Program Notes
Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
https://vimeo.com/53722033?width=800&height=600
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A brief history of Palenque Norte (video)
Bruce Damer takes the 2012 Palenque Norte audience at the Burning Man Festival on a far flung journey into what he calls his practice of “global multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-technic shamanism” where you “put yourself on the shelf” and dive deeply into the worlds of Pentagon think tanks, NASA mission designers, the tribal cultures of Pakistan, the Swiss, Egyptologists, IT professionals, and Christian Evangelicals, to come back with the true alchemical gold. With apologies to Terence McKenna, he says “there is no dominator culture” and that if we aren’t careful we can collectively fall for cartoon epistemologies, chase chains of weaker and weaker claims, and become a victims of our own delusions, and fall prey to others’ unsubstantiated theories. Bruce advises everyone to become their own best skeptic and develop “critical intelligence”. If someone says something that strikes you as flaky or just doesn’t feel right, Bruce suggests that you think it through before you pass on their meme.
Check out all of the projects Bruce talks about at his personal site at: www.damer.com
Dr. Bruce’s Levity Zone Podcast
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And as you have most likely figured out by now, I’ve been on another one of my little breaks from the net,
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and this insidious computer of mine.
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But I figured that I’d better get back online and get some more podcasts out before this summer’s Burning Man Festival,
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at which this year’s version of the Planque Norte Lectures will be featuring over 40 speakers.
00:00:45 ►
And most of those talks you and I are going to be listening to here in the salon this coming fall and winter.
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In fact, I’ve spent some of the last few days with Chris Pezza and Tom Riddell
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talking about not only the 2013 speaker series, but about some other events that they’re planning as well.
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And once some of those plans are finalized,
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I’ll be sure to tell you about all that’s going to be taking place under that banner.
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But right now, I still have four talks left from this past year’s festival to play for you,
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and one of those talks you are about to hear right now.
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It’s the first of two talks that Bruce Dahmer gave,
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and in it he shows us yet another way to think about shamanism,
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modern-day shamanism, I should say. So let’s journey back in time to a hot August night on
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the playa at Burning Man, the night of August 30th, 2012 to be exact, and join Bruce and friends in
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the Crystal Dome at Camp Above the Limit, and listen to the story that he has to tell us.
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camp above the limit and listen to the story that he has to tell us.
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So I’m very excited right now. I’ve been looking forward to this talk for a few months now.
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So Bruce Dahmer is a polymathic sci-tech guy whose work runs the gamut from big questions in science to the future of human
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civilization to tending an organic farm garden. He designs and leads projects in many areas,
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including the origin of life, and that’s the EVA grid and Genesis engines, space exploration
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with the NASA mission virtualization, and the origins and impact of the digital lifestyle
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virtualization and the origins and impact of the digital lifestyle with this Digibarn Computer Museum. So it’s my great pleasure to introduce Bruce Dahmer. Thank you.
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Thank you, Pez. You’re going to get an impromptu, synesthetic talk today because this is unplanned,
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which are always the best.
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Terrence McKenna used to just love to just be an unprompted.
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He hated sitting on stages and having to come up with scripts and things.
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And as soon as he could throw that over his shoulder,
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sit on the edge of the stage and just rap and do Q&A, he was good.
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You know, he was relaxed and rested.
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If you listen to, how many listen to Terrence McKenna on the,
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how many are psychedelic salon listeners as well?
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Wow, it’s a goodly proportion.
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Well, I want to give you, it’s just something the three of us were talking about
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when we started.
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I do some kind of a practice.
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It’s sort of a kind of global, multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-technic shamanism.
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And I’ve been doing this for about 25 years.
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And what that is, is what I call put yourself on the shelf.
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Get the idea. Yourself put yourself on the shelf. Get the idea.
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Yourself is parked on the shelf, and then you dive into another world.
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And for me, this has been these delightful worlds of Pentagon think tanks,
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NASA mission design, where you wear, in the Pentagon think tanks, you wear a certain garb.
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If you’re not uniformed in active duty military, you kind of tone down because active duty are wearing their active duty.
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Although some of these places, they don’t have to, so everybody’s relaxed.
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At NASA, you always wear logo shirts, Johnson Space Center, Am ames research center and you speak in a certain
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way you you use certain length use certain acronyms so you have to load a whole cultural
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operating system but it’s a thrill to go into these worlds shut your mouth put yourself on
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the shelf listen and learn these people’s reality and I’ve become good at it so that now it only takes me a few weeks to get up,
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figure out who the personalities are, the hot issues, what the key lock words are.
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And lock words are, I’ll give an example of this.
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You’d never believe this, but in NASA, the word flaky is a really powerful word,
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flaky. And they describe Buzz Aldrin as flaky because he has all these wild ideas of how to
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go back, how to go to Mars and stuff. And so I researched this, what does flaky mean? And it’s
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engineers. You know, in the, there’s a great Dilbert cartoon which shows a mother bringing her son to the doctor’s waiting room.
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And then her son is just sitting there.
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And he looks like a little Dilbert with glasses.
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And then the mother comes in and the doctor says, I’m sorry to inform you, madam, but your son is an engineer.
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And then she’s bursting out in tears. You know, so that’s…
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But the NASA world, I’ll tell you,
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that was a hard world to get into
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because they have flaky radar.
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So you have to speak their speak.
