Program Notes
Guest speaker: Ken Adams
“I’m almost sixty years old, and I can guaranty you that I’m fucking tired of having to whisper about psychedelics.” - Ken Adams
Watch a video of this talk
Today we feature the fifth Palenque Norte Lecture of 2012, which was given at the Burning Man Festival. This talk features the filmmaker Ken Adams, who was a neighbor, friend, and collaborator of Terence McKenna in their search for new ways of explaining the psychedelic experience. Ken is the producer/director of a new, and experimental, film titled “The Terence McKenna Experience” which features never before seen and heard raps by Terence.
TerraLucida-The Terence McKenna Experience-test sequence from Ken Adams on Vimeo.
Ken Adams “Producing “The Terence McKenna Experience”” - Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo.
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A bailout of the people by the people
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And before I introduce today’s program, I want to let you know that there are really a lot of people who are involved in
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getting these podcasts from the salon out to you. Obviously, that includes our fellow salonners who
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have either sent in a donation or who bought one of my books because, well, without them we really
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wouldn’t be getting together here in Cyberdelic Space each week. But there are also a lot of Thank you. long and hard hours to organize Camp Above the Limit at Burning Man this year, and who
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then hosted the Planque Norte talks that we’ve been enjoying here for the past few weeks
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in the salon.
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And then there were the wonderful speakers who gave their time to make their presentations
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and allowed us to record and podcast it.
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Of course, there is also Chris Pezza, or Pez,
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who spent a significant amount of his time
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actually organizing the speakers and the schedule
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that he somehow magically talked them into following.
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And I know that can often be quite a thankless task,
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as I discovered myself when I had that job,
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but even on a much smaller scale than what Pez took on.
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And finally, I want to offer a huge thank you to Tom Riddell,
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who recorded the entire lecture series for us.
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You know, until this year, we’d never successfully recorded
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all of the Planque Norte talks at Burning Man,
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because before this year, it seemed as if we were unable to overcome all of the huge obstacles involved in doing a live recording on the playa
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where the conditions can quickly shift from simply hot and uncomfortable to, well, downright dangerous
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when a dust storm makes it almost impossible to breathe or see.
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Yet Tom worked all kinds of miracles this year and not only produced these
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audio recordings that I’ve been playing lately, but he also captured these talks in high def video.
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And you can now actually watch each of these talks as well as listen to them on your mp3 player.
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I’ve already embedded the first four of the videos along with the program notes for the
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four Palenque Norte lectures that I’ve podcast so far.
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And I’m told that the video of today’s lecture will also be available for me to embed almost
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as soon as I get the program notes ready, which should be soon after I post the podcast
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itself.
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And for what it’s worth, even if you’ve already heard these lectures on your MP3 player, I
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think that you’re going to find it really worth your while to take a look at some of the video as well, just to get a good feel for the vibe on the playa at the time the talks were given.
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So Tom, Pez, Bruce, Annie, and all the rest of you burners who worked on this project, my hat is off to you.
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And on behalf of all of us here in the salon, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
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Now, for today’s talk, we are about to hear Ken Adams’ talk,
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and he’s going to talk first about creating the movie that he titled, The Terrence McKenna Experience.
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Now, Ken is one of the most modest men I know,
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and so he doesn’t really clearly mention the fact that for a number of years,
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right during the peak period of Terrence’s professional life, Ken was not only Terrence’s neighbor and one of his closest friends,
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but he also collaborated with Terrence on working out ways to translate the psychedelic experience into an audio and visual language
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that, well, comes closer to capturing the
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essence of a psychedelic experience.
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And along the way in his talk, you’ll hear that Ken brings out a side of Terrence that
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maybe hasn’t been much discussed.
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And, of course, by the end of his talk, Ken is waxing eloquently about the psychedelic
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community in general and the Burning Man experience in particular.
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about the psychedelic community in general and the Burning Man experience in particular.
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So let’s join Ken Adams now as he takes center stage at Camp Above the Limit on the Tuesday evening before the burn and shortly before the screening of his film.
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Welcome. Well, this is exciting.
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We’re getting ready to close out the day here with Ken Adams
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who is the producer
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of the Terrence McKenna experience
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movie. Ken’s going to talk about
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the movie and then we’re actually going to screen it
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and we’ll get the crystals
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glowing for you and
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kick off
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what will be surely another awesome
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night on the playa
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so thanks for being here.
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And with that, I’ll hand it off to Ken.
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Thank you. Thank you for being here.
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It’s wonderful to be here.
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All these guys have worked really hard to get this thing together.
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It’s an amazing amount of effort to put on behind the scenes
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for these few hours of being together.
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And I want to thank you a lot, Pez.
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It’s been really great to be here.
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And thank you for the invitation.
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I think I’m going to tell you guys why I made this movie
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and see if it stimulates any questions or discussions.
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And then we can screen the movie.
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And we’ll have time for Q&A if anybody wants afterwards
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because I don’t think there’s anything else on the schedule.
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Screening the movie is about an hour and it’s an experimental movie that’s a giant montage
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of thousands of images and videos, illustrations, ephemera, artifacts.
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And it’s catalyzed by a series of videos
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that I shot with Terrence McKenna
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between 1989 and 1993.
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I was thinking that was pretty dramatic, Tom.
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I want to thank Tom also.
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Tom is the guy that puts together
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a lot of the technical stuff for this stuff.
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And he’s also become my fashion advisor
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and allowed me to wear this groovy shirt of his so I wouldn’t look like such a hick. So thanks again, Tom. He
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likes to be called Skittles, by the way. So give him some love later.
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So Terrence and I met in about late part of 1989. I had written a grant to get a computer to do experimental
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media with. As soon as I got it, basically I went to one of my favorite LSD dealers and
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asked him if he knew how to get in touch with this guy Terence McKenna. His number was literally
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laying there next to the phone. So I called him in real time,
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immediately got a hold of him in Esalen,
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told him I was an artist that was going to spend the rest of my life
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making psychedelic media with computers, essentially.
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And he said, come down to Esalen tomorrow and let’s start some shit.
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And it was really that simple.
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And I spent the next four years working
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with him very closely on a bunch of projects we released several movies
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together we did one movie called alien dream time that was done San Francisco
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in 1993 and it was done during a 48-hour rave in a warehouse and Terrence did two hours of spoken word that we later turned into a CD and a
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movie. And it was all done under the very intense presence of the San Francisco police.
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That’s really where this movie sort of starts off for me is I left that scene at that time for various reasons,
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including that I had a child and things were getting very intense in the scene.
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And there were things that were attracting the attention of both authorities and weird people that I didn’t want to have in the middle of my family.
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So I left and I went to Austin, Texas,
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and went through family years, raising a family there,
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and did my work under different names
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and different kind of circumstances.
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Four years ago, I was camping out in the Rockies
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near Fort Collins with my family.
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And I had a brand new camera, a new high-def video camera.
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So I was trying to capture some very close footage of the fire.
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And I was wearing my glasses.
