301 - Terence McKenna_ Beyond 2012 Part 4

Program Notes

In this, the concluding episode of recordings from the workshop titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012” and led by Bruce Damer and Lorenzo, we hear Bruce’s final presentation in which he begins by taking us on a mental voyage around our solar system. From there he tells a fascinating story of his meeting with a somewhat dodgy character who convincingly explained that, although it may appear that way at times, there actually is no cabal secretly controlling human affairs. Following that begins an interesting Q & A session… . In the Occupy segment of the podcast I ponder over the pros and cons of the Black Bloc tactics that have become somewhat controversial lately.

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Bruce Damer.]

“The financial system is a giant hair ball of GO-TO statements and lack of control and out of control pools of assets that flow.”

“We do not have real technology compared to what nature does. We’re not even close.”

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20 ►

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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And today is day 168 of Occupy Wall Street.

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And, well, I guess it’s been well over a week since I’ve last done a podcast, and I wish I had a good reason,

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but the truth is that I’ve just kind of fallen into a lazy mood here lately and have been mainly just reading and working on my next book.

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And then there’s also been more time spent in the dentist’s office than I care to talk about,

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but that’s another story. So to you wonderful souls who have made donations to the salon during

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the past couple of weeks or who have bought one of my books, I sincerely thank you. And

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except for the Amazon Kindle books, I’ll be in touch with you via email in the next few

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days and those of you who have bought a book on Amazon I do appreciate your support but I don’t

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get to know who you are and I really appreciate the fact that you guys aren’t as lazy as I seem

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to be these days. Also just a quick word to my friend John from the Chicago area. I received

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your snail mail but when I went

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back to Facebook to thank you, I discovered that you’d disappeared from the site. So, well, I hope

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you’re okay, and if you get a chance, please let me know via email so I can quit worrying about

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what happened to you. Now, as you may remember from my last podcast, we were just about to finish

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up with the talks that Bruce Dahmer and I gave at

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the Terrence McKenna Beyond 2012 workshop that was held on the 28th of January this year.

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And my apologies go out to my dear friend Bruce, because it’s his final talk that I didn’t get out

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in a podcast last week. But well, here we are once again. And so now let’s join Bruce Dahmer for his talk, in which, well, he begins by taking us on a mental voyage around our own solar system,

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and from there he tells a fascinating story of his meeting with a, well, a somewhat dodgy character

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who convincingly explained that although it may appear other ways at times,

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there actually is no cabal secretly controlling human affairs.

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But hey, why am I telling you all this when we could be listening to Bruce instead?

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So here he is.

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I want to share two stories with you.

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So from a vision that I had, surprisingly, it was prior to me going to the jungle recently.

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it was prior to me going to the jungle recently,

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sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll just sit, you know,

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with nothing more than, say, bad airline coffee or just an open mind,

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and I’ll say, you know, I’m open.

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I’m a completely open container.

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And maybe this is what happens to us after we’ve been there.

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And I said, what is it when I’m going to the jungle, what is it when I’m going to the jungle what is it that I’m supposed to do

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and for about two and a half this is on a flight so for about two it’s a good way to spend a flight

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rather than watching those cheesy movies but and the noise canceling headphones are the

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godsend for all visionary explorations at 38,000 feet.

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But I was encountered by what became apparent over time as the planetary plant body.

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It was this massive green-coiled thing all around me.

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And I could zoom up around the Earth and see how it wrapped the Earth.

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It was the hyper-sea.

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It was this thing. It was all earth. It was the hypersea. It was this thing.

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It was all algae.

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It was all redwood forests.

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And I’m a plants kind of a person.

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I do a lot of gardening and things like that.

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And I said to it, okay, you’re here.

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What is it you’re trying to do?

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You know, what are you telling me?

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We’re trying to stand up.

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We’re trying to get up. Well, why are you telling me? We’re trying to stand up. We’re trying to get up.

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Well, why are you trying to stand up? We’re trying to look out. Okay, looked in the lookout. I’m in the lookout department myself. Why are you doing this? And because it’s time to go out.

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Okay, let’s go together.

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You know, this is familiar territory.

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I’ve spent 10 years putting my mind all over the solar system and visualizing missions and even helping design some

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and studying every plant body and comet and asteroid.

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And I kind of have a solar system in my head.

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So we zoomed around, and we went first to the moon,

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and there was this very, very desiccated dust,

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and they said, this is no good for us.

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And so then we went on to a near-Earth, an Apollo object, they’re called,

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and we got in a little bit deeper in the inside,

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and there was some moisture, and they said, this is good.

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And then we went to the sands of Mars,

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and we went to different sands of Mars, and we went to different latitudes of Mars.

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And I could feel this plant body putting its tendrils,

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almost like the octopus tendrils or its tongue,

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through the soils and saying, this is good.

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We could be here.

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We can eat this.

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This is for us.

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And while we were on Mars, I said, come with me.

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I’ll show you something.

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And we pulled back, and we went around Mars until this Gusev crater.

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And I was at the meeting at JPL where they picked the landing sites for the rovers.

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Everyone voted.

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Just put their hands up and voted.

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And so I remember this vividly.

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And so we zoomed down, and there was one of the rovers.

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I could hear it to this day going crunch

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crunch crunch was like going at a few centimeters a minute you know along i said this is from the

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monkeys the monkeys have been here you have to understand and they said really impressed

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we had no idea but only the monkey’s mind has been here we don’t see the monkeys themselves

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you only see their mind i said that’s yeah that’s right and so we went back to the earth and i said

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well you’re trying to stand up what’s the problem uh well it’s too slippery we keep slipping out we

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keep trying to lift the planet you know the the plant body the consciousness and we keep slipping out. We keep trying to lift the planet, you know, the plant body, the consciousness,

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and we keep falling back. So what are you trying to climb on? We’re climbing on you.

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I said, okay, we’re slippery buggers, you know. What are you climbing on? On your technology,

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on everything you’re doing, we are climbing. We are trying to get higher and higher to look out.

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climbing. We are trying to get higher and higher to look out. Because once we look out, we can go out. I said, well, is it a problem that we’re cutting you down? There’s less algae than there

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ever was in the oceans. We’re cutting the rainforest and everything. No, this is not a

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problem. This is what it’s all about. This is the sacrifice we are willing to make.

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This is what it’s about. This is what you are for,

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and this is what we are about. And I was like, okay. I came out of this tears streaming down

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my face. This was so powerful, and I was attempting to write my usual notes, but it was really

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difficult to English this one. And so this has now become kind of, this is an odd, this is an

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overmind kind of inspired vision of now what,

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I don’t know the answer.

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I said to them, I promise you I will try to solve this problem

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of how to get purchase, how to get up this ladder.

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So that’s story number one.

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Story number two is something that I think I hope will help you understand

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what’s going on in the world a little bit. It sort of made me relax a little bit more.

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And it comes back to Terrence saying, there is no one in control. The terrible news is that all

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conspiracy theories are wrong. There are no cabals that run the world. There’s no one pulling the strings. The worst thing is that the truth is that there is no one driving. Now, I’ll give you an example of this.

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I was in my 20s, in my early 20s, I was at University of Southern California, and

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turns out I met a guy playing chess who was a financial guru for, gosh, it was Aristotle Onassis. He had been.

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And so I got in with this bad company, these deal-making financial guys. He was a genius.

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And we structured deals. And I was in the background. He’d be on a call to Kuwait or

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a call to this and that. It was gray market financial instruments. All this bizarre stuff like a giant pearl from

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somewhere or, you know, $4 billion in Dore gold bars that are unstamped, that got moved out of

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Iran after the revolution. They’re in this warehouse and we can use them to back this

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deal. And of course, all these deals mostly fell apart. And he just didn’t make money,

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but he was really good at finding them. So I kind of said, oh, this is the financial system? Wow. Anyway, so I got to meet, he said,

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come on, we’re going to LAX. There’s a guy who’s come in. He’s at the Embassy Suites.

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And his name is Kojak. And that’s all you need to know. So we go see this guy. And they’re in

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these rooms. And he’s a bald guy. He’s Turkish. He’s completely bald. And he looks like Kojak, and that’s all you need to know. So we go see this guy, and they’re in these rooms, and he’s a bald guy.

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He’s Turkish.

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He’s completely bald, and he looks like Kojak.

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So he’s called Kojak.

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And I said, you know what?

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There’s guys across the embassy suite.

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This is a bad hotel to do this in because all the rooms across the way look out on this courtyard.

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There’s, like, people in suits over there with cameras

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oh yeah we’re used to that you know don’t okay as long as they don’t have gun sites or something

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but anyway so the just kojak had a case of this stuff these these promissory notes from

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governments of bizarre governments and during the lunch break you know i’d usually say nothing i

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would just because i was just tagging along and i I asked Kojak, I said, can I ask you a question?

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Like, you’re involved in all this shit.

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He says, my family has 500 years’ experience in this shit.

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I said, okay.

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Can I ask you a question?

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Is there a conspiracy running the world?

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Is there a small group of people who have influence over big economic things,

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big geopolitical things?

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And he said, scratched his finger.

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Let’s see.

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Not now, but before the war,

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some families could do it.

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In the 19th century, there was this influence.

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In the 18th century, there was this influence,

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et cetera, et cetera.

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But after the war, World War II,

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the money just started to move like this.

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So the money had been in Europe, and the money then started to move to America.

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And then it got up and it flowed toward the Far East.

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Then in the 70s, it flowed into the Middle East.

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And money is power, and money is leverage.

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And this was the mid-80s, so that was about the end of the story.

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He said, the system is so dynamic,

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it’s like a serpent.

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You try to ride it, it throws you off.

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There’s no one in control.

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Period. It’s impossible.

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Now, in the 2003 time frame,

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I was part of a Pentagon think tank

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called the Arlington Institute,

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and our job in January 2003 was to come up with this massive report

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about how to move America off petroleum.

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And it was getting more and more urgent.

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This was a DOD-sponsored study.

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And it was beautifully done.

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It’s online.

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You can see it.

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It shows where energy is used in the economy

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and how you could replace petroleum with all these other things.

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It’s realistic.

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Tens of millions of dollars are put in this.

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But there was practically a fistfight in this meeting over the Iraq operation,

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which was coming up between somebody from the war college and somebody else and this and that.

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And I stood up at one point and said, you know, I’m in the background here,

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but I want to tell you guys that if you blow a half a trillion dollars in this war and you wreck the DOD, which they were

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concerned of, there’s something else coming, and it’s called mortgageageddon. And it’s going to

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happen in 2008. They asked me what date. I said 2008’s an election year. These things always

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happen in an election year. All these toxic mortgages, which we’re just starting, are going

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to tumble. The banking system will go down. Everything will go down like a house of cards.

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Why did I know this? Because the software I helped build in the 80s was used by currency desks.

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I said, you guys don’t understand. Not only is there no one running the system,

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it’s code that is going to automatically do things. So derivative instruments,

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currencies, code will execute whether or not anybody’s watching or not.

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Not only is there no one running the system, there’s no code running the system.

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Because the financial system is a giant hairball of go-to statements and lack of control.

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And out-of-control pools of assets that flow.

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And the traders are just watching the rapid eye movement,

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trying to figure out what is going on as this stuff happens,

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as this machine wakes up and does its thing.

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And most of the time it wakes up and does its thing

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such that a few people can make some money over here.

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But the code is worse than Microsoft’s worse than, you know, Microsoft could ever

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deliver in Windows ME. You know, this is, it’s a, it’s a hodgepodge. So truthfully, in order for us

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to remake the world, it, and this comes back down to is no one is to blame. Not only is no one in

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control, in truth, you can’t do the 60s thing. You can’t stand outside the Pentagon and protest those

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people because, well, there’s a whole bunch of other people that are pushing the system to get

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the funding to this. You’re protesting the wrong place. Or then you go over and protest in K Street

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and that’s the wrong place. And you go protest at a wealthy individual’s house. That’s actually

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the wrong place too. It’s a whole system that is working this way.

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You actually have to go in with nerds.

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Once you’ve changed the legal code, you have to change the software code.

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And that will take some of the people in this room who can think in terms of whole systems.

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It’s almost like psychedelic thinking, too, because you have to think.

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You have to see a machine so large.

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I mean, think McKenna’s elf

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universes, think the complexity of that

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to visualize the entire

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system and then to start changing it

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start pulling the plugs on this

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rewriting the code, you have to optimize the

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operating system for the planet

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in real terms, financial, etc

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you have to do operating system optimization

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that’s just a little scoop on taking Terrence’s nobody is in control.

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No code is in control, but nerds are on the way.

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The geeks are going to rule.

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Nobody for president

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I got a new iPhone 4S

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I vote Siri for president

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She makes way more sense

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She’s a voice that talks to you back

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Answers all questions

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Lorenzo, did we want to

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I think, yeah, let’s honor McKenna’s

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McKenna’s format and his chief buzz and do Q&A,

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because that’s where the new things are made.

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We could do a lot more little raps and everything,

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but join us at Esalen or come to Burning Man.

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We’re going to continue this, maybe another event here in L.A. again.

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We’ll just keep going.

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But with the limited time we have, let’s hear from you.

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I know somebody had a question about 2012,

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because we kind of blew that off.

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So do you have a specific question about 2012?

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Yeah, well, more of a comment.

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I think Kiernan’s kind of got a bad rap about the Atrocious.

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He never said it was the apocalypse.

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He just called it the end of time.

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And to me, that’s what’s going on here.

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Everything we’ve been talking about,

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the Occupy Movement, everything,

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this is a time of change.

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It’s not a time of an end.

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It’s a time of evolution,

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of cycling into the next.

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I had something came to me, one of those ones that does sometimes.

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It said interface with machines, cooperate.

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And, in fact, that’s what we’re doing.

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That’s the 2012 thing is already happening.

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That’s what you’ve been feeling all along.

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I’ve been feeling states of ecstasy

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for the last couple of years

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that are just, I can’t

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believe that I look around and I see people

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frowning and stuff. It’s so wonderful.

