299 - Terence McKenna_ Beyond 2012 Part 2

Program Notes

In today’s podcast we pick up with the next part of a workshop that was held on January 28, 2012 titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”. This section features Bruce Damer, who begins with his “Ode to Terence” [

In the Occupy segment I begin with a recap of what went down in Washington, D.C. the day of the eviction from McPherson Square. Also, I play a series of short audio clips. The first one is of a young man from San Diego who was speaking at the General Assembly that was held in the middle of K Street in Washington the evening after the McPhearson eviction. And while this segment also ends with a call to the barricades from Chris Hedges in different interview, between those two Hedges segments I play a three minute pep talk that Tony Benn gave to some of the occupiers in London the other day.

Links Mentioned In This Podcast
The Adult Autism and MDMA/Ecstasy Study

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon and today is day 146 of Occupy Wall Street.

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And to our fellow salonners who have either bought a copy of one of my books or who have made a direct donation to the salon, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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Hopefully, I’ve by now emailed all of you directly and my sloppy filing system didn’t let anybody slip through the cracks, so to speak.

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But I do thank you one and all, and I truly appreciate your support.

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And speaking of support, right now I’d like to support one of our fellow salonners,

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and someone who has also been a featured speaker here in the salon, my good friend, Alicia Danforth.

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here in the salon, my good friend, Alicia Danforth.

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And if you recall, Alicia was featured in my podcast number 131, where she gave a talk titled Building a Model for Sustainable Psychedelic Therapy.

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Also, Alicia has been mentioned in several of the podcasts featuring Drs. Charles Grobe

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and Preet Chopra, who conducted the psilocybin study with end-stage cancer patients several

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years ago, and that’s where Alicia took over the duties of research assistant from my wife.

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So Alicia and our extended family go back quite a ways.

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And now Alicia is completing her work on a PhD and is looking for volunteers for a study

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that she’s conducting.

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is looking for volunteers for a study that she’s conducting.

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It’s titled, The Adult Autism and MDMA-Ecstasy Study,

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and you can find out more about it at www.danforthresearch.com, where, in part, Alicia says,

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I invite you to participate in a research study for my doctoral dissertation

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on what experiences with a drug known as MDMA or ecstasy

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are like for adults with autism and Asperger’s syndrome.

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You are not required to have taken ecstasy or any other recreational drug

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to participate in this survey.

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This study will compare responses from individuals

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who have tried ecstasy and individuals who have not tried ecstasy. In order to participate in

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this study, you must be autistic or have Asperger’s syndrome, and for screening purposes, you’ll be

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asked to confirm that you have received an autism or Asperger’s syndrome diagnosis from a licensed professional.

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You also must be between the ages of 21 and 75,

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be a non-MDMA ecstasy user,

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or have used MDMA ecstasy no more than 50 times.

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For MDMA ecstasy users, last use must be within the past 15 years

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and have no history of major psychotic disorder.

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So, if you meet that criteria, or if you know someone who might meet that criteria

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and would like to participate in some important research,

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you should go to danforthresearch.com and read more.

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And I’ll put a link to Alicia’s website in the program notes for this podcast,

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which you can get to, of course, via psychedelicsalon.us. So now, as you already know,

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if you listened to my previous podcast, I’m going to play the second part of a workshop that Bruce

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Dahmer and I led on the 28th of January this year. Also, I want to repoint you to the program notes

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for last week’s podcast,

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because now you’ll also find the video of that part of the program embedded there.

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And thanks to Daniel Morales and Tom Riddell, the entire program was captured to video with

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several cameras, and the entire workshop will eventually be online. In fact, I’m amazed at

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seeing that first segment already posted,

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considering all the editing that a multi-camera shoot requires.

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I know for a fact that Tom didn’t get much sleep for a few days while doing that edit,

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along with everything else involved in getting a long video posted on YouTube.

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So thanks ever so much for all of your hard work, Tom,

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and thank you, Daniel, for your excellent camera work.

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And right now we’ll be picking up with the next part of the soundtrack from the workshop, which was titled Terrence McKenna Beyond 2012.

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And we begin with Bruce reading his ode to Terrence.

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So, in the last six or seven years, for some reason I’ve had this obsession with Terence McKenna.

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And at one point, it was about six or seven years ago, I sort of sat bolt upright in bed.

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And because I had this clear, pressing vision, this pressing presence of Terence McKenna in my body.

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Or he would say, in my body.

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And I said to him, Terence, you left too soon.

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I’m bringing you back.

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I don’t know why I said it.

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I said it out loud.

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Cats jumped off the bed.

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Hell broke loose.

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So about this time, Lorenzo was starting the Psychedelic Salon,

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and there had been a lot of source material

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from Palenque Norte and Burning Man and whatnot,

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and things were getting going.

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And I started re-listening to McKenna

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and rediscovering him,

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because truthfully, I only met him in 1997.

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I met him through an Avatar experience,

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strangely enough.

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Too long a story to tell here.

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And we had an email correspondence.

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And then we agreed to do an exchange.

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He was fascinated by my worlds, which were, as you could see on screen, cyberspace, avatars.

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And I was fascinated by his, you know, his fantastical internal invisible landscapes.

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So we did a swap. I was fascinated by his fantastical, internal, invisible landscapes.

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So we did a slop, and he came to my house in December of 1998,

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and this was around the time he was doing overtoning performances with Lost at Last.

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I don’t know if any of you are at these fantastic concerts.

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Terrence was really a performer. He had come and merged as a performer, not just a oral, you know, a talking

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artist. And none of us knew what was coming for this man. So we just sort of merrily, I put him

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in front on the glass table, big monitor there and put him into Avatar cyberspace. And Finn was there and Ralph Abraham were there. And he was enough

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enamored by it,

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of it, enough that we

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agreed we were going to reconvene in Hawaii

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in February of 1999.

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And after Palenque.

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And I was going to set up, and we were going to

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do a virtual world experiment

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from his house.

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And he helped set up some other

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experiments that I participated in in between.

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So then we had no idea.

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I mean, we were at his house,

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and this was just prior to the seizure

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that announced his coming dissolution.

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And so it was very fast.

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It was like, here it goes again.

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I meet these wonderful people.

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I met Jeff Raskin a year before he got cancer and died.

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Jeff Raskin was the founder of the Macintosh Project,

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a wonderful human being, and then he’s gone.

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So I built his memorial site when he was dying.

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Actually, he told me to build my memorial site.

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Thousands of people wrote into it.

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This is for Jeff Raskin. So when this happened, I was like,

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oh boy, here it is again. I meet this fantastic person that I

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wanted to really get to know. And we started these deep conversations

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late at night. And we were just getting going. And I heard the news.

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And it’s like, oh. And one of the conversations we had in Hawaii

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was Terrence said, you know, we should do a program at Esalen together next year.

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And I’m going to get in touch with the lady who will arrange it.

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And that was Nancy Lunney at Esalen.

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And it was going to be in February of 2000.

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And I told Michael Murphy I was at Esalen five years later.

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And I said, this is what happened.

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And Michael Murphy is the founder, co-founder of Esalen.

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He said, you must do this program.

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Terrence intended, and I said, well, we’ll do it.

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Terrence intended he wanted me to get out there with my own stories,

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my own raps, my own message.

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And that was his intention.

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And so I said, you know, he really had this intention,

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but I wanted to have the conversation.

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So I then dutifully absorbed every last piece of Terrence I could,

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and audio was streaming in, and we had the copious resources.

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We had cassettes coming in, and, you know, it was being put out in the salon,

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so it was an easy access.

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But then one day I got the call that the fire which had started in Quiznos and burnt a substantial part of a city block in Monterey had hit the Esalen offices and there’s where Terrence’s library was and was all gone.

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And at the time I was working with Dennis Berry on the Leary archives.

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I became the agent for the Leary archives.

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I kind of looked her in the eye and

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said, I feel your pain. You’ve been carrying 500 boxes of Timothy Leary around all this time,

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and I will help you find a home for this. And so we worked together, and a home was found at the

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New York Public Library last year. And then I realized Terrence had a physical archive that’s

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gone. Tim still does, but Terrence is well-known.

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Tim is not.

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We sort of rectified that a little bit in the salon

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by getting the archives, the digitized reel-to-reel tapes

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out to the public.

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But I said, you know what?

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Terrence McKenna is now a real Humpty Dumpty.

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He’s really shattered.

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There’s nothing left.

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There’s no papers.

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There’s no documents left.

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There are the books,

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and there are whatever people recorded on cassette. So we started, we said we’re

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putting Humpty Dumpty back together. We don’t know why, we’re obsessed, we’re

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doing it. And I think that I’ve had subsequent messages from Terrence about

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this event, about this year, about doing these things. And driving on the 210

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freeway, just

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coming around where it curves around toward, you know, you’re coming toward Pasadena. On Thursday,

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I had this rush. And I saw him sitting on the polished floor of his upstairs library in Hawaii,

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just sitting, leaning back. And he turned to me and he just started laughing and laughing and

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laughing. I said, hmm, I could take that several ways. I could be

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really ominous or just, you know, you did it. We’re bringing you back. And so we are bringing you back,

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Terrence. We are starting here. This is a very sacred and meaningful place that you were at.

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But along with that, the bringing back of a man or a woman, doing their biography, digging into their lives, you discover things.

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And I’ve been starting, I interviewed a lot of people who had worked with Terrence over many years.

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Dennis, a lot of correspondence with him, because we were doing these programs.

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And what do we talk about?

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There were so many aspects aspects why we loved him.

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But there was other things that you should know,

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and Dennis is going to cover them in the book.

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But I think it is important in these sessions

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to kind of hint about the sort of little things

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that were going on in Terrence’s life

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that were not so good in the Feet of Clay department.

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We all still love him,

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but it’s very important to know about them. And I said, you know, how on earth can I have presumptuous of me to do this? I mean, to reveal these things, and it is presumptuous, and

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therefore I won’t. This is Dennis’s, as Dennis wrote to me in December, he said, it’s a heavy

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weight in his mind to bear. But I said, you know, still I want to do something for Terrence.

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It’s sort of the aspect to give you an aspect of his life.

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So I wrote an ode, the odious ode to Terrence McKenna, which I shall now read to you.

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And it’s a piece of poetry, and it is partly in his language.

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And it draws from years of study of the man

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and years of his. There will be a lot of inside references. It will be hard to get. But it

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will all come clear in Dennis’s book. So with that, I hope you permit me, I will read you

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the Ode to Terrence. And this is roughly,

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rough chronological order of his life.

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So the first section,

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the first scene is, or chapter is,

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where did you come from, Terrence?

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You youthful seeker of the weird,

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from circus freak show Fuzzy Charlie

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to Eros on the tightrope,

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strutting just out of reach of death in the big

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top. Amazing stories filled your fuzzy head, the best sci-fi the 50s had to offer. These invaded

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your mind with mind machines of alien cities flying overhead on 10-mile diameter Hoover vacuum

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clean covers. Seeker of brilliant opalescent nature, or opalescent, he would probably say,

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of your Colorado home, you hunted agates, jade, and associated minerals until one spring you

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spotted a butterfly, the most astonishing thing you had yet seen.

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Out in the bay, the psychotropic butterfly flew you to the land of iridescent

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machines. The butterfly then vectored you to the tropics on globe-girdling adventures,

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seeking another place never of this world. Hauling 200 pounds of books to the Seychelles for a peaceable read,

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who else would remotely even consider doing that?

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This is the young Terrence.

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Running scared with your hash through the markets of Bombay,

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you skirted the Dominator’s cellular immuno-attackers.

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Finally,

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parked to the left of the Andes,

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the Amazon green enfolded your fellowship.

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You sought black gold,

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but the little elfin bodies

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of your assigned teacher found you

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first.

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Impregnated thus with

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the adjacent possible, you conjured

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a cosmology, an anthropology, an eschatology, a numerology, and a technology that saner people wouldn’t dare place their life’s poker chips on.

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Two brothers panned an invisible landscape. Two O’s cultivated a book on growing the teachers so that they could ensporilate the West. You turned away from science and scientists, instead

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seeking fellow travelers like John D. Whitehead and others piling up on the

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pier. In 1982, your ship, the HMS Philosophical Gadfly, set sail with a full crew complement for ports unknown,

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tapes set to record. Next chapter. Why did we love you when you were here, Terrence?

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Stories flowed and droves came to your sort of theater, an amazing concoction not seen since the shaman’s tales of the dream time.

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In a time of the drought, you courageously promoted the pathway back to the plant experience.

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Three friends formed a trilogue, and your ideas could be floated in a gentlemanly fishbowl.

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Your voice soothed us, your wordage mesmerized us, your laugh opened us, so that when your flashlight shone on your take on the overmind, we believed.

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Esalen, Omega, and other one-worded places beckoned as the gadfly grew into the guru, no matter

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your abhorrence of the latter.

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And those tales you experienced, if only 10% were true, your incredible mind will maybe

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never again walk or be carried upon this earth.