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But in spite of that, an ember found a way to fly through the air and land on my cornea,
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and it burned my cornea away instantly.
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And I had to go into Fort Collins and find out what was going on and then get surgery.
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And they cut off my cornea and said that if I would wait about five days in dark silence,
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I could probably resume my vacation with my kids
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if I would wear a pirate patch, that kind of thing. So I sat in this dark room for these five
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days trying to meditate and breathe as calmly as I could because it was very painful to blink my eye
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at any kind of sound or any other kind of distraction. And the first night that we actually were allowed to go back out camping, in the middle
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of the night I had this very intense visitation from Terrence, who had been dead for a very
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long time.
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And it was a very complex engagement, and it was in a state that was not like tripping,
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not like dreaming, and not like a ghost story.
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And I don’t have any other ghost stories to tell you.
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I’m not really particularly superstitious, and I’m not quite sure what to make of the story even after I tell it.
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But we spent a great deal of time together, like an hour and a half, where we discussed all sorts of unfinished business.
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We discussed all sorts of unfinished business.
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He gave me specific word sequences that he told me would identify important people to collaborate with in the near future,
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and all of them happened exactly as he said.
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He gave me all sorts of suggestions about things that I had forgotten about that you’ll see in the movie.
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Because this movie, these videos that you’ll see that catalyze this movie,
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were shot on high-8 cameras at the very beginning of the personal computer revolution.
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And immediately, Terrence and myself and my partner Britt Willeen and Rose X understood that the computers would allow us to develop a more sophisticated visual language than we had been able to accommodate in the past and that it would be very crude in the beginning
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but that it would evolve very quickly
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and become a very sophisticated way
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to communicate about difficult subjects
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like psychedelic experiences.
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So we immediately started just burning tape
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in front of a set of cameras
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and really primitive video processing stuff.
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We got the opportunity to do this product called this evening called Alien Dreamtime
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that I was mentioning.
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We became convinced that there was really something there to do and that if we could
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eroticize intelligence with computers and make thinking a lot sexier we might be able to push the progressive side of this agenda forward
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with a little more uh power and force at this critical time where it looks as though the whole
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planet’s you know a sinking submarine so that’s what you’re going to see as the start of this
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story in the movie now four years later after I have this bizarre experience in the woods,
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a massive number of synchronicities and strange events occurred related to this.
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And I found myself walking away from the work that I’d been doing
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and going back to explore these tapes that I hadn’t seen since they were made.
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I’d never looked at them again.
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And I extracted about an hour’s worth of material on 11 different subjects.
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And you’ll see that each of these is embedded into a collage of hundreds
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and sometimes thousands of other images
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that are revealed in a 3D space
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that I think is pretty unique and specific to the psychedelic experience
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and learning to articulate between ourselves,
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between experienced people that know about psychedelics,
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to try to learn to communicate at a more expressive level than
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repeating our trip stories to each other, which is a sacred pastime. I’m all for it.
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But I think we can build a bigger and denser culture in that we are building one. Burning
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Man’s the most convincing part of it. So I went back and I reclaimed these videotapes, excerpted what I wanted out of them, and it was very emotional for me
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because when you see somebody you love that’s dead on a video,
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I don’t know how many have done this yet,
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but it’s something that’s going to become a very commonplace phenomenon in our culture
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is you’ll go back and look at video of someone you dearly loved and they’re dead.
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And they might have been 20 years ago and they looked very healthy and exuberant.
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And it’s a very mysterious and powerful experience to go through.
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And in this case, it would blow me away.
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Every time I’d get through scanning a tape, I’d have to quit and go away from it for a few days
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because it was so weird and emotional to see myself and Terrence and my partner and feel this incredible energy and optimism at the beginning of this revolution and in the middle of all this psyched in years to now where I’m almost a 60-year-old guy, and there’s been
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a whole segment of my life led where I basically had to try to pretend to not be psychedelic
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so that I didn’t get in trouble where I lived in Texas raising my family.
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So this movie, in some ways, is my coming out ritual and ceremony that I made for you
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people. Literally to come here to Burning Man
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and do this is definitely a dream come true and a prayer answered, many, many prayers answered.
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So for each of you individuals that are out there hearing my mumbling, thank you from the deepest,
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most essential part of my heart and being for being here and for being part of what all this
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whole scene means. It’s incredibly important. And I love you all for who you are. You wouldn’t be
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here. So thank you very much for that stuff. Well, I think Terrence would be pretty amazed
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and flabbergasted and excited. And I think he would see it in a very optimistic
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filter. Terrence was really an anarchist and he was a poet and a performing artist in my opinion
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more than any of the other things that he gets called more than being a philosopher or an amateur ethnobotanist. He really liked
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to get in front of people and perform, even if it was just two people smoking pot with
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him. He performed almost constantly. And he was very entertaining and he was very creative.
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And he was very easy to hang out with.
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He was very easy to have a talk with.
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He always made you feel smarter than you were.
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He always made any, even the most absurd kind of comment,
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he would be able to turn it into something interesting and redemptive when people screwed up.
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So he was very fun to be around, but in part it was all because he was on this
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performance constantly. He could entertain and charm anybody. I recently met virtually anybody.
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I know a few that he definitely didn’t. But I heard a story offhand at a party recently.
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This man I didn’t know was talking to me about being at UC during a certain period, and
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he later asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was working on this movie about McKenna,
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and he says, oh, well, McKenna was in that program I was talking about in,
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at Berkeley, they were in an experimental college program, and it was one of these things where they had like 1,500 applicants, and they allowed in 125, and they got to do their own curriculum.
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And he said from the very first day that they registered, Terrence took control of the whole department.
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He decided what the curriculum would be.
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He led whatever discussions were started.
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He seeded all sorts of trouble that would cause other things to need to be discussed.
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And he was 18 years old, and he had come off of a farm town in Colorado.
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So Terrence has always been an extraordinary person,
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but even before he ran into DMT and mushrooms and LSD, he was an extraordinary kid.
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He was an extraordinary young adult.
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So I think anything like this would have blown his mind,
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and he would have loved it.
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He would have felt completely at home and vindicated
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because he really radically advocates not only the use of psychedelics,
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but having faith in the artistic and creative resources
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that are available to us as a community,
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he thought that would be the way we would find our way out of all these dilemmas.
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It wouldn’t be through simple like technological innovation.
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It wouldn’t be sent through new models of socioeconomic distribution, which was really a popular thing
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in the 60s, it would really take this incredible act of imagination by the creative group of our
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community to visualize and imagine a new world where we can share, where we can care about each
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other, where we can laugh and party and not be ashamed of what we do to find our hearts and our souls together.
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I mean, I’m fucking almost 60 years old, and I can guarantee you I’m fucking tired of having
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to whisper about psychedelics.
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Psychedelics are precious to me.
