of our government.
00:26:41 ►
Wonderful things like this.
00:26:43 ►
And he said, yeah, he was sort of waxing poetic.
00:26:46 ►
My family’s been in this business for 500 years.
00:26:49 ►
In Turkey, in Lebanon, we’ve been trading, we’ve been working for princes,
00:26:55 ►
we’ve been moving money, cleaning things up, knocking people off.
00:26:59 ►
This is our family history.
00:27:02 ►
And I got into it just like my ancestors because of the get rid of the bastards
00:27:06 ►
that are running these countries. And I concluded after 20 years that the bastards hiring me were
00:27:14 ►
no better, or they could have been worse, the people coming in. I wasn’t doing anyone any good.
00:27:19 ►
So I quit. And now I’m on the move all the time. So I deal in these instruments. I said, can I ask you a question?
00:27:26 ►
He said, oh, sure.
00:27:27 ►
I said, is there like an all-knowing, all-intelligent conspiracy
00:27:31 ►
that is running the planet?
00:27:34 ►
You have to have been, if there is,
00:27:36 ►
they have to have been some of your clients, right?
00:27:39 ►
Because what you do would serve their interests.
00:27:42 ►
He said, well, he thought for time in the past, there would have
00:27:49 ►
been a wealthy family that had a big influence in a region. It might have been the Rothschilds,
00:27:55 ►
maybe in Europe at a period of time before the war. It might have been that there was influence,
00:28:02 ►
but after World War II, it all changed. After World War II,
00:28:06 ►
Europe was on its back. Europe was not projecting its power anymore. But America was coming
00:28:14 ►
up. But these were new people. These were naive people. And they were becoming very
00:28:21 ►
influential, but not in the same way. And then in the 60s, it started to move to
00:28:26 ►
Asia, and money started to move there, manufacturing, Japan. And then in the 70s, it started to move to
00:28:33 ►
my region, Saudi Arabia, oil money. And then we all realized that this thing is a wave. This wave
00:28:41 ►
is moving around the world. It can’t be predicted where it goes. And you just hold on and you roll with it.
00:28:48 ►
And anyone who tries to control it is thrown off by this wave.
00:28:53 ►
So no, there is no conspiracy.
00:28:56 ►
There is not even a person or a group of people who have in their mind an idea of what’s going on.
00:29:06 ►
Or a piece of the whole picture.
00:29:14 ►
There is not. And this was in the mid-1980s, so you can imagine. So no, not only isn’t there a conspiracy, there couldn’t be a conspiracy. And as Terence McKenna said, the horrible
00:29:19 ►
truth is, there’s no one in charge. So that’s another thing for the crescendo view.
00:29:26 ►
If no one is in charge,
00:29:28 ►
you can actually give up all the energy you were expending
00:29:31 ►
in blaming people
00:29:33 ►
or in being fearful of the people you think are holding the conspiracy
00:29:39 ►
or in expecting someone to fix things.
00:29:42 ►
If no one is in charge,
00:29:45 ►
it’s like if you have the sudden revelation that there isn’t a God that is running everything,
00:29:51 ►
then in fact, you know, nature is running itself, you are running things,
00:29:56 ►
then you become responsible.
00:29:58 ►
Well, if God’s not, you know, looking over me, I have to become like a God.
00:30:04 ►
I have to become benevolent and caring and, you know, a good me, I have to become like a god. I have to become benevolent and caring and,
00:30:08 ►
you know, a good kind of a god. I have to actually take that role myself. And if there’s no one in
00:30:13 ►
charge, don’t act like there is anyone in charge, then you start getting really responsible. You
00:30:18 ►
say, my god, nobody’s in charge. Or am I not god? Nobody’s in charge. Therefore, everything I do contributes to
00:30:27 ►
our riding of this wave to a good degree or not. And the crescendo is when the wave just
00:30:34 ►
enters into this incredibly fast undulatory pattern and so many changes are coming.
00:30:41 ►
And so if you come into the first breath of your life saying no one’s in charge and yet
00:30:47 ►
everyone is in charge, then we’re going to be able to make it through those undulations. And we’re
00:30:52 ►
going to revel in them, to tell you the truth, because the undulations of that wave in this
00:30:58 ►
more intense crescendo that we’re going to come through are going to be an incredible ride,
00:31:03 ►
a roller coaster ride. We’re going to learn things we could never have learned. We’re going to come through are going to be an incredible ride, a rollercoaster ride. They’re going to be,
00:31:06 ►
we’re going to learn things
00:31:07 ►
we could never have learned.
00:31:08 ►
We’re going to be freed from things.
00:31:10 ►
You know, the crescendo will throw off
00:31:12 ►
all the old religions.
00:31:14 ►
It will throw off the conspiracy theories.
00:31:16 ►
It will throw off, you know,
00:31:19 ►
crusty old corporate jobs will be gone
00:31:22 ►
as they’re disappearing quickly.
00:31:24 ►
And replaced will be
00:31:26 ►
self-sufficiency, direct communication with nature, with other human beings, with media,
00:31:33 ►
the creation of opinion directly, which is what we’re already seeing. All the things
00:31:38 ►
that replace, because we’re so flexible in our minds, we let it in. We say, fine, let that old crusty thing go.
00:31:47 ►
I’m ready for the next because I know no one’s in charge.
00:31:50 ►
No one’s going to give me direction.