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Next chapter. How did you fare, Terrence?

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In the 1980s, dark thunderheads announced their throaty arrival, yet your course stayed ever

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truer to your sense anyway. By 1991, business got scary, a marriage dissolved, and your teacher gave you a frightful licking one night.

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Control in the mind got you all the way to the domed vestibule of the elves,

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but as the shamans taught, only the submissive heart opens the inner sanctum.

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As all that and integrity entered the rearview mirror,

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it was now the story that was the thing.

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Ram Dass to Terrence. Your life is your message. Terrence to Ram Dass. My life is a mess.

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My message is my message.

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Bills to pay and a web to be woven. You that white-knuckled grasp on the wheel And navigated into ever less charted waters

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Nominated as the altered statesman

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Anointed by the good Dr. Leary

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And books flying off the presses

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Your trajectory arced high

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A date in 2012 lay shimmering on screen as Time Wave Zero code came to life,

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but it was destined to languish in the bardo of scientific non-falsifiability.

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Ask me about that later.

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Your fellow trial loggers one day drew a line in the sand as the story started dragging anchor.

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Ralph to Terrence, that is a paranoid fantasy.

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Overtoning made you into a performer and you gloriously peaked in late 98, but by then

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your personal singularity was barreling toward you.

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but by then your personal singularity was barreling toward you.

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You began to experience dreams that were un-Englishable,

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and for you this is really saying something.

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By 99 we saw the fatigue of too many trips inscribed into your face,

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and unbeknownst to us you were headed for one more encounter with the teacher.

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So close to your concrescence, I was honored to guide you as Avatar’s own ghost to take a dip into the language-built virtual world of cyberspace,

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your last taste of tech novelty.

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Next chapter.

00:19:23 ►

Where did you go, Terrence? Next chapter. Y2K and your surgeries came and went without a hitch, so the end of the world fell from

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favor, but you still had your date with a forward escape.

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On April 3rd, your final boundary disillusion was at hand, and almost too late, mind disintegrating,

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your heart forced its way open, gifting you the ultimate wisdom

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of the teaching plants

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and of this and any world

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it is all about love

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so Terrence

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teller of Irish tales

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we love you

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and we are still here

00:20:23 ►

it’s 2012

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and in some sense, your year.

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And yes, we kept breathing.

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But where did you go?

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Did you end up so stuck in the muck

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that the transcendental object could not even pull you out?

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Did the mushroom wave come for you ten miles wide

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and sweep you out to sea?

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Or did the saucer ship pick you up on the pier and ply the

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waters to the Elf and Grey Haven’s luxury condo complex? In a dream with you in Hawaii in 99,

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I saw you unfold yourself and step into an elf-piloted, plush-seated, bejeweled Faberge

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egg which carried you up through the azure veil. When told of this vision

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you said, ah, the getaway car. Last chapter. We have brought you back, Terrence. Years later in

00:21:17 ►

dreams you returned to me and to others in many guises. An electrical short, or the elves, or whatever, took your archives from us in the fire

00:21:28 ►

of 07. So Lorenzo and I and many others got going and got together in a project to put you back

00:21:34 ►

together and make sense of the whole. But your journey was only partly completed, your business left unfinished, and yourself partially realized, is this even possible?

00:21:48 ►

What the heck? Today we bring you back to life in this place where you visited by happenstance in 69,

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where you later spoke and where Ken and others, with Ken and others, you organized the

00:22:01 ►

Pulling Case seminars, and where your life was celebrated with the proper Irish wake a dozen years ago in this very room. Then what of you is left, Terrence?

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What of your raps, your recipes, your theories, your life lessons? What is there left that goes

00:22:18 ►

beyond 2012? So Terrence, that is what this gathering and others to come are all about

00:22:26 ►

so help us out

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and with that we’re now going to show you

00:22:32 ►

a couple of very special pieces

00:22:35 ►

thank you

00:22:36 ►

so with that I just wanted to open up a little bit to kind of a Q&A.

00:22:54 ►

You know, Terrence just loved Q&A.

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He hated to be up on a stage like this with you all out there

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just kind of having to be on and and you know do do that

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kind of thing he really loved the q a so we’re i think with showing you all that uh why don’t we

00:23:13 ►

just open it up uh you can ask about terence you can ask about these films you could ask about me

00:23:19 ►

uh really you know questions this is where the magic always was with Terrence

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and this is the tradition we need to carry on.

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So, more questions in the room?

00:23:34 ►

I’ve often wondered if Terrence was here today

00:23:38 ►

what he would say about what’s going on in the world.

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So, any insight?

00:23:46 ►

You know, I think Terrence would resonate with Occupy.

00:23:51 ►

I would like to think so.

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Actually, when you started asking the question, I was first thinking,

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I wondered what he’d say about us getting together like this today.

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You know, he’d probably be uncomfortable with it.

00:24:01 ►

Just, you know, I’ve heard, you know, like all of you have heard a lot of his talks

00:24:06 ►

and i would just have to think that he would be really excited about things going on because it

00:24:11 ►

is a shift in consciousness and i’ll bring that up some this afternoon too but uh my dream is that

00:24:17 ►

he would be really excited about it that uh you know one of the things that bruce uh he quoted

00:24:22 ►

terrence you know his his last words were it’s all about love and then keep breathing.

00:24:27 ►

And I may be the only one that thinks this, but if you’ve been to some of his workshops

00:24:33 ►

and he talked about DMT and he was talking about how you use it and et cetera,

00:24:37 ►

he said the biggest problem is to keep breathing.

00:24:40 ►

You have to remind yourself to keep breathing.

00:24:43 ►

And my fanciful mind is wondering if at the very moment he was expiring,

00:24:49 ►

you know, there’s speculation we might have a DMT release.

00:24:52 ►

I’m just wondering if that wasn’t a reflexive action of his,

00:24:54 ►

just say, keep breathing, the DMT is here.

00:24:57 ►

You know, I’m making that all up, but I like it.

00:25:02 ►

We had a question here.

00:25:05 ►

Okay, I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the EvoGrid

00:25:08 ►

and just kind of a little more information and the status of it right now.

00:25:14 ►

Well, the EvoGrid, you saw a little snippet of it in the intro to Who is Bruce movie.

00:25:21 ►

The EvoGrid project was a little bit inspired by Terrence.

00:25:25 ►

I’ll have to say his ideas about that, of course, the universe is a novelty,

00:25:31 ►

a conserving engine, he would call it.

00:25:34 ►

These are not new ideas.

00:25:35 ►

It’s just that science hasn’t really taken a hard look at it.

00:25:40 ►

So I was always into this project called Digital Biota,

00:25:44 ►

where we had a conference at the Burgess Shale.

00:25:49 ►

We had a conference there.

00:25:51 ►

We hiked 3,000 feet, paleontologists, computer scientists, up to this fossil quarry,

00:25:58 ►

and that was our first day of our meeting.

00:26:00 ►

And then we went back down to the Banff Center.

00:26:02 ►

The Burgess Shale is where the evidence of nature creating bodies,

00:26:08 ►

bodies, multicellular but big bodies,

00:26:14 ►

big things with flaps and multiple eyes on stalks,

00:26:17 ►

the Cambrian explosion creatures.

00:26:20 ►

So I brought all these people there in order to really open them up

00:26:23 ►

to having this discussion of how does life start?

00:26:26 ►

How do you use computers to figure that out?

00:26:29 ►

The wonder of this radial diversity of life that’s seen at the Burgess Shale, and they’re our ancestors.

00:26:36 ►

In fact, one of the creatures between slabs of slate, basically, in the Burgess Shale Library, if you would think of it that way,

00:26:45 ►

is a very, very small worm that was found, a fossil impression of a worm, and down its

00:26:51 ►

back was a very thin cord.

00:26:53 ►

That’s all of our ancestors.

00:26:55 ►

That’s our ancestor of all of us.

00:26:56 ►

That’s the first thing was developing a spinal cord.

00:27:00 ►

And they called, they named it Pichaya after the shrill rodents that scream at you from the trail as you walk up to the bridge.

00:27:08 ►

I grew up quite near there.

00:27:10 ►

As kids, we used to hike up in that area all the time.

00:27:13 ►

That was why I was so attracted to bringing these people there.

00:27:17 ►

The Evil Grid project is fairly audacious.

00:27:21 ►

I had the idea in 1981.

00:27:24 ►

It’s a precursor idea.

00:27:25 ►

This is a long-term bake.

00:27:28 ►

In 1985, I started graduate school at the University of Southern California

00:27:32 ►

with this idea to create a system where evolution could start on its own in computers.

00:27:38 ►

But I had a VAX computer, which the old-timers would probably remember,

00:27:43 ►

on the ARPANET, just one

00:27:45 ►

computer and a color graphics display. And I thought, I’m set. I can do this thing. You know, I’m just,

00:27:52 ►

you know, rub my hands. So it only take 20 years here in grad school, but, you know, they’ll pay.

00:27:57 ►

I’ll go to happy hour every day and I’ll get free food. And, you know, what I’ll become is God, you

00:28:03 ►

know, but it’d be terrible and i realized

00:28:06 ►

after three years that no one knew what i was talking about there was no field the field of

00:28:11 ►

artificial life was in the future and nobody was doing this work i found a dusty russian book and

00:28:18 ►

a book by a guy named johnny von neumann in the 1950s and i thought thought, you know what, I’m too soon.

00:28:27 ►

So in between, I said, I’ve got to wait,

00:28:30 ►

and it might be 25 years.

00:28:32 ►

L.V. Ray Smith, the co-founder,

00:28:36 ►

technical co-founder of Pixar with Lauren Carpenter,

00:28:40 ►

had the same epiphany in 1979 in a restaurant.

00:28:41 ►

They were saying, we want to make a full-length feature animated film.

00:28:44 ►

And they grabbed the

00:28:45 ►

required napkin

00:28:47 ►

and they said, how many frames

00:28:49 ►

can we render at this resolution today

00:28:52 ►

at Pixar, you know, in 70s Pixar?

00:28:54 ►

And I was like, oh,

00:28:55 ►

this is going to take like 30

00:28:58 ►

years to be able to do a

00:28:59 ►

two-hour feature film. But this was

00:29:01 ►

the dream of these guys. And they

00:29:03 ►

did it by 1994 when Toy Story was

00:29:06 ►

made. And they knew that this was a lifetime commitment if they wanted to get in this

00:29:11 ►

business. And so they cut all these corners and Toy Story was an hour and five minutes.

00:29:15 ►

And they built special hardware. But these guys had that vision in the late 70s. And Steve Jobs

00:29:19 ►

came along and helped them do it. So it was the same kind of thing with me. It’s like, this is going to take 25 years to even start.

00:29:28 ►

So I waited 25 years.

00:29:31 ►

And I held four conferences on the topic.

00:29:34 ►

I met Richard Dawkins, who was a very early inspirer,

00:29:38 ►

Douglas Adams, Tom Ray, all these people.

00:29:42 ►

I toured the world’s labs.

00:29:44 ►

I gathered information. And then in 2007, I found a Ph.D. I toured the world’s labs. I gathered information.

00:29:45 ►

And then in 2007, I found a Ph.D. program, joined the Ph.D. program,

00:29:49 ►

because I thought, you know what?

00:29:50 ►

I had started on the Ph.D., and I stopped.

00:29:53 ►

And a Ph.D. is a good thing.

00:29:55 ►

It’s a disciplinary thing.

00:29:56 ►

People are going to peer review your work.

00:29:59 ►

And I had 30 advisors to the project from Freeman Dyson on down.

00:30:05 ►

I mean, Freeman was really very inspiring on this.

00:30:08 ►

And I had a team from NASA that we were doing 10 years of mission simulation for NASA.

00:30:14 ►

And so we took the same team and we started building this thing.

00:30:16 ►

And what it was is a way to simulate billions and billions of molecules in a digital soup in a realistic way that a chemist would do and see

00:30:26 ►

what happened. Can you get self-assembly and at what rates? And it turned out to be a way harder

00:30:31 ►

project for 2007. I built the first grid to run the EvoGrid in the barn next to the vintage computer

00:30:38 ►

and the pigs. I took old servers, wired them together, and I was running it in the summer of 2010, and they were burning up.

00:30:45 ►

And our friend John Graham at UC San Diego said,

00:30:49 ►

I pity you so much.

00:30:51 ►

I’m going to build a professional array of machines.

00:30:54 ►

So he built this fantastic array of machines that saved my bacon and the pigs.

00:31:01 ►

But what it showed, and this was talking about a Hollywood finish to a PhD.

00:31:06 ►

I mean, this is a PhD project that had been written up in the New York Times.

00:31:10 ►

This is a lot of pressure.

00:31:11 ►

This is a project that David Brin was watching,

00:31:13 ►

because according to David Brin,

00:31:15 ►

there’s some kind of short story that he wrote in the 70s

00:31:18 ►

where some crazy guy started a project like Permutation City’s AutoVerse project,

00:31:24 ►

and they started it in 2008.