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They’ve been the most sacred thing that this planet in this time in history brought to
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me to help me understand who I was and to open up my heart, my mind, my body, my pleasure,
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my intellect. All of this stuff became alive in an exponential fashion because I was exposed to
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psychedelics and that I sought psychedelics. And I sought spiritual disciplines. I sought education
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from the indigenous, from the Far East, the Middle East, from the North Pole, wherever it was. I’m a
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perfect postmodern guy. And in the middle of all that is psychedelics. And to have to still be
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whispering around idiots that want to go to war over war about something I consider so sacred is,
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it’s just time to be done with it.’s enough it’s time to get over so I’m
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excited to come here and see this free expression in this multitude of people
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you know horizon to horizon creativity where people are allowed to be as
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strange as they want to be as long as there’s no violation of the consent of
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any other person we’re making right now a model that people will study for a long time
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about how to generate organic community
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from this sort of indigenous psychedelic world that started in the 60s
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as a pop cultural phenomena.
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Do I look like Satan?
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Thanks.
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So I am tired of it,
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and I’m proud that everybody is coming out of their closets
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and people are writing books.
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Did I hear somebody ask?
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Oh, somebody out there. I’m sorry.
00:20:42 ►
It’s confusing.
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Welcome.
00:20:43 ►
Somebody out there. I’m sorry. It’s confusing. Welcome.
00:20:50 ►
I always wonder why Terrence kind of stopped.
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He didn’t really talk that much about LSD.
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He went into mushrooms and DMT.
00:21:02 ►
Why was it? Do you think that Terrence didn’t talk much about LSD?
00:21:05 ►
It was mostly the tryptamines.
00:21:09 ►
And was that because he favored it,
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or was it some political reason?
00:21:15 ►
The question was,
00:21:21 ►
why did Terrence not speak more to LSD,
00:21:24 ►
and what do I know about that, essentially. The interesting thing about McKenna
00:21:28 ►
is that I know, I learn more about him, you know, every time I do a screening someone
00:21:35 ►
comes up to me to tell me some secret knowledge about Terrence. So I learn things about Terrence
00:21:40 ►
all the time. And I also can tell by the way the story is getting told by his
00:21:47 ►
brother and by Bruce Dahmer, my buddy, by people in his family. Everyone has a different
00:21:54 ►
story about who Terrence was. And everyone knows different parts of it. And I know parts
00:22:00 ►
of it that have to do with criminal behavior that I personally was engaged with
00:22:05 ►
that make me understand a lot of things in his life differently than the folklore part of it.
00:22:11 ►
So there was pressure on Terrence at different times in his life to provide for a family.
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And like Charles Chaw was just demonstrating so proudly here on this stage last hour,
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smart people that don’t have enough money to feed
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their kids will consider all sorts of things to do. So I think that’s enough for me to
00:22:31 ►
say about some things, but I just want to tell you, Terrence knew a lot about LSD, and
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Terrence did a great deal of LSD, and Terrence had played an important role in the popularization of LSD in a way
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that no one’s writing about and probably never will, and completely anonymously, and it was
00:22:54 ►
a way that led to all sorts of trouble at some different points in his mid-career.
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So LSD was something that he had to touch very gingerly because of things that he was
00:23:08 ►
involved with and knew about. It makes perfect sense to me that he wouldn’t be blowing the
00:23:14 ►
trumpet a lot. We used to do micro doses of LSD very regularly to do creative binges of several days in a row working with this stuff.
00:23:27 ►
So we would do little microchip 10, 25 micrograms of very, very clean, pure LSD,
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and you can do it more often without having the effect die off so dramatically.
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Like if you do a lot of LSD several
00:23:45 ►
days in a row, the effect
00:23:47 ►
drops off dramatically very quickly
00:23:49 ►
but this stuff would allow us to just
00:23:51 ►
feel energized, vitalized
00:23:53 ►
we had fresh ideas, we spun them
00:23:55 ►
around this way and that way and we
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just had this attitude that we were in the beginning
00:23:59 ►
of something important and that
00:24:01 ►
if we just rode this wave with computers
00:24:03 ►
and psychedelia, we would be
00:24:05 ►
able to be part of this awakening of a new culture that could begin to address all this
00:24:10 ►
crazy shit out in the world that’s going right now unaddressed by most folks.
00:24:17 ►
So DMT then comes into the picture after Terrence. I don’t know how many. Does everybody here know who Terrence was?
00:24:26 ►
I mean, I just kind of.
00:24:27 ►
Is there anybody here that doesn’t know Terrence?
00:24:30 ►
Okay.
00:24:31 ►
I’m sorry.
00:24:32 ►
You know, I should really consider that.
00:24:34 ►
I just presume that when I go to these screenings, everybody knows this guy.
00:24:39 ►
But he was, you know, he’s actually a relatively obscure guy out of this very immediate circle of this tribe.
00:24:46 ►
He was an advocate of psychedelic experiences, and he was a writer and a public speaker.
00:24:55 ►
And sometimes he did some performance artists, especially in the end of his life.
00:24:59 ►
He did some straight-up performance stuff.
00:25:01 ►
straight-up performance stuff.
00:25:06 ►
And he was unabashedly advocating that psychedelic experience is as essential as sex
00:25:09 ►
to understanding what being a human is about
00:25:13 ►
and that to forbid that from people was both a sacrilege
00:25:17 ►
and also, frankly, a really bad way to try to run your culture.
00:25:23 ►
So he died in 2000, and he’s become a phenomena
00:25:27 ►
on the internet where he’s far more widely distributed and discussed now than he was
00:25:33 ►
while he was still alive. And he’s become a very popular guy to be sampled in certain
00:25:38 ►
kinds of electronic music and stuff. So he’s a hero to a bunch of people that are interested in
00:25:46 ►
psychedelics that aren’t necessarily interested in reading books. They’re not necessarily
00:25:55 ►
intellectuals. They’re not reading all just Huxley and going through this whole paradigm
00:26:00 ►
of psychedelia that I learned as a kid growing up in the 60s and going through
00:26:05 ►
my own psychedelic education. I’ve read thousands of books on subjects that are related to that.
00:26:13 ►
And there’s a whole generation of people that will never read that many books, even if they
00:26:17 ►
like to read, because we do other things now. And one of those things is we pass around
00:26:22 ►
things on YouTube that we think are cool.
00:26:25 ►
So Terrence has passed around now just millions and millions and millions of downloads of various pieces of his story.
00:26:35 ►
And he was always very eager to be recorded.
00:26:38 ►
He never tried to discourage anything in terms of the recording and distribution of his voice and his image
00:26:46 ►
and his work. He really wanted it out there and was willing to sacrifice a lot of control.
00:26:53 ►
One of the consequences of that is that you can see that Terrence jumps around on his
00:26:57 ►
facts as needed. As his brother said, he would never let facts get in the way of a convincing story.
00:27:13 ►
So dealing with Terrence as though he’s some kind of repository of psychedelic wisdom that we should go through and pick out these moments of jeweled enlightenment,
00:27:20 ►
well, they’re there. They’re absolutely there.