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There’s so much great energy here.

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How can you not

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feel it?

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What’s happening

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is going to transcend politics

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and money. Human life is going to transcend politics and money.

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Human life is going to be the thing that matters, not money.

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And the future currency of information is money.

00:17:17 ►

And that’s… I agree with you about Terrence maybe getting a bad rap for 2012

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because he’s really not here to defend himself.

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He left in the year 2000.

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And I even noticed in some of his later talks,

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he was kind of backing away from the time wave thing a lot.

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Pardon me?

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Don’t take it so seriously.

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I hope people don’t take it literally is what he told me.

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In fact, Bruce might want to

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say something about the time wave and the little

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note that you found of Terrence’s.

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You notice in the post-it note

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he writes December 21st, yes, yes.

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And when they finally had adjusted

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the curves right.

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I think he seriously

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backed away from it. And Dennis

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McKenna told me, he said on December

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21st of this year,

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I’m going to find a rock to hide under. But back to your point, I think what you’re

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pointing out is something that I think we all need to really listen to, because

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there is incredibly wonderful things going on. And that the media gives, when I fly from

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other countries into the United States,

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it’s like you’re flying through a dome,

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a pall of anxiety that’s created by this shouting, screaming media.

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And if I happen to accidentally see TV here somewhere in a hotel room

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or in the airport, I go, oh, my God.

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But then I get home to the farm where we have no TV.

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Things start getting better again.

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I can lift that pall up and do my work.

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And so this artificially, there’s one thing, I’ll tell you one rap on this,

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where this comes, if you’ve seen the Mad Men TV show,

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which I’ve never seen, but I hear it’s about ad men in the 50s.

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So my wife’s family were all mad men.

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And her father made some of the first television commercials.

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He was an art director in the 40s, 50s.

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He was on Yank magazine in the war.

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And her mother’s husband was a really big guy in advertising in New York.

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So once we were invited to this funeral at the Cooper Union,

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this guy named Lou, somebody or other,

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who had started advertising at CBS in 1946.

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And so here you have this panel on stage of these ashen-faced older men

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that look like they’re out of a ghoul movie.

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These guys are not happy. They have no color

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in them. No color.

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And they’re the surviving

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madmen from that 1940s

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that created the business, the world

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we live in. They created that television

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electronic business. Well, they’re

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doing their ordinary tributes

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to this guy Lou and what he would

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do. You’d come in and he’d scare the shit out of you first

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and then he’d make you work for 48 hours.

00:20:09 ►

And they’d drink their way

00:20:11 ►

and they would sleep their way through all of their offices.

00:20:14 ►

And it was all true, you know,

00:20:16 ►

three martinis and then go home and stuff like that.

00:20:19 ►

And then the clients were stupid.

00:20:20 ►

And it was all true so that Hollywood’s captured that.

00:20:24 ►

But at one point this uh

00:20:26 ►

an elegant woman stood up in the audience and she couldn’t hold it in anymore and she pointed at

00:20:32 ►

each of these guys and said you’re a bastard you’re an effing bastard you’re the worst thing

00:20:37 ►

you know you should go to hell and you and you and you and she was the daughter of lou and she basically went on her own rant about how

00:20:49 ►

you made our family life hell for how you behaved and i went out of that like this is these are the

00:20:57 ►

people that were nominated somehow or to create the messages that we get. This is their archetypal, mythological,

00:21:07 ►

father, gray elders.

00:21:09 ►

This is the elders of this business.

00:21:10 ►

And look how horrendous, how awful these people are.

00:21:14 ►

And so we have to, in a sense, heave them off.

00:21:18 ►

Chayette Day, Jay Chayette, rather,

00:21:21 ►

one of the creators of modern advertising,

00:21:23 ►

he wrote about 10 years ago, he wrote this thing in Fortune magazine.

00:21:27 ►

It was like, advertising is the worst curse on human civilization ever.

00:21:32 ►

And the advertising that me and, you know, Day created was a particularly bad strain.

00:21:39 ►

And we steal your dreams.

00:21:40 ►

We steal your imagination.

00:21:41 ►

We steal your health.

00:21:43 ►

This is bad. We steal your imagination. We steal your health. This is bad.

00:21:45 ►

Don’t misunderstand me.

00:21:47 ►

This is a very, very bad medium.

00:21:50 ►

It’s very unhealthful for society.

00:21:53 ►

So I don’t know how I got started on this, but it’s about seeing the brighter side.

00:21:59 ►

You have to look through that pall, that dome of fabricated negativity and anxiety and desire

00:22:07 ►

you know our community needs to do a better job at preserving its history you know we talk about

00:22:13 ►

advertising has invented new histories for us that never happened right so our community is

00:22:18 ►

pilloried and you know blah blah blah we already know that. But these archives, like Terrence’s archives, were lost, so we reconstructed them.

00:22:26 ►

A couple of years ago, you know, in concert with Lorenzo,

00:22:29 ►

I started something called Psychedelia Collection,

00:22:32 ►

which is at the Internet Archive, archive.org.

00:22:35 ►

And we are dumping everything in there, and that’s all protected.

00:22:39 ►

That’s backed up on two continents.

00:22:41 ►

It’s Brewster Kahle who will protect, you know, it’s the Internet Archive.

00:22:45 ►

It’s the largest archive

00:22:46 ►

in the world.

00:22:47 ►

They archive the whole web

00:22:48 ►

every month

00:22:48 ►

since 1996.

00:22:50 ►

But these are

00:22:51 ►

special collections.

00:22:52 ►

Everything that’s in there

00:22:53 ►

is Creative Commons licensed.

00:22:55 ►

So people are now

00:22:56 ►

uploading like crazy.

00:22:58 ►

You know,

00:22:58 ►

the first big block groups.

00:23:00 ►

And from the Leary Collection,

00:23:02 ►

it turns out,

00:23:03 ►

and Michael Horowitz,

00:23:04 ►

who’s the archivist, could not figure this out. So we found a home for the Leary collection, it turns out, and Michael Horowitz, who’s the archivist, could not figure this out.

00:23:06 ►

So we found a home for the Leary collection.

00:23:08 ►

This is 450, 500 boxes of stuff.

00:23:11 ►

You can’t imagine what was in this collection.

00:23:14 ►

Lorenzo came up, and the collection speaks to you.

00:23:18 ►

So Lorenzo’s, I know that when you have an important visitor like Lorenzo,

00:23:23 ►

the collection is going to, think of these banker’s boxes.

00:23:26 ►

They’ll open up their mouths and say, look inside of me.

00:23:29 ►

And one of them did, and he looked in,

00:23:32 ►

and he pulled out this thin folder and said, if, if on it.

00:23:35 ►

I, if, I, if.

00:23:36 ►

Oh, I’ve been looking for this for a year.

00:23:39 ►

How did you find it?

00:23:40 ►

And it’s the Institute for Internal Freedom and whatever it was. It said, if-if 1960. It’s like,

00:23:48 ►

wow, and what did you see when you opened it up?

00:23:51 ►

There were so many things in there that day that we even found his baby book

00:23:56 ►

where his mother recorded the day and hour of the first time he splashed in the bathtub.

00:24:00 ►

That’s how complete that archive is. But actually, the key

00:24:03 ►

document you found was the first psilocybin trip of Alpert and Leary.

00:24:08 ►

And it’s on a laboratory notebook paper, and there’s a little, it says,

00:24:12 ►

Leary, Alpert, 450 micrograms, and scribble, scribble, scribble, and then Leary.

00:24:17 ►

It’s things like that.

00:24:18 ►

And so we finally, after years and years and years, through another rare books dealer,

00:24:24 ►

Dennis Berry found a home, the New York Public Library.

00:24:27 ►

And they were able to pay enough money that Tim’s will was satisfied

00:24:31 ►

that some of his heirs get some money.

00:24:33 ►

Because let’s face it, he wasn’t the best father in the world.

00:24:35 ►

I mean, Tim Leary had his life.

00:24:38 ►

I mean, Terrence’s life you can kind of get into your skull.

00:24:42 ►

Tim Leary’s, if you try to put his life into your skull,

00:24:45 ►

it’d blow up in a million pieces.

00:24:47 ►

This life is never to be led again.

00:24:52 ►

We’ll get to you.

00:24:54 ►

So we spent years and years digitizing what we could

00:24:58 ►

and everything before it went to the New York Public Library.

00:25:00 ►

A lot of the talks you’ll hear in the salon

00:25:02 ►

were from that wonderful collection,

00:25:05 ►

and they’re beautiful talks. I mean, Tim Leary hopefully is being reborn for a new generation.

00:25:10 ►

But the public, the library didn’t want his books. So the trustee called me up from the warehouse

00:25:16 ►

and said their truck has pulled out heading to Queens, you know, from California. And they left

00:25:22 ►

the books, and they left all the news clippings and they left a bunch

00:25:26 ►

of other things and the vinyl record collection it’s like they didn’t want anything that was

00:25:30 ►

already previously copyrighted they wanted only original papers and they she said now I’m throwing

00:25:35 ►

these stuff away because I just don’t want to do I mean carrying around for 15 years and I said is

00:25:41 ►

are the dumpsters in the building because have you’ve thrown out half the news clippings.

00:25:45 ►

Now, these are clippings from the Harvard Crimson all the way up,

00:25:50 ►

1960, 70, 80, et cetera, 90.

00:25:52 ►

Big books of them.

00:25:53 ►

Big books of them and loose ones

00:25:56 ►

and all stamped from a professional clipping service.

00:25:59 ►

This is hundreds of thousands of hours of work and preservation.

00:26:03 ►

And it’s the entire story of that period.

00:26:07 ►

And I went and I said, oh, don’t put the dumpsters outside.

00:26:11 ►

I’m coming to save them all.

00:26:13 ►

So I took them all, and I took as many of the books as I could.

00:26:16 ►

I had one or two seconds to say yes, no to each book.

00:26:19 ►

If it had marginalia in it, I grabbed it.

00:26:22 ►

If it had a signed author copy where it was about things I was interested in,

00:26:26 ►

but the rest just went.

00:26:27 ►

In his vinyl record collection, I took that.

00:26:30 ►

The chandelier from his house in Beverly Hills

00:26:32 ►

is going to hang over the dome at Burning Man at our camp.

00:26:36 ►

It’s this weird, painted, very wild chandelier.

00:26:40 ►

But just three days ago, the Internet Archive said

00:26:44 ►

we’ve managed to scan a complete box

00:26:47 ►

of the 16 boxes, one box

00:26:49 ►

because they had never handled clippings before

00:26:51 ►

and it’s all live in Psychedelia Collection

00:26:54 ►

and so now you can go and see

00:26:55 ►

they picked a random box

00:26:57 ►

they were like we’re going to have to make a swivel plate

00:26:59 ►

these are archive nerds

00:27:02 ►

and they’re like how do we do clippings?

00:27:04 ►

and they’re immediately designing something in their heads,

00:27:07 ►

you know, how to do both sides and turn it and have the camera shoot.

00:27:10 ►

And they did it, and I’ve got to convince them to do the rest.

00:27:13 ►

But that will now be available to you,

00:27:17 ►

and you could go in yourself and become an archivist

00:27:19 ►

and start building metadata and research and build.

00:27:23 ►

It’s going to, what I call the Library of Alexandria for this medium.

00:27:27 ►

Otherwise, our information is just scattered.

00:27:29 ►

You know what?

00:27:30 ►

The Psychedelic Salon needs a permanent home.

00:27:32 ►

So every episode is backed up there.

00:27:34 ►

All of your podcasts, all of your work, your art, your writing

00:27:37 ►

can get a permanent home there.

00:27:40 ►

And there’s a team building a shell that will go on top of this

00:27:43 ►

called psychedeliaarchive.org.

00:27:45 ►

I am promoting projects again here, but we had a question in the back.

00:27:49 ►

You talked about there’s no real-world conspiracy.

00:27:54 ►

Could you relate to what happened on 9-11

00:27:58 ►

in terms of there’s no real conspiracy?

00:28:03 ►

Well, I usually stay away from this topic.

00:28:07 ►

I’ll make a comment, though.

00:28:09 ►

And I don’t want to get into what happened at 9-11,

00:28:14 ►

because we all have our own opinions of that.

00:28:17 ►

I think that one of the ways to approach it, though, is to say

00:28:20 ►

it really doesn’t matter who was behind it.

00:28:24 ►

What matters is what happened after it.

00:28:26 ►

We have become a fascist clamped-down nation.

00:28:29 ►

We’re under video surveillance everywhere.

00:28:31 ►

You can’t fly without getting half naked.

00:28:33 ►

And it’s going to get worse.

00:28:35 ►

The 9-11 was an excuse.

00:28:38 ►

No matter who caused it, the results are the same.

00:28:42 ►

And the results are not very pleasant, I think.

00:28:45 ►

But I think we’d get into a real can of worms if we give all our own opinions on that.

00:28:49 ►

But go ahead.

00:28:50 ►

Just to further that is that we have the NDAA that nobody is speaking about.

00:28:55 ►

None of our – and it’s important for us to talk about it because –

00:28:59 ►

What is that?

00:29:00 ►

NDAA.

00:29:01 ►

It’s the National Defense Authorization Act.

00:29:05 ►

Which means that any one of us, any American citizen can be detained and without due process.

00:29:12 ►

Indefinitely.

00:29:13 ►

Indefinitely.

00:29:14 ►

By the military.

00:29:15 ►

By the military.

00:29:15 ►

So what’s important about this is that it’s not that we become paralyzed and go, oh shit, look what’s going to happen.

00:29:24 ►

it’s not that we become paralyzed and go, oh shit, look what’s going to happen.

00:29:28 ►

It’s that we’re aware of this and that we start a dialogue.

00:29:32 ►

Because the thing that’s so powerful about the internet is that we’re all talking to each other.

00:29:34 ►

If we don’t talk to each other about this, then power is over us.