00:31:52 ►
When the Soviet Union fell,
00:31:54 ►
one of the most interesting things was the journalists
00:31:57 ►
standing around at Pravda saying,
00:32:00 ►
we were always told what to report.
00:32:04 ►
Now we’re not being told what to report.
00:32:06 ►
We are in a state of complete confusion.
00:32:09 ►
What do we do?
00:32:12 ►
Now, of course, they had to learn that they could go out and form their own opinion
00:32:16 ►
and they could shape a story.
00:32:18 ►
And for them, that moment was, this is a terrible responsibility.
00:32:23 ►
Now think about that.
00:32:24 ►
So they had given that power to the government,
00:32:27 ►
which told them what to do,
00:32:28 ►
which that was for better or for worse what society was to be told.
00:32:34 ►
Now it comes upon them for a moment,
00:32:36 ►
there was a moment of complete honesty saying,
00:32:40 ►
this is a terrible responsibility.
00:32:42 ►
I don’t know if I’m up to it.
00:32:44 ►
Now, of course, most reporters going out in the world have a point of view,
00:32:48 ►
and, of course, they feel they do, but many of them perhaps don’t.
00:32:52 ►
They don’t understand what the full responsibility is,
00:32:55 ►
and those Pravda people did.
00:32:58 ►
They almost said, we can’t do this.
00:33:00 ►
How can we put our own viewpoint?
00:33:02 ►
With my paltry knowledge, how can I go and report on the garbage collection policy of the city of Moscow
00:33:09 ►
with any authority, which people care about?
00:33:13 ►
But I can say anything. I can say political things.
00:33:16 ►
We can say anything about the garbage collection,
00:33:19 ►
failure of collecting garbage on the right days and who’s to blame.
00:33:23 ►
And they’ve never done that.
00:33:24 ►
They’ve never blamed a city official, never done that.
00:33:27 ►
Well, what if we hurt somebody?
00:33:29 ►
What if we’re wrong when we do this story?
00:33:33 ►
Think of that, that crystal moment
00:33:35 ►
where they were given the responsibility.
00:33:39 ►
And this is 20-plus years ago.
00:33:43 ►
So if you give yourself the responsibility for,
00:33:47 ►
because you don’t believe that anybody’s in charge,
00:33:49 ►
you know it for a fact,
00:33:52 ►
you give yourself a piece of responsibility,
00:33:55 ►
that is a life changer.
00:33:57 ►
There’s no God, there’s no government agency,
00:34:02 ►
there’s no…
00:34:03 ►
This, of course, happens to people in disasters.
00:34:06 ►
And this is why humans shine in disasters.
00:34:09 ►
They either reach their lowest points,
00:34:12 ►
but often humans absolutely shine
00:34:15 ►
when all that structure disappears
00:34:17 ►
and they rescue people from the torrent
00:34:21 ►
and help each other out.
00:34:24 ►
That makes some of the best stories and the best movies.
00:34:29 ►
Totally.
00:34:30 ►
Well, maybe we could talk about your recent work
00:34:35 ►
and what that’s taught you about the nature of life and how it works
00:34:41 ►
and especially this chemistry.
00:34:43 ►
This chemistry.
00:34:43 ►
I mean, you don’t have to necessarily get into the specifics, but really, what have
00:34:48 ►
you learned about reality and life?
00:34:51 ►
Well, the auspicious, the audacious project that I undertook several years ago and I’ve
00:34:57 ►
been thinking about since 1985, so for almost over 25 years, is how did life get started?
00:35:03 ►
over 25 years is, how did life get started?
00:35:08 ►
Now, if you, for a moment, put away ideas of a creator,
00:35:12 ►
of a watchmaker, putting it together, think of this.
00:35:17 ►
The universe runs along quite happily with atoms and molecules and planets and oceans and stars and blowing up things
00:35:21 ►
and condensing things.
00:35:22 ►
Laws of physics are happening.
00:35:24 ►
And then suddenly, in some location,
00:35:27 ►
this thing arises that has an internal plan that says,
00:35:32 ►
here’s my plan of what to do.
00:35:34 ►
But the plan is made out of the same blobs as it is made out of.
00:35:38 ►
It runs along the plan like a zipper and says,
00:35:42 ►
okay, to build a wall around me, I’ll do this.
00:35:46 ►
To eat food, I’ll make this thing which will help me eat food.
00:35:50 ►
And to see, I’ll build this thing from this plan.
00:35:54 ►
What an audacious, bizarre, trippy, psychedelic thing this is.
00:36:00 ►
That this thing emerged on its own from molecules or machines that are just sort of there,
00:36:08 ►
and you get this thing.
00:36:10 ►
And, of course, creationists call this
00:36:12 ►
the problem of irreducible complexity,
00:36:14 ►
that there is no pathway.
00:36:17 ►
And for software nerds like me,
00:36:18 ►
this is the ultimate coding challenge.
00:36:20 ►
The code has to write itself.
00:36:23 ►
Now, this also helps.
00:36:25 ►
This is the unsingularity project
00:36:27 ►
because this project would be, in a sense,
00:36:31 ►
the ultimate singularity project.
00:36:33 ►
And in fact, it is the only meaningful singularity project,
00:36:37 ►
the origin of life, the origin of widgets,
00:36:40 ►
that if you could simulate the widgets in software
00:36:42 ►
and show that the widgets, without somebody mucking around,
00:36:46 ►
ratcheted and assembled themselves into a machine that is now a lifelike thing.