00:31:27 ►

And this, I was it.

00:31:29 ►

So, you know,

00:31:30 ►

it’s like, okay, so there’s a lot of pressure.

00:31:32 ►

So we ran

00:31:33 ►

seven experiments

00:31:34 ►

and it was three weeks before

00:31:38 ►

the dissertation.

00:31:40 ►

We probably turned all our

00:31:41 ►

phones off. Oh, well, this is good dramatic

00:31:43 ►

music. It sounds like Bond.

00:31:46 ►

So as Bond is swinging through the air saying,

00:31:48 ►

we have no experimental results,

00:31:50 ►

and there’s three weeks due for the PhD.

00:31:56 ►

I’m sorry I’m going on long here, but it’s such a funny story.

00:31:59 ►

Then finally I said to Peter, the chief architect,

00:32:02 ►

we’ve got to, you know, we’re tweaking the experiment.

00:32:05 ►

And these experiments take three months to run.

00:32:08 ►

And we did one last, I had an intuition one night, you know, not unlike a psychedelic intuition, because I see these molecules in my head.

00:32:16 ►

I mean, the whole thing was designed because I would, you know, sit there and I would go into worlds and I would become a molecule.

00:32:23 ►

And this is on usually cheap airline coffee.

00:32:26 ►

But I’m kind of built this way.

00:32:28 ►

And so this was all a vision.

00:32:29 ►

This is the psychedelic, the inspired project.

00:32:33 ►

And finally I said, that’s it.

00:32:35 ►

We have to do blah-de-blah-de-blah.

00:32:37 ►

We have to degrade this and that and change that formula and that thing.

00:32:41 ►

And we started running the thing, and on April 15th,

00:32:43 ►

the staircases started to show up.

00:32:46 ►

You see it in the film?

00:32:47 ►

The little staircases, and those are like gold

00:32:50 ►

because those are almost never seen in computer systems.

00:32:55 ►

What happens in computer systems is somebody makes a little funny game of life world,

00:33:00 ►

and it goes up to some really cool behaviors,

00:33:02 ►

like there’s crawlers and there’s things in these worlds,

00:33:05 ►

and they never do anything else after that.

00:33:07 ►

They never get any more complex

00:33:08 ►

because they’ve reached the limit of their physics.

00:33:12 ►

And what we had done was we’d based our physics

00:33:14 ►

on the absolute craziness of nature.

00:33:17 ►

And nature isn’t built like algorithms or computers.

00:33:21 ►

This is why computers can’t simulate nature.

00:33:23 ►

Nature is built, basically consider a world of a zillion ping pong balls bouncing off of each other.

00:33:30 ►

Some of them stick to each other and some of them are ricocheting around and there’s waves of energy moving through the system.

00:33:36 ►

And it just so happens that that is the basis of everything.

00:33:40 ►

It’s called a dissipative system.

00:33:41 ►

It’s called a dissipative system.

00:33:45 ►

You might think that your cells are little factories where sugar comes in here if you drink a Coke,

00:33:49 ►

and then it goes here, and a little winder does this.

00:33:52 ►

No, no, no, no.

00:33:53 ►

The sugar molecule from the Coke goes into one end,

00:33:56 ►

and it slams around for about two seconds in the cell,

00:33:59 ►

hitting almost everything else in its path

00:34:01 ►

until it happens to slam to the right thing to digest it.

00:34:05 ►

That’s how you work. It’s a very psychedelic world. It’s a very weird world. That’s how nature

00:34:11 ►

works. So if you’re going to simulate nature, you have to simulate all that, and that takes vast

00:34:16 ►

computing power that nobody wants to do. But we had done it. We had built such a system,

00:34:20 ►

and we saw the telltale trace of the open-ended complexity. So we would get a whole

00:34:26 ►

bunch of biomolecules forming, organic molecules. Then the system would sit around for a while,

00:34:32 ►

and then more would form on top of them, and more would form on top. And then the idea is,

00:34:37 ►

if you keep going, you get self-assembly. You get lipids. You get little cell wall lipids could

00:34:43 ►

form, and then little cells could form,

00:34:45 ►

and inside the computer you might see an origin of life.

00:34:49 ►

And because we’d simulate the chemistry,

00:34:51 ►

you could then take that simulation and rerun it in molecules,

00:34:56 ►

and you would have an origin of life.

00:34:59 ►

So now here’s the funny thing.

00:35:01 ►

So it turns out that when I took out my napkin and I wrote down,

00:35:06 ►

okay, we’ve simulated one nanosecond of time, 1,000 atoms.

00:35:11 ►

We’ve done 300,000 of these small volumes.

00:35:14 ►

I was like, this is not even a human lifetime.

00:35:17 ►

This is a couple of human lifetimes to do this size of experiment in the computer

00:35:21 ►

to do origin of life work.

00:35:24 ►

I was like L.V. Ray Smith.

00:35:26 ►

I was like, well, I’m already halfway through the lifetime. So I was sitting on a park bench

00:35:32 ►

in Montpellier, France. You always get good ideas on park benches in cool places. But

00:35:36 ►

with another researcher, and this is a week before defending my PhD, and I said, basically,

00:35:41 ►

the experiment has failed because computers cannot do origin of life, period. They just can’t. We proved it. And he said, don’t worry about it. In your defense,

00:35:51 ►

just creatively describe that. Just sort of put that in as a bullet point.

00:35:58 ►

And then it popped into my head. I had this vision of, well, the first thing was, wait a minute,

00:36:04 ►

we need to use molecules to simulate themselves. They’re good at it. And I had this vision of, well, the first thing was, wait a minute, we need to use molecules

00:36:05 ►

to simulate themselves. They’re good at it. And I have this vision of someone blowing up a party

00:36:11 ►

balloon and then taking a solution, squirting it in, and you have this tiny little space. I said,

00:36:17 ►

that’s it, party balloons, or the tips of surgical gloves. You can make experiments without glassware

00:36:23 ►

that you can discard. You can make large chemical spaces.

00:36:26 ►

You can stream the results out.

00:36:28 ►

And I can show you pictures of this rig in the afternoon if you’re interested.

00:36:32 ►

So the EvoGrid now has become the ChemoGrid project.

00:36:36 ►

And there is a company named Springer that does big scientific books,

00:36:40 ►

and they’ve recruited me.

00:36:41 ►

I’m a lead editor on a book on this now.

00:36:44 ►

So we’re going to have about 20 contributors

00:36:46 ►

and it’s called Genesis Engines

00:36:47 ►

and how to build a machine,

00:36:50 ►

a Rube Goldberg machine

00:36:52 ►

out of any parts you can come up with,

00:36:55 ►

microfluidics, balloons,

00:36:57 ►

glassware on little rocker tables.

00:36:59 ►

You could build these at home

00:37:00 ►

like a Maker Faire kind of thing.

00:37:03 ►

An origin of life machine

00:37:04 ►

with chemicals doing what chemicals do.

00:37:08 ►

And then computers watching what comes out of those experiments.

00:37:11 ►

And then the mind designing the experiments.

00:37:14 ►

But you have to run billions of simulations.

00:37:18 ►

And the chemo grid will be successful when, and I’ll try to encapsulate this,

00:37:23 ►

when you see soap bubbles, soap bubbles in solution,

00:37:27 ►

or if you go to the seashore, you see a lot of bubbles in foam. That’s what they believe life

00:37:32 ►

could have gotten a purchase on, could have gotten a start with. All these naturally forming

00:37:36 ►

compartments all the time. Well, what happens if you watch soap bubbles carefully, or if you’ve

00:37:42 ►

got cream in your coffee, if you’re an old-fashioned person,

00:37:45 ►

use cream in your coffee,

00:37:46 ►

and you see these things on the surface.

00:37:48 ►

If you get the light just right,

00:37:50 ►

you see these things forming and unforming.

00:37:52 ►

That’s lipids fighting with the water

00:37:55 ►

because the one end of the lipid

00:37:57 ►

wants to get away from the water

00:37:58 ►

and the other one’s attracted to the water.

00:37:59 ►

It’s kind of like a relationship.

00:38:02 ►

And they’re trying to form themselves

00:38:03 ►

in the smallest little blobs.

00:38:07 ►

And these blobs are growing

00:38:08 ►

because there’s more coffee,

00:38:09 ►

there’s more cream in the coffee

00:38:11 ►

keeps coming up,

00:38:12 ►

and this weird thing is happening

00:38:14 ►

on the surface of your coffee.

00:38:15 ►

You can’t believe it.

00:38:16 ►

It looks like a living thing.

00:38:18 ►

So this starts happening.

00:38:19 ►

And in the EvoGrid,

00:38:21 ►

we would simulate,

00:38:22 ►

or the Genesis engine

00:38:23 ►

would simulate billions

00:38:24 ►

of little cups of coffee.

00:38:26 ►

And when you’ve got the little bubbles dividing,

00:38:31 ►

and then dividing again with about the same amount of contents in them,

00:38:35 ►

you don’t have to know what the contents are,

00:38:37 ►

and you see another daughter cell form from another thing with the same contents,

00:38:41 ►

an alarm goes off because you have a precursor origin of life that

00:38:45 ►

just happened in front of you. And we could cut through nature’s, you know, the millions of years

00:38:53 ►

nature took in the oceans of the world. We could cut through that using these techniques and we

00:38:57 ►

could get to the point where it’s like Jack Shostak’s lab at Harvard’s like, these little bubbles are dividing with the same contents,

00:39:06 ►

and this line lasted for 60 divisions, but then it all went away. It’s not an eternal bubble. As

00:39:12 ►

soon as you get eternal bubbles, you have the beginnings of the origin of life in front of you.

00:39:19 ►

So I’ll leave you with that. The question is relating what I’m doing to what Craig Venter was doing.

00:39:26 ►

Craig Venter is taking apart the existing biology and removing things and putting other things in.

00:39:32 ►

He’s hacking. He’s biohacking. And then people like myself or Steen Rasmussen in Denmark and

00:39:39 ►

others are trying to build it from scratch, from the bottom up. Oh, and I wanted to make one more point,

00:39:48 ►

which is Terence’s idea, his sort of vague notion of novelty,

00:39:52 ►

is actually on the verge of emerging, I think, within these systems.

00:39:55 ►

So, for example, Stuart Kaufman,

00:39:57 ►

I don’t know if you guys read around in complexity science,

00:40:01 ►

but Stuart Kaufman calls this the fourth law of thermodynamics,

00:40:05 ►

where you’ve got stuff, if you put heat into the system,

00:40:09 ►

it all kind of goes down to what’s called equilibrium and bounces around for a while,

00:40:16 ►

but it then climbs back up to order somehow. And you can hit it again and it goes back down,

00:40:21 ►

but it climbs back up a little higher. What is going on? There’s some kind of a force that is in the system that is saying, you know, even though I’m a disordered

00:40:26 ►

bunch of things, I’m going to reorder, despite what you’re doing to me. And what we did in the

00:40:32 ►

EvoGrid was we modeled interstellar space. Interstellar space is this really interesting

00:40:37 ►

place. It’s where life begins, really. It’s a big vacuum, very little in in it but there’s a lot of free atoms that were blown off

00:40:46 ►

by supernovae

00:40:48 ►

a lot of stuff floating through

00:40:50 ►

and reactions happen very very infrequently

00:40:53 ►

yet in interstellar space

00:40:55 ►

now that they look at it

00:40:56 ►

it’s full of organic molecules

00:40:58 ►

it’s crammed and when a solar system

00:41:00 ►

forms and that disc

00:41:02 ►

that accretion disc forms and you get earth like

00:41:04 ►

planets and

00:41:05 ►

there’s their atmospheres and everything their surfaces are made out of the stuff that was that

00:41:09 ►

took a half a billion years to form an interstellar space so that is the true nursery that’s the

00:41:15 ►

incubator so when we built the evo grid by accident dave deemer at uc santa cruz said you have built a

00:41:21 ►

model of interstellar chemistry it It’s called cosmochemistry.

00:41:31 ►

And so literally we got gold because showing in this simulation that we get assemblages happening despite the ravages of heat and ionization

00:41:39 ►

and everything we were putting in, it would still climb back up.

00:41:42 ►

So it’s possibly the first computer simulation to show some evidence of a fourth law of thermodynamics.

00:41:48 ►

And I’m going to pursue this in the Genesis Engine project.

00:41:52 ►

But in some ways, it’s a hand wave.

00:41:55 ►

It’s an homage to Terence.

00:41:56 ►

Like, Terence, we found, we nailed novelty.

00:41:59 ►

And it’s just starting to come out of the woodwork.

00:42:01 ►

It’s a very fringy idea for science, though, to tell you.

00:42:05 ►

But it may go back to the origin of the universe,

00:42:08 ►

that there’s some characteristic of how the universe began that is in there,

00:42:13 ►

and that’s another thing that I’m now doing a lot of thinking and visioning about.