00:29:39 ►

The only way we can become thrivers as opposed to victims

00:29:42 ►

is if we discuss it with each other and and then

00:29:46 ►

we find ways to make it healthier for one one big way to make it healthier on that i talked to

00:29:53 ►

friends in the military and they said you know what we don’t know who put that in there this

00:29:58 ►

has happened to us before we don’t want to do this we’re not set up to do this this is like a nightmare for us

00:30:05 ►

that this is in this stupid act

00:30:07 ►

but

00:30:09 ►

so they’re kind of

00:30:12 ►

appalled that this is there

00:30:14 ►

we don’t have the infrastructure

00:30:15 ►

the setups

00:30:16 ►

so what you do actually

00:30:19 ►

in order to counter stuff like this

00:30:21 ►

you go talk to those people

00:30:23 ►

that are appalled in the military that this was put in.

00:30:26 ►

Because what generally in the system, this is what my friend explained,

00:30:29 ►

he said, some stupid political individual put this in the act.

00:30:35 ►

No one consulted us about enforcement, nothing.

00:30:39 ►

And it will get through, and then it will go grinding through for years

00:30:42 ►

in courts until it’s thrown out.

00:30:44 ►

And we will just not act on it because now it’s in the courts. But it’s a waste of everyone’s

00:30:49 ►

time. So if you go to them and you make a partnership, don’t consider that they’re the

00:30:54 ►

enemy. Go and find as many partners you can from all sides of the issue and you will overturn

00:31:00 ►

these. And one theory that I have is that it’s no more than, if you counted it up,

00:31:05 ►

that the troublemakers in the media, perhaps in religion, in political funding, in the system,

00:31:13 ►

the people that really are doing the damage, you can identify them. That’s what Occupy showed,

00:31:18 ►

you know, like so-and-so from Bank of America just got a huge bonus. And they would list the names. No one had ever done this before.

00:31:30 ►

But I challenge us that if you were doing research,

00:31:35 ►

you could find that there was probably no more than 500 people causing most of the damage in the system.

00:31:38 ►

You’d find the individual who got that act put in there and identify them

00:31:42 ►

because it’s still open.

00:31:44 ►

Now, one of the things that Warren Buffett could do,

00:31:46 ►

and this is a thing that I wrote in Radical Remake

00:31:49 ►

because Warren Buffett’s very alarmed about all this.

00:31:52 ►

So I said a challenge to Warren Buffett,

00:31:54 ►

take a billion dollars from the fund,

00:31:56 ►

from this enormous fund that he uses for public good,

00:32:01 ►

fund just straight investigation and litigation.

00:32:07 ►

And litigation is powerful. It’s still a very powerful tool this is why you can have you know litigation can really shut stuff down

00:32:13 ►

and you fund very tough-minded top people for 15 20 years that go after they see that kind of shit

00:32:21 ►

and they go and they say listen we’re just an investigation. And when we find out who did this, if they broke laws,

00:32:27 ►

we’re going to litigate from just this foundation.

00:32:30 ►

And it will cause a chilling effect upon a lot of the people who are just like,

00:32:35 ►

hey, I can do anything I want.

00:32:36 ►

I’ll write anything in.

00:32:38 ►

A chilling effect if there’s a watchdog,

00:32:40 ►

effectively an independent watchdog on bad behavior.

00:32:44 ►

I’m normally the cheery guy, but I’ll add to the doom and gloom a little bit

00:32:48 ►

and take a little different tack on that because NDAA is definitely a threat.

00:32:53 ►

However, I think the even more imminent one, you know, I used to say,

00:32:59 ►

you know, they can’t have martial law because the National Guard and the military

00:33:02 ►

is just worn thin, you know, with all the wars we’ve got going.

00:33:05 ►

So they just don’t have the people to do it.

00:33:06 ►

And then the Occupy Movement comes along, and you look at the police forces,

00:33:11 ►

and these are stormtroopers.

00:33:13 ►

There’s no riots that are being called out for, but these riot police stormtroopers.

00:33:19 ►

What’s been happening is a lot of the kids with the cameras and stuff up in the front lines

00:33:23 ►

are calling them out by name and all.

00:33:25 ►

Of course, then they’re hacking their accounts and publicizing that.

00:33:28 ►

The officers are covering up their name tags.

00:33:30 ►

So there’s lawsuits about that, and they’re bringing them out.

00:33:33 ►

But I talked to a friend of mine in law enforcement,

00:33:35 ►

and he said, because I think it was Albany, New York,

00:33:39 ►

a lot of the officers just laid down their badges and said,

00:33:43 ►

we’re not going to do this.

00:33:44 ►

And what this friend of mine says, yeah, what they’re doing is they’re weeding out anybody that has any sympathy for the Occupy movement.

00:33:50 ►

And all you’re going to have left is some pretty hardcore stormtrooper guys.

00:33:53 ►

So I think that even though I agree with what Bruce says about the military, but I think the police has been militarized so much that we have an ongoing issue there.

00:34:03 ►

And that’s where the Occupy kids are so good is

00:34:05 ►

calling these people out. They’re standing on the front lines and they’ll see a name tag and say,

00:34:09 ►

Officer Ramirez, do you have a family? What do your children think about this? Your grandchildren

00:34:13 ►

are going to be embarrassed about what you’re doing and they’re talking to them just on,

00:34:17 ►

some of the kids are shouting and all, but some of them are trying to have a conversation.

00:34:21 ►

So they look up Ramirez’s Facebook page and say, your kid just posted that he doesn’t like what my dad is doing.

00:34:28 ►

I’m sure that’s probably happened.

00:34:30 ►

So I don’t want to spin it off too much.

00:34:32 ►

Go ahead.

00:34:32 ►

Do you have any comments on the future of Facebook?

00:34:35 ►

Next week they’re coming out with IPO.

00:34:38 ►

Oh, boy.

00:34:39 ►

It could change everything.

00:34:40 ►

I guess Facebook’s just another part of the infrastructure.

00:34:44 ►

Is it safe to just be so transparent on Facebook? I don’t know. I guess Facebook’s just another part of the infrastructure.

00:34:47 ►

I don’t know.

00:34:52 ►

You know, these corporations, you know, the do no evil thing,

00:34:54 ►

I mean, all corporations go through these life phases.

00:34:57 ►

So I think what you’re going to see, you know,

00:34:59 ►

as you sort of saw with Microsoft at one point and Apple and all that,

00:35:03 ►

they went through these sort of growing youthful phases where they’re fairly open, and then they enter middle age, and that’s kind of where they’re adrift.

00:35:07 ►

And then when they enter the challenging years, they can kind of get squirrely.

00:35:11 ►

So Facebook for a while will be on this nice trajectory.

00:35:15 ►

But truthfully, if people really thought Facebook was doing evil things,

00:35:19 ►

then they would rush to other networks.

00:35:22 ►

But Facebook will become part of the cyber infrastructure.

00:35:25 ►

Don’t get me wrong.

00:35:30 ►

But I think, you know, I think don’t believe everything you hear.

00:35:34 ►

I think these companies really listen to people.

00:35:36 ►

They listen, especially as public companies.

00:35:37 ►

Boards do listen.

00:35:38 ►

I’m on a couple of boards.

00:35:42 ►

And if there’s a huge protest against something,

00:35:45 ►

the companies will take it seriously, maybe more than government. And Facebook now is becoming a model, too, because there’s a lot of mini-Facebooks.

00:35:49 ►

There’s one for Occupy, O-C-U-P-I-I.org, I think.

00:35:52 ►

There’s only about 1,000 of us on it right now, and everybody kind of knows each other.

00:35:56 ►

But there’s hundreds of videos already posted.

00:35:58 ►

And I think you’re going to see a lot of these little community Facebook things popping up, too.

00:36:07 ►

Are you here? community Facebook things popping up too. Bruce, I asked

00:36:09 ►

a question earlier too. I’m getting a little esoteric.

00:36:12 ►

Good. We need more esoteria.

00:36:15 ►

Well, because Terence was so pressing on so many things

00:36:18 ►

and I was talking about how

00:36:21 ►

as we explore more and more about the quantum universe,

00:36:24 ►

how do you see life in the quantum universe?

00:36:30 ►

Your life in particular.

00:36:32 ►

How do you see people interacting?

00:36:35 ►

Well, I mean, the layer, and I’m not a quantum physicist,

00:36:39 ►

but I do live next to one, Nick Herbert,

00:36:42 ►

and occasionally I come up with some ideas,

00:36:44 ►

and he comes and slaps my wrists

00:36:46 ►

or other parts of me and says

00:36:48 ►

you don’t know what you’re talking about.

00:36:52 ►

He works on non-locality

00:36:54 ►

Bell’s theorem and stuff like that.

00:36:57 ►

I think that

00:36:57 ►

and I think it’s been said before

00:37:00 ►

by other people far better, I think we shouldn’t

00:37:03 ►

map

00:37:03 ►

the abstract world of physics,

00:37:06 ►

especially subatomic physics,

00:37:07 ►

into anything meaningful that

00:37:09 ►

makes sense to a primate brain.

00:37:11 ►

I think it’s a weird, weird reality.

00:37:15 ►

You know,

00:37:15 ►

looking at how the cell works

00:37:17 ►

00:37:18 ►

strange enough.

00:37:22 ►

For my money,

00:37:24 ►

the quantum world is so far from our everyday

00:37:26 ►

reality that you just can’t get your head around it. But when you get your head around, you try to

00:37:31 ►

get your head around the origin of life, which probably has roots in, you know, quantum dynamics

00:37:37 ►

as well. Why is it, and this is a chance for me to go on this a little bit, why is it that

00:37:43 ►

molecules that have been happily living ever after and getting more complex

00:37:48 ►

and getting heavier elements, just happily

00:37:52 ►

living with not a care in the world, why would they go through all the trouble of

00:37:56 ►

self-assembling into a compartment, which then goes through all

00:38:00 ►

this trouble and all this ballet dance to make a copy

00:38:04 ►

and make a second compartment.

00:38:05 ►

Why?

00:38:06 ►

All this bother, all this complexity.

00:38:10 ►

And that’s, you know,

00:38:12 ►

there’s a couple of places that you,

00:38:14 ►

as the kind of thinkers that you are,

00:38:16 ►

can put your mind.

00:38:18 ►

One of them is that,

00:38:19 ►

and I’ve been pondering that for 10 or 15 years.

00:38:22 ►

Another one is this ordinary embryogenesis.

00:38:24 ►

Why is it that a single cell, you know, a fertilized cell, pondering that for 10 or 15 years. Another one is his ordinary embryogenesis.

00:38:27 ►

Why is it that a single cell,

00:38:28 ►

you know, a fertilized cell that’s going to divide a few times

00:38:30 ►

and make a ball,

00:38:32 ►

why is this ball suddenly becomes differentiated

00:38:35 ►

so that that’s now going to be the head,

00:38:36 ►

the gut, the outside skin?

00:38:39 ►

Nobody knows the answer to this.

00:38:42 ►

There’s a friend of mine, Dick Gordon in Canada,

00:38:44 ►

who’s an advisor on the EvoGrid project.

00:38:47 ►

They found, now this is a very psychedelic thing,

00:38:50 ►

he’s found these waves through these high-powered microscopes

00:38:54 ►

that watch embryos, axolotl embryos,

00:38:56 ►

which are some bizarre creature from a lake somewhere.

00:38:59 ►

I’m not sure, but they’re easy to study.

00:39:02 ►

Salamander.

00:39:03 ►

And there are these waves that,

00:39:06 ►

in the very, very early little ball stage of the embryo,

00:39:09 ►

they pass over the embryo and they ripple.

00:39:12 ►

And they ripple.

00:39:14 ►

And he believes that this is the actual,

00:39:16 ►

this is genesis, this is embryogenesis,

00:39:18 ►

this is information that’s rippling through this ball

00:39:21 ►

and saying, now you will be head, you will be tail.

00:39:25 ►

Now, where did this ripple get generated?

00:39:29 ►

You know, they can’t find it.

00:39:31 ►

There’s no little stereo system in one of the cells

00:39:34 ►

attached to an iPod somewhere,

00:39:36 ►

a celestial iPod, to send the right signal.

00:39:39 ►

It’s got to be rich information.

00:39:41 ►

But it’s, and it happens every second of every day you know

00:39:46 ►

embryogenesis is an origin of the universe event that’s happening over and over and over again

00:39:51 ►

and so dick gordon’s actually you know he wrote two massive books about this thing which are

00:39:58 ►

starting to get some visibility but but think of that i mean it’s a vibration. You know, in the beginning there was the word.

00:40:07 ►

Something like that.

00:40:07 ►

And then it vibrated.

00:40:08 ►

And then it vibrated.

00:40:11 ►

Very far back.

00:40:14 ►

You know, the knowledge of gerunds is about the psychedelic and the icing thing.

00:40:20 ►

There’s also another component about the heat talk.

00:40:22 ►

Can you comment about, that’s a little more my interest.

00:40:29 ►

Lately, it’s been also a lot of gathering of pretty much alchemists.

00:40:34 ►

This was even a conference last year here in LA that seemed to be starting the gathering of the minds.

00:40:39 ►

And a similar kind of consciousness is starting to become more gregarious type of thing. Can you comment a little bit on what was the state of the

00:40:47 ►

Alchemist, but why suddenly this research is also

00:40:50 ►

this ancient Archanimist theory that’s starting to slowly open up in a different way?

00:40:56 ►

Yeah, I think, I lived in Prague for

00:40:59 ►

three years in the early 90s and literally walked

00:41:03 ►

every other day through Prague Castle. And this was back

00:41:07 ►

in the day, there were no tourists initially. Like 1990, there were just no tourists. You couldn’t,

00:41:13 ►

you could get beer, but there was no restaurant, functioning restaurant. It wasn’t a state-controlled

00:41:18 ►

restaurant in the beginning. It changed fairly quickly. But I could walk to the Alchemist Lane.