00:36:51 ►
That’s a singularity event.
00:36:53 ►
So if you really focus on this, let’s make this a goal,
00:36:58 ►
you find out how incredibly hard it is.
00:37:01 ►
So chemistry, let’s go back to people you know, people’s eyes glaze over.
00:37:07 ►
There are people who have built supercomputers, you know, costing millions of dollars to simulate
00:37:12 ►
a little cube of simulated chemical volume, 100 nanometers on the side, with thousands of atoms.
00:37:20 ►
And they are proudly announcing, in this day and and age that they have been able to simulate a microsecond of time
00:37:29 ►
for this little simulated chemical space,
00:37:33 ►
and they did it in only 30 days of calculation,
00:37:37 ►
flat out on this great big powerful machine.
00:37:40 ►
30 days, we got a microsecond.
00:37:43 ►
So this is a very small space. This is like a little
00:37:47 ►
corner of a cubbyhole of a part of an E. coli organism, just a tiny little space. And they
00:37:54 ►
simulated, you know, so you think of the computing, it’s not really computing, but the computing
00:38:00 ►
nature is doing all the time, outstrips, you know, our largest supercomputing grid. The grid that
00:38:06 ►
wins at Jeopardy and the grid that beats people at chess isn’t up to simulating a corner of
00:38:15 ►
a single living, simple living cell, period. It’s not up to it for any length of time.
00:38:23 ►
any length of time. So nature is awesomely hard to simulate in the computer.
00:38:28 ►
And a single neuron in the human brain, to simulate
00:38:32 ►
it at the molecular level is just precisely
00:38:35 ►
and is inconceivable right now.
00:38:39 ►
So those who believe one can upload consciousness to technology,
00:38:44 ►
granted you could simulate the neuron a little bit simpler,
00:38:48 ►
but there’s billions and trillions of those things in your brain.
00:38:53 ►
How can you have a mind that is less than what neurons do
00:38:57 ►
if you’re trying to upload consciousness?
00:38:59 ►
So if we can’t even do one neuron thing,
00:39:02 ►
how are we going to upload consciousness exactly?
00:39:06 ►
So I picked the task to work on as a research project for many years,
00:39:11 ►
and I started in about 2007.
00:39:13 ►
How can you use computers to simulate the origin of life,
00:39:16 ►
the pathway from the simple molecules to the big machine
00:39:20 ►
that is what would be called a protocell?
00:39:24 ►
And we’ve run two batches of simulations on
00:39:27 ►
something called the evolution grid or the evo grid in the past 12 months and shown ourselves
00:39:33 ►
how incredibly hard it is to do this. And we’re doing only a thousand atoms in a little cube in
00:39:40 ►
space and we’re distributing that across lots of computers so we simulate a thousand atoms moving
00:39:45 ►
around forming molecules forming bonds breaking bonds just doing that those basics it is it is
00:39:51 ►
very hard so i’ve switched horses and this is in the middle of doing a phd maybe not always the
00:39:58 ►
best thing to do but the the conclusions of the phd are this this is an intractable problem in computing.
00:40:07 ►
This is just too hard to do.
00:40:10 ►
You can go into a lab in chemistry and build little vesicles,
00:40:15 ►
little hollow shapes made out of lipid, made out of fats,
00:40:21 ►
and watch them move around.
00:40:22 ►
You can inject things into them.
00:40:24 ►
You could have them,
00:40:25 ►
stuff will go through their walls. They’re like simple cells, but they’re nowhere near
00:40:30 ►
biological. People have been doing that for a hundred years. That’s hard too. Are you going
00:40:36 ►
to get the origin of life by doing it in chemistry? Possibly not. It’s just too hard of a problem.
00:40:47 ►
It’s just too hard of a problem. There is a middle way, and the middle way is to say, let’s create a toy universe. And this concept came from Freeman Dyson, who I went to see,
00:40:53 ►
I occasionally visit the Institute in Princeton where he is working. I came to see him a couple
00:40:59 ►
of times and he talked about toy universes. Universes that have a physics, they’re invented, they don’t do every
00:41:07 ►
little thing that the real universe does, but they have just enough juice, just enough physics,
00:41:12 ►
so that stuff can happen that’s interesting. So what I’m now doing is designing a toy universe
00:41:18 ►
that would have enough juice to show in a toy life form that if you simulated it on computers of today
00:41:28 ►
up to 2050, you might get an artificial origin of life happening inside them. Now, if you
00:41:37 ►
get that happening, and of course, who will fund such a thing? There isn’t many commercial
00:41:41 ►
spin-offs of this. But if you have that happen,
00:41:45 ►
then that’s a fundamental thing for the future of human beings
00:41:49 ►
and human civilization.
00:41:51 ►
Because it also goes down to you are responsible,
00:41:56 ►
i.e. you’re here not because something put you here
00:42:00 ►
and fabricated you and guided the evolution
00:42:03 ►
and created the whole planet.
00:42:04 ►
It’s an emergent phenomenon, and so are you.
00:42:07 ►
And you are an ongoing story, and the story is written in your genes,
00:42:11 ►
but it’s also written in your mind.
00:42:13 ►
And you have responsibility for this amazing emergent phenomenon.