00:42:19 ►

The guys who practice the Mayan code,

00:42:21 ►

there’s a complete misinterpretation of the whole calendar and what it meant to that culture. Well, I challenged him privately in the house in Hawaii.

00:42:31 ►

We were standing in the kitchen, and he asked me,

00:42:35 ►

you know, what do you think about Y2K?

00:42:38 ►

I mean, this is 1999.

00:42:39 ►

I said, Terrence, nothing will happen.

00:42:42 ►

Nothing.

00:42:43 ►

I could see him sort of looking around at this he had built this house

00:42:47 ►

he had got his store of dried banana chips you know and he had you know for him it would be like

00:42:55 ►

bake dried bacon and eggs right um but um i was like oh okay i said well nothing will happen you

00:43:03 ►

may get really humorous glitches like babies will be born in the year 1900 in hospital computers

00:43:09 ►

and they will issue these birth certificates, which is exactly what happened.

00:43:14 ►

And then I said, well, okay, Terrence, I need to challenge you.

00:43:17 ►

You talk about people like the UFO believers needing to come with the same rules of evidence as everyone else.

00:43:26 ►

What about this 2012? You’ve got to be kidding kind of thing.

00:43:30 ►

And we talked about it for a while, and he turned to me and said,

00:43:33 ►

you know, I hope people don’t take this too literally.

00:43:38 ►

And the last thought we had was, hmm, this could become like a kind of new age Y2K under certain circumstances,

00:43:48 ►

which it is. We had a question here. Do you want to speak it yourself, or do you want me to read?

00:43:56 ►

My name is also Bruce, and I also design virtual worlds. I did it for the Walt Disney Company.

00:44:03 ►

So a couple of my persistent worlds are still Toontown Online

00:44:07 ►

and Pirates of the Caribbean Online.

00:44:11 ►

My interest, though, in these virtual worlds

00:44:15 ►

is principally how we interact with them

00:44:17 ►

and the sort of emergent behaviors that I see happening with,

00:44:24 ►

well, in my case, it’s kids who are going into these

00:44:27 ►

worlds and using them as virtual playgrounds.

00:44:28 ►

But they sort of are models of systems that are all around us now.

00:44:37 ►

I mean, when I was looking at the crowd this morning, everybody was looking at their screens

00:44:40 ►

and reading their email and so forth, which I also think is a component in some way

00:44:46 ►

of the virtual world that’s all around us.

00:44:48 ►

So I’m wondering if you could just sort of,

00:44:50 ►

both of you actually,

00:44:51 ►

because you wrote the book Spirit of the Internet,

00:44:55 ►

if you could comment on that aspect of it.

00:44:59 ►

Very good. Thank you.

00:45:01 ►

Are you all paid shills, by the way?

00:45:03 ►

This is wonderful.

00:45:05 ►

You’re asking about all my beloved topics.

00:45:08 ►

In Avatar Cyberspace, what happened in 1994-95, I had a vision.

00:45:14 ►

I was living in Prague, drinking way too much dark beer.

00:45:19 ►

In fact, I would have loved to have known that Terence was a bohemophile,

00:45:23 ►

because I lived there from 1990 to 1994 and set up software labs

00:45:26 ►

and went into catacombs and crypts and all kinds of stories.

00:45:31 ►

If you want to hear prog tales, I have a load of them.

00:45:34 ►

But I had this vision.

00:45:36 ►

We were involved in MUDs on the side, and MUDs are text-based virtual worlds.

00:45:41 ►

But they’re powerful because you’re reading language

00:45:43 ►

and you’re constructing the world in your mind. In some ways, MUDs were more powerful than visual worlds even now.

00:45:50 ►

But this was a new medium about to be born. And it was very exciting for those first

00:45:55 ►

five years or so because we were kind of inventing, how do you teach in here?

00:45:59 ►

How do you allow people to create art in here? How do you resolve conflict in this space? Because these

00:46:05 ►

were tabula rasa worlds that the users built. They were game worlds rose slightly later,

00:46:11 ►

where there was more control. It was almost like these worlds were like Burning Man

00:46:14 ►

versus Reno, you know, designed and planned versus. So there was this wonderful period of

00:46:20 ►

opening of this meeting was a pioneering period. And was the period I was you know engaged in and you know we had no idea that it would become so pervasive in some in some

00:46:32 ►

sense you know one of the great books to read on this is Werner Wenge’s Rainbow’s End if you’re

00:46:38 ►

into science fiction it’s the world of the 2020s like 202626. And in there, Werner actually puts you in North San Diego

00:46:48 ►

County, right next to where Lorenzo and many people live. They’re all set in North San Diego

00:46:53 ►

County. You wear this system that’s actually embedded in your eyes called the Epiphany system.

00:47:01 ►

And you see, wherever you look, you see creatures.

00:47:06 ►

And there’s the data space,

00:47:09 ►

every little speck floating in the atmosphere is a server.

00:47:14 ►

And you can see virtual characters.

00:47:15 ►

If you’re playing a game, you’re walking down the street,

00:47:16 ►

you’ve got data.

00:47:18 ►

It’s a really wild ride. The sci-fi writer is always the best

00:47:20 ►

at showing us the consequences of this.

00:47:23 ►

The character in the story is a Stanford English professor

00:47:26 ►

who goes into dementia in 2006.

00:47:29 ►

He’s cured in like 2030,

00:47:32 ►

but he’s now illiterate

00:47:34 ►

because he’s never worn.

00:47:38 ►

And so they don’t know what to do with this guy.

00:47:40 ►

He’s one in a million cured from a deep dementia.

00:47:44 ►

And the cure not only cures him,

00:47:46 ►

brings him back to consciousness, but it also reverses his aging back to where he’s a teenager.

00:47:52 ►

So he’s a teenager with very, very tired eyes and a very cranky teenager that’s a Stanford

00:48:00 ►

professor and a Marist professor. So what do they do? They put him in junior high.

00:48:02 ►

a Stanford professor, an Ameris professor.

00:48:03 ►

So what do they do?

00:48:04 ►

They put him in junior high.

00:48:08 ►

So he’s in junior high, and one kid takes him on and teaches him how to wear and make him literate.

00:48:12 ►

Otherwise, he’s just not part of the modern world.

00:48:14 ►

And it’s a wonderful book.

00:48:16 ►

So it potentially is as good as any.

00:48:19 ►

The combination of augmented reality

00:48:21 ►

and things like the Avatar movie,

00:48:24 ►

where you’re in a rich world

00:48:25 ►

you know the screens are gone the uh the big screen the big laptop you sit in front of is

00:48:32 ►

gone in that world it’s all built into the body the body sorry you’re listening to the psychedelic

00:48:42 ►

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

00:48:47 ►

So, how was that for an information-packed session with Bruce Dahmer?

00:48:52 ►

And I hope that you can better understand how it is the question and answer sessions at these workshops that are where some of the best information comes out.

00:49:05 ►

information comes out. As Bruce mentioned, the main format that Terrence was using for his workshops during the last few years of his life was where he would give a brief introduction on

00:49:10 ►

whatever topic the workshop brochure had mentioned, and from there, within the first hour or so,

00:49:16 ►

the Q&A would lead him off in all kinds of different directions. And that may be one of

00:49:21 ►

the reasons that his talks all seem to be slightly different even when the same topic is alleged to be the focus of the talk.

00:49:30 ►

Also, I should mention that Bruce and I will be doing a three-day version of this workshop

00:49:34 ►

at Esalen Institute from June 15th through the 17th of this year,

00:49:39 ►

which is 2012 in case you’re a time traveler hearing this in the future.

00:49:44 ►

And if you are thinking about attending that event, you may want to get a reservation in soon,

00:49:48 ►

because I’m told that it’s already about half sold out.

00:49:51 ►

And as you know, the workshop whose soundtrack we just heard was also sold out.

00:49:57 ►

And due to the physical restrictions of the spaces in which these workshops are being held,

00:50:01 ►

we have no control over getting somebody in once the event sells out.

00:50:06 ►

Now, in my next podcast, I’ll be playing the remaining audio from the January 28th event,

00:50:11 ►

and by then I may know a little bit more about when the Ken Adams film, the new one featuring

00:50:16 ►

Terrence McKenna, will become available. But if you know somebody who was at this recent workshop

00:50:22 ►

and who purchased a copy of the pre-release version of Ken’s movie,

00:50:26 ►

you may want to ask them to invite you over to see it.

00:50:29 ►

And then if you do, after you’ve watched it, I’ll be happy to Skype in to get together with you afterwards for a short Q&A if you want.

00:50:38 ►

And now it’s time once again for an update on the Global Occupy movement.

00:50:43 ►

It’s time once again for an update on the Global Occupy Movement.

00:50:49 ►

As you already know, the screwheads in the establishment have again added more impetus to the movement by evicting the two encampments in the nation’s capital.

00:50:53 ►

And while I don’t want to focus only on the in-your-face moments of the movement,

00:50:58 ►

I do think that it’s important for us to remain aware of the fact that

00:51:01 ►

the establishment is going to do everything within its power to crush the spirit of change that is now sweeping the globe.

00:51:08 ►

While it’s great to have some victories in saving people’s homes from foreclosure and things like that,

00:51:14 ►

what we also have to keep in mind is the fact that when the power elite evict an Occupy encampment,

00:51:20 ►

they are also evicting homeless people from these tent cities.

00:51:24 ►

Can you get your head around that?

00:51:26 ►

People who are already homeless are being made even more homeless now.

00:51:30 ►

So I’m going to begin with a recap of what went down in Washington, D.C.

00:51:34 ►

the day of the eviction from McPherson Square.

00:51:37 ►

And the voice you’ll hear is that of Nate,

00:51:39 ►

who streams a live video feed on ustream.tv that’s called Occupy Air, and this is his recap of the

00:51:48 ►

day’s events. So I saw a couple of you guys. Hi, I’m Nate, for those of you who are visiting the

00:51:57 ►

stream for the first time. I don’t normally sound like this. I don’t normally scream so much.

00:52:02 ►

I don’t normally sound like this. I don’t normally scream so much.

00:52:06 ►

I might tell you something about the intensity

00:52:08 ►

of the situations here during the eviction today.

00:52:14 ►

Quiet old Nate was screaming at the top of his lungs.

00:52:17 ►

So let’s go over the day a little bit.

00:52:19 ►

I saw a couple of you guys were looking for a recap.

00:52:22 ►

For those of you who coming in and out during the day,

00:52:26 ►

I don’t blame you.

00:52:28 ►

You couldn’t watch 13 and a half hours of video today.

00:52:32 ►

5.30 a.m.

00:52:34 ►

Last night, this was last night,

00:52:38 ►

a rumor began spreading that the police were going to enter the park this morning at 5 a.m.

00:52:50 ►

We started preparing for it some fortifications were built around the temple dreams and so I stayed up till 5 and they hadn’t come so I didn’t think

00:53:00 ►

they were going to come and and I walked back to Freedom.

00:53:11 ►

And then I got a call a half hour later that they were coming in.

00:53:16 ►

So I ran down, and I got here just in time for the helicopter overhead,

00:53:21 ►

and the police on horseback, and everybody just sort of coming in.

00:53:25 ►

I got, yeah, I already, It’s called denying a central tremor.

00:53:27 ►

I kind of shake a little bit.

00:53:28 ►

It’s called your friend.

00:53:28 ►

And it’s cold too.

00:53:30 ►

Yeah, exactly.

00:53:31 ►

Yeah, you going to be around for a while?

00:53:32 ►

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:53:33 ►

I’m going to take off tonight because I’m having a really, really shitty month for this

00:53:38 ►

birthday.

00:53:39 ►

Yeah, happy birthday.

00:53:40 ►

Poor Mark, man.

00:53:42 ►

Everybody wish him live stream happy birthday.

00:53:44 ►

Oh, yeah. He’s been kicking ass today.

00:53:48 ►

It was important work today, dude.

00:53:50 ►

It was real important work today.

00:53:51 ►

We did good.

00:53:54 ►

That’s Mark.

00:53:55 ►

He’s great.

00:53:56 ►

He’s the other live streamer.

00:53:58 ►

Occupy DC

00:53:59 ►

on Ustream.tv.

00:54:02 ►

So anyway,

00:54:03 ►

all the police came in.

00:54:07 ►

Started putting barricades up around, wow, I’m really starting to shiver here, ended up, so the Ten of Dreams was taken down,

00:54:16 ►

they gave us two stipulations, they said, either you guys take it down or we rip it down.

00:54:23 ►

So we took it down, we kept it, we kept the tart,

00:54:26 ►

and the Guy Fawkes mask that was on General McPherson’s face.

00:54:31 ►

So those were going to be donated to the Smithsonian Institute

00:54:34 ►

because they were making an Occupy Wall Street exhibit or something like that,

00:54:40 ►

or just collecting our history.