00:27:26 ►
enlightenment well they’re there they’re absolutely there but he’s also like should be known that he was trying to be funny virtually every moment he was alive so he was full of irony he loved pulling
00:27:33 ►
things out tricks on people he understood the value of historical tricks he was fascinated
00:27:40 ►
there’s a short segment in here about the Rosicrucian conspiracy. We were both fascinated
00:27:45 ►
with this conspiracy that John Dee and other alchemist-type folks created documents that
00:27:52 ►
claimed there was this powerful underground secret organization that would fight the church,
00:27:58 ►
heal people, and give them what they needed to have full and happy lives. And as far as anybody can tell, it
00:28:05 ►
was a fabrication that has had hundreds of years of ramifications all the way up to the
00:28:12 ►
most recent conspiracy theories about whatever you’re worried about. You can always tie the
00:28:17 ►
Russian Crucians into it. So he understood the value of historical, I don’t want to call them hoaxes because they’re more clever than hoaxes.
00:28:28 ►
They’re instruments.
00:28:29 ►
They’re devices.
00:28:30 ►
And 2012 was one of these devices that he thought through very carefully the opportunities of an apocalyptic date that would come after 2000,
00:28:50 ►
that would come after 2000, but near enough to 2000 to still be able to harness some of the millennial fear, energy, excitement,
00:28:55 ►
visionary transformative messages that everybody was creating.
00:29:07 ►
So he thought those things through as things that would be able to be dropped into a culture as a seed or like a string in a super saturated solution and immediately get attention and structure and order would emerge out of these different chaotic parts of this
00:29:13 ►
suggestion he was making so when i see now what’s happened and how people have reified the 2012
00:29:20 ►
thing so dramatically it’s it’s like almost hard to understand how it’s gotten so dramatically
00:29:27 ►
out there in some people’s lives to where they’re really counting every second down and every hour
00:29:33 ►
between now and then has a color and a tone. And I mean, I know quite a few people that are involved
00:29:38 ►
in the Mayan thing at a level of detail and specificity that would seriously have blown Terrence’s mind.
00:29:46 ►
But he’d have been fascinated by it,
00:29:48 ►
and he’d have supported every stroke of it.
00:29:51 ►
He wouldn’t have said,
00:29:52 ►
that’s bullshit, you got it wrong.
00:29:54 ►
He’d have said, go for it.
00:29:55 ►
If that’s what it feels like is happening to you,
00:29:57 ►
articulate it.
00:29:59 ►
Make books, make diagrams,
00:30:01 ►
create whatever kind of documentary movies you can,
00:30:04 ►
but make your own story and make it clear.
00:30:07 ►
Make it honestly and authentic.
00:30:09 ►
Your own story about these kind of subjects.
00:30:12 ►
And it will enrich our culture dramatically.
00:30:15 ►
It will focus a huge amount of attention on things that we’re currently ignoring.
00:30:20 ►
So Terrence was a trickster.
00:30:22 ►
I almost titled this movie Friend of Elves. Terrence McKenna, Friend of Elves,
00:30:29 ►
because there are people in our community that have complained about Terrence
00:30:32 ►
because he didn’t like to go to the white light and be blissful and holy.
00:30:39 ►
I don’t know how these people know that because I’m sure he did plenty of that.
00:30:43 ►
But he also thought that it was important to go out to the edge of the playa,
00:30:48 ►
have crazy adventures, and come back to the campfire and share your stories.
00:30:53 ►
And that that was the only way we were going to dislodge all this messed up culture we had been born in
00:30:59 ►
was for people to go out on their own, take chances and risk,
00:31:03 ►
and learn that they have a spiritual world that they live in, that they exist in,
00:31:08 ►
that they have these opportunities to alter their own consciousness
00:31:11 ►
and their own lifetime for a more beautiful and mysterious life,
00:31:15 ►
and that to advocate that was for him, it became his sacred path.
00:31:20 ►
It was very early, his sacred path.
00:31:23 ►
Even though he was a trickster, he knew that it was essential.
00:31:26 ►
So I think whenever you think about Terrence, if you’re going to have any kind of lens,
00:31:30 ►
think of this guy as a really smart trickster, very sly, incredibly charming,
00:31:37 ►
smarter than you can take into account.
00:31:41 ►
He was really, really smart.
00:31:44 ►
I know a lot of smart people people and I love to talk to almost
00:31:47 ►
anybody but Terrence was the most entertaining interesting fascinating mind I’ve ever been able
00:31:55 ►
to sit next to and burn time with the guy was incredibly fun self-deprecating, and generous in a way that very few people are with their mind and their attention if you happen to be in front of him.
00:32:11 ►
He really put a lot of honor on a lot of people.
00:32:14 ►
And I think that’s one reason why a lot of folks, you know, kind of go to bat for him a lot and have made him more famous now than he was. It was because virtually any hippie or raver that stumbled into his path, he would give his full attention to
00:32:31 ►
and listen to whatever was on their minds and try to make a respectful, intelligent
00:32:36 ►
comment on it and then try to leave them laughing. So he was a very generous man and I loved
00:32:42 ►
that very deeply about him. It was very fun to hang out with him, and I miss him constantly.
00:32:47 ►
I constantly, I have a thing I do where I’ve made my own ancestor cult
00:32:52 ►
because I missed a couple of my friends that I buried, including Terrence.
00:32:57 ►
So I practice hearing their voices in my head on subjects they would be interested in talking to me about,
00:33:04 ►
head on subjects they would be interested in talking to me about. And I’ve cultivated it enough now to where if I want to, I can hear Terrence right now
00:33:10 ►
laughing with me, or I saw him sitting back over there in my mind’s eye while I go, and
00:33:15 ►
I thought if I was actually tripping now, I could just completely befuddle myself with
00:33:20 ►
all sorts of manifestations of this guy because I’ve deliberately now gone
00:33:27 ►
in and tried to hold his voice in my body memory so that I have him for the rest of
00:33:32 ►
my carnal years as a consultant, as a friend, and just as an ironic point of view on this
00:33:39 ►
whole world that we’re all living through.
00:33:42 ►
It was so fun to hear his comments on the daily news
00:33:45 ►
and i would like to have that so i gave it to myself i have another friend that tried to bring
00:33:51 ►
me to burning man several times and ill-fated trips nick west who i want to honor here on the
00:33:57 ►
playa that i loved intensely that helped start the apple media Lab. And same thing, he passed away from another kind of cancer.
00:34:07 ►
This fucking cancer is killing everybody that it can,
00:34:10 ►
and we ought to fix it.
00:34:12 ►
But he also, you know, lived for creativity,
00:34:19 ►
lived for beauty and consciousness,
00:34:21 ►
and this was what it was all about for him.
00:34:24 ►
Burning Man was the epitome of
00:34:25 ►
all this stuff and i really feel lucky to at this point be here in this place and to honor both of
00:34:31 ►
these guys for what they did to make all this realistic and possible it’s hard to imagine
00:34:36 ►
what it’s like to be a terrence mckenna and to have all that pressure and all that
00:34:42 ►
weird admiration,
00:34:45 ►
and people have been out tripping.