00:41:24 ►

I didn’t know Terence was into this stuff.

00:41:25 ►

Can you imagine that if we had started?

00:41:28 ►

I did not know he was a bohemophile.

00:41:30 ►

But you could go in these little houses that didn’t have anyone in them.

00:41:34 ►

They were so narrow.

00:41:35 ►

They were in the parapets of the castle.

00:41:36 ►

In order to get upstairs, you unfolded the stair system to then go up.

00:41:42 ►

And the alchemist lived in this lane.

00:41:47 ►

And I was very, very inspired by all this and Rudolph II. And I started an alchemy lab at Charles University, the math physics department

00:41:53 ►

underneath Prague Castle. So there was this Jesuit monastery. And then we literally, we took,

00:42:01 ►

I mean, this is a long answer to the question, but we took steel bars to hammer through an 11-foot thick wall

00:42:07 ►

to put a fiber optic cable to get this lab on the early version of the Internet.

00:42:12 ►

And we did alchemical software.

00:42:14 ►

So we were doing an artificial life project with the students there

00:42:19 ►

and weird 3D graphics and stuff like that.

00:42:22 ►

We called it the Comanius Lab.

00:42:24 ►

So I got very…

00:42:25 ►

The alchemical environment of Prague,

00:42:28 ►

maybe most recently, was Kafka.

00:42:31 ►

Because Kafka, you know, he created…

00:42:34 ►

In his books, there’s the idea of metamorphosis

00:42:37 ►

and transformation and the robot.

00:42:39 ►

And yet his mind was looking into the future.

00:42:42 ►

Robotai is a Czech word.

00:42:44 ►

The robot that was coming.

00:42:46 ►

So I think that alchemy, and this is from my ignorance of what the recent things have happened,

00:42:52 ►

alchemy is a re-expanding of the human imagination around, away from reductionism,

00:43:00 ►

away from this tunneling in a scientific technological reductionism that every time drills you down and says you can only stay in these little narrow boundaries.

00:43:11 ►

And great scientists, they’re all alchemists.

00:43:13 ►

They’re all thinking very strange, imaginal thoughts.

00:43:16 ►

They’re way out there because they’re going out into the imaginal world to get insight,

00:43:22 ►

and they realize that if they stay in the reductionist path,

00:43:24 ►

they’ll be technocrats until they die. if they stay in the reductionist path, they’ll be

00:43:25 ►

technocrats till they die. Freeman Dyson is one of these guys. And he was a helper in the

00:43:31 ►

EvoGrid project. And I go to see him now and then. And his imagination is everywhere. And he might

00:43:38 ►

be considered a nutter by some people in the English term nutter. But I think that maybe that is

00:43:45 ►

alchemy, it’s restretching, it’s the stretching

00:43:47 ►

of our minds again out into

00:43:50 ►

the mystical and out into the scientist

00:43:51 ►

becomes the mystic in order to become

00:43:53 ►

to make a huge leap.

00:43:56 ►

So I

00:43:57 ►

probably got the answer wrong, but

00:43:59 ►

I think your hand was up first there.

00:44:07 ►

One of the things that troubles me, and I don’t have an answer for it,

00:44:11 ►

but I want to know your take on it,

00:44:13 ►

is on the one hand you have this vision of the positive good

00:44:17 ►

that the Internet is doing connecting us all,

00:44:19 ►

but it’s powered by these fossil fuels that are, you know,

00:44:24 ►

tipping the balance in the atmosphere.

00:44:31 ►

I think it came back to that conversation with the plant body.

00:44:37 ►

You know, it’s interesting because the oxygen holocaust that happened

00:44:41 ►

two billion years ago when you had photosynthetic algae,

00:44:45 ►

pond scum basically, that pumped free oxygen into the atmosphere, O2,

00:44:50 ►

and poisoned it for everybody else.

00:44:53 ►

I mean, that was in the era of single-celled things.

00:44:56 ►

But it turns out that the huge leap that happened in that period

00:45:00 ►

was the cells that were able to metabolize this free oxygen,

00:45:04 ►

which otherwise acts like a cookie cutter and takes apart your organic molecules.

00:45:09 ►

So then we got the citrus acid or Krebs cycle that made energy in cells

00:45:15 ►

because of this huge stress of an atmospheric change-out.

00:45:19 ►

And if humans are doing an atmospheric change-out,

00:45:23 ►

it’s because of this, perhaps the whole planet.

00:45:26 ►

I mean, we think that we only limit ourselves to us,

00:45:29 ►

but the whole planet is doing this outgassing.

00:45:33 ►

And the transformation of the atmosphere is an expression of this.

00:45:36 ►

And maybe it’s like the plant body said, it’s not a problem.

00:45:40 ►

It’s what it was all for.

00:45:43 ►

You know, that’s not a very…

00:45:45 ►

I think

00:45:47 ►

we just don’t know where we’re going.

00:45:50 ►

I think definitely responsible

00:45:52 ►

pollution controls,

00:45:54 ►

we’ve pulled back from some brinks.

00:45:56 ►

The CFC elimination

00:45:57 ►

and stuff like that.

00:45:59 ►

But I think we’re going to make a big mess of the

00:46:02 ►

place before we see the

00:46:04 ►

direction. Population growth is… I mean, I going to make a big mess of the place before we see the direction.

00:46:10 ►

Population growth is the – I mean, I go to China a lot, and my God, I mean, it’s – everyone’s going up to our living standard and then maybe higher, and they’re building highways.

00:46:15 ►

It’s like the Eisenhower era.

00:46:16 ►

They’re building highways horizon to horizon and high-speed rail,

00:46:19 ►

and they’re redoing it, but five times faster than we did it here from the 50s.

00:46:25 ►

So where does that go?

00:46:26 ►

So there’s the good news.

00:46:27 ►

We have no plan, and nobody’s in charge.

00:46:32 ►

Let’s party.

00:46:36 ►

Yeah, I’d like to comment on that.

00:46:39 ►

I’ve been working with plants for over 20 years in a very, very intimate fashion.

00:46:46 ►

And I’ve had similar conversations to the one you had with the plant body on the plane.

00:46:53 ►

And there is really, all I want to say is that these are highly, highly evolved creatures.

00:46:59 ►

And their ability to adapt to what we’re doing to them should not be underestimated.

00:47:05 ►

I think we still, you know, it’s just a matter of learning how to work our systems.

00:47:10 ►

And we don’t need, I mean, I think it’s pretty clear that we can change over from fossil fuel.

00:47:16 ►

We have other alternatives available, and it’s just a matter of pushing aside that older technology

00:47:24 ►

and getting into the new stuff.

00:47:25 ►

And then we can deal with other things.

00:47:29 ►

But you shouldn’t fret about that because there’s a lot of power there, a great, great deal.

00:47:36 ►

And we’re really, we’re really, I’ve said this before, I hope I’m not offending anybody,

00:47:42 ►

but the Bible’s really backwards.

00:47:41 ►

I’ve said this before.

00:47:42 ►

I hope I’m not offending anybody.

00:47:44 ►

The Bible is really backwards.

00:47:51 ►

Man is not the ruler of all other things.

00:47:54 ►

We are dependent on all other things.

00:47:55 ►

We’re actually at the bottom.

00:47:56 ►

We’re not at the top.

00:47:57 ►

We’re at the bottom.

00:48:02 ►

And really, plants are, in my opinion, at the top.

00:48:07 ►

And so I don’t think we can wreck it, really,

00:48:10 ►

even with nasty fossil fuels, I don’t think.

00:48:13 ►

Here’s a funny long-term thinking story.

00:48:18 ►

We’re not far from Jet Propulsion Lab here,

00:48:21 ►

and it turns out that all the boys at Jet Propulsion Lab,

00:48:23 ►

and the girls too, thought that, oh, we’re sterilizing the spacecraft really nicely in our sterilization facility,

00:48:29 ►

and then we’re sending it to Mars, and we sent Viking and sent all these things.

00:48:35 ►

And it turns out that there were adapted, like a dozen strains of adapted bacteria

00:48:41 ►

that had adapted to ultra-dry, even hard radiation, and were living on these spacecrafts.

00:48:46 ►

So Viking, on its inside surfaces from 1976, has got living things.

00:48:52 ►

They’re not metabolizing much, but they’re there and they’re dormant

00:48:55 ►

and they’re doing their thing.

00:48:57 ►

So there’s this whole idea of exportable biota now,

00:49:01 ►

that these things will survive interstellar transits,

00:49:04 ►

they will survive big solar events,

00:49:05 ►

and they will end up in… So we’ve already exported life to other planets, notably Mars

00:49:12 ►

as sort of the big place. But the joke version of this is that when each of these spacecraft

00:49:18 ►

lands, like the Mars Exploration Rovers, the bacteria that are on board report into the bacteria in the Martian crust

00:49:27 ►

that were always there, and they say, okay, what’s the story now?

00:49:32 ►

Well, they’ve invented this Internet thing, and they’re doing all this stuff,

00:49:37 ►

but we don’t think it’s a go.

00:49:39 ►

We don’t think it’s a go.

00:49:40 ►

And so we’ve got to try again.

00:49:44 ►

This next time, it’s ar go and so what we got to try again this next time it’s arachnids so the the martian

00:49:49 ►

bacteria say fine okay we’ll order the strike and they talk to the bacteria in the great big meteorite

00:49:56 ►

that does the dance the bacteria turns somehow managed to change its magnetic field by going

00:50:01 ►

running to one end and it pirouettes around and it ends up on a collision course with Earth.

00:50:07 ►

And then, of course, the bullseye that it’s going to hit is like North America, of course.

00:50:11 ►

And so one spring day, we notice that none of the plants are growing in this 1,000-mile-wide area.

00:50:20 ►

And winter has not left, and everything that’s living is heading out of this bullseye zone

00:50:26 ►

because this meteorite’s going to come in and knock out, just big enough,

00:50:31 ►

just perfectly tuned to knock out the human species so they can try all over again

00:50:35 ►

because they tried with Anomalocaris in the Cambrian seas, and it was just too clueless.

00:50:44 ►

And then they tried again with dinosaurs,

00:50:46 ►

and they were too self-centered or something like that.

00:50:49 ►

And they’re trying with people, and they almost got there,

00:50:51 ►

and we’re almost out of the, you know, the time is the app is running down for Earth,

00:50:57 ►

and we’ve got to try again.

00:50:58 ►

Why? Because we want to make a container to take us everywhere else,

00:51:02 ►

and it’s got to be intelligent, but it has to, you know,

00:51:06 ►

really like, you know, awful food so we can live in the guts,

00:51:10 ►

and it has to be able to travel and be less self-centered

00:51:12 ►

and something like that, so.

00:51:15 ►

You know, along what you were saying, though,

00:51:17 ►

that I’m sure you’ve read it,

00:51:18 ►

there’s a great book called Biology of Belief,

00:51:21 ►

and it’s basically about the plants are using us humans

00:51:25 ►

to move their genes around the planet.

00:51:26 ►

So it’s a pretty interesting book.

00:51:30 ►

Botany of Desire.

00:51:31 ►

Why did I say Biology of Belief?

00:51:33 ►

Botany of Desire.

00:51:34 ►

Thank you.

00:51:35 ►

Michael Pollan.

00:51:37 ►

Question way back here.

00:51:38 ►

I would love to know your opinions about Ray Kurzweil

00:51:43 ►

and his singularity of information,

00:51:46 ►

his theories on that, and what’s new with your team?

00:51:49 ►

Well, let me start first.

00:51:50 ►

I only have one little thing about that is, you know,

00:51:53 ►

Ray Kurzweil is talking about the singularity.

00:51:57 ►

And I was, thanks to Matt Palomary,

00:52:00 ►

he invited me along to a dinner with Werner Wenge, the science fiction writer Bruce was talking about.

00:52:08 ►

Because Werner is the one that came up with the concept of the singularity, the technological singularity.

00:52:15 ►

And so I’m talking to him about Ray Kurzweil and how he was talking about how quick this could happen and all.

00:52:20 ►

And he looked at me and he says, oh, Kurzweil is a gradualist.

00:52:25 ►

Because Wenge has a little snappier idea about it.

00:52:29 ►

Go ahead.

00:52:30 ►

Well, you know, it’s kind of a sad thing to see someone who’s in engineering,

00:52:35 ►

who knows about engineering, just kind of go crazy.

00:52:38 ►

And about eight, nine years ago, I met Ray at a conference in Camden, Maine.

00:52:45 ►

We had lunch together, and I agreed to help him generate the statistics

00:52:51 ►

for a book called The Singularity is Near, which came out.

00:52:55 ►

And my job was to go into the Digibar Museum

00:52:57 ►

and figure out processor speed growth.

00:53:01 ►

And I said, you know what?

00:53:01 ►

Processor speed don’t represent it.

00:53:03 ►

We’re going to do GPUs, graphic processors, like 3D things.

00:53:07 ►

So I did that, generated all this data for him, and sent him the data.

00:53:12 ►

And then I sent him an essay saying, and Ray, this is irrelevant information.

00:53:17 ►

What you’re trying to argue is so absurd and so in the realm of fantasy.

00:53:21 ►

And I’ll give you bulletproof examples of how technology doesn’t re-engineer itself.

00:53:28 ►

In fact, the opposite is true.

00:53:29 ►

And around this time,

00:53:31 ►

Jaron Lanier wrote this wonderful thing

00:53:33 ►

called Half a Manifesto,

00:53:35 ►

and it was a critique of all these people.

00:53:38 ►

But basically, I said,

00:53:39 ►

we have the Xerox Star Workstation, 1981,

00:53:42 ►

in the collection.

00:53:43 ►

You can boot it up.

00:53:44 ►

It does about the same thing as a modern computer but it runs you know in 256k of code and a processor one

00:53:51 ►

thousandth of the power but you can do word processing email you know you name it on this

00:53:56 ►

machine was the machine everyone copied machine steve jobs copied and everybody copied but so

00:54:02 ►

what do we have today giant Giant machines with their giant capacity

00:54:06 ►

with bloated code and APIs.