00:42:19 ►
You’re perhaps one of the greatest outputs of it,
00:42:22 ►
and the reason the planet went through all the trouble.
00:42:25 ►
You’re an accident,
00:42:26 ►
as Stephen Jay Gould or Richard Dawkins would say,
00:42:30 ►
the apes were going extinct.
00:42:32 ►
People don’t know this, but I mean,
00:42:34 ►
the great apes,
00:42:36 ►
regardless of whether humans had emerged
00:42:38 ►
off the plains of Africa,
00:42:40 ►
were going extinct.
00:42:41 ►
Why?
00:42:42 ►
Because the rainforest,
00:42:44 ►
the forests were drying up due to climate change,
00:42:47 ►
and this we’re talking two, three million years ago in Africa. But also the arrival of the great
00:42:54 ►
competitor, monkeys. Troops of monkeys. Think of them like a colonial insect group. Monkeys are,
00:43:03 ►
they have smaller brains, they’re faster moving, they have guards,
00:43:08 ►
they have foragers, they have soldiers, they have this whole societal structure. They’re
00:43:13 ►
like an ant colony or a beehive. If monkeys moved into the area, they’re going to get
00:43:18 ►
every piece of food. And they’re fast. And they’re an indefensible power,
00:43:26 ►
these troops of monkeys.
00:43:27 ►
So here you have highland gorillas.
00:43:29 ►
They come along, they find a banana tree.
00:43:33 ►
What they do is they sit there for several days.
00:43:36 ►
They eat the tree.
00:43:37 ►
I mean, they eat the bananas, but they also consume the tree.
00:43:40 ►
I mean, they’re herbivores.
00:43:41 ►
They’re vegetarians.
00:43:42 ►
They’ll consume the entire tree,
00:43:44 ►
and they’ll crunch everything down their incisors.
00:43:46 ►
It must be the most impressive things to work on if you were a dentist.
00:43:50 ►
But they’re slow and they take a long time to create.
00:43:55 ►
They’re young, they’re long-lived, but their bodies are big, their brains are big,
00:44:00 ►
they’re costly to maintain.
00:44:02 ►
If a monkey got to that banana plantation first,
00:44:05 ►
that banana tree there, it wouldn’t be there.
00:44:08 ►
The high-value foods would be gone.
00:44:10 ►
The bananas would be gone.
00:44:12 ►
So the great ape populations were declining and declining and declining.
00:44:17 ►
And we were headed out.
00:44:19 ►
So we can’t get on our high horse here.
00:44:22 ►
We’re an accident in a sense that we made it.
00:44:27 ►
We slipped through.
00:44:28 ►
Somehow we slipped through.
00:44:30 ►
So the miracle of, if you look in the writing in your genes, that coding, there are fragments
00:44:39 ►
of your gene that go back unaltered to the earliest microorganisms that had genetic codes in the
00:44:47 ►
early oceans. And you’re talking two, three, you know, four billion years ago. And those codes
00:44:54 ►
outlasted star systems, whole star systems. They’re so robust. It’s such a freaky property.
00:45:03 ►
And your ancestors, you are a line
00:45:06 ►
based on a line of successful ancestors
00:45:08 ►
that lived long enough to reproduce
00:45:10 ►
and that single-celled thing
00:45:12 ►
in that ocean is yours
00:45:14 ►
belongs to you
00:45:15 ►
that pikaia that has the little notochord backbone
00:45:18 ►
535 million years
00:45:21 ►
in the Burgess Shale
00:45:22 ►
that’s swimming along and eating garbage
00:45:24 ►
at the bottom of the ocean. That’s your
00:45:26 ►
personal ancestor.
00:45:28 ►
That is you.
00:45:30 ►
And all the way up through the thing that
00:45:32 ►
crawled on land that had the
00:45:34 ►
lung, all of them belong
00:45:35 ►
to you. They’re your lineage and
00:45:37 ►
they’re a unique lineage.
00:45:39 ►
We share common ancestors but they’re
00:45:41 ►
unique. One of them
00:45:43 ►
ate an insect and managed to get enough energy to reproduce at one point.
00:45:48 ►
That’s a unique pathway to you.
00:45:51 ►
That insect was eaten.
00:45:53 ►
So the miracle upon…
00:45:54 ►
You don’t need religion for miracles.
00:45:57 ►
The fact that you exist and all this exists
00:45:59 ►
is stacked upon miracles, turtles all the way down.
00:46:03 ►
So if we grok that, we don’t need any religious stories anymore.
00:46:08 ►
We grok that and you look into that chasm of improbability
00:46:12 ►
and of miraculous survival and innovation.
00:46:16 ►
You just stand there in awe and you look out into the universe
00:46:20 ►
and you say, we’re rare, we’re astoundingly rare.
00:46:23 ►
We’re now seeing exoplanets,
00:46:29 ►
and we’re seeing that many of the exosolar systems have hot giants.
00:46:32 ►
They have like big Jupiters orbiting close in.
00:46:35 ►
When you think of it, you slap your head and say, but of course.
00:46:38 ►
If I was a solar system and I was forming,
00:46:40 ►
I’d have like one or two stars,
00:46:43 ►
and if I had just one star, say for instance,
00:46:45 ►
and I had a big accretion disk of material, the big hot things would kind of get like most of the goodies, and they’d be
00:46:50 ►
close in, because the accretion disk is getting fatter as it gets close to the star that’s
00:46:54 ►
forming.