00:34:47 ►
I mean, when we made this movie, Alien Dreamtime,
00:34:50 ►
I literally had people come up and tell me,
00:34:52 ►
I’m from the Blue Angel cult, and we’re having a ritual tonight
00:34:56 ►
that involves a great deal of sex and drugs,
00:34:59 ►
and you need to be there because we’ve been focusing our dream attention
00:35:02 ►
on you through your movie.
00:35:04 ►
We watched it 65 times. Oh, is that your son over there? Excuse me, Mr. What’s your name
00:35:11 ►
again? And all they really know about you is that you’ve done something with Terrence
00:35:15 ►
McKenna and they think that they have a special connection with it. And the last time I actually
00:35:21 ►
saw Terrence was at an event in Austin and he asked me to literally walk with him as his bodyguard,
00:35:30 ►
and I said, what the hell are you talking about?
00:35:33 ►
And he had just been attacked by somebody at a book signing
00:35:36 ►
that had lost a lover after doing psychedelics.
00:35:41 ►
For whatever reason, they had committed committed suicide and she blamed Terrence.
00:35:46 ►
And so she lunged across this table in a bookstore and tried to choke him and people had to pull
00:35:51 ►
her off.
00:35:52 ►
And his next stop was Austin and he was just like freaking out and rattled about it.
00:35:57 ►
Well, it’s not fun to be at the front end of everyone’s hallucinations and fantasies
00:36:02 ►
about who you are and what you’re doing and is he something from outer space or has he got a special message for me.
00:36:09 ►
It’s a very heavy weight for people to live with,
00:36:11 ►
and I know it caused Terrence a lot of pressure on his family.
00:36:15 ►
I know it did with Tim Leary.
00:36:17 ►
It did in my family.
00:36:20 ►
Charles that was on stage earlier tonight, it’s like it’s still Daniel Pinchbeck
00:36:27 ►
every one of these people
00:36:29 ►
that’s willing to stand up
00:36:31 ►
this high and say
00:36:33 ►
I’m advocating psychedelics
00:36:35 ►
go to the wiki
00:36:36 ►
the wiki media thing
00:36:39 ►
on psychedelic advocates
00:36:41 ►
and there’s like 28 people there
00:36:43 ►
from the whole spread of history.
00:36:46 ►
There’s not a lot of people that are going to get out in public and do that.
00:36:50 ►
And the fact that they do and have, I think we ought to respect and, you know,
00:36:54 ►
find a nice way to treat them as elders and give them a lot of forgiveness
00:36:59 ►
for the things they did that were fuck-ups and give them a lot of understanding
00:37:03 ►
that to carry all that kind of ambiguity in one human personal life
00:37:07 ►
is virtually impossible.
00:37:10 ►
And it does not happen without suffering.
00:37:13 ►
It doesn’t happen without sacrifice.
00:37:16 ►
And that there are people here right now
00:37:17 ►
that are becoming targets of culture
00:37:23 ►
that doesn’t want us to happen
00:37:24 ►
because they have enough nerve to stand up tonight in some other part of the playa
00:37:29 ►
and show a movie, tell a story, admit to their personal devotion to something that’s still illegal,
00:37:39 ►
even though it’s insane that it’s illegal, it’s still illegal all over the fucking place.
00:37:46 ►
Maybe not Portugal.
00:37:53 ►
So I have kids. I have 16 and 18 year old kids. Terrence had kids that were becoming teenagers when I was hanging out with them. And it’s an awesome thing to think about your decisions
00:37:59 ►
leaning on some other young being’s life in a way that you can’t predict.
00:38:04 ►
leaning on some other young being’s life in a way that you can’t predict.
00:38:08 ►
So give those guys some slack.
00:38:11 ►
When you see these guys fighting in public on these panels and stuff,
00:38:13 ►
if you do, I hope you won’t.
00:38:15 ►
We were talking about this earlier. And if you see people in this semi-celebrity role as suburban shamans and stuff
00:38:20 ►
getting a little over their heads and losing their emotional clarity,
00:38:24 ►
it shouldn’t be a surprise.
00:38:26 ►
They’re really out on the edge by themselves, and there’s a lot of pressures on them.
00:38:32 ►
So support them.
00:38:34 ►
Encourage them.
00:38:35 ►
Give them hugs.
00:38:37 ►
You know, all the women out there, give all these weird guys that are holding these microphones hugs.
00:38:42 ►
But then next, get up on the fucking stage.
00:38:45 ►
Is there a pregnant woman in the house tonight?
00:38:49 ►
No? Okay.
00:38:50 ►
Is there any woman right now that wants to come up on stage
00:38:53 ►
and say something into this mic about psychedelics?
00:38:56 ►
I’d be honored to give you the floor.
00:38:58 ►
For that matter, there are some men in this floor
00:39:00 ►
that I’d be honored to have some space for.
00:39:02 ►
This guy here is brilliant.
00:39:03 ►
That guy there is brilliant.
00:39:11 ►
I have some brilliant friends here. The women will take the floor very soon and it can’t happen too soon, but we need that guidance. We need this deep.
00:39:17 ►
Right now, what I’m thinking a lot about is a word called echodelia. That’s a new coinage. And for me, it means a convergence of divine feminine,
00:39:27 ►
a deeper ecology with psychedelic wisdom.
00:39:31 ►
And I think it’s emerging out of this culture very quickly.
00:39:34 ►
And everywhere I go, I find these powerful, strong women
00:39:38 ►
that are beginning to take over the decisions
00:39:42 ►
of how to do this and why to do it.
00:39:44 ►
And it’s happening all over the country
00:39:46 ►
where these small festivals are coming up.
00:39:49 ►
Some of them are only 100 people in a cow field.
00:39:53 ►
But they’re doing it because of the playa
00:39:55 ►
and because of all this incredible romance and myth
00:39:58 ►
that you’re building by coming out here
00:40:00 ►
in this incredibly bizarre environment together
00:40:04 ►
and creating something
00:40:06 ►
out of immense faith and heart. It’s really beautiful. As a sociologist, I don’t get it
00:40:12 ►
at all. I don’t think this is possible. This is totally off the books. There’s really no
00:40:17 ►
way to explain all this cooperation and incredible complexity being created year after year after year out of love for each other to be
00:40:28 ►
here. There’s really not that much else to justify. We want to be with each other. We want this
00:40:33 ►
community and this tribe. I made this movie simply for this tribe. I don’t really give a fuck about
00:40:39 ►
PBS. I don’t try to convince the farmer in Iowa that he should try LSD. I just don’t care.
00:40:47 ►
I want to serve this family and this community that has enough courage to stand up and live a
00:40:53 ►
free life and to explore their own hearts and their own minds with courage and without this
00:40:59 ►
deep regret. We’re moving forward and we want to be part of a much richer culture. We are that. We’re making it.
00:41:09 ►
It’s very easy for me to see that in a hundred years people will discuss this playa in terms we
00:41:17 ►
can’t even understand. It’ll just seem so mysterious that these thousands of people would go this far away from wherever they were to be able to be free and to be able to express it openly and with love to any stranger they meet on the street.