00:54:09 ►

The code is far less maintainable.

00:54:12 ►

It’s far harder to make innovation

00:54:14 ►

within those environments than it was.

00:54:17 ►

And code ain’t writing itself.

00:54:19 ►

It really is fantasy.

00:54:22 ►

For example, every year that the Singularity University operates in the summer,

00:54:28 ►

the last three years I’ve been doing talks there,

00:54:30 ►

and it’s the anti-singularity talk.

00:54:36 ►

It says we’re going to look at what a single neuron does.

00:54:39 ►

So I bring up these molecular diagrams and signal diagrams and process diagrams.

00:54:46 ►

I’m trying to understand what a neuron does with thousands of little incoming connections.

00:54:50 ►

And then you have the head and then you have incredible.

00:54:53 ►

It’s incredible.

00:54:54 ►

And I said, did you know that there is no supercomputing grid on Earth that can model this thing?

00:55:00 ►

That you could distribute all the, at the molecular level, which is the real true level,

00:55:04 ►

that you could distribute at the molecular level, which is the real true level.

00:55:08 ►

Not a single neuron could be distributed across a thousand computers to faithfully model its action.

00:55:11 ►

So how exactly are we supposed to upload, or as Terence said, download consciousness?

00:55:17 ►

You know, we don’t even have, a single neuron cannot be modeled.

00:55:20 ►

And so the argument against all that is, well, you know, you just do a simpler

00:55:26 ►

job. I said, and then it’s a slippery slope. What do you leave out in the behavior of a biological

00:55:32 ►

system? It’s a miracle on its own. I mean, everything matters. It turns out that there

00:55:36 ►

is no junk. Everything matters. And we don’t even understand the real granular granularity

00:55:42 ►

of its operations. Just it’s, it’s, and this all comes from, it’s sort of a hubris of the engineer, right?

00:55:50 ►

The engineer that thinks, I’m an all-powerful god,

00:55:54 ►

and I’ve written Microsoft Windows, therefore I can do anything else.

00:55:59 ►

And it’s tremendous hubris that comes from engineers not understanding

00:56:04 ►

how Mother Nature actually works.

00:56:06 ►

And some of the talks I do, I bring up these models of the cell to engineers,

00:56:11 ►

and they go, oh, we could never have coded that.

00:56:16 ►

We can’t get our heads around that.

00:56:18 ►

That machine of the cell, one cell, a little bacterium, is so large that it blows their minds.

00:56:24 ►

And there’s beautiful graphic animations now of the workings of the cell,

00:56:29 ►

a lot of them done at Harvard.

00:56:30 ►

And you watch these, and I show these to engineers, and they’re going,

00:56:34 ►

oh, my goodness, you know, proteins folding and unfolding.

00:56:38 ►

And looking at this stuff sends you on a trip.

00:56:42 ►

And I think that when you see this simple view of technology

00:56:47 ►

and this sort of cyborgic Hollywood,

00:56:50 ►

treat it with a huge grain of salt

00:56:52 ►

because these are guys that are dealing with tinker toys.

00:56:55 ►

They’re not dealing with real technology yet.

00:56:57 ►

We do not have real technology compared to what nature does.

00:57:00 ►

We’re not even close.

00:57:03 ►

So are they saying that computers will never be like a human

00:57:06 ►

mind?

00:57:07 ►

What I did

00:57:10 ►

as part of the research on the EvoGrid

00:57:12 ►

is I said, okay, I’ve got to

00:57:14 ►

figure out where this original computer

00:57:16 ►

design came from. I’m going to the

00:57:18 ►

archives of the Institute for Advanced Study

00:57:20 ►

and because of Pete Hutt

00:57:22 ►

and Freeman Dyson, I was able to go

00:57:24 ►

in there and get all the boxes out

00:57:25 ►

and they brought all this material out for Robert Oppenheimer’s files.

00:57:30 ►

And it was his files to do with, when he was director,

00:57:33 ►

of the Electronic Computer Project and then John von Neumann’s files

00:57:37 ►

and then the schematics for the machine they built,

00:57:39 ►

which is really the prototype for all modern computers.

00:57:43 ►

And so I went through card decks.

00:57:45 ►

It was the first time cards were ever fed into a computer through an IBM thing.

00:57:50 ►

And basically in the notes it says,

00:57:53 ►

this is just a provisional design to get this thing to work

00:57:57 ►

with 2,400 valves, 2,400 vacuum tubes, CRTs for storage of the thing,

00:58:03 ►

and just to keep this operating.

00:58:05 ►

So we made an instruction set that would go through this little narrow thing,

00:58:08 ►

and they would all execute and address memory.

00:58:11 ►

And they gave it away.

00:58:12 ►

They open-sourced it.

00:58:13 ►

The Army wanted them to do this too,

00:58:15 ►

and von Neumann didn’t want to write patents and crap like that,

00:58:18 ►

so they open-sourced the design,

00:58:20 ►

and everybody copied the von Neumann machine.

00:58:23 ►

And so the von Neumann machine started out.

00:58:25 ►

But before his death in 1955, he wrote cellular automata books

00:58:31 ►

and visions of ways computers could be.

00:58:33 ►

Because he thought, well, the thing we built at Princeton,

00:58:35 ►

that was just sort of a simplistic and it’ll do a few jobs.

00:58:40 ►

But what von Neumann didn’t see is that that machine got faster and faster and faster.

00:58:45 ►

And so it does everything, we think, very powerfully, but its design is incredibly weak.

00:58:51 ►

It’s a very, very weak design.

00:58:52 ►

It is utterly incompatible with simulating nature, which is what we found out in the Evil Grid project.

00:58:59 ►

So it’s the wrong tool for doing the things that people presume that it can do, in my opinion.

00:59:06 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

00:59:14 ►

So there you have it, at least in Bruce’s opinion, and in mine as well, I should add.

00:59:19 ►

For the foreseeable future, there isn’t any chance that we’ll be uploading our consciousness into machines.

00:59:25 ►

And if you’ve been using a PC or a Mac for a while, my guess is that the inside of one of those boxes is the last place that you’d want to be spending eternity.

00:59:34 ►

Of course, having your consciousness locked in a Windows-based computer would surely give a whole new meaning to fear of the notorious blue screen of death, wouldn’t it?

00:59:44 ►

give a whole new meaning to fear of the notorious blue screen of death, wouldn’t it?

00:59:50 ►

Now, if you’ve been following the thread on the Notes from the Psychedelic Salon webpage or on Facebook, you know that the videos of the first three of these workshop talks are

00:59:55 ►

already available on YouTube.

00:59:57 ►

And within a few days, our wonderful volunteer, Tom Riddell, will finish the editing on the

01:00:02 ►

segment that we just heard, and we’ll have that one online as well.

01:00:06 ►

And again, I want to thank both Tom and our other cameraman, Daniel Morales,

01:00:10 ►

who did an excellent job of recording the first of our 2012 workshops.

01:00:15 ►

And as you know, the second of these workshops will be held over the weekend of June 15th through the 17th this year

01:00:23 ►

at Esalen Institute in California.

01:00:26 ►

And I understand that the workshop is now about half filled,

01:00:29 ►

and so if you plan on being there, you probably shouldn’t wait too much longer in making your reservations.

01:00:35 ►

It’s going to be a really nice, intimate little group of about 25 or so of us,

01:00:40 ►

and I’m sure that by the time the weekend is over,

01:00:43 ►

we’ll have collectively solved all

01:00:45 ►

of the world’s problems and probably have had a good time in doing it.

01:00:49 ►

So I’ll post a link to that event along with the program notes for today’s podcast in case

01:00:53 ►

you want to check it out.

01:00:56 ►

Now as for the third of these events, I’m sorry to have to report that the one planned

01:01:01 ►

for Burning Man may not happen, at least not as originally planned.

01:01:04 ►

that the one planned for Burning Man may not happen, at least not as originally planned.

01:01:09 ►

As you’ve no doubt already heard, the Burning Man organization,

01:01:13 ►

which only had a mere 20 years to plan for selling out one day,

01:01:16 ►

well, nonetheless, they completely botched it.

01:01:22 ►

Originally, Bruce and I had joined forces with the good folks at Angel Oasis, the theme camp, and who were in the process of combining with another camp to

01:01:25 ►

organize a village of about 250 people for this year’s burn. Unfortunately, out of several dozen

01:01:32 ►

key people, particularly the ones who were really necessary to pull this off, well, only two or three

01:01:38 ►

of them got tickets in the lottery. And yes, I know that there are a whole raft of ticket redistribution schemes currently underway

01:01:45 ►

but what happened is that most of our key people, myself included

01:01:50 ►

well, we simply lost our enthusiasm for the event when nobody got tickets.

01:01:55 ►

You know, it takes an incredible amount of time and money to pull off a good theme camp

01:01:59 ►

and without your heart really being in it

01:02:02 ►

because many of your friends have already decided to move on and go to other festivals this year,

01:02:07 ►

well, without all that necessary energy, it just seems smart to cancel the camp.

01:02:11 ►

Now, for our fellow salonners who did get tickets and are still planning on attending,

01:02:16 ►

I am happy to announce that Bruce did get a ticket for himself and one for his wife,

01:02:21 ►

and he’s now talking with a couple of different theme camps about hosting the Palenque Norte lectures this year.

01:02:27 ►

And, of course, that’s where the Burning Man version of this workshop was to be held.

01:02:32 ►

So stay tuned for an announcement about where you’ll find Bruce

01:02:35 ►

and some of the other salonners at this year’s burn,

01:02:37 ►

but I do want to let you know that I won’t be going myself.

01:02:41 ►

In fact, I guess it’s now pretty safe to say that I’ve probably been to my last burn.

01:02:46 ►

But let me tell you, I still have some great memories of the ones that I did attend, and

01:02:50 ►

if you’re planning on attending this year, I’m sure that you won’t be disappointed. You know,

01:02:54 ►

it’s one great party if you do it right. And now I want to return to a topic that I included in the

01:03:03 ►

Occupy Movement segment of my last podcast,

01:03:06 ►

which was where Chris Hedges expressed his criticism of the Black Block tactics,

01:03:11 ►

and I also added my support for his harsh criticism of them.

01:03:16 ►

Now to begin with, I want to play part of a conversation that I had recently with my friend and fellow podcaster KMO,

01:03:23 ►

host of the Sea Realm podcast. In fact, our mutual friend

01:03:27 ►

the Dope Fiend was also on the call because KMO was recording a few bits for his upcoming 300th

01:03:34 ►

podcast, which probably should be online just about the time you’re hearing this. Now what I’m

01:03:39 ►

going to play is a segment that KMO tells me won’t be included in his already overly packed program,

01:03:46 ►

and so I’m not trying to take any of his thunder here. But during our talk, he asked me a question

01:03:52 ►

about the black block, which, well, I answered it off the top of my head, but which afterwards

01:03:57 ►

really got me to thinking about better clarifying my own position on this subject. And my purpose

01:04:03 ►

here is not to get you to agree with me, but

01:04:05 ►

more importantly, to encourage you to think this thing through for yourself.

01:04:10 ►

And as you’ll hear right now, when I answered KMO’s question, I wound up saying that I could

01:04:16 ►

probably argue both sides of the question. So I’ll play that for you right now, and then I’ll

01:04:21 ►

come back and tell you what conclusion I’ve finally come to and which of the two sides I’ve landed on. Well, Lorenzo, I don’t know if you heard those episodes,

01:04:33 ►

but last summer, last August, actually, I went to New York City for a psychedelics conference and I

01:04:38 ►

barely attended the conference because Occupy Wall Street was so much more interesting.

01:04:43 ►

And so I did a few episodes on Occupy Wall Street live so much more interesting. And so I did a few episodes

01:04:45 ►

on Occupy Wall Street live from Zuccotti Park. You know, obviously it’s a podcast, so it’s not live

01:04:51 ►

in the sense of a live feed on TV or, you know, a live web feed. But yeah, I was there and now I’m

01:04:57 ►

going back. And so I was, you know, we were talking with the Dope Fiend and I’m going to be reviving

01:05:02 ►

the Psychonautica podcast with Olga, and we’re

01:05:05 ►

going to be incorporating a lot of the Burning Man spirit around Brooklyn and Manhattan and

01:05:09 ►

that artistic community and scene there.

01:05:11 ►

But I’m also going to be on the ground, you know, when the weather gets warm in New York

01:05:15 ►

City.

01:05:16 ►

And I know that the Occupy movement is everywhere and that this spirit of transformation and

01:05:21 ►

revolution is everywhere.

01:05:22 ►

But that being such a global crossroads and that being such a population center

01:05:26 ►

and a place where so many creative people go to try to establish themselves in a creative career,

01:05:32 ►

it seems like it’s going to be a really exciting scene.

01:05:34 ►

And I plan to be there and sharing that with our podcasting community.

01:05:40 ►

Yeah, you know, I was really envious of you getting to Zuccotti Park because, you know,

01:05:45 ►

I wasn’t able to do that myself.

01:05:47 ►

And, you know, it was a very historical event.

01:05:48 ►

And I think there’s a lot more.

01:05:50 ►

You know, we’re only, you know, 160 days in or something like that.

01:05:54 ►

But, yeah, with you in New York, I’m now planning on probably lifting some of your audio

01:06:00 ►

from the Occupy segments of your own podcast and slipping them into mine here in the years ahead.

01:06:05 ►

I would hate that.

01:06:08 ►

I’ll give you full credit.

01:06:10 ►

You know that.

01:06:13 ►

So you’ve been playing a lot of Chris Hedges material

01:06:17 ►

on your podcast in recent episodes.

01:06:19 ►

I wonder if you are following the sort of confrontation

01:06:23 ►

or at least the rubbing of egos between David Graeber and Chris Hedges.

01:06:29 ►

No, I’ve missed that.