00:46:54 ►
Of course, the Jupiters and Saturns would be close in, they’d be boilingly hot, and
00:46:59 ►
then I’d get a few rocky planets further out.
00:47:03 ►
Well, what is that solar system for a living space?
00:47:06 ►
How comfortable is it?
00:47:07 ►
It ain’t.
00:47:08 ►
Because you’ve suddenly got, you know, you’re way out here.
00:47:12 ►
You’re in the cold and you’ve got this hot Jupiter that’s perturbing your orbit
00:47:16 ►
and your orbit is all strange and oceans may be liquid for a period of time
00:47:21 ►
and then freeze and then boil off and it’s not happy.
00:47:25 ►
So our solar system,
00:47:26 ►
and of course you’re exposed to stuff coming in,
00:47:29 ►
our solar system is inverted.
00:47:32 ►
Circular orbits, a stable star,
00:47:35 ►
Jupiter’s and Saturn’s on the outside,
00:47:37 ►
they’re vacuuming up all the hazardous material.
00:47:40 ►
They’re cold.
00:47:41 ►
They’re protecting us.
00:47:42 ►
We have a giant outsized moon
00:47:44 ►
that was probably formed by a collision. They’re protecting us. We have a giant outsized moon that was probably formed by a collision.
00:47:46 ►
It’s protecting us.
00:47:48 ►
We’re in a stable orbit around a stable star.
00:47:51 ►
That is a freakishly rare solar system.
00:47:54 ►
That is a real special one.
00:47:56 ►
And so we’re now looking, we look down to our genes and thinking, how on earth?
00:48:01 ►
And then we look up and say, wow, there are so few of these,
00:48:06 ►
you know, of our type of setup.
00:48:08 ►
And then if that doesn’t give you a sense of specialness
00:48:13 ►
or responsibility or lack of specialness,
00:48:16 ►
you know, what would?
00:48:18 ►
No religion will give that to you.
00:48:20 ►
No product will give that to you.
00:48:23 ►
So it’s looking straight into these astounding
00:48:26 ►
realities, you know, unfettered. And scientists are getting better at telling the story, but
00:48:33 ►
truthfully, it’s the journalists and the people in between that are telling this story and
00:48:39 ►
making the computer animations and making the poetry and telling that story
00:48:45 ►
that are giving people the look through this window.
00:48:50 ►
And it’s a window, but it’s also a door,
00:48:52 ►
because when you look through that,
00:48:54 ►
it’s like the fellow who went to the Giza Plateau.
00:48:57 ►
He went there in the early 70s.
00:49:00 ►
There was a researcher who started out being part of a cult
00:49:04 ►
that believed that the pyramids were built by UFO aliens.
00:49:08 ►
So he was funded to go there.
00:49:10 ►
He went there, and then he got connected with the Egyptian antiquities people,
00:49:14 ►
and real excavation got completely fascinated by the reality of this dig.
00:49:19 ►
Went back to the States, got a PhD in archaeology,
00:49:22 ►
and has been working there on the Giza Plateau for 20 years.
00:49:26 ►
And they’ve now excavated the city of the artisans that built the pyramids.
00:49:32 ►
And so we were at a conference, and he showed,
00:49:35 ►
archaeologists still use slides, slide projectors,
00:49:39 ►
very high resolution, it’s a good medium, no PowerPoint.
00:49:43 ►
And he showed us slide after slide of this cityscape, which was much better laid out than modern day Cairo. He showed
00:49:50 ►
an overlay of this beautifully laid out city and then modern Cairo coming up to it with
00:49:55 ►
all this labyrinthine streets. And there was the big bakery to make the meals in these conical baking horns for these people.
00:50:06 ►
There’s a clinic.
00:50:08 ►
There’s housing.
00:50:10 ►
And the interesting thing is, of course, he said, the cult never gave me any of this.
00:50:15 ►
This is so much more profoundly interesting than what came out of some guy’s imagination.
00:50:21 ►
The reality is so much more mind-blowingly interesting. We’ve discovered that
00:50:26 ►
the pyramids were not made by slaves. That’s another invention of somebody. They were made
00:50:32 ►
by competing gangs. They would call themselves gangs. We find their graffiti everywhere.
00:50:38 ►
So these people competed from villages to be part of these work crews because it was in high privilege.
00:50:46 ►
And then they would compete on construction.
00:50:48 ►
And we would find in the shaft in the Great Pyramid
00:50:52 ►
writing in Egyptian that said,
00:50:55 ►
the drunken friends of Khufu have reached this point first.
00:50:59 ►
And that was a note that we’re winning.
00:51:02 ►
You know, it’s season 32 and we built up to this
00:51:06 ►
point. And this thing was a national
00:51:07 ►
sport. It was a pastime. It was
00:51:09 ►
a great project. It was a privilege to be a part
00:51:12 ►
of it. So then you look at the pyramids
00:51:13 ►
with this whole different reality.
00:51:16 ►
These things were,
00:51:17 ►
these things meant a lot. People cared about
00:51:19 ►
this. They really cared about it.
00:51:22 ►
So facing reality
00:51:24 ►
is the ultimate in beneficial trip.