00:54:43 ►

So that happened, and then me and Mark and Katie,

00:54:49 ►

Katie runs the Twitter for the, it might be for the movement,

00:54:53 ►

I think it’s official, at OccupyKST.

00:54:58 ►

It’s their Twitter.

00:55:00 ►

And we three were allowed to be Occupy observers with our media equipment.

00:55:07 ►

And we followed the police around as they went into the tents at the first part of the park.

00:55:15 ►

So that must have been around 10 o’clock because it took so long.

00:55:20 ►

Actually, I skipped something.

00:55:21 ►

There were about 10 Occupiers in the center circle this morning.

00:55:26 ►

And after speaking with the police, six of them felt like, okay, I’m going to get out.

00:55:33 ►

Four of them stayed behind and got arrested.

00:55:35 ►

They were let back out.

00:55:36 ►

They were here at the GA.

00:55:37 ►

They were here for most of today’s actions.

00:55:39 ►

They were just out of commission for about three hours.

00:55:41 ►

They were let back.

00:55:41 ►

They were just out of commission for about three hours.

00:55:48 ►

So after that, we began following the police as they searched tents and removed bedding and personal belongings and bagged them up

00:55:52 ►

to be shipped somewhere in the city to be picked up within 60 days.

00:56:00 ►

Where I think the park police made their biggest mistake,

00:56:05 ►

is that they started taking tents down.

00:56:08 ►

That was not part of the deal.

00:56:11 ►

They were taking tents down, saying that they were biohazards.

00:56:15 ►

I don’t know what was so biohazardous about them, the tents.

00:56:20 ►

They might have been a little wet and a little muddy,

00:56:22 ►

but they weren’t a freaking biohazard.

00:56:25 ►

So that’s when everybody got mad.

00:56:28 ►

Real, real mad anger that lasted hours.

00:56:33 ►

Hours.

00:56:34 ►

And if they had left all the tents, we gave them a little bit of trust.

00:56:40 ►

We figured, okay, maybe we can make this easy.

00:56:44 ►

We can comply with them. There’s a little bit of trust. And figured, okay, maybe we can make this easy. We can comply with them. There’s

00:56:46 ►

a little bit of trust, and they messed it up. They lost their chance. And so things

00:56:51 ►

got a little bit more hectic after that. Two tents were put up. I’m trying to remember

00:56:58 ►

the chain of events now. It’s all sort of conglomerated together. Two tents were put up on the east side of the park across the sidewalk,

00:57:09 ►

and that’s when we first saw pepper spray can being held in the hand of a police officer.

00:57:17 ►

No pepper spray was used today, thankfully.

00:57:20 ►

No rubber bullets were shot today, but we did see rubber shotguns, rubber bullet rifles, whatever the hell they are.

00:57:29 ►

So it was that.

00:57:33 ►

When the police were trying to move in to one of the parks here on the northeast,

00:57:39 ►

we formed a blockade of sorts and tried stopping them from moving in to place more barricades around

00:57:49 ►

so that they could siphon off each part of the park.

00:57:52 ►

That became a massive…

00:57:55 ►

That was, other than the last thing that happened here, that was the biggest fight that happened today.

00:58:03 ►

People getting shoved to the ground.

00:58:05 ►

I saw some people getting hit by nightsticks and whatnot.

00:58:08 ►

One of the police officers was really losing control,

00:58:14 ►

and another police officer had to pull him back by the arm.

00:58:18 ►

I did see that.

00:58:19 ►

I think I did catch that on the screen.

00:58:22 ►

So after that, we mainly just had the two spots left.

00:58:28 ►

They took the other spot, and we were all rallied up in one spot.

00:58:33 ►

Throughout the course of all this, there were a number of arrests.

00:58:37 ►

Brian was the first arrest after the 4 in the morning.

00:58:42 ►

Brian was very angry that we had been lied to and that tents were being taken down.

00:58:48 ►

And so he grabbed me by the arm, and I walked over with him, and he jumped over the barricade.

00:58:53 ►

And he walked up to Captain Beck, and he said, you’re a liar. You’re a liar.

00:58:59 ►

And they arrested him. Brian has not been seen since.

00:59:02 ►

Someone was tased for banging on the barricades not long afterwards

00:59:06 ►

here on the west side of the park and arrested.

00:59:11 ►

Jerry, the photographer for journeyamerica.org, was arrested.

00:59:18 ►

He’s been here since day one.

00:59:19 ►

I’m not sure if he’s an occupier, but he’s always out here photographing.

00:59:23 ►

He takes great pictures.

00:59:25 ►

So I guess show his website some support.

00:59:29 ►

In his absence, journeyamerica.org.

00:59:37 ►

I can’t remember.

00:59:39 ►

I think I’m forgetting the rest somewhere around there, but I just can’t remember.

00:59:50 ►

So let’s see.

00:59:52 ►

So we were all in that last spot, and I stayed behind because they wanted legal and library,

01:00:02 ►

thought it would be a good idea for a live stream to stay behind,

01:00:05 ►

capture the search for compliance at the library.

01:00:10 ►

So I volunteered.

01:00:12 ►

And I don’t know how I’d feel about that.

01:00:17 ►

A lot of protesters sat down in support of the library.

01:00:21 ►

And after the library was found to be in compliance,

01:00:24 ►

and I caught

01:00:25 ►

that on video, so if any of those books are missing, we’re going to see how bad Nate can

01:00:32 ►

get. I don’t even know how bad Nate can get, but I’m going to friggin’ go there. So, while While the ten occupiers were sitting there…

01:00:47 ►

Thank you, you’re a soldier.

01:00:48 ►

You are a soldier!

01:00:49 ►

Thank you, Scott.

01:00:51 ►

While the ten occupiers were sitting there,

01:00:54 ►

a lot of riot police,

01:00:58 ►

I think every single riot police officer that was here,

01:01:01 ►

stormed the last part of the park and forced everybody back in a violent, the most violent thing I’ve ever seen.

01:01:11 ►

You know, just people screaming. A few people were arrested, and while they were forcing them back,

01:01:19 ►

someone was knocked out by the horses on the inside of the park. I don’t know if this guy was picked

01:01:27 ►

out of the crowd and he’s getting dragged. I don’t know. I just looked over and there’s

01:01:30 ►

a protester just lying there. I was just like, holy, did a horse step on his head or something?

01:01:40 ►

Is this guy dead? He’s definitely unconscious. He ended up getting up a few minutes later

01:01:47 ►

after they cuffed him to rouse him.

01:01:52 ►

Then the library was found to be in compliance.

01:01:54 ►

We all came back out here.

01:01:57 ►

And someone was,

01:01:58 ►

another person was tased over at the intersection.

01:02:03 ►

Library was found in compliance, hasn’t been taken down?

01:02:06 ►

Library has not been taken down, no.

01:02:08 ►

I was there.

01:02:08 ►

I mean, I hope it hasn’t been taken down.

01:02:10 ►

They told us they would not take it down.

01:02:12 ►

They’ve lied to us today already, so.

01:02:13 ►

Okay.

01:02:14 ►

Has anything happened in the last ten minutes, or just?

01:02:16 ►

Just the GA.

01:02:18 ►

Oh, okay.

01:02:18 ►

GA occurred here in the street.

01:02:21 ►

Yeah, so.

01:02:26 ►

Yeah, that arrest was made there.

01:02:33 ►

Apparently, a police officer called this man named Jeremiah over to him and said,

01:02:34 ►

Hey, I want to say something to you.

01:02:44 ►

And as he walked up to them, they forced open the barricade and tackled him and tased him and arrested him. So I don’t know how many arrests.

01:02:46 ►

I guess there’s over 10. Police officers seem to have been injured during that last rush

01:02:54 ►

as well. I think that’s just about it. I might be missing some smaller details. forgive my frozen brain. A lot of people walking up to me today, chatters that

01:03:11 ►

I’ve recognized before from the chat box right here at Occupied Air. People coming up to

01:03:18 ►

me saying, I tweeted your channel, I’m getting it all out. All the support, I want to thank

01:03:23 ►

you. I want to thank you for viewing. I know a lot of you have been with me all day.

01:03:28 ►

And I was feeding off of that energy.

01:03:31 ►

I promise you that,

01:03:32 ►

that there were people watching what I had to show.

01:03:38 ►

And I hope I conveyed it well enough.

01:03:51 ►

So thank you for watching. And I hope you do come back and watch some more. I plan on staying here in DC after all this. I can’t leave this occupation anytime

01:03:58 ►

soon. This is the hardest day I’ve ever, ever even imagined having at an occupation.

01:04:08 ►

So I would hope that you would follow our Twitter at Occupied underscore Air.

01:04:17 ►

Same name as the channel with an underscore in between the two words.

01:04:20 ►

Whenever we go live, I send out a tweet tweet and so it’s easier to find me. Join the Ustream

01:04:29 ►

crowd if you could. That’d be great. That’s all I need. That’s all the support I need.

01:04:35 ►

I see you guys talking in the chat saying, get Nate some food. He hasn’t eaten anything

01:04:38 ►

today. Get him some water. Gee, I got handed three packs of cigarettes today. I handed them out. But

01:04:47 ►

I do appreciate that you brought me, personally, tobacco. And you know what? I’m going to keep,

01:04:54 ►

I feel like I kicked ass today. I’m going to keep kicking ass. I will be streaming tomorrow.

01:04:59 ►

I’ll be streaming the next day. Look forward to Thursday through Saturday next week for the CPAC convention.

01:05:07 ►

Conservative political something committee. I’ve only looked into it a little bit, but

01:05:13 ►

it’s a three-day event. Expect huge protests, us reeling back showing that we are still

01:05:22 ►

here after this McPherson eviction.

01:05:27 ►

Those three days are going to be our time to shine.

01:05:30 ►

So I will be streaming that, and I will be a part of that.

01:05:36 ►

So please come and watch that Thursday through Saturday, I believe, next week.

01:05:42 ►

I might have the dates maybe a little wonky, but I think that’s it.

01:05:48 ►

I’m going to warm up.

01:05:51 ►

Right now, maybe get some food in my stomach.

01:05:55 ►

And let’s see.

01:05:58 ►

I guess that’s about it.

01:05:59 ►

Thank you so much for watching.

01:06:02 ►

I’m honored that you,

01:06:04 ►

and everybody who’s screen capping me today,

01:06:09 ►

really, thank you for, because there were a couple points in there when I was behind the police line,

01:06:10 ►

and I spent probably just about two hours today behind the police line

01:06:16 ►

where I was very scared,

01:06:18 ►

but I knew you guys were screen capping me and that my footage would be safe.

01:06:23 ►

So thank you for the assuaging

01:06:26 ►

of my fear in that. Thankfully I did not get arrested. I was being careful not to be.

01:06:39 ►

And sadly, Nate’s home for the night after that long day was the other D.C. encampment, and that was also raided the next day.

01:06:48 ►

You know, it may seem like a waste of energy to occupy these public spaces like so many people are doing,

01:06:54 ►

but without those brave souls who are putting their bodies on the line,

01:06:58 ►

there would be little or no way that the great mass of people who only get their news from television

01:07:03 ►

would even know that the Occupy movement isn’t just in New York or Madrid or Melbourne.

01:07:09 ►

It’s everywhere. It’s in their cities and towns as well.

01:07:13 ►

And even in cases like San Diego, where the police state has totally clamped down

01:07:17 ►

on all forms of free speech in public places,

01:07:20 ►

even in that draconian situation, these wonderful and peaceful citizens

01:07:24 ►

are holding not only their ground, they’re holding ground for all of us.

01:07:29 ►

Once our right to peaceably assemble is gone, we’re in for a long, dark period of fascist repression.

01:07:35 ►

So, if you have a little Occupy encampment in your town, well, why don’t you take some food and water down to them whenever you get a chance?

01:07:42 ►

You’ll be doing it for all of us.

01:07:45 ►

And just one more comment here. In case you’ve got some friends who maybe are saying that,

01:07:50 ►

well, the protesters are getting what they ask for when the cops attack them with flash grenades,

01:07:56 ►

rubber-coated bullets, pepper spray, and beating them with clubs. Hey, weren’t we led to believe that we live in a civil society?

01:08:07 ►

If that’s true, then how do you make the case that attacking kids who are simply sitting on

01:08:12 ►

a public sidewalk doing nothing harmful to themselves or others, how do you justify

01:08:17 ►

attacking them with chemical weapons? You know, from my point of view, it’s no different from a

01:08:22 ►

parent who beats a two-year-old for wetting their pants.

01:08:29 ►

I don’t see that as human behavior. That’s animal behavior. Period.

01:08:34 ►

All those campus cops at the University of California had to do was to wait them out.

01:08:37 ►

Have you ever sat on a concrete sidewalk yourself?

01:08:42 ►

And if so, you know that after a couple hours of sitting there, it gets very uncomfortable.

01:08:50 ►

Not to mention the fact that a toilet break eventually becomes a necessity, as well as food and water. So all those stupid cops had to do was to sit and wait them out. Instead, they attacked these innocent kids and showed the

01:08:55 ►

world what a tightly screwed down police state the U.S. has become. But enough of my rambling.