00:41:35 ►
That’s unheard of in today’s America.
00:41:38 ►
Just try go hugging a stranger on a street in America.
00:41:43 ►
It’ll freak them out and it’ll cause a scene.
00:41:45 ►
Here, we’ve loosened this whole thing up and everyone knows it.
00:41:49 ►
We’re doing something new and beautiful with our lives that other folks haven’t been able to try.
00:41:55 ►
And it’s a lot to carry forward, but it has a lot of momentum too.
00:41:59 ►
The number of people that are willing to talk about psychedelics compared to when I met Terrence is exponential. There’s so many people that are so set in their spiritual hearts about this thing,
00:42:11 ►
especially the kind of Gen Xers, the late 30s and early 40 people are everywhere I go.
00:42:18 ►
And they have a confidence that this is essential to saving the planet. Not saving the planet,
00:42:23 ►
the planet’s going to be fine.
00:42:27 ►
But saving some room for us to be in this community so that we can have rich and beautiful lives
00:42:30 ►
in more paradisical environments
00:42:33 ►
and less of these dystopians that we’ve been stuck with.
00:42:37 ►
So we’re moving in that direction.
00:42:39 ►
We all know what we need to do in some ways
00:42:41 ►
is to learn to love and share and to quit having war.
00:42:44 ►
You know, like we know how easy that idea is. what we need to do in some ways is to learn to love and share and to quit having war you know
00:42:45 ►
like we know how easy that idea is we need to let peace into the world and make war an obscenity
00:42:53 ►
that it is to make it a an unacceptable option and those things begin to fall back through the
00:43:00 ►
energy policy and monetary monetization and stuff all this stuff is tied
00:43:06 ►
together and when we make these movements of conscience we shift the factors of history
00:43:13 ►
it doesn’t matter who’s running merrill lynch it matters who’s going to write the best
00:43:18 ►
fucking song who’s going to write the best poetry who’s going to wear the craziest clothes now it’s even beyond that
00:43:27 ►
who’s going to throw this amazing festival
00:43:29 ►
that no one could have predicted
00:43:31 ►
in the middle of nowhere
00:43:33 ►
that people will spend a lot of money
00:43:35 ►
and a huge part of their year to participate in
00:43:38 ►
so that they can be around each other
00:43:40 ►
and discover what this new world will feel like
00:43:43 ►
now in our own lifetimes
00:43:45 ►
and we’re here for that we’re doing it does anybody have any questions or comments
00:43:50 ►
yeah sure um i really hope you guys enjoy this movie it’s not exactly in its final form
00:43:56 ►
there’s one piece uh near the beginning that has a base nectarectar Beats Antique piece in it now.
00:44:08 ►
And there’s one piece that will probably be taken out.
00:44:11 ►
Other than that, the visual cut’s final,
00:44:14 ►
and the audio is very rough cut.
00:44:17 ►
And actually, Tom, if you can ride that, please,
00:44:21 ►
because it’ll move all over the place.
00:44:24 ►
Thank you a lot for being here, and i look forward to talking to you
00:44:26 ►
after the movie you’re listening to the psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives one
00:44:37 ►
thought at a time i really wish that there was uh some way right now for you to view the Terrence McKenna experience,
00:44:47 ►
which is the film that Ken discussed at the beginning of his talk.
00:44:50 ►
As you just heard, it isn’t quite complete just yet,
00:44:54 ►
and I understand that Ken is still working on creative ways to come up with the money
00:44:58 ►
to pay for the lawyers and the music that he needs to complete the project.
00:45:03 ►
I did see a version of this movie
00:45:05 ►
that was ready for the workshop that Bruce Dahmer and I led at Esalen last June, and I really wish
00:45:11 ►
that I had the words to describe it. As Ken said, it’s somewhat of an experimental film, but I’m
00:45:17 ►
here to tell you that it’s an experiment that has succeeded on every level, and hopefully I’ll be
00:45:23 ►
able to point you to a place to either
00:45:25 ►
watch it or to buy a copy sometime in the not-too-distant future.
00:45:29 ►
And if we can get Ken over the hump of getting this version finalized, or in the can, as
00:45:35 ►
my Hollywood friends say, then he can get on with editing the other 100 or so hours
00:45:40 ►
of film that he shot with Terrence, which so far has never been seen.
00:45:44 ►
or so hours of film that he shot with Terrence, which so far has never been seen.
00:45:50 ►
And while the website for the movie isn’t working just yet, there is a preview of the film that Ken posted on Vimeo about a year ago, and it’ll give you a, oh, I think it’ll
00:45:55 ►
give you somewhat of a good sense of the technique that he uses to help Terrence’s words come
00:46:00 ►
to life.
00:46:01 ►
And I’ll embed that with the program notes for this podcast, which as you know you can
00:46:06 ►
get to via psychedelicsalon.us. Now before I go today, I want first to do one more short update
00:46:13 ►
on a couple of things that are going on with the worldwide Occupy movement. And to do that,
00:46:19 ►
I’m going to play three short clips, two of which came from RT television and one that was done independently. The first
00:46:27 ►
clip comes from Atlanta, where a black woman who is a retired police detective had to take out a
00:46:33 ►
second mortgage on her home in order to pay for cancer treatments. And while her home has already
00:46:38 ►
been foreclosed upon, the occupiers and now the police themselves are camping out in her yard and holding off anyone who tries to put her out in the street.
00:46:48 ►
You know, it’s a story that’s being repeated all over the country as activists who formerly were occupying city parks are now occupying the yards of family homes where the wealthy bankers are trying to evict the working poor from their houses.
00:47:03 ►
Bankers are trying to evict the working poor from their houses.
00:47:09 ►
Following that, I’ll be playing another RT television clip featuring Abby Martin,
00:47:12 ►
who is joined by two other RT correspondents,
00:47:18 ►
and they talk about the new project of Occupy Wall Street that’s called Rolling Jubilee, where people are absolving others from their credit card debts.
00:47:23 ►
Lastly is a clip that was made by Patricia Arquette,
00:47:26 ►
who I’m sure you know through some of her many movie roles.
00:47:30 ►
And Patricia, who has also been volunteering in Haiti,
00:47:33 ►
will be talking about what the Occupy Wall Street people are doing
00:47:36 ►
in the wake of the Superstorm Sandy to help people in the New York area
00:47:41 ►
who are still very much in dire straits many weeks after the storm
00:47:45 ►
has passed and when most of the corporate news organizations have already moved on to other
00:47:51 ►
stories. Occupy Wall Street protesters and police usually don’t mix well, but apparently Atlanta is
00:47:58 ►
an exception. Police there have teamed up with Occupy activists to save a former detective and
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her four grandchildren from getting evicted.
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This is the woman that’s bringing them together.
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Jacqueline Barber, she’s a former detective and cancer patient.
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She’s fallen behind on her mortgage struggling to pay her medical bills.