00:51:28 ►
And I think that that is part of this crescendo. If the crescendo can throw off all these old
00:51:33 ►
crusty, irrelevant, produced usually by a small group of people things and allow us
00:51:41 ►
to look directly into reality without fear and unfettered, just
00:51:47 ►
in a state of awe, uninterpreted.
00:51:51 ►
That’s transforming.
00:51:52 ►
That’s a civilization transformer.
00:51:56 ►
Definitely, definitely.
00:51:57 ►
There you go.
00:51:59 ►
Well, there’s one thing that piques my interest, too, and you were talking about just how much computation power
00:52:07 ►
and time and dedication it takes to try and just find one minute piece of space-time
00:52:13 ►
that actually exists and this room is full of it,
00:52:16 ►
and everywhere in the universe you find it.
00:52:19 ►
Did that give you some new reverence for nature and reality?
00:52:23 ►
some new reverence for nature and reality?
00:52:33 ►
Yeah, the discovery of the incredible impotence of our technology,
00:52:34 ►
of our computing technology.
00:52:36 ►
You know, I collect old computers.
00:52:39 ►
So I have the Digibarn Computer Museum. We saw the Cray-1 supercomputer sitting there.
00:52:43 ►
And, you know, if you’re brought up in this culture,
00:52:45 ►
you sort of get into this delusional state,
00:52:49 ►
but it’s a wonderful, happy state
00:52:50 ►
that all things are possible with digital computation.
00:52:54 ►
And if you’re in virtual worlds or World of Warcraft,
00:52:58 ►
it’s like a compelling reality.
00:53:00 ►
You think, yeah, reality can be represented in here,
00:53:03 ►
but it’s a cardboard cutout. It’s
00:53:06 ►
really a cardboard cutout compared to what is going on in nature. But it’s a useful cardboard
00:53:15 ►
cutout. But there are those who then extend it infinitely and claim it is the savior of all, but in fact it’s a fragile, error-ridden, handmade technology.
00:53:31 ►
And previous technologies, the technology of steam railways and steam engines in the 19th century,
00:53:38 ►
people held great belief for those.
00:53:40 ►
I mean, they felt you could create an intelligent speaking being out of pistons and cogs and gears.
00:53:47 ►
I mean, this is a Victorian idea, the Frankenstein idea, in a sense, came from this.
00:53:52 ►
And we look back and think, how absurd.
00:53:55 ►
You know, that’s just completely absurd.
00:53:57 ►
But people in the deep 21st century that look back at us, and they had such belief in this stuff. I predict that if an alien spacecraft comes into orbit,
00:54:10 ►
it will come into orbit,
00:54:12 ►
it will be this gigantic steam engine thing
00:54:15 ►
with cogs and wheels, it’s huge.
00:54:17 ►
They’ll look at our space station and they’ll say,
00:54:19 ►
ah, using digital technology,
00:54:22 ►
you’ll never get to the stars with that.
00:54:24 ►
This is how we get big, clunky, reliable, million-year warranty parts.
00:54:30 ►
Digital technology, fragile, quick and dirty, inflexible.
00:54:36 ►
It’s basically a kindergartner’s technology.
00:54:39 ►
Software is a kindergarten technology compared to how nature is made.
00:54:45 ►
It’s Fisher-Price.
00:54:47 ►
It’s a Fisher-Price version of reality.
00:54:53 ►
Of course it’s a usable, valuable tool.
00:54:57 ►
It’s something that benefits us greatly in some regard.
00:55:00 ►
I think it’s just that distinction about getting carried away
00:55:03 ►
with it being greater than reality
00:55:04 ►
and the spectacle creating the bubble around you from what really is there.
00:55:09 ►
Yeah, what you’ll see as we get hologram, I mean, holodecks in our homes
00:55:15 ►
and people really immersed in virtual worlds,
00:55:18 ►
especially when augmented reality kicks in,
00:55:20 ►
when you’ve got not just on your smartphone and you’re looking at it
00:55:24 ►
and it’s showing you the constellations in the sky,
00:55:27 ►
but it’s glasses or it’s retinal displays that are giving you data floating all over everything.
00:55:35 ►
A great book is Werner Wenge’s Rainbow’s End.
00:55:39 ►
It’s about San Diego in about 2030, and it’s when augmented reality has really kicked in
00:55:45 ►
and the world is filled with objects and creatures and data and and you’re in
00:55:50 ►
that space but AR is interesting in that AR is about mapping onto the real world
00:55:56 ►
so to try to find this farm you’re driving along and it’s it’s showing you
00:56:02 ►
floating signs that are saying turn left in 29 seconds or something.
00:56:07 ►
I mean, that’s actually useful.
00:56:09 ►
And if you were looking at a dandelion, you know, it’s pulling out,
00:56:14 ►
it’s doing a NASA kind of zoom camera and pulling out the finest detail on the petal
00:56:18 ►
or the little yellow part of the dandelion and it’s showing you the pollen.
00:56:25 ►
little yellow part of the nanoline and it’s showing you the pollen and then the pollen’s getting big and then there’s a leg comes and it sweeps the pollen off and it’s a bee that
00:56:32 ►
is taken and the leg hairs fit perfectly with that pollen and you think, wow, and you’re
00:56:38 ►
just blown away. So AR maybe is a gateway into this transformation of thought. So it takes you away from the virtual world,
00:56:46 ►
which is really quite off there,
00:56:48 ►
and you forget to eat and sleep,
00:56:50 ►
and you pass out on your keyboard,
00:56:53 ►
to joining you back to the real,
00:56:55 ►
letting you see things you couldn’t see before,
00:56:58 ►
except through imagination.