01:09:02 ►

What I’m going to do right now is to play a series of audio clips.

01:09:06 ►

The first one is of a young man from San Diego who was speaking at the General Assembly that was held in the middle of K Street in Washington, D.C., the evening after the McPherson Square eviction.

01:09:20 ►

And he tells how the San Diego occupiers are dealing with police suppression.

01:09:24 ►

And he tells how the San Diego occupiers are dealing with police suppression.

01:09:29 ►

Following him is a bit about the Department of Homeland Security,

01:09:33 ►

which now includes a national secret police force, in case you missed that announcement.

01:09:38 ►

And now we learn that the DHS is monitoring journalists and bloggers in a blatant attempt to keep the press away from the Occupy actions.

01:09:43 ►

Next up is part of an interview with journalist Chris Hedges,

01:09:46 ►

who you’ve heard from on several occasions here in these podcasts already.

01:09:50 ►

And in this clip, Chris will be talking about some of the ideas

01:09:54 ►

that he puts forth in his book, Empire of Illusion.

01:09:58 ►

And while this segment will also end with a call to the barricades from Chris Hedges

01:10:02 ►

in a different interview, between those two Hedges segments, I’m going to play a three-minute pep talk that Tony Benn gave to some of the occupiers in London the other day.

01:10:12 ►

And when I come back after playing those clips, I’ll tell our fellow salonners in the U.S. a little something about Tony Benn, who is quite well known in the U.K. and Europe.

01:10:23 ►

You want to just do it? You can just mic check. Mic check! Mic check! Mic check! Mic check! UK and Europe. together. How we came about on that is borrowing New York model, combining some of the spokes

01:10:51 ►

councils, and also borrowing some from Austin, Texas. And how did it actually help? Our GA will not consent upon anything

01:11:09 ►

unless it’s gone through a working group.

01:11:13 ►

If there is a topic that’s coming from an individual,

01:11:19 ►

we open it for crowdstorming.

01:11:24 ►

We break them into groups.

01:11:27 ►

And in that group, they can consent upon

01:11:31 ►

what item they would like to discuss in that group.

01:11:36 ►

They also will be consenting upon a spokesperson.

01:11:41 ►

To stand and actually inform the GA what item they would like to discuss.

01:11:47 ►

And a good thing about that, it opens an opportunity for people to get involved while they’re in

01:12:01 ►

GA.

01:12:02 ►

Based on my experience, because I’m from facilitation over there,

01:12:09 ►

our working group had actually increased

01:12:14 ►

and a lot more people came back.

01:12:17 ►

After Spokes Council destroyed RGA,

01:12:23 ►

for elitist accusation, we were down to seven.

01:12:31 ►

Now we have a solid of 40 up to 50 people.

01:12:37 ►

And sometimes it goes up to 100.

01:12:41 ►

And another thing about in San Diego, because we’re not allowed to sleep in the plaza, how we’ve dealt with that, it’s kind of tacky.

01:12:54 ►

Some people donated their vans and parked their cars at Ace parking lots.

01:13:03 ►

And people slept in the cars.

01:13:06 ►

Some also offer, we work with other organizations and unions

01:13:12 ►

to use their housing commune housing thing.

01:13:18 ►

And we also make sure that there are people present in the plaza. We want to make sure that there are people present in the plaza.

01:13:25 ►

Just in case people would like to ask where the GAs are still being held.

01:13:29 ►

Just in case people would like to ask where the GAs are still being held.

01:13:33 ►

And some actually do sleep in the sidewalks.

01:13:35 ►

And some actually do sleep in the sidewalks.

01:13:38 ►

Thank you.

01:13:40 ►

Well, the First Amendment protects your right to the freedom of religion, speech, assembly, the press.

01:13:45 ►

However, the Department of Homeland Security has decided to modify that freedom of speech and press

01:13:50 ►

under its newly enacted Media Monitoring Initiative.

01:13:54 ►

Now, this initiative will be conducted under the National Operations Center.

01:13:57 ►

And the idea from the brains over at the DHS headquarters will allow the government to keep data

01:14:02 ►

on anybody who uses any sort of news or media outlet to share, report, or stay informed. So basically that means that journalists, news

01:14:10 ►

anchors, hosts like myself, producers, anybody who’s just a news junkie in general who relies

01:14:15 ►

on television and the internet to keep up with the times are all going to be under close watch.

01:14:20 ►

But see, their targets don’t stop there. Any government worker who makes a public statement

01:14:24 ►

and anyone who’s been involved in any homeland security type of crime

01:14:27 ►

will also be under the microscope.

01:14:29 ►

And if you’re thinking that something like this already exists,

01:14:32 ►

technically you would be correct.

01:14:34 ►

See, old guidelines allow the government to collect data

01:14:36 ►

as long as they’re given authorization to do so.

01:14:39 ►

But according to Fast Company’s website,

01:14:40 ►

DHS has been collecting Intel since 2010,

01:14:43 ►

and they’ve been distributing

01:14:45 ►

that information to international third parties and private sector businesses.

01:14:49 ►

Why, I wonder.

01:14:51 ►

However, this new initiative, which was created back in November, removes the entire need

01:14:55 ►

for any authorization, thus making it virtually anybody who’s linked to media fair game.

01:15:00 ►

Now, DHS is hoping to combat any outcry over lack of privacy by saying that they’re only

01:15:04 ►

going to keep tabs of publicly made information while they’re retaining data about persons of interest.

01:15:10 ►

But personally, I think we all know that’s not going to happen.

01:15:13 ►

It’s unclear as to how much taxpayer money is going to be going towards this initiative or the manpower required to keep tabs on anybody who speaks out.

01:15:20 ►

But it does offer up more proof that the government is taking the time to add yet another layer of surveillance to an already huge surveillance apparatus all

01:15:28 ►

for the sake of keeping a running tab of who says what and it’s not just the

01:15:32 ►

media it’s also social media last week we told you about Twitter users who

01:15:36 ►

receive subpoenas and court orders also the police could get information about

01:15:40 ►

what they do online and who they follow and what they say just more proof that

01:15:44 ►

your freedom of speech really ain’t all that free.

01:15:47 ►

In fact, it just might land you on a government list.

01:15:51 ►

Because if you are making judgments about yourself

01:15:55 ►

and the direction of your society based on illusions,

01:15:59 ►

you are not operating in a reality-based universe,

01:16:01 ►

and the consequences of that are catastrophic.

01:16:05 ►

There are seismic changes that the United States is undergoing

01:16:09 ►

and the culture at large is undergoing.

01:16:12 ►

With the collapse of globalization, the destruction of personal wealth,

01:16:17 ►

we in the United States have added to it tremendous debt,

01:16:21 ►

which we can never repay now in terms of commitments and loans

01:16:24 ►

and guarantees into the trillions, over $12 trillion.

01:16:29 ►

We are borrowing to sustain an empire that we can no longer afford.

01:16:34 ►

We are borrowing to sustain a lifestyle that we can no longer afford.

01:16:38 ►

I mean, real wages in the United States have declined since 1973, and people sustain their lifestyle through credit.

01:16:45 ►

Well, that is all, of course, drying up. Banks, although they’ve been bailed out by the taxpayers,

01:16:50 ►

are not giving credit anymore. And yet, we believe that it’s all going to come back.

01:16:57 ►

We believe that we are still the most powerful and the most virtuous nation on the planet.

01:17:03 ►

the most powerful and the most virtuous nation on the planet.

01:17:11 ►

And that incapacity to grasp the severe new limitations that we are about to face,

01:17:22 ►

the destruction of our financial system has left us clinging to fantasy, to magical thinking.

01:17:26 ►

You know, what we’re in essence trying to do is borrow our way back to a bubble economy of 2006. And the danger of that is that when you believe, and this is just a cross

01:17:34 ►

popular culture, that if you just dig deep enough within yourself, if you, you know, find that inner

01:17:40 ►

strength and fortitude, if you grasp that you are truly exceptional, you can have everything you want.

01:17:46 ►

Well, and you point to reality shows and the proliferation of reality shows as a real illustration of that kind of thinking that everyone is just one edition away from being a celebrity.

01:17:58 ►

Well, that’s the celebrity culture.

01:18:00 ►

We’re all sort of waiting for our cue to walk on stage.

01:18:03 ►

That cause or effect.

01:18:03 ►

we’re all sort of waiting for our cue to walk on stage.

01:18:04 ►

Does that cause or affect?

01:18:08 ►

I mean, do these kind of things, the proliferation of reality shows,

01:18:12 ►

Survivor, where, you know, everyone is evil against themselves and there’s no cooperation,

01:18:15 ►

do you see this as a reflection of the broader culture or something that moves the broader culture to another and less happy place?

01:18:20 ►

I think it’s both.

01:18:22 ►

It certainly reflects the ethic of the broader culture.

01:18:26 ►

You know, the qualities that are celebrated in a commodity culture are essentially boiled down to

01:18:31 ►

the capacity for manipulation. And if you lie, if you build, and reality shows a perfect,

01:18:38 ►

reality programs are a perfect example of that. If you build false friendships and then betray

01:18:43 ►

these people who trust you, who believe

01:18:46 ►

that they have become your friend, it’s about self-aggrandizement, the ability to promote

01:18:54 ►

yourself, often at the expense of others, to achieve fame or fleeting fame and money.

01:19:02 ►

leading fame, and money.

01:19:04 ►

That is the ethic of Wall Street.

01:19:08 ►

That is what has trashed the global economy.

01:19:13 ►

The lack of capacity to understand the necessity of the common good,

01:19:16 ►

of self-sacrifice, of community.

01:19:20 ►

These are values that from the lowest rungs of popular culture up to the highest levels of our financial industry are uniform and are at the core of

01:19:26 ►

celebrity culture itself, which is about the cult of the self, about the promotion of me above others.

01:19:33 ►

Neil Gabler, I think, has written some good stuff on this, and he talks about how it’s that life

01:19:39 ►

movie in the head, that we’re all sort of playing out a screenplay in our head.

01:19:46 ►

And the power of technology to create events that are not real but that appear real

01:19:56 ►

has warped our perception of the world around us.

01:20:01 ►

I know it as a war correspondent, having spent 20 years covering conflicts around the globe. I know the reality of war. And yet the perception of war,

01:20:12 ►

especially given the capacity of Hollywood to create images and special effects, is totally,

01:20:19 ►

a total variance with what’s real. And yet people who have never been to war

01:20:25 ►

have a belief that they understand something about it

01:20:28 ►

because the pseudo-event replaces reality itself.

01:20:33 ►

You also see, I mean, from the port industry to our elite universities,

01:20:37 ►

Yale, Harvard, Princeton, even the U of T,

01:20:40 ►

as contributing to this empire of illusion.

01:20:44 ►

In what way?

01:20:46 ►

Because the educational system has been completely hijacked

01:20:51 ►

by people who create systems managers,

01:20:56 ►

those who are competent at managing a system but not questioning it.

01:21:03 ►

The withering of the humanities has had a devastating consequence.

01:21:08 ►

Now, the humanities are about asking the broad moral questions about the common good, about

01:21:15 ►

how a society should be constructed. True intellectual introspection is about challenging assumptions and structures. But this, especially

01:21:29 ►

within the corporatized walls of universities, is deemed, quote-unquote, political. And there has

01:21:35 ►

been a huge witch hunt against those professors that have, quote-unquote, liberal bias in the

01:21:41 ►

same way that they’ve gone after them. This is a code really for moral autonomy.

01:21:48 ►

What we have done is destroy those voices that provide a kind of moral center

01:21:55 ►

for how we should be structuring a society.

01:21:58 ►

And the universities, the elite universities where I’ve taught at Princeton, Columbia, and NYU

01:22:03 ►

are particularly guilty

01:22:05 ►

because they reward a very narrow kind of intelligence, an analytical intelligence.

01:22:10 ►

Yeah, well, your critique is what they’re doing is they’re imparting skills rather than wisdom.

01:22:14 ►

It’s vocational.

01:22:15 ►

Yeah, but their defense would be, well, you know, we have to prepare the next generation’s workforce.

01:22:20 ►

Well, what are they preparing them for?

01:22:21 ►

They’re preparing them to move people’s money around electronically 12 hours a day for huge firms that engage in speculation that are really parasitic and do nothing for the economy at large. billions of dollars of taxpayer money in bailouts. And that is, that inability to question structures

01:22:48 ►

is what’s killing us, because the only thing we are capable of doing is attempting to sustain

01:22:55 ►

a dying edifice, which means throwing truckloads of money at a system that has already failed.

01:23:01 ►

that has already failed.

01:23:07 ►

And that is the, I think, a direct result of a kind of winnowing within our educational process

01:23:12 ►

whereby other forms of intelligence,

01:23:15 ►

moral intelligence, creative intelligence,

01:23:17 ►

are punished or marginalized.