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And earlier this week, several officers joined activists at her home to try to keep her in it. For more on this unlikely alliance,
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Rob Call, organizer for Occupy Homes, joins us now. Welcome there, Rob. So this is kind of a
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different story from what we’re used to hearing when it comes to police and Occupy activists. I
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know 11 months ago, I understand Occupy Atlanta protesters clashed quite fiercely with police.
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That’s correct.
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You know, in the park case, people were evicted from the park by police officers.
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But we believe that housing is a human right.
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And Jacqueline is certainly a woman struggling and fighting for her house.
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So we see it as our job to stand by.
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OK, can you tell us more? How did things kind
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of turn around? How are the police and activists now working together? So Ms. Barber actually
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reached out to us about three weeks ago. She got our number from a friend that had heard about us.
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She came to one of our weekly meetings and basically just told her story and asked for support. Her story is that of a retired police
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detective battling cancer, having been put in this situation by cancer and now facing eviction.
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And we decided we need to step in. Do you know how long she lived in this home previously to getting foreclosed on?
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Yeah, she’s been in the home since, I believe, 2004. And her troubles started in 2009. She
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tried to refinance as she was undergoing aggressive chemotherapy.
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Okay. And as of now, what is the status of her foreclosure?
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Okay. And as of now, what is the status of her foreclosure?
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Well, so her home was actually sold at auction. So the foreclosure was completed back in March.
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She has been able to put off eviction up till now. But at this point, the stay granted by bankruptcy has been lifted. So technically, GMAC could move in any time to perform the eviction, which is why we are defending our home.
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All right. So, as I said, this is kind of a different story than we’re used to hearing
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when it comes to police and Occupy Wall Street protesters. Does this kind of show that
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the two groups can, in fact, get along and work together?
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I think so. And it’s interesting seeing, you know, Jacqueline is really bringing her community out to events at her house.
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And, you know, most of her friends are retired law enforcement officers and filling the lawn, filling her living room for community meetings.
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And there’s really none of that tension that one might expect.
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All right. So this alliance was able to happen to help this lady hopefully stay in her home.
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But as we know, foreclosure is a huge problem throughout the U.S. today.
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Can you see this kind of being a trend and the two groups fighting to help others stay
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in their homes?
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Well, I think it’s very related because law enforcement officers are the ones that do perform evictions.
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And, you know, we’d like them to see that they are putting people out of their homes.
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And there are certain counties in the United States where sheriffs have refused to perform evictions.
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And, you know, we see it as part of a movement to gather all kinds of different communities to stand up for housing.
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All right. And lastly, now that you’ve you’ve taken on trying to help this lady stay in her home, what is next for Occupy Atlanta Homes?
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So we’ve got Miss Barber’s campaign and we’re also looking into alternatives to the vacancy rates here in
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Atlanta that are extremely high, and we’d like to see those homes put to use, preferably by those
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who are displaced, sheltered. All right. Well, good luck with that, Rob, and appreciate you coming on
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the show to tell us all about your efforts. That was Rob Call, organizer for Occupy Atlanta Homes. Despite what the media would have you believe,
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the Occupy Wall Street movement is alive and well. Take this for example. A new initiative
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was just launched called Rolling Jubilee. It’s a special project that buys debt for pennies on the
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dollar, but instead of collecting it, it abolishes it. So how will this really work and what will it mean for the future of debt holders and the Occupy movement? To
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talk more about that, I’m joined by RT correspondent Anastasia Cherkina from our New York studio
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along with our very own Manny Rapolo. Thanks so much for joining me, you guys.
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Hi, Abby.
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So, Anastasia, let’s start with you. Can you explain a little bit more about how this would
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exactly work?
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Well, Abby, this whole idea is really amazing in its simplicity. And we’re hearing so many experts say that this is really one of the
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best ideas to come out of the Occupy Wall Street movement since its inception. Because as we all
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know, of course, over 77 percent of American households are hounded by debt collectors.
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The student debt bubble is at over one1 trillion. The numbers are staggering.
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The debt burden is something that people are dealing on a day-to-day basis. We have an average
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one in seven Americans being burdened by debt every single day of their lives. And the Occupy
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Wall Street movement said, hey, we can actually do this really cool thing that could help out,
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if not obviously a huge chunk
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of the people burdened but certainly help out at least some people that they
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can help because certainly the government is really not doing that
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being too busy bailing out corporations and what they’re doing the strike debt
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project is like you said they are collecting they’re buying up distressed
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debt by pennies on the dollar.
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And instead of, as would debt buyers, keep hounding and harassing people whom this debt belongs to,
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what they’re going to do is say, we’re wiping it out for you.
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We just bought it for pennies on the dollar, and now you don’t have to deal with this anymore.
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And according to Strike Debt, they say that as little as $50,000 can abolish as much as a million dollars
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worth of debt. And on their Rolling Jubilee website, they have a ticker going on with
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how much money they’ve collected. And so far, last I checked, over $90,000, even though
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this project is just getting started, which could erase, according to the project, as
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much as $1.8 million dollars worth of debt and it’s
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the small donations that really count because it’s the little amounts of money
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that are able to abolish much bigger sums that for an individual person in
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debt would be much harder to gather so this is getting started Thursday’s the
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big night when they’re holding the fundraiser hoping to gather as much
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money as possible and from what we hear that event is already completely sold
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out so definitely looks like a project that’s only getting started, but already quite popular.
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Incredible. Yeah, crippling debt is definitely plaguing the country all across the board. I mean,
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what do you think about the debt collectors and the government? Do you think that they’ll let
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this happen? What do you think just about the initiative and what it’s going to do or if it’s
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going to work? I think it’s amazing. I really do think the way that Anasasi just put it,
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it’s a really novel idea what they’re doing. And it’s not like we can, I think it’s amazing. I really do think the way that Anasasi just put it, it’s a really novel idea what they’re doing.
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And it’s not like we can, I think people are just tired of waiting for the government to do something about it,
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seeing change and debt forgiveness come from the top bottom.
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At the end of the day, I’m a little bit torn around the idea.
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Because the way I see it, it’s putting a Band-Aid on a problem that needs an antibiotic.
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Sure, you’re dealing with debt forgiveness when it comes to, not people that
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have these superfluous debt. These are people that really do need help, people that are dealing with
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foreclosure, people that have gone into debt because of medical issues, people that are in
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debt because of student loans. But at the end of the day, what we’re doing is that we’re helping
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these people in the short term, but in the long term, this isn’t addressing the main problem.
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The main problem is that foreclosures are going to happen.
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Affordable housing is not affordable in this country.
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Education is very expensive.
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Medicine is very expensive.
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And as long as this country continues to need these things, and we’re always going to need
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these things, people are going to continue to go into debt.