00:57:00 ►
Now, of course, if people lose the ability to have imagination,
00:57:03 ►
we have a problem.
00:57:04 ►
But I’m not afraid of that next wave.
00:57:08 ►
I think I was a pioneer of virtual worlds, but I always saw them as the Keystone Cops.
00:57:14 ►
You know, the Keystone Cops movie, they’re running fast through the streets and there’s no sound.
00:57:19 ►
And they basically fit these short films into the length of the reel
00:57:25 ►
that they could get in a theater at the time.
00:57:27 ►
This is 100 years ago.
00:57:29 ►
Now, of course, we see them sped up and fast,
00:57:31 ►
and the cars are moving fast,
00:57:32 ►
because we’re playing them at the wrong frame rate.
00:57:35 ►
But we play them at that frame rate because it’s more fun.
00:57:38 ►
And maybe the stories aren’t that interesting,
00:57:40 ►
so it’s better to get through them quickly.
00:57:42 ►
But the Keystone Cops, I I mean the virtual worlds and avatar spaces
00:57:46 ►
and multiplayer games of now are the
00:57:48 ►
keystone cops of what
00:57:49 ►
virtual worlds will be
00:57:51 ►
in 20 or 30 years through AR
00:57:54 ►
and big home
00:57:55 ►
holodecks and stuff like that
00:57:57 ►
wow
00:57:59 ►
yeah I mean
00:58:00 ►
it’s just
00:58:03 ►
bizarre to think of how this will all play out, you know,
00:58:07 ►
and technology’s role in the course of our civilization.
00:58:11 ►
Will we revert back without needing much of any of it and taking out little pieces of it,
00:58:16 ►
or will it really blossom into something that really excels?
00:58:21 ►
I think you’ve found the answer in your last year of
00:58:26 ►
filmmaking, which is that you’ve
00:58:28 ►
what you’ve probably
00:58:30 ►
divined out of it is that you need, and you
00:58:32 ►
said this before, you need to
00:58:34 ►
have people that have
00:58:36 ►
one foot in the world
00:58:38 ►
who are doing things in society
00:58:40 ►
or growing things,
00:58:42 ►
helping people,
00:58:44 ►
creating art, whatever, and then one foot
00:58:47 ►
in this very driven up crescendo of high tech and of interaction and engagement and no fear.
00:58:55 ►
And it’s the people that are doing that that are going to be the most effective in showing
00:59:01 ►
us the future.
00:59:02 ►
Yeah, yeah, no definitely. That’s a good point.
00:59:07 ►
And that the people who are allowing themselves to be dominated by pessimism, fear, doom,
00:59:13 ►
are probably marginalizing their mind and their power.
00:59:18 ►
But the people that are completely sold over on the technology
00:59:24 ►
are also deluding themselves.
00:59:28 ►
So there’s some kind of in-between.
00:59:31 ►
There’s a wisdom that says, believe, but be realistic.
00:59:38 ►
And another one that’s part of it says,
00:59:40 ►
be open to the bad news, but not become the bad news.
00:59:46 ►
And there might be another sense that say,
00:59:48 ►
fear for the earth but help a part of the earth be better,
00:59:55 ►
be well or be healed.
00:59:57 ►
So it’s like that in between.
01:00:00 ►
And in some sense, I think to a degree,
01:00:04 ►
Americans like to be in one extreme or the other.
01:00:07 ►
They feel like it’s fake if they’re not 100% in the Tea Party or 100% in Amy Goodman’s court
01:00:15 ►
or 100% in the conspiracy of chemtrails.
01:00:20 ►
They have to be 100% or they’re somehow not real.
01:00:24 ►
And I think that that’s a problem.
01:00:25 ►
When you’re raised in Canada,
01:00:27 ►
Canadians are very skeptical about things.
01:00:30 ►
And Canadians pride themselves, I think, on seeing other points of view.
01:00:34 ►
Being able to say, we invented the ombudsperson.
01:00:38 ►
We invented a lot of the ideas of arbitration.
01:00:42 ►
Formal positions of helping sides determine,
01:00:47 ►
because Canada is a confederation.
01:00:49 ►
Canada is made up of an agreement
01:00:51 ►
between mostly drunken gentlemen
01:00:52 ►
in the 19th century with their flasks.
01:00:56 ►
But it was an agreement that wasn’t forged
01:00:58 ►
through war or conflict or revolution.
01:01:00 ►
It was forged by saying, you know what,
01:01:03 ►
we have to make a whole lot of compromises.
01:01:11 ►
We have to hire a bloody American to build our railway. But eat crow, we don’t have anybody who has this skill. Bring them up, because we don’t have the railway, we have to keep going
01:01:16 ►
down south to ship ourselves across the other part of our nation. This isn’t going to work. So hire
01:01:21 ►
the best person you can. And we need to accommodate
01:01:26 ►
native peoples, aboriginal peoples. We need to accommodate the cultures that are here,
01:01:32 ►
French Canadians, immigrants are coming in. Accommodate them in a different way because
01:01:37 ►
we need the strength of their communities. We don’t have a melting pot here. It’s not enough
01:01:41 ►
of us really to build a big empire or big army. So we don’t do armies. We don’t really do our own defense. And we’re always asked to
01:01:49 ►
fight in other people’s wars anyway. So Canada was this huge set of measured compromises.