01:23:20 ►

And this very narrow, test-taking,

01:23:24 ►

rote-learning, drone-like intelligence is celebrated and elevated.

01:23:31 ►

Many see Obama as a breath of fresh air, someone outside of the mold.

01:23:36 ►

You see him as a product of this very, very system, more of the same?

01:23:39 ►

He’s a brand. He functions the same or has the same function as those advertisements that Calvin Klein and Bennington put out a few years ago with HIV positive models and people of color.

01:23:54 ►

I mean, he is something new, faintly erotic maybe, but he has done nothing to challenge the structure of the corporate state.

01:24:11 ►

He functions as all brands done.

01:24:13 ►

There was a brand deflation or collapse, which is very common in advertising,

01:24:18 ►

and so we have been given something new.

01:24:19 ►

And I think in an image-based society, in a society built around celebrity culture,

01:24:25 ►

and Obama has many of the qualities of celebrity, we confuse how we’re made to feel with knowledge. We confuse

01:24:32 ►

propaganda with ideology. And I think if you look closely at Barack Obama’s campaign and his tenure

01:24:38 ►

as president, that is precisely what’s happened. You’re also very critical of the positive thinking,

01:24:46 ►

the kind of feel-good psychology movement of Tony Robbins. Much like

01:24:50 ►

wrestling, people would say, what harm is there in this kind of feel-good stuff?

01:24:55 ►

The danger of it is that you become responsible for your predicament. You are to blame.

01:25:07 ►

This has been devastating for especially the working class.

01:25:11 ►

There are no jobs.

01:25:12 ►

These former manufacturing centers in places like Youngstown, Ohio,

01:25:15 ►

are boarded up.

01:25:18 ►

They look like bombed-out wrecks.

01:25:21 ►

The industry has literally been crated up and shipped off to China or Mexico.

01:25:25 ►

And, of course, in many of the plants now, there’s large-scale factory closings along the Mexican borders.

01:25:31 ►

People or corporations ship these factories to China, so where workers get $0.10 anh o u r in s t e a d o f$ 0.90 an hour.

01:25:39 ►

This, in your view, is also delusional, just telling people that all you have to do is kind of think positively and all your problems will go away?

01:25:44 ►

Sure, because if there are no jobs, if there, you know, there are, there have been huge

01:25:48 ►

structural changes within the United States that have made it almost impossible for blue

01:25:54 ►

collar workers to sustain themselves and their families. And they have not only lost hope,

01:25:59 ►

but they realize that their children, there’s no chance that their children will ever be

01:26:03 ►

able to replicate the kind of lifestyle that in the 50s, 60s,

01:26:07 ►

and into the early 70s was possible for blue-collar workers.

01:26:11 ►

And so Tony Robbins and positive psychologists and people who tell them that it’s all about attitude create this delusional idea

01:26:30 ►

idea, and any kind of analysis of reality that is bleak or dark or negative is dismissed as unhelpful because it’s not happy and positive.

01:26:34 ►

And this only propels us back into magical thinking, that we can have everything we want,

01:26:40 ►

that it doesn’t matter what the corporate state does to the structures of the society. If we just believe, if we have faith in ourselves, reality can be overcome. And this,

01:26:52 ►

you know, this magical thinking is imparted across the culture, whether it’s Tony Robbins,

01:26:59 ►

whether it’s the Christian right, whether it’s Oprah Winfrey, whether it’s Hollywood, whether it’s television. It is a common denominator in all of the ideologies that are thrown out.

01:27:11 ►

In fact, you see it permeating kind of almost human resource policies in corporate America,

01:27:16 ►

the same techniques used in positive psychology.

01:27:19 ►

Give me some examples of that.

01:27:21 ►

Well, it’s very much a part of corporatism,

01:27:23 ►

as anyone who has worked in a

01:27:25 ►

corporation as I did at the New York Times understands. You take corporate retreats. You

01:27:31 ►

tell people that quotas, if you’re in advertising, can always be raised. Profits can always be

01:27:38 ►

raised. What’s happening outside the doors of your corporation are irrelevant. It is about the happy kind of conformity,

01:27:46 ►

any kind of challenging of the organization,

01:27:50 ►

the direction of the organization,

01:27:51 ►

and the very authoritarian structure of these organizations

01:27:56 ►

becomes a form of dissent

01:28:01 ►

which breaks the familial, harmonious collective that is being formed within the

01:28:08 ►

corporation. There’s a kind of Maoist quality to it in that any kind of challenging of the

01:28:17 ►

corporate structure is again blamed on the individual who is trying to obstruct the happiness and the prosperity of the corporate

01:28:27 ►

whole. Corporations are particularly pernicious, and these positive psychologists make quite a

01:28:35 ►

good living being brought into these corporate structures to teach that kind. And I have passages

01:28:41 ►

in the book about people who’ve attended these seminars where they are told that it’s all about being happy.

01:28:48 ►

And, of course, none of us are ever as happy as we appear.

01:28:52 ►

There are anxieties and troubles.

01:28:54 ►

But all of this has to be hidden under kind of a cheerful, fake veneer.

01:29:02 ►

You also make the point that these same positive psychologists are not simply brought into the

01:29:07 ►

corporation, but they’re brought into the

01:29:09 ►

military, and particularly the military’s

01:29:11 ►

interrogation technique. Tell me more

01:29:13 ►

about that. Well, the

01:29:14 ►

psychologists have been

01:29:17 ►

used at Guantanamo

01:29:19 ►

and Abu Ghraib and

01:29:20 ►

other centers

01:29:22 ►

to quite scientifically deconstruct human personalities, human psyches.

01:29:30 ►

And they monitor the, you know, they used to say that the Gestapo broke bones and the Stasi broke souls.

01:29:38 ►

We’re the Stasi. We break souls.

01:29:41 ►

Sensory deprivation, a lot of the work was done in Canada on the CIA contract, as you probably well know.

01:29:46 ►

It’s about four or five days.

01:29:50 ►

You can’t see.

01:29:51 ►

You can’t hear.

01:29:52 ►

You don’t know where you are.

01:29:53 ►

Nobody speaks to you.

01:29:55 ►

You can very quickly reduce human beings to a kind of fetal state.

01:30:03 ►

And that breakdown, we know, has rendered prisoners in Guantanamo insane,

01:30:09 ►

and they’ve not recovered. Eisenhower quoted the notion that America was becoming a military

01:30:15 ►

industrial complex. I mean, you raise the same alarm bells in this book and go as far as say

01:30:21 ►

that America is functionally addicted to war. Well, look at our economy. I mean, half of all discretionary spending since World War II has gone into the defense

01:30:29 ►

industry, which has largely destroyed domestic industry. Because if, look, if you’re a large

01:30:36 ►

corporation and you know that if you sign a Pentagon contract, all cost overruns will automatically be paid. And whether you’re producing M1 Abram tanks or F-16 fighter jets,

01:30:51 ►

huge amounts of American money are given to countries like Israel or Egypt,

01:30:56 ►

and within the $3 billion that’s handed Egypt,

01:31:00 ►

$1.3 billion is to be used to buy American weapons.

01:31:03 ►

It’s a great, It has nothing to do with

01:31:05 ►

capitalism. It’s kind of corporate socialism or something. And for those of us who aren’t

01:31:08 ►

economists, how does this distort the economy? Because the domestic economy can’t compete. So,

01:31:14 ►

for instance, when New York City wanted to order new subway cars, there were no manuals. Nobody in

01:31:19 ►

the United States made them. Why would you make them? Make tanks. And this is the major public

01:31:24 ►

policy concern you have from the illusion that it allows us to think everything’s going to get better,

01:31:30 ►

that basically this military spending and the deficit that America has racked up is simply

01:31:35 ►

unsustainable. Well, it is. I mean, we survive because we sell our debt. China buys about $2

01:31:41 ►

billion of debt a day, I think is the figure, or one day, our debt.

01:31:46 ►

And they’re not going to buy our debt.

01:31:48 ►

I mean, it’s not over the long term.

01:31:50 ►

It’s like pretending that we’re always going to have fossil fuels,

01:31:53 ►

that gasoline is never going to go to $5 a gallon.

01:31:57 ►

I mean, once gasoline goes to $5 a gallon,

01:32:01 ►

our food system is going to become, at least for the poor and the working class,

01:32:08 ►

foodstuffs are going to be unaffordable.

01:32:11 ►

Because in the United States with agro, and this has also happened in Canada,

01:32:15 ►

but I mean the agro businesses have wiped out small farms.

01:32:19 ►

Almost everything we produce, like fruits and vegetables,

01:32:23 ►

are out of Southern California, which is experiencing

01:32:25 ►

droughts. It has to be shipped all the way across the country. I mean, I live outside New York City.

01:32:30 ►

New Jersey used to, it’s still called the Garden State, although now it’s unfortunately not many

01:32:34 ►

gardens left. But it supplied the food that and upstate New York, supplied New York City with

01:32:40 ►

food. We are not standing up and facing the realities in front of us,

01:32:48 ►

and it’s not coincidental that twinned with our economic crisis is an environmental crisis.

01:32:54 ►

The polar ice caps are melting. We’ve seen up around the Arctic what scientists describe as

01:33:00 ►

methane chimneys bubbling up from the permafrost that has melted. Methane is 25 times

01:33:07 ►

more potent in terms of greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. Some scientists have said that

01:33:14 ►

if that is not halted, the human species will literally asphyxiate itself. The parallel

01:33:19 ►

villain through all your travels here is is corporate America and the huge power that corporations wield now.

01:33:27 ►

I mean, you talk about a culture of deregulation that has evolved in the last little while.

01:33:31 ►

Given the current economic crisis and the reaction we’re seeing, especially in Europe,

01:33:34 ►

I mean, do you have any, in your instance,

01:33:37 ►

there’s probably hope that we’re going to see another generation of trust busters,

01:33:40 ►

a new regime of regulating and reining in the excesses of business in the next

01:33:45 ►

little while? No. You don’t see that, certainly not in America? Not in America. Canada was saved

01:33:51 ►

from that because you don’t have a banking crisis because you didn’t allow your commercial and

01:33:56 ►

investment banks to hedge funds. And we live in the United States in, I think, what is probably more properly termed inverted totalitarianism.

01:34:09 ►

That’s a term coined by the great political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, taught at Berkeley and Princeton.

01:34:17 ►

And inverted totalitarianism is different from classical totalitarianism.

01:34:22 ►

Number one, it’s not built around a demagogue or a charismatic leader.

01:34:28 ►

It does not tear down old structures to create new edifices. It purports to honor democracy,

01:34:36 ►

the constitution, electoral politics. But it has so corrupted the levers of power

01:34:41 ►

that it makes democracy dysfunctional. Unlike classical

01:34:48 ►

totalitarianism, where politics or economics is subordinate to politics, in inverted totalitarianism,

01:34:55 ►

economics or politics is subverted to economic interests, which creates a different form of

01:35:00 ►

ruthlessness. And there are innumerable examples. You can look at the health care debate,

01:35:06 ►

but probably the most or the best example

01:35:08 ►

is the first $700 billion bailout plan.

01:35:11 ►

You had constituent calls in the United States

01:35:13 ►

running 100 to 1 across the political spectrum

01:35:16 ►

against the bailout.

01:35:18 ►

Some of the most impassioned speeches decrying the bailout

01:35:21 ►

were delivered by right-wing Republicans from Texas

01:35:24 ►

on the floor of the House of Representatives.

01:35:26 ►

And yet it passed anyway.

01:35:27 ►

And why did it pass?

01:35:28 ►

Because the corporations wanted it passed.

01:35:31 ►

Any serious debate about health care in the United States

01:35:34 ►

should begin with a factual acknowledgment

01:35:36 ►

that the for-profit health care industry is the problem,

01:35:39 ►

has to be destroyed,

01:35:40 ►

and then we can talk about what kind of a system do we want.

01:35:43 ►

Do we want a Canadian-type system, British type system, you know, a French? But that will never happen

01:35:49 ►

because the corporations and with a corporatized media, we have six or eight corporations that

01:35:53 ►

control virtually everything we see, read, hear and think in the United States has created

01:35:59 ►

a kind of faux debate where arguments that really should have no validity in an open society are given

01:36:06 ►

great import and weight and uh that’s not changed and is not changing chris had just very tough

01:36:15 ►

stuff i want to thank you very much for joining me and sharing thanks for having me first of all

01:36:19 ►

i want to thank you for inviting me i greatly admire what you’re doing i’ve come to thank you for inviting me. I greatly admire what you’re doing. I’ve come to support you and to encourage you. Because what you’re doing here at St. Paul’s is what has been done over many centuries in Britain.

01:36:41 ►

for democratic government.

01:36:45 ►

That the laws are made by the people we elect,

01:36:46 ►

we can remove them,

01:36:48 ►

and if you get a new government,

01:36:51 ►

they can make laws and you can remove them as well.

01:36:54 ►

So the people at the top have to listen to the people over whom they exercise power.