01:06:32 ►

I’m trying to work on this new book, so I haven’t been spending as much time as I should researching it.

01:06:37 ►

So fill me in on that.

01:06:39 ►

Oh, wow.

01:06:40 ►

So where to go from here?

01:06:42 ►

You know, Chris Hedges wrote that article about the black bloc being the cancer of Wall Street or Occupy Wall Street.

01:06:48 ►

Yeah, actually, I played one of his segments talking about that.

01:06:51 ►

Well, David Graeber responded to that saying this is some very dangerous rhetoric from you, Chris Hedges.

01:06:58 ►

One, you know, the black bloc people and their activities are not nearly as cartoonishly simplistic as you have been portraying them.

01:07:08 ►

Secondly, even Gandhi.

01:07:10 ►

Gandhi said that if he had to choose between violence and cowardice, he would always choose violence.

01:07:20 ►

And while he took a nonviolent path, he never condemned people who used violence to fight the British occupation of his country.

01:07:28 ►

And David Graeber is basically championing the right of people to resist by whatever means they see fit.

01:07:36 ►

And he made a pretty compelling case. I can’t say that I come down on one side or the other.

01:07:42 ►

Well, I understand what he’s saying there,

01:07:46 ►

and to a large degree, I support it. I think that the point that Chris Hedges made that seems maybe

01:07:53 ►

to be kind of pushed to the background is one of the points he was making is if they wanted to

01:07:59 ►

have their Blacklock activities, they shouldn’t blend, you know, use the main crowd as their foil.

01:08:08 ►

And I have two real problems with the black block.

01:08:11 ►

One is not the violence, quite frankly.

01:08:13 ►

It’s that that is the easiest group to infiltrate.

01:08:15 ►

And I remember COINTELPRO back from the, you know, the 60s.

01:08:19 ►

And so the black block is the easiest for the government to infiltrate and then kind of turn the popular opinion against them.

01:08:27 ►

And then, you know, I was kind of ambivalent about it until the black bloc, you know, they attacked Kim Poole and then they stole Freedom’s Freedom L.A.’s camera when they attacked her out in the West Coast.

01:08:38 ►

And those activities seem to be more like police activities than real true black bloc.

01:08:44 ►

activities seem to be more like police activities than real true black block.

01:08:50 ►

The pristine black block, if they would get together and do things without hiding behind the non-violent protesters, I would have a lot less problem with the whole thing.

01:08:58 ►

It’s a tough one because for me, the fact that there is this enormous gathering of people

01:09:05 ►

for the Occupy movement and Occupy activities,

01:09:09 ►

that is an environment.

01:09:11 ►

It’s not just an activity.

01:09:13 ►

It’s not just sort of a rally that somebody has organized

01:09:15 ►

and they can claim ownership of.

01:09:17 ►

This is a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds

01:09:20 ►

with shared interests, but different mentalities coming together.

01:09:25 ►

And an environment like that, it just seems there are going to be parasites,

01:09:29 ►

there are going to be predators, there’s going to be a human ecology that emerges there.

01:09:33 ►

And I don’t see that the sort of criticism that Chris Hedges has leveled

01:09:39 ►

against the black bloc people really can do anything to change the situation

01:09:44 ►

unless, as David Graeber says,

01:09:46 ►

this sort of language is leading to a sort of nonviolent peace police where the rest of the protesters actually use violence

01:09:53 ►

against the black bloc groups to exclude them and to prevent them from operating in this big melting pot,

01:10:01 ►

which is the Occupy movement.

01:10:03 ►

Yeah, you know, it’s it’s there’s going to be a lot of, you know, trial and error evolution steps here.

01:10:10 ►

One of the things that’s happened out here is I’ve been kind of involved with a number of people

01:10:15 ►

involved in Occupy that are, you know, closer to my age.

01:10:19 ►

And some of them are very liberal, been involved in all kinds of liberals activities since the 60s.

01:10:25 ►

And because of Black Block, most of them have dropped out.

01:10:28 ►

They feel that the movement has turned violent now, which it hasn’t.

01:10:32 ►

But that’s, of course, the popular press.

01:10:35 ►

And so out here we’ve already lost a significant number of people because of Black Block.

01:10:40 ►

So a lot of support, I should say.

01:10:42 ►

So a lot of support, I should say.

01:10:54 ►

Well, something that Chris Hedges says and which I absolutely agree with is that the interests that the Occupy movement represents really are mainstream interests.

01:11:02 ►

These are the interests of people who are struggling in an economy which is supposedly recovering, but it’s really, we know, it’s not recovering for everybody.

01:11:06 ►

It is recovering for the moneyed class, you know, the people who make money by having money.

01:11:12 ►

It’s not recovering for people who trade their time and labor for the money that they need to pay rent and eat and pay all the various bills and interest payments that people have, you know, allowed themselves to be controlled by.

01:11:22 ►

And I would probably take David Graeber’s arguments a lot less seriously

01:11:26 ►

if I hadn’t recently read Debt, the first 5,000 years. And David Graeber has got such a deep

01:11:34 ►

historical insight into the ways by which moneyed classes and privileged classes have,

01:11:40 ►

for thousands of years, enslaved everybody else with money and with debt.

01:11:53 ►

And violence has historically been one of the very few tools that the masses have at their disposal to use against elites.

01:11:55 ►

And generally, it is some sort of violent revolution, or at least the credible threat

01:12:00 ►

of violence from the masses, which causes the elites to say, okay, we’re going to relent for a

01:12:05 ►

time. We’re going to loosen up. We are going to stop taking your children away into slavery. We

01:12:11 ►

are going to stop having debts which are passed on from one generation to another to keep everybody

01:12:16 ►

enslaved to this small minority. So as much as I understand the need to make sure that the

01:12:24 ►

Occupy movement does still seem to represent mainstream interests and concerns,

01:12:30 ►

and as much as I don’t really care for his rhetoric normally, I have to sort of weigh in with Derek Jensen here and say that,

01:12:36 ►

you know what, there is a place for violent resistance, and we have to be very conscious about it, we have to be very careful with it,

01:12:42 ►

but there is a place for violence, because the elites are certainly not forswearing the use of violence against us.

01:12:50 ►

Yeah, I’m not going to disagree with any of that.

01:12:52 ►

In fact, David Graeber’s book, Death, the First 5,000 Years, I’d say is one of the ten most important books I’ve ever read.

01:12:58 ►

It’s a phenomenal work, and I learned an awful lot with it.

01:13:02 ►

And I have to admit, you know, I’ve watched almost every one of these evictions.

01:13:06 ►

And had I been there, I would have been arrested at every one for violence because I really get angry about what what the militarized police forces are doing.

01:13:16 ►

And so, you know, I and I do agree that at least for sure, the threat of violence is the only way that the masses, the working class, are going to get control of their own government again.

01:13:27 ►

And so, you know, it’s like you say, it’s a dicey issue.

01:13:30 ►

It’s a fine line.

01:13:32 ►

I guess one of the reasons I’m pushing the nonviolent end of the thing pretty heavily is because, at least in my audience, a lot of the people are, you know, under 25.

01:13:43 ►

And it’s so easy when you’re young to get swept up in something like that.

01:13:49 ►

And all of a sudden you’re in jail for 20 years if you’re not careful.

01:13:52 ►

So especially with the police infiltrators, I think it’s pretty.

01:13:55 ►

And here in San Diego, we have already uncovered a photograph of the infiltration of the police into some of the more violent elements.

01:14:05 ►

And so we know that’s going on and that they’re antagonizing the crowd so that, you know,

01:14:11 ►

if you know what you’re doing, if you’ve got some experience in this, then, you know, you can take your chances.

01:14:18 ►

But if you’re just young and inexperienced with these mass demonstrations,

01:14:21 ►

you’ve got to be pretty careful that you don’t get swept up and, you know, get out of your depth.

01:14:26 ►

And so it’s just a cautionary thing more than anything.

01:14:29 ►

The senseless violence on each other, like the black bloc attacking the video streamers, to me is pretty senseless.

01:14:37 ►

But, you know, it’s like you say, you know, I can actually I could very successfully, I think, argue your side of the story, too.

01:14:47 ►

And I’m going to have to look for more of David Graber’s work because, you know, I really admire him.

01:14:52 ►

And I would say that David Graber is probably the the key person that got this whole thing going.

01:14:58 ►

I imagine that he would he would dispute you there.

01:15:02 ►

You know, that might be false modesty. I don’t know.

01:15:01 ►

he would dispute you there.

01:15:03 ►

But, you know, that might be false modesty. I don’t know. Yeah, he

01:15:05 ►

was at least there from day one

01:15:07 ►

and very instrumental in

01:15:09 ►

helping the discussion

01:15:12 ►

head in these directions, I think. So

01:15:13 ►

I have a great deal of respect for David

01:15:15 ►

Graber. And, of course, you know, he

01:15:17 ►

has been around on

01:15:19 ►

the anarchist side of the

01:15:21 ►

coin for a long time, whereas

01:15:23 ►

Chris Hedges has just been on the reporting side.

01:15:26 ►

So, you know, they’re coming from two different worlds, too.

01:15:29 ►

Speaking of the reporting side, you know, if there are a thousand peaceful protesters and, say, 500 police,

01:15:39 ►

and the police beat a few of the protesters over the head, then on the news that night,

01:15:44 ►

the news media, the news media,

01:15:45 ►

the corporate media, is going to report that protesters clashed with police.

01:15:49 ►

They clashed against police batons with their skulls, but they clashed with police, and

01:15:54 ►

that’s just how it will be reported.

01:15:56 ►

And I know that you have great admiration for the sort of emergent, courageous citizen

01:16:01 ►

journalism that has been allowing the Occupy movement to get its message out

01:16:05 ►

and bypass the really pernicious filter of the corporate media?

01:16:11 ►

Yeah, that without these citizens journalists, you know, this thing would be over by now, I think,

01:16:16 ►

because you wouldn’t be getting the story out.

01:16:18 ►

For example, in Oakland, where the city hall was trashed, well, you know,

01:16:23 ►

if you really watch the

01:16:25 ►

video feeds, which most of them are still

01:16:28 ►

online and archived, you can see

01:16:30 ►

that city hall was left unguarded

01:16:32 ►

and open.

01:16:33 ►

And somebody in the black block

01:16:36 ►

said, let’s go take it.

01:16:38 ►

To me, they were set up

01:16:40 ►

on that. And of course, that’s what made the news.

01:16:42 ►

And there’s all violent protesters.

01:16:44 ►

The violence isn’t even close to one percent. And so, you know, it’s a fine line.

01:16:52 ►

And I am not going to say I do want to maintain a nonviolent movement, but I’m not going to say

01:16:58 ►

unilaterally that violence is never necessary, because as you said earlier, without the threat of violence, these demonstrations

01:17:06 ►

are worthless, that the power elite have to realize that when you put a million people

01:17:11 ►

in the street, their troops aren’t going to shoot them.

01:17:14 ►

You know, that is eventually what happened in East Germany is the stormtroopers just

01:17:19 ►

refused to shoot the people.

01:17:21 ►

And right now, you know, I’ve talked to some people who are retired police

01:17:26 ►

officers and they say that, you know, the police departments are weeding out anybody with any kind

01:17:30 ►

of social conscience and empathy and they’re militarized. And these are people that like

01:17:35 ►

beating people on the head. So, you know, we’re in a kind of a dangerous time right now. And yet,

01:17:42 ►

you know, it’s at least not like the 50s when everybody sat home and just said, well, what are we going to do?

01:17:50 ►

Well, I must also represent for the other side something that Dmitry Orlov said at the ASPO conference in Washington, D.C. last year.

01:17:59 ►

ASPO is the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas.

01:18:02 ►

for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas.

01:18:04 ►

He said that if you have 99 people,

01:18:06 ►

or if you have 100 people in a room,

01:18:10 ►

and 99 of them are united in their viewpoint,

01:18:12 ►

and one person is opposed to them,

01:18:15 ►

the 99 do not need to be violent.

01:18:18 ►

There is no need whatsoever for those 99 people to enact violence against that one person,

01:18:21 ►

because the one person is completely overwhelmed anyway.

01:18:23 ►

So the slogan that we are the 99% is, it seems to me, an aspirational slogan

01:18:29 ►

because clearly we’re not.

01:18:30 ►

A different guest in the program, Mark Rabinowitz, he was saying that he lives in Portland, Oregon,

01:18:35 ►

and there was a Portland, Oregon Occupy event where the occupiers, there was about 2,000 of them,

01:18:40 ►

and they were there chanting, we are the 99%, when across town at the professional

01:18:45 ►

sporting event, you had 50,000 people assembled.

01:18:48 ►

So the fact that that slogan has been so successful isn’t really indicative of the reality.

01:18:55 ►

We don’t have a full consensus of the oppressed against oppressors yet.

01:19:01 ►

And if we did have that sort of consensus, then violence would be completely unnecessary. Yeah, you’re exactly right. It’s more like we are a coalition of ninety nine one

01:19:10 ►

percenters in the groups I’ve been involved in. I don’t know that any two of us have agreed on

01:19:17 ►

anything other than change is necessary. So, you know, that it was a clever way to get things

01:19:24 ►

started. But it’s and Larry Lessig points out, if you’re really going to go by income inequality is ninety nine point nine or something like that.

01:19:31 ►

So it was a clever way to get going. But everybody now, like you’re saying, is realizing that, no, it’s more like maybe like hedges.

01:19:40 ►

It’s mainstream and mainstream has a lot of different currents in it. And so there’s nowhere close to being unified other than people just have a sense that things are unfair.

01:19:51 ►

And, you know, you bring up peak oil with all of this, you know, saber-rattling going on over Iran.

01:19:59 ►

You know, gas is already $4.27 here in California.

01:20:03 ►

And I think you’re going to see $6 an d$ 7 gas before this year is out.

01:20:07 ►

That’s going to change a lot of things, and who knows what’s going to happen.