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So what I’m seeing is that while this is a really great idea and an opportunity for the
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private industry to kind of bring a solution out of this, it’s not sustainable. And so while it’s a great idea, it’s not going to be kind of a solution
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for the long term. Anastasia, what does it say that this idea is coming out of the Occupy Wall
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Street movement? I mean, a movement that people said was over, it was dead. Here we see them
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helping, you know, Occupy Sandy. They’ve done more than the multi-billion dollar bureaucratic
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agency, FEMA. They’ve done more to help the relief efforts, and now you have them launching this historic initiative.
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What does this say that this Occupy movement is doing more than our government
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to absolve these issues?
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Well, Abby, I mean, as always, the haters were expecting
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that the Occupy Wall Street movement must have disappeared
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since the crowds are no longer on the streets
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and the numbers that they used to be and the camps are not around.
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This means the movement is dead. But because the movement was faced with this trouble of
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physically keeping up an appearance on the ground in the encampments throughout the country,
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what they did was take that time to organize for more specifically oriented projects,
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such as this one. Like you mentioned, the relief after Hurricane Sandy has been tremendous. We
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visited one of the sites where occupiers are working, gathering donations from people all over the tri-state area
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and even from outside, trucks coming in with food, with clothing, with diapers, you name it.
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And it’s the occupiers that have been working very, very hard and making sure around the clock
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that the people who need these donations and these simple things in life actually receive them and
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the fact that this is yet another project that they’re working on
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and i like many
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many uh… mentioned obviously this is something that probably won’t have an
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effect in the long term
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what it does is up begin a process and begin
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helping out some people
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who’ll get that phone call, who will be
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so happy and relieved that the burden is no longer there.
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And whether or not it’s going to make a small number of people happy is better than finding
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a long-term solution for everybody.
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One movement can take care of that.
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What they’re hoping to achieve is get the process rolling, and then hopefully this bailout
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for the people by the people will end up having some kind of effect on the way the rest of the system works.
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And, Manny, you have about a minute left.
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Do you think that the solution is possible only from the bottom up, I mean, only from movements like this?
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I think it’s great what Occupy Wall Street, that they’re moving away from this kind of just protesting group
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where there’s a lot of words,
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and they’re moving into kind of a time where it’s time for action,
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and they’re doing things to make things better.
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But at the end of the day, and I’ve said this before on your show,
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we live in a representative democracy,
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so what we need to do is elect the officials that can affect that change,
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and that’s the only way that we’re going to see change happen.
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Thank you so much for joining me, you guys.
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Really appreciate your time.
00:59:05 ►
So I was in New York, and I was working on a job,
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and I was really grateful to be here,
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that God kind of sent me here during this time
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because Sandy had happened, and I really wanted to volunteer,
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and I would have been really bummed if I was on the West Coast
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and couldn’t do anything to help.
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So I started looking around.
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From working in Haiti, you start to get a good nose of who’s doing what
00:59:28 ►
and what’s really happening and what really needs to happen.
00:59:32 ►
And I ended up finding Occupy Sandy, and I started contacting them
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because I had a couple days off and I wanted to rent a truck
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and there was the gas shortage and I wanted to move volunteers or equipment or whatever and kind of get the lay of the land through people that were really working on the ground and making a big difference.
00:59:51 ►
And then I got an email back, and it was Lopey, my friend from Haiti, who was a badass broad in Haiti.
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And then I knew, like, oh, my God, of course, of course.
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It’s a badass person who I’ve seen do amazing things in the world in difficult circumstances,
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and now this is our time in America to help each other.
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One of our times in America to help each other,
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and there will be many more times in America to help each other.
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And it’s grassroots people that really make a big difference.
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And it didn’t matter where this election went or who had won this election.
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This badass group of grassroots people would be doing this work no matter what.
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And I really pray that this is a time for the government to reach out.
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We do happen to have an office of president who came up as an activist
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and came up in community that he reaches out through that bubble that he’s been insulated in
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in Washington and reaches out to these people and says, what do you guys see on the ground?
01:01:00 ►
What is happening on the ground? Let me know what’s really going on. Let’s talk about how we can improve FEMA.
01:01:09 ►
Because we really need a different strategy now for how we deal with disasters.
01:01:16 ►
Groups like Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy are making a phenomenal difference
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in the lives of a lot of people.
01:01:23 ►
There’s elderly that would not have food, would not have candles, would not have…
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They don’t have electricity anyway.
01:01:31 ►
They don’t have running water still.
01:01:32 ►
They haven’t bathed in weeks.
01:01:34 ►
But they would literally be dying, and we know people are dying in these tenements.
01:01:39 ►
And with them, I was able to go out there and find the right location
01:01:43 ►
with a great distribution center
01:01:45 ►
and bring supplies to people who needed it and go up stairs to 12 stories where there were no elevators,
01:01:55 ►
where elderly could not make their way down, where cancer patients were isolated in apartments and diabetics had insane sugar content levels as we were reading them with
01:02:09 ►
the doctors that had volunteered from Bellevue.
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So we have to come together as a community.
01:02:16 ►
We can’t assume government can do it for us or will do it for us or even knows how to
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do it for us.
01:02:30 ►
knows how to do it for us. And I’m so grateful to partner with and work with like-minded individuals who are really doing the hard work day in and day out of finding those great
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partners on the ground who really care about their community and working with community and changing the dynamic of community.
01:02:46 ►
Like, okay, here we are, we’re volunteering.
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And now, hey, you want to volunteer too?
01:02:52 ►
And changing that whole kind of paradigm.
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It’s really beautiful.
01:03:02 ►
As Patricia just said, it is really beautiful when us people come together and create stronger communities by helping one another.
01:03:10 ►
And I realize that there is a huge gap between creating an artistic and dance community in the desert,
01:03:17 ►
like Ken Adams was just speaking of, and on the other hand, creating a community of people who are helping one another after a major natural disaster.
01:03:26 ►
But in the end, the dynamics are very much the same.
01:03:30 ►
While at Burning Man, it’s a community of people who have actually put themselves in a rather hostile environment,
01:03:37 ►
done it intentionally, in the northeast of the U.S. right now,
01:03:41 ►
the people are in difficult circumstances because they were thrust into their situation by Mother Nature.
01:03:47 ►
Yet, in both places, you see large numbers of people helping strangers.
01:03:52 ►
And I should point out, of course, that even in New York City, there is a very large Burning Man community,
01:03:59 ►
and I know for a fact that many of them, if not almost all of them, have been pitching in and helping their neighbors in these difficult times.
01:04:07 ►
But circling back to Ken’s talk just now, and then thinking about how various incarnations
01:04:13 ►
of the Occupy movement are reaching out to help their neighbors in all kinds of ways,
01:04:18 ►
I think that it is easy to see that even in spite of the ruling elite and Wall Street banksters doing all they can to rob us of our meager resources and our dignity,
01:04:29 ►
nonetheless, we the people have no intention of rolling over
01:04:33 ►
and continuing to let the overclass rule the world.
01:04:37 ►
You know, a great movement of consciousness is now already underway,
01:04:41 ►
and quite simply, it can no longer be stopped.
01:04:45 ►
I think the tribe is awakening.
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And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:04:52 ►
Be well, my friends.