01:36:57 ►

That is what democracy is about.

01:37:00 ►

And it’s something which we thought we had won

01:37:04 ►

because we did in the end after many centuries.

01:37:08 ►

We won the vote first for men and then for women,

01:37:12 ►

and in 1948, which is not so long ago, we finally got to one vote, one man, one woman at the same age.

01:37:20 ►

And now we live in a world where real power has moved away from the parliaments we elect

01:37:27 ►

and is now the real power is exercised by people we didn’t elect can’t remove and who don’t have

01:37:35 ►

to listen to us and that is the problem that we face and it is a problem that you are dealing

01:37:42 ►

with by coming here to St. Paul’s,

01:37:50 ►

and it’s aroused a lot of interest and a lot of admiration all over the world.

01:37:53 ►

But I must tell you how progress is made.

01:37:58 ►

When you come up with a good idea like the one you have today,

01:38:01 ►

the first thing they do is to ignore you.

01:38:05 ►

Then if that doesn’t deal with you, then they say you’re mad.

01:38:09 ►

And if that doesn’t deal with you,

01:38:11 ►

then they arrest you and put you in jail,

01:38:13 ►

which is what they did with the suffragettes.

01:38:15 ►

And then there’s a pause,

01:38:18 ►

and then you can’t find anyone at the top who doesn’t claim to have thought of it in the first place.

01:38:21 ►

And that is how progress is made.

01:38:24 ►

And it’s the way

01:38:25 ►

you’re doing it. You’ve drawn attention to the lack of democracy. You’re doing it in

01:38:30 ►

a way that involves making sacrifices yourself of comfort and food and doing it here. You

01:38:37 ►

are being, oh, you were ignored, but you can’t be ignored anymore. You’re now being described

01:38:43 ►

as mad or dangerous. And there are,

01:38:46 ►

of course, threats against you by the Corporation of London, and you will have to decide what to do

01:38:51 ►

about it. It’s not for me to recommend what you should do, because the consequences of what you

01:38:58 ►

do will fall upon you yourselves, and you will have to use your own democracy to decide how to deal with

01:39:06 ►

those who want to get rid of you but i just hope that you carry on because i think all over the

01:39:13 ►

world there’s a great deal of interest in what’s happening in st paul’s cathedral here now and

01:39:20 ►

while you stick at it while you keep keep at it, you give people hope.

01:39:25 ►

And hope is the greatest force for social progress and social change.

01:39:30 ►

Go on arguing.

01:39:33 ►

Stick up for what you believe in.

01:39:35 ►

Don’t be put down by people who weren’t elected and have no legitimate right to control you.

01:39:42 ►

And all over the world, people will say, thank God in London, they’re

01:39:47 ►

taking a stand. And that’s why what you’re doing is so important. So good luck, carry on. And you’ll

01:39:54 ►

find that in the end, you will succeed because that is how all progress is made. So carry on.

01:40:00 ►

Good luck and all the best.

01:40:02 ►

Carry on. Good luck and all the best.

01:40:03 ►

Jody Venn.

01:40:10 ►

Your assessment of President Obama?

01:40:12 ►

A disaster.

01:40:15 ►

A poster child for the bankruptcy of the liberal class.

01:40:18 ►

Somebody who, like Clinton, is a self-identified liberal,

01:40:22 ►

who speaks in the traditional language of liberalism, but has made war against the core values of liberalism, which is a concern for those people outside the narrow power elite.

01:40:31 ►

And the tragedy of tragedy is the right word, is that Obama, who made this Faustian bargain

01:40:36 ►

with corporate interests in order to gain power, has now been crumpled up and thrown

01:40:42 ►

away by these interests. They don’t need him anymore. He functioned as a brand after the disastrous eight years of George Bush.

01:40:48 ►

And what we are watching is an even more craven attempt on the part of the White House

01:40:53 ►

to cater to the forces that are literally destroying the United States,

01:41:01 ►

have reconfigured, are reconfiguring this country into a form of

01:41:05 ►

neo-feudalism. And all of the traditional, the pillars of the liberal establishment that once

01:41:10 ►

provided some kind of protection, and more importantly, a kind of safety valve, a mechanism

01:41:15 ►

by which legitimate grievances and injustices in this country could be addressed, have shut

01:41:20 ►

tight. They no longer work. And so we are getting these terrifying proto-fascist movements

01:41:26 ►

that are leaping up around the fringes of American society and have as their anger not only

01:41:31 ►

a rage against government, but a rage against liberals as well. And I would say that rage is

01:41:36 ►

not misplaced. Finally, Chris Hedges, you began your speech outside in the snow, outside the gates

01:41:42 ►

of the White House by saying, hope from now on

01:41:45 ►

will look like this. That’s right. All we have left are acts of physical resistance. Of course,

01:41:51 ►

I’m deeply nonviolent. And if we don’t get out, then we’re finished. To trust in the normal

01:41:58 ►

mechanisms of power and those normal liberal institutions that once, and democracy now,

01:42:06 ►

Normal liberal institutions that once, and democracy now, of course, is an exception to this,

01:42:10 ►

but once gave a voice and a place to working men in this country,

01:42:17 ►

is to be very naive and essentially acquiesce to our own bondage.

01:42:23 ►

Now, I realize that the great majority of people walking around today probably think that the Occupy movement is just another bunch of liberal, hippie, dope-smoking malcontents, but I know for a fact that that is very far from the truth.

01:42:44 ►

taking place on street corners, in public plazas, and primarily on the net,

01:42:50 ►

then, well, you’re missing out on a major shift that is taking place in human consciousness right now,

01:42:51 ►

and on a global scale.

01:42:56 ►

Before I played the collection of audio clips we just heard,

01:43:00 ►

I said that I would tell our non-UK salonners a little more about Tony Benn,

01:43:02 ►

whose stirring words we just heard.

01:43:05 ►

Of course, the best place to go for a quick overview is always Wikipedia, so I’ll leave that part up to you other than to say that on this coming April

01:43:11 ►

3rd, he will be celebrating his 87th birthday. So he’s been around the block a few times,

01:43:17 ►

if you understand what I mean. What I’m going to do, however, rather than recite a few biographical

01:43:23 ►

details, is to read a few words written by Mr. Ben that was in the Wikipedia article about him.

01:43:29 ►

It reads,

01:43:30 ►

As a minister, I experienced the power of industrialists and bankers to get their way by use of the crudest form of economic pressure, even blackmail, against the labor government.

01:43:43 ►

Compared to this, the pressure brought to bear in industrial disputes is minuscule.

01:43:48 ►

This power was revealed even more clearly in 1976

01:43:51 ►

when the IMF secured cuts in our public expenditure.

01:43:56 ►

These lessons led me to the conclusions that

01:43:58 ►

the UK is only superficially governed by MPs and the voters who elect them.

01:44:04 ►

Parliamentary democracy is, in truth,

01:44:07 ►

little more than the means of securing a periodical change in the management team,

01:44:11 ►

which is then allowed to preside over a system that remains in essence intact.

01:44:15 ►

If the British people were ever to ask themselves

01:44:18 ►

what power they truly enjoyed under our political system,

01:44:22 ►

they would be amazed to discover how little it is, and

01:44:26 ►

some new Chartist agitation might be born and might quickly gather momentum.

01:44:31 ►

And Tony Benn, who was deeply inside the Towers of Power, wrote that in 1988.

01:44:38 ►

So it isn’t just us working class agitators who are saying these things about how the

01:44:42 ►

system works.

01:44:43 ►

People at the very top of the system, at least the extremely honest ones, are also telling us that the

01:44:49 ►

emperor is wearing no clothes.

01:44:52 ►

And while some of us may think that this is just a cyclical swing of the pendulum from

01:44:57 ►

left to right, and that eventually it will swing back to the left once again, well, to

01:45:04 ►

the we’ll just muddle along crowd, what do you think to the left once again. Well, to the we’ll-just-muddle-along crowd,

01:45:06 ►

what do you think about the fact that one of the leading drone manufacturers here in the States

01:45:12 ►

has proudly stated to its investors that it plans on selling at least 18,000 drones

01:45:18 ►

to various and sundry government agencies,

01:45:21 ►

and that those drone sales will include some of the so-called switchblade

01:45:26 ►

models, which can track a person, land on the person, and then explode.

01:45:31 ►

And this information, by the way, is in the public records of a corporation that is looking

01:45:36 ►

for more investors in its Orwellian products.

01:45:40 ►

To me, this brave new world is even more dystopian than Huxley and Orwell prophesied.

01:45:46 ►

Now, please don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way saying that all of this is about to happen tomorrow.

01:45:51 ►

In fact, if the Occupy movement continues to gain momentum,

01:45:55 ►

I don’t think that any of these fascist, Orwellian schemes of the establishment are going to come to pass.

01:46:02 ►

I think that we are all getting close to the point of no return, but pushback has already begun, and I have no doubt about the outcome. After all,

01:46:11 ►

99 to 1, which are the actual numbers of the rest of us versus the super wealthy who are calling the

01:46:16 ►

shots right now, well, those odds are so overwhelmingly in our favor that we the people

01:46:22 ►

of the world cannot lose. But we’d better get

01:46:25 ►

control of the reins of power pretty soon because we’ve got a whole lot of other problems heading

01:46:30 ►

our way in the form of species extinction, climate change, world population growth, food and water

01:46:36 ►

supplies, and a whole raft of other issues that will be so much easier to deal with if all 100%

01:46:42 ►

of us on this little rock floating in space are

01:46:45 ►

on the same page, or should I say on the same planet.

01:46:49 ►

So I hope that I haven’t bummed you out any, because the truth is that we’re a whole lot

01:46:54 ►

better off than we were last year this time.

01:46:56 ►

A lot has happened since then, and for sure there is now an awakening of consciousness,

01:47:02 ►

of spirit, human spirit, all over this beautiful little planet.

01:47:06 ►

Hey, after all, it is our home planet,

01:47:10 ►

so why don’t we get to talking with one another,

01:47:12 ►

solve our differences, and get to work on making this planet a place to brag about

01:47:17 ►

as we begin to come into contact with our neighbors here in this wonderful little galaxy.

01:47:23 ►

Now I’m going to close with the music from a very nice little video titled Thank you. and the program notes for this podcast that, of course, you can find via psychedelicsalon.us or at the Occupy Update blog at occupysalon.us.

01:47:50 ►

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

01:47:55 ►

Be well, my friends.

01:47:58 ►

People of the world unite!

01:48:02 ►

For we can no longer walk around with our eyes open and our mouths shut.

01:48:08 ►

Now is the time for change.

01:48:10 ►

The time to be brave.

01:48:11 ►

The time to scream.

01:48:13 ►

To speak.

01:48:14 ►

To say.

01:48:16 ►

To talk a revolution is one thing.

01:48:19 ►

But to make it happen is another.

01:48:22 ►

We can find adventure everywhere.

01:48:24 ►

But not in our armchairs. People of the world, unite. We could be the ones to say this.

01:48:33 ►

We could be the ones to change.

01:48:37 ►

When our lips are sealed or nothing.

01:48:40 ►

Just another generation famed.

01:48:44 ►

We could be the ones to save this

01:48:47 ►

We could be the ones to change

01:48:50 ►

When all lips are sealed or nothing

01:48:54 ►

Just another generation famed

01:48:58 ►

People of the world unite

01:49:00 ►

Unlock your voice boxes and fly free with your speech

01:49:04 ►

Turn up the volume,

01:49:07 ►

speed up momentum. Be generous with your ideas. Because the value of money means jam shit

01:49:14 ►

when the innocent are dying because of it. People of the world, unite.

01:49:20 ►

We could be the ones to say this. We could be the ones to change, when our lips are sealed we’re nothing, just another generation late.

01:49:34 ►

We could be the ones to say this, we could be the ones to change, when our lips are sealed we’re still nothing Just another generation late

01:49:47 ►

Be more for all!

01:49:48 ►

Unite!

01:49:54 ►

Be more for all! People of the world, good night

01:50:13 ►

Complacency in this process is not acceptable

01:50:17 ►

It is not cool

01:50:20 ►

Act, react, and respond

01:50:25 ►

And make a future to be proud of

01:50:27 ►

Cause one by one, side by side

01:50:32 ►

We can bring down the boundaries

01:50:34 ►

People of the world, unite

01:50:38 ►

Cause your time is now

01:50:40 ►

We can be the ones to say this

01:50:43 ►

We can be the ones to say this, we could be the ones to change, when our lips are sealed we’re nothing, just another generation of us.

01:50:54 ►

We could be the ones to say this, we could be the ones to change, when our lips are sealed or nothing Just another generation fight

01:51:07 ►

We want the world

01:51:08 ►

We want the world

01:51:22 ►

Yeah, night We move the world Unite

01:51:25 ►

Unite

01:51:32 ►

We move the world

01:51:38 ►

Unite

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

299 - Terence McKenna_ Beyond 2012 Part 2

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