01:20:12 ►

But if they keep trying to start a war in Iran, we’re going to see some really expensive gasoline out here,

01:20:19 ►

and then peak oil conversations take over again, I think.

01:20:25 ►

Indeed. Indeed.

01:20:26 ►

You know, something else that Mark Rabinowitz said to me was,

01:20:30 ►

if you’re really going to have a coalition of 99 percent, that’s got to include the Tea Party people.

01:20:36 ►

And I was on an Occupy Cafe conference call,

01:20:40 ►

and there was an old 60s lefty rackel type railing against Glenn Beck and railing against Fox News and railing against the Tea Party people.

01:20:48 ►

And I was trying to ask him, you know, if we’re really going to have this broad based coalition, it’s got to include people like that.

01:20:55 ►

So where can you agree with their concerns?

01:20:58 ►

What what can you find as a piece of common ground from which to start to build consensus with these people?

01:21:04 ►

And he would have none of it.

01:21:05 ►

He was like, I will not soften my rhetoric.

01:21:07 ►

These people need to be confronted.

01:21:08 ►

And I’m like, okay, well, great.

01:21:09 ►

You are entrenched in your polarization and you are entrenched in seeing these people

01:21:15 ►

who are just as oppressed and manipulated as you are as your enemies.

01:21:19 ►

And the 1% couldn’t be happier.

01:21:23 ►

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting.

01:21:25 ►

I’ve got a number of friends who are, you know, I wouldn’t say they’re in the Tea Party,

01:21:29 ►

but they definitely are aligned with the Tea Party, and, you know, they’re very conservative.

01:21:33 ►

And when we get together, you know, it’s like that, what’s that, Ouroboros, the snake eating its tail?

01:21:41 ►

Yes.

01:21:42 ►

The very, very far left and the very, very far right have an awful

01:21:46 ►

lot in common. And so when I get together with them, I just start and saying, OK, we disagree

01:21:51 ►

about, you know, I don’t like Glenn Beck, but I don’t like that other blowhard, whatever his name

01:21:55 ►

is. But but let’s talk about what where we agree. And so I always start with something that’s

01:22:02 ►

where they’re rabid and I’m close to it,

01:22:06 ►

and that’s in my dislike of the Obama administration.

01:22:09 ►

And we have different reasons to dislike them.

01:22:12 ►

Their reasons are based on what I consider fantasies, the birther thing and all like that.

01:22:20 ►

But we both agree that the administration has been a disaster.

01:22:24 ►

But we both agree that the administration has been a disaster.

01:22:31 ►

And then we ease back into, well, you know, a lot of this FISA stuff started under Bush and the Patriot Act.

01:22:34 ►

And so most of them aren’t big fans of Bush either. And we’ve found an awful lot of common ground.

01:22:39 ►

You know, they’re anti-union just because they’ve been brought up anti-union.

01:22:42 ►

I’m in a union, and all of a sudden they say, well, you’re not a bad guy. And so I think that you just hit the nail on the head that

01:22:49 ►

until the Tea Party and the Occupy people find common ground, this thing is just going to kind

01:22:56 ►

of founder around. Because if we’re 99%, 30% of them at least are Tea Parties, and 30% are

01:23:03 ►

way far left like me,

01:23:05 ►

and then the rest of them are just in the middle of trying to figure out which way they want to go.

01:23:12 ►

Well, we kind of drifted away from the black block issue there at the end,

01:23:16 ►

but I left it in because I do think that what KMO said is very important,

01:23:21 ►

and that is that we have to begin to find common ground with our friends who

01:23:25 ►

are considerably more conservative than we are. As I’ve mentioned before, back after I left active

01:23:31 ►

duty with the Navy, and even after I’d already quit practicing law, I was still very conservative

01:23:37 ►

and active in the Republican Party. You know, after four years in a strict Catholic college,

01:23:44 ►

another number of years as a naval officer, both on active duty and inactive duty,

01:23:49 ►

and then as a Texas lawyer, well, there’s a lot of conservative conditioning that has to be worked through before you get to where I am today.

01:23:56 ►

And that’s just the way it is, and it’s going to be that way with everybody, probably.

01:24:01 ►

I wasn’t a mean-spirited person back then. I just was only getting my

01:24:06 ►

news or my so-called facts from a single source, a source called the current establishment.

01:24:12 ►

And that’s where you’ve got to really love the good old Dr. Timothy Leary, who taught my generation

01:24:17 ►

that we should think for ourselves and question authority, all authority. And on top of that,

01:24:24 ►

my personal thinking is that you’ve also got to

01:24:26 ►

be prepared to change your own mind about life if you suddenly see things from a different angle.

01:24:32 ►

You know, I once heard somebody ask Ken Kesey what was the main thing that he learned from the 60s,

01:24:38 ►

and his answer was simple. He said, never pick a fight with a dumb guy who has a gun.

01:24:44 ►

Of course, he was referring to the police who were doing the dirty work for the possessing class at the time,

01:24:49 ►

and they still are, of course.

01:24:51 ►

Now, as for what KMO pointed out regarding what David Graeber said about

01:24:55 ►

the masses only having violence as a last resort to break the yokes that their economic masters have placed upon them,

01:25:02 ►

well, it may be true what Graber the historian says.

01:25:06 ►

But, and this is just my own opinion here,

01:25:09 ►

but it seems to me that today us masses have another weapon to use in place of violence,

01:25:14 ►

and it’s called the Internet.

01:25:16 ►

Never before in human history have so many of us been so well informed

01:25:20 ►

without having been fed our information through the corporate and state-controlled media.

01:25:25 ►

So, before we throw up our hands and say that ultimately there must be violence because that’s the way it’s always been,

01:25:32 ►

well, before that, why don’t we at least give this free flow of information tactic a chance to work for a few years and see what happens?

01:25:40 ►

And now that I’ve had some more time to think about it,

01:25:43 ►

what I said at the beginning of my answer to KMO just now,

01:25:46 ►

that it wasn’t the violence itself that caused me to take issue with the black block,

01:25:51 ►

well, I’ve changed my mind.

01:25:52 ►

You see, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that,

01:25:56 ►

yes, it is this senseless violence that I’m against.

01:25:59 ►

Let’s face it, if you think that letting the air out of police cars’ tires

01:26:03 ►

or throwing a brick through a shopkeeper’s window is going to win a revolution,

01:26:08 ►

well, maybe you need to volunteer for the military and see up close and personal what kind of violence you’ll have to deal with if you want to take on the establishment head-to-head.

01:26:17 ►

But before I continue on with this thought, I first want to play part of an interview with Jeff Smith of the Occupy Wall Street press team

01:26:24 ►

when he talked about the Black Block with Sam on the Majority Report program.

01:26:30 ►

And he’s on the other side of this issue.

01:26:32 ►

We’re going to talk about this story from Chris Hedges, or this piece from Chris Hedges,

01:26:40 ►

and also this piece from David Graeber.

01:26:43 ►

and also this piece from David Graeber.

01:26:53 ►

And let me also just say that we’re going to obviously post a link at majority.fm to the OWSbus.tumblr site so people can get a sense.

01:26:55 ►

You’re going next to Ithaca, you said, right?

01:26:58 ►

Yes, we’ll be in Ithaca through Sunday.

01:27:00 ►

Okay, so people can get a sense of where the uh… the buses going so that uh…

01:27:05 ►

you can meet up with it if you’re in the area but

01:27:08 ►

you’d you you tweeted out just i guess before the show

01:27:12 ►

that there’s a lot of conversation

01:27:14 ►

about david graber’s response

01:27:17 ►

to chris hedges peace

01:27:19 ►

about black box

01:27:21 ►

uh… block

01:27:22 ►

being a uh… cancer within Occupy Wall Street.

01:27:28 ►

What are people saying?

01:27:29 ►

What is your feelings about this?

01:27:32 ►

Well, I mean, I think most people thought his articles, frankly, ludicrous,

01:27:37 ►

and that it almost seems like he doesn’t understand

01:27:40 ►

what the so-called Black Bloc is about.

01:27:44 ►

I mean, it’s’s a tactic not even a

01:27:46 ►

group of people so it’s almost like calling you know terrorists as if that they all have a similar

01:27:53 ►

ideology it doesn’t even make sense and there are definitely people on this trip you know that i’m

01:27:58 ►

traveling with now that consider themselves anarchists in the you know strictest sense

01:28:03 ►

and they’ve definitely

01:28:05 ►

the whole issue with Oakland and violence

01:28:08 ►

and black bloc that’s all been thrown around

01:28:10 ►

it’s definitely very contentious

01:28:12 ►

and I think the misnomer about it

01:28:14 ►

is that

01:28:15 ►

there’s really any

01:28:18 ►

specific line

01:28:20 ►

that this movement takes

01:28:22 ►

in terms of the tactics

01:28:24 ►

the idea behind being horizontal is that you open up the possibility to anything happening.

01:28:31 ►

And so that doesn’t mean that we necessarily prefer violence,

01:28:35 ►

but at the same token to just completely take it off the table or even what the definition of violence is,

01:28:40 ►

because, again, we’re talking about, you know, property destruction maybe or in some cases challenging laws that we feel are not even really just anyway.

01:28:50 ►

So to me, it’s more about understanding the diversity of tactics is about, you know,

01:29:00 ►

the openness of this movement and not about enforcing specific ideas behind tactics.

01:29:07 ►

And so for now, it’s been nonviolent.

01:29:10 ►

But to say going forward that that’s the only thing that we would ever use,

01:29:15 ►

I have no idea what shape this movement is going to take.

01:29:17 ►

And I’m sure there will be elements of all these things.

01:29:20 ►

And so I think it really did a disservice.

01:29:23 ►

I mean, I think people feel like, in a sense, by Chris Hedges saying this is tearing apart movement, what he’s actually done is tear apart the movement or, in a sense, do what he’s claiming others are doing.

01:29:35 ►

And that’s been – it’s been contentious, but I think it’s a good thing to get out there, I guess. But I really don’t know exactly what caused Hedges to sort of branch out on that avenue.

01:29:48 ►

I mean, my sense was that, and I think we had spoken about this last week,

01:29:53 ►

that at a time where we are in a sort of a, the activity of Occupy Wall Street is less,

01:30:36 ►

Activity of Occupy Wall Street is less, is more under the radar, I should say, in general, that the weather and there is sort of a, we’re in a sort of a preface time period right now where we are, you know, there’s anticipation of the spring. I think the existence of people who are using black block tactics seems larger than it did at a time when there was simply a lot more people around.

01:30:40 ►

And so there’s a sense, I think, by people who are on the periphery or, you know, are sort of spending a lot of their time talking to the reactions of other people that there’s a concern that this is alienating.

01:30:56 ►

I think that concern is overstated to a certain extent because, like I say, it doesn’t really matter what people’s perceptions

01:31:06 ►

are now. I think, you know, or I should say, it doesn’t matter what people’s perceptions are now

01:31:13 ►

that they can’t be dispelled with 15,000 people, you know, marching up Broadway or something,

01:31:22 ►

or, you know, a hundred thousand people going on

01:31:27 ►

strike across the country those are all things that can certainly make people forget about uh

01:31:32 ►

a couple of uh black block uh tactics that were you know employed in february of this year so

01:31:41 ►

it’s it’s interesting to see i think think the most, the, the, the,

01:31:45 ►

the part of Graber’s article that stuck out at me was this part. We was talking about

01:31:55 ►

diversity tactics is not a black block idea. The original GA in Tompkins Square Park that

01:32:01 ►

planned the original occupation, if I remember, adopted the principle of diversity of tactics. At the same time, we also concurred that a Gandhian approach would

01:32:10 ►

be the best way to go. This is not a contradiction. Diversity of tactics means leaving such matters up

01:32:17 ►

to the individual conscience rather than imposing a code on anyone. Partly this is because imposing such a code invariably backfires, and the results are

01:32:28 ►

usually disastrous. After the fiasco in Seattle, we watched some activists actively turn over,

01:32:33 ►

turning others over to the police. We quickly decided we needed to ensure this never happened

01:32:38 ►

again. What we found, we declared, quote, we shall all be in solidarity with another.

01:32:44 ►

We will not turn in

01:32:45 ►

fellow protesters to the police. We will treat you as brothers and sisters, but we expect you to do

01:32:50 ►

the same to us. Then those who might be disposed to more militant tactics will act in solidarity

01:32:55 ►

as well, either by not engaging in militant actions for fear they endanger others, or in

01:33:02 ►

doing so in ways that run the least risk of endangering fellow activists

01:33:07 ►

so from graber’s perspective it seems to me that the key is for people who are engaging in

01:33:13 ►

black block activities to be doing so in such a way that they are not

01:33:18 ►

integrated with the larger protests that are actually happening so that others may be endangered

01:33:27 ►

by it well i guess i would counter that to say that you know they’re on this bus trip with us

01:33:34 ►

so the idea that somehow they don’t want to be a part of the movement and aren’t interested in

01:33:39 ►

other perspectives is just patently false well no no no i think you’re missing you misinterpreting

01:33:44 ►

well you’re you’re addressing hedges.

01:33:46 ►

And I’m talking about Graeber saying that it’s important for people who are using those tactics

01:33:52 ►

to use those tactics in a way that makes it clear is far enough away from what is going on,

01:34:02 ►

at least physically, with other protesters so as to not in danger them

01:34:10 ►

i mean he’s a high-ranked

01:34:11 ►

that those black block tactics are specifically

01:34:17 ►

utilized to protect

01:34:19 ►

the rest of the movement

01:34:21 ►

because that way you can identify

01:34:24 ►

who is going to be involved in potentially more militant activity and stay away from them.

01:34:30 ►

Correct.

01:34:31 ►

You know, and that’s always been, I mean, my experience throughout Occupy Wall Street is that literally every direct action,

01:34:37 ►

there are always choices to be made, and they’re explicitly made, given to people up front,

01:34:43 ►

that if you want to be in high risk of getting arrested,

01:34:46 ►

this is what we’re going to do.