01:01:55 ►
And as a result, people are trained, I think, to sort of listen to something and say, hmm,
01:02:01 ►
I’ll take that under consideration. Or, but there’s another point of view, you know.
01:02:07 ►
So that’s our cultural heritage. Whereas for some
01:02:12 ►
reason Americans have to be, if they’re seen to be
01:02:15 ►
saying, I could give up my own view, then they’re seen to be
01:02:19 ►
weak or vacillating or traitor
01:02:23 ►
to the cause.
01:02:27 ►
And that’s the problem.
01:02:31 ►
And the United States specifically is going to have to learn about being much more sophisticated in seeing things.
01:02:36 ►
And Americans who live abroad tend to get that sophistication.
01:02:39 ►
Americans that are raised on the media, corporate culture,
01:02:43 ►
and the mythologies of this country tend to not.
01:02:46 ►
They tend to become, you know, you have to be a believer in something.
01:02:50 ►
You can’t say the other side’s partially right, too,
01:02:53 ►
because then you’re, you know,
01:02:55 ►
and so they’re really pigeonholing themselves.
01:02:58 ►
And that’s, I think, where the growing up phase of the United States
01:03:02 ►
could and should happen is to recognize that that’s a very unsophisticated way to live,
01:03:08 ►
is to believe in a cause to all ends.
01:03:14 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:03:17 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:03:23 ►
Well, there was quite a lot to think about in the conversation that we just listened to.
01:03:28 ►
But for me, the one thing that stood out most clearly was when Bruce said, and I quote,
01:03:34 ►
You’re here not because something put you here and fabricated you and guided the evolution and created the whole planet.
01:03:42 ►
It is an emergent phenomena, and so are you.
01:03:45 ►
And you are an ongoing story, and the story is written in your genes,
01:03:50 ►
but it is also written in your mind.
01:03:52 ►
And you have responsibility for this amazing emergent phenomena.
01:03:57 ►
Well, I sure like that.
01:03:59 ►
And evidence of this amazing emergent phenomena that is our fellow salonners
01:04:04 ►
are the questions that are slowly coming in for the ongoing discussions we plan to have in our global trialogue podcasts.
01:04:12 ►
I just spoke with Bruce yesterday, and he told me how pleased he is with the quality of the questions that he’s been receiving.
01:04:19 ►
And once he gets his Ph.D. thesis behind him, which he’s working on feverishly right now,
01:04:24 ►
we’ll be hearing the first of these interactive podcasts.
01:04:28 ►
So if you want to add your voice to the mix, just send your questions to Bruce at Damer.com
01:04:33 ►
and click on the contact link at the bottom of that page.
01:04:37 ►
That’s Damer.com.
01:04:40 ►
Or through the Psychedelic Salon Forum over at TheGrowReport.com.
01:04:44 ►
Either of those places will get your questions to Bruce,
01:04:47 ►
and the ones that are selected for him to answer in the forum,
01:04:51 ►
we hope that we can get you to actually record the question yourself,
01:04:54 ►
so we can add your voice to the salon.
01:04:57 ►
And in addition to these segments that will be coming your way in the future,
01:05:02 ►
we’ll also be hearing from our friend Matt Palomary,
01:05:04 ►
who is going to conduct a couple of interviews for us in the months ahead.
01:05:09 ►
And as for next week’s podcast, well, I haven’t decided what I’m in the mood for just yet.
01:05:14 ►
But there’s still a lot of unheard material from the Timothy Leary archive that I haven’t gotten to yet,
01:05:19 ►
as well as some more tapes of Terrence McKenna lectures that I have yet to digitize.
01:05:24 ►
as well as some more tapes of Terrence McKenna lectures that I have yet to digitize.
01:05:32 ►
And on top of that, I’ve just finished digitizing all of the talks from the 2001 Entheobotany Conference in Palenque, Mexico.
01:05:39 ►
However, after some rather harsh criticism about the sound quality of the last talk that I podcast from that series,
01:05:43 ►
I’ll only be playing them if they clean up satisfactorily but one way or another
01:05:45 ►
I plan on being back next week
01:05:47 ►
with yet another podcast from here
01:05:49 ►
in the Psychedelic Salon
01:05:50 ►
so that’ll do it for now
01:05:53 ►
and I’ll again close today’s podcast
01:05:55 ►
by reminding you that
01:05:57 ►
this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:06:00 ►
are freely available for you to use
01:06:01 ►
in your own audio projects
01:06:03 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:06:08 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
01:06:10 ►
just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
01:06:14 ►
which you can find via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:06:18 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon,
01:06:21 ►
you can hear a little bit about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,
01:06:31 ►
which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:06:36 ►
And if you want a free copy, don’t feel bad about doing that. Not all of us have a lot of money right now, so just go to genesisgeneration.us and you’ll find the link for the free copy where you
01:06:42 ►
don’t even have to leave your email address. You won’t be followed up or bugged or anything about it.
01:06:47 ►
So I hope that you’ll take advantage of it if it’s something that interests you.
01:06:52 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:06:56 ►
Be well, my friends. L.A. L.A. L.A. L.A.
01:07:12 ►
I’m L.A. L.A. Thank you.