01:34:47 ►

If you want to be in low risk, you know, you want no risk, this is where you stay.

01:34:52 ►

And so, you know, it’s more about just understanding that as protesters all,

01:34:58 ►

we have a common enemy, and it’s much more effective to simply focus your energy

01:35:02 ►

against that enemy and not internally and

01:35:05 ►

allow this to happen.

01:35:07 ►

I mean, part of it, I think, is that it’s sort of scary for people that are used to

01:35:12 ►

old constructs to just allow something to happen and to not have control of exactly

01:35:17 ►

every single person and what they’re going to do.

01:35:20 ►

And at the same time, that’s really what’s made this movement so effective.

01:35:34 ►

And at the same time, that’s really what’s made this in every way. And, you know, you can call

01:35:45 ►

it violence if you want, but on another term, you think of what the, you know, the SOPA blackout,

01:35:51 ►

and in a sense, that was sort of taking these kind of militant, you know, black block tactics

01:35:56 ►

to the internet. And they literally shut down sites or people participated in something that,

01:36:02 ►

you know, if it were physical and in the the world they would have probably considered that violent well no

01:36:06 ►

way to say and let me ask you this though

01:36:08 ►

uh… okay

01:36:09 ►

do you think there is a

01:36:12 ►

a point that if uh…

01:36:13 ►

and i’m not saying that had you saying this is i i i thought this piece was i

01:36:17 ►

i couldn’t quite make it from

01:36:18 ►

make it out from this but

01:36:20 ►

uh… from a tactical perspective

01:36:24 ►

if if i was to present to you,

01:36:27 ►

and I’m not saying, this is completely hypothetical,

01:36:29 ►

but if I was to say to you, I have evidence that shows that these tactics are scaring people away

01:36:41 ►

from joining up with protesters at Occupy Wall Street.

01:36:46 ►

I don’t have that evidence.

01:36:48 ►

I’m not even sure that I think anecdotally that’s happening or I buy into it.

01:36:53 ►

But what’s your response?

01:36:55 ►

If I was to say, what is your response to the idea that it might be keeping people away

01:37:03 ►

because it’s scaring them as to the nature of Occupy

01:37:06 ►

Wall Street? I would say that, you know, the scare tactics are really only coming from

01:37:15 ►

people like Chris Hedges. I think that if you are involved in these actions in person,

01:37:21 ►

you find that there really isn’t any kind of a threat in any way.

01:37:25 ►

I mean, it’s sort of the same as Zuccotti Park.

01:37:28 ►

There were always these, you know, rumors that there were terrible things going on there,

01:37:32 ►

and then you would show up and realize, although you could find those kind of things

01:37:35 ►

if you were really looking for them, it was very easy to stay away from them at the same time

01:37:39 ►

and to make the experience what you wanted to make it.

01:37:42 ►

So, you know, I really have never felt in any instance, and I’ve been out there on the streets now

01:37:48 ►

for almost five months, that I was ever swept into a scenario where I’m in the middle of

01:37:54 ►

a black block against my will or have ever felt like I haven’t personally been able to

01:38:00 ►

make decisions virtually in every instance.

01:38:03 ►

I just don’t think it’s true.

01:38:12 ►

I think that in very, very select instances, primarily in Oakland,

01:38:15 ►

something may have happened that has been different.

01:38:18 ►

But to characterize the entire movement, I haven’t seen it at all.

01:38:20 ►

Right. Okay. Fair enough.

01:38:29 ►

Jeff Smith, he’s on the bus, the Occupy Wall Street bus, driving through upstate New York, heading to Ithaca.

01:38:36 ►

And you can go to OWSBus.tumblr for more information.

01:38:39 ►

We have a link at Majority.fm.

01:38:41 ►

Jeff, thanks for joining us.

01:38:43 ►

We’ll talk to you next week.

01:38:54 ►

Now, if I understand correctly what Jeff Smith meant when he just now said about the black block, and I quote,

01:38:57 ►

it’s a tactic, not even a group of people.

01:39:01 ►

So if that’s correct, and I have no reason to doubt him,

01:39:08 ►

then what the discussion is all about actually has nothing to do with the inclusion or the exclusion of anyone.

01:39:11 ►

It’s about whether or not to use a particular tactic.

01:39:13 ►

So, let me get this right.

01:39:17 ►

If the General Assemblies are to be where consensus rules,

01:39:22 ►

then why is there even a discussion in the places where the GA agrees to black block tactics,

01:39:24 ►

or where they disagree with them?

01:39:25 ►

That certainly changes the way this story is being presented, I think.

01:39:28 ►

Well, at least to me it does, because then what Chris Hedges is actually saying

01:39:32 ►

is that the tactic of vandalism and random or not-so-random violence,

01:39:37 ►

that tactic is a cancer on the Occupy movement.

01:39:41 ►

And with that, I wholeheartedly agree.

01:39:43 ►

Now, as to where you want to come down on this

01:39:46 ►

issue, well, that’s up to you. For my part, after having served in Vietnam and lived through the

01:39:51 ►

rage and violence of the 60s, well, I’m just firmly against violence of any kind, even down

01:39:57 ►

to letting the air out of someone’s tires. And yes, I do understand where people like Jeff Smith

01:40:02 ►

are coming from, and I sympathize with him.

01:40:05 ►

However, I just hope that we can all keep our heads about us for the next few decades

01:40:09 ►

and work ourselves around to a little less warlike and more civil civilization of humans on this little planet.

01:40:16 ►

So, I am firmly against the tactic of black bloc violence.

01:40:21 ►

Not against the people who favor that tactic,

01:40:23 ►

any more than I’m against the people who favor other issues and tactics that I disagree with. There are going to be a lot of disagreements

01:40:29 ►

in the years ahead, but hopefully we can discuss them civilly and without personal animosities.

01:40:35 ►

What you decide is obviously up to you, but if we can all treat one another civilly, I’m sure that

01:40:41 ►

a civil society will follow. And if you want to see what a truly

01:40:46 ►

civil society can be like, then I highly recommend that you watch the brilliant film by Melissa

01:40:51 ►

Wanasina. I think I pronounced that right, but if I’m out, I apologize, Melissa. And her film is

01:40:57 ►

titled 2012, The Mayan World. I’ve already posted it on my Facebook page, my Google Plus page, and

01:41:03 ►

my personal blog. And I’ll embed it with the program page, my Google Plus page, and my personal blog,

01:41:08 ►

and I’ll embed it with the program notes for this podcast as well,

01:41:12 ►

which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

01:41:15 ►

It’s a really wonderful documentary,

01:41:18 ►

and I learned a lot more about today’s Mayan societies from that than I have in many years of reading about them.

01:41:21 ►

I just can’t recommend this highly enough.

01:41:23 ►

It will cause you concern,

01:41:25 ►

it will get you mad, and I hope it will inspire you and give you hope for our continuing survival

01:41:31 ►

as a species. The story Melissa tells in this film, in my opinion, is also intimately connected

01:41:38 ►

with the worldwide Occupy movement, which hopefully will help the voices of these wonderful people reach more ears.

01:41:52 ►

Now, I want to end today by reading an essay that came in, it was in the latest Veterans for Peace newsletter. And if you don’t know about VFP, you may want to look into it. Whether you are on active

01:41:58 ►

duty right now, or ex-military, or simply a supporter of our women and men serving in uniform,

01:42:04 ►

there’s plenty of room for you in this great organization.

01:42:07 ►

And this month’s newsletter began with an essay titled,

01:42:11 ►

VFP and the Occupy Movement.

01:42:13 ►

And it ends with a beautiful letter from a woman occupier in Boston.

01:42:18 ►

The historian Tony Judt wrote shortly before his too early death that,

01:42:23 ►

quote, for many American commentators

01:42:26 ►

and policy makers, the message of the 20th century is that war works, end quote.

01:42:32 ►

Many of these same commentators and policy makers took another message from the 20th

01:42:36 ►

century, that unregulated financial and commodities markets also work.

01:42:42 ►

As the 21st century began, the view was that the globalized

01:42:47 ►

power of the greatest military machine the world had ever known would guarantee peace and security

01:42:52 ►

and that the globalized economic power of the most productive engine of growth the world had ever

01:42:57 ►

known would guarantee opportunity and prosperity. Alas, we are now in the 11th year of what the Pentagon refers to as the Long War,

01:43:08 ►

a struggle that has left the country less secure and whose purpose, beyond the original response

01:43:13 ►

to 9-11, has never been adequately articulated. We have just ended, and the word ended is in quotes,

01:43:20 ►

we have just ended a seven-year war and occupation in Iraq, a country that, despite President Obama’s claim, is not sovereign, stable, or secure.

01:43:30 ►

Also, we are now in the fourth year of the worst economic catastrophe in the capitalist world since the Great Depression,

01:43:37 ►

a catastrophe that has accompanied a 30-year attack on the welfare state

01:43:42 ►

and the ethic of common provision necessary to sustain it.

01:43:46 ►

We are at perpetual war. We cannot employ our people in honorable work.

01:43:52 ►

The protests against militarism and monetarism have, until recently, been ineffectual.

01:43:57 ►

The country, and again country is in quotes, the country is not fighting the perpetual war.

01:44:04 ►

It’s being prosecuted by about one half of

01:44:06 ►

one percent of the population. However, the rise of the Occupy Movement, which is an expression of

01:44:13 ►

the frustration and the suffering resulting from the economic catastrophe, from its beginnings on

01:44:18 ►

Wall Street to an international movement with broad but incohete aims, has united those who

01:44:24 ►

ask for an end to war with those who ask for an end to war with those who

01:44:26 ►

ask for an end to inequality. Veterans for Peace has been involved in the Occupy movement throughout

01:44:31 ►

the country. The chapter reports in this issue document the extent of the involvement from

01:44:37 ►

Portland, Maine, and Oregon to San Francisco and from Minneapolis to San Antonio. Some of the most

01:44:43 ►

iconic events of the Young Movement

01:44:45 ►

have involved VFP members or other veterans.

01:44:48 ►

In New York City, Marine Sergeant Shamar Thomas,

01:44:52 ►

a veteran of the war in Iraq,

01:44:54 ►

famously shamed a phalanx of city police officers

01:44:57 ►

trying to disperse a crowd.

01:44:59 ►

His cry to them that they should be protecting the people in the street

01:45:02 ►

and admonishing the police that there is no honor in this, eloquently stated the cause of people attempting to retake the public

01:45:10 ►

space. In Oakland, California, Scott Olson, an ex-Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq

01:45:17 ►

and who is a member of the IVAW and VFP, was struck by a tear gas canister and severely injured,

01:45:26 ►

and VFP, was struck by a tear gas canister and severely injured, one of the first casualties of this struggle. In Boston, members of Chapter 9, the Smedley Butler Brigade, who were at the

01:45:32 ►

Occupy encampment, formed the first line of resistance to the Boston police, who were

01:45:37 ►

attempting to clear the gathering by force. Some of the members of the brigade were injured and

01:45:42 ►

or arrested. Their actions inspired the following response by one of the members of Occupy Boston.

01:45:49 ►

And this is the letter that she sent.

01:45:52 ►

Veterans for Peace, I am writing to thank you for your courageous actions at the Occupy Boston encampment on Monday evening and Tuesday morning.

01:46:00 ►

You arrived in the middle of our General Assembly.

01:46:04 ►

The energy prior to your arrival was,

01:46:06 ►

frankly, a bit low. Most of us had been marching, chanting, singing, and standing since noon,

01:46:11 ►

and we were exhausted, yet committed to remaining. When you arrived, however, there was a significant

01:46:17 ►

shift in the energy of our group. We were suddenly enlivened again, bolstered by your support,

01:46:23 ►

your words, your mere presence.

01:46:31 ►

The very act, the theater of your entrance, conjured up an image of knights in shining armor,

01:46:35 ►

riding in, proud and brave, with your flags held high, flapping behind you.

01:46:38 ►

And let me tell you, as an ardent feminist,

01:46:44 ►

I don’t think I’ve ever referred to a group of mainly men as knights in shining armor.

01:46:45 ►

Further, I had the chance to speak with a few of you as we waited for the police to arrive.

01:46:49 ►

Your encouraging words, and again your mere presence, emboldened and bolstered me.

01:46:55 ►

Having never been in such a fear-charged, potentially violent situation,

01:46:59 ►

somehow I felt safer because you were there.

01:47:03 ►

Frankly, I was not expecting you to stand with us as we defended our encampment.

01:47:07 ►

I figured you would stand to the side, supportive but removed.

01:47:11 ►

But when the police arrived to disperse us, and I realized that you all had no plans to move from your position in front of our chain,

01:47:18 ►

again I felt strengthened.

01:47:21 ►

From my position in the chain, I could not see fully what was occurring.

01:47:33 ►

But watching your proud, beautiful flags held tall, then waver and fall due to the police actions against you, my heart wrenched.

01:47:35 ►

I could not believe what I was seeing.

01:47:38 ►

You all deserve so much more respect than that.

01:47:42 ►

And then I watched one of your members be forcefully pushed to the ground. At that moment, something inside me snapped,

01:47:45 ►

and I was overwhelmed with the deepest feeling of determination I have ever felt.

01:47:50 ►

I was filled with fear, but also with pride, knowing that we were all in this together.

01:47:56 ►

There was no question in my mind that what I, what we, were doing was right and just.

01:48:02 ►

So again, I want to thank you for your actions and presence.

01:48:06 ►

I don’t think that words can accurately convey my deep appreciation for you all,

01:48:11 ►

and what it meant to me to have you with us that night.

01:48:15 ►

Thank you.

01:48:16 ►

Sephira Bell Masterson

01:48:18 ►

And then the author of the essay concludes by saying,

01:48:23 ►

Standing with such as this young woman should make all of us proud.

01:48:27 ►

There is honor in this.

01:48:31 ►

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

01:48:36 ►

Be well, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

301 - Terence McKenna_ Beyond 2012 Part 4

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