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You have to…
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They do everything in increments.
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Like, it’s called TRL,
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Technology Readiness Level. and everyone’s marching up like
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will my camera fly on the next mars observer well if it’s technology readiness level and there’s all
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these cues and all these proposals and projects you have to in this incredible marching it’s almost
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like a religious order and so learning that world then you get access to the gold of that world.
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And the gold of that world
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is that these people do amazing things.
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They do, in a sense, psychedelic things.
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I mean, if you look at the Curiosity landing,
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there’s never been a ballsier thing done.
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Do you see the animation of how that came down?
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You know, half of us sitting around at NASA Ames Research Center
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in the lab, you know, we were like, knock on our heads,
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this thing has a 50-50 chance of, you know, basically
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Mars Odyssey, it was like I told Mike Sims,
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call up Mars Odyssey and have them look for the crash site.
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You know, the wreckage of this thing,
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because they lowered the thing on a halter at the last minute
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from this rocket bedstead,
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and then they had to release the rover that was on the ground
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and get the rocket bedstead the heck out of the way,
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and Mike showed us the crash site for that,
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and it was like stuff had been scattered hundreds of feet
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when that hit the
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martian surface these people do astounding things they they’re going to launch a telescope that is
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half a football field in length that has it’s like a if you go to sacred spaces village and you see
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the beautiful strung fabric roofs there and you see them them on a lot of new tents. Well, they have seven strung fabric blockers
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on the bottom of this thing
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and a full-on freaking telescope sitting on top.
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Those seven layers are to block the Earth,
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all the crap radiation noise from the Earth.
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And they’re going to send it way the heck out
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and it’s going to look to the beginning of the universe.
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It’s going to look to where the universe turned on. You guys talk about turning on. Well, the universe turned on when
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electrons, which are separated from nuclei, started to orbit and started to say, hey,
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we’ll get together, you know, electrons and nuclei, and then light could be possible.
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Light was possible at that point. And the universe turned on. And they’re actually going to try to see back to that point when the universe was ionized.
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And you could have light.
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Because before that, there was no photons flying around.
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Can you imagine any more?
00:08:36 ►
I mean, that’s alchemical gold right there.
00:08:38 ►
But it’s couched in really tough engineering, really rigorous, anti-flaky, anti-woo-woo engineering.
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Because in the end, there’s some incredibly tough system has to work.
00:08:55 ►
These are objective people.
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We can sit around and talk about, wouldn’t it be nice if such and such did it?
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Well, for them, they have to test and test and test and test
00:09:06 ►
because if it doesn’t do it, 25-year careers go up in smoke
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and $5 billion in budget.
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And these people have worked all their lives to see this happen.
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So you can imagine their culture.
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But it’s useful to know their culture
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because if you come out of the NASA world
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and you come into another world,
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you say, you know what, these guys can deliver. They deliver some of the NASA world and you come into another world, you say, you know what,
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these guys can deliver. They deliver some of the toughest things. You could apply that to another
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community. So stepping on in the shaman’s journey, the Pentagon world, and I’ll get into that a
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little bit later, that’s a whole reality. But I now frequently go to Pakistan. Why? Because a company that I co-founded in the 80s set up a lab in Pakistan with 200 people.
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And this lab sits right across from the parliament on Constitution Avenue in Islamabad, Pakistan.
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And so that world is another trippy world because it’s a combination of really super high tech.
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It’s Twitter Muslims who are devout.
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I mean, these guys don’t drink.
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They don’t smoke.
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Their parents are, you know, old British, so they are knocking back whiskeys.
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But these Twitter Muslims, long beards, the Friday prayers.
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When I go into the office this Friday, I wear the finest shower
00:10:25 ►
kameez. You know, everyone wears their finest on Friday. I don’t go to prayers, but I love that
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tradition of dressing up on Friday, and people leave for lunch, and we go out for lunch. I just
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love the crispest shower kameez I can get, the best makes, and I’m so proud to sort of be part
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of their world. And they’re praying five times a
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day in the lab i mean they’re they’re they leave meetings and we’re always conscious of that
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because someone’s cell phone starts to read a call for prayer there’s apps to tell you when to go and
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pray and we’re very you know and it’s cool it breaks up the day into manageable blocks. And when they come back, they’re really grounded.
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So, man, you’ve got to, something’s working for them.
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And every engineer that works for our lab in Islamabad supports maybe 50 people.
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So the multiplier factor is huge.
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It supports their immediate household.
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And that money, that good salary, just has a massive percolation effect.
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But outside is this bizarre combination of this modern capital city, which is subject to massive bombings,
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not that many recently, but the Marriott Hotel, which is kitty-corner from our office,
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the whole front was blown off by a truck bomb
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that killed, I don’t know, 100 people,
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and it left a 30-foot crater
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and blew the windows out of the back of our lab
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about three, four years ago.
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That’s a reality.
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So you’re in this strange world
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of Starbucks and cafe life,
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Twitter Muslims doing their thing,
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a ultra-corrupt government
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that is draining corrupt officials,
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and et cetera,
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USB-52s,
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and they’re not doing too much roaring these days,
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but this whole trippy thing,
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universities under construction,
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a booming sector in education.
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Power outages every single hour in the capital city.
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And generator plants, the rich people’s houses have generators that just kick on.
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Cricket in the weekends with the guys with the fully automatic weapons that are in the front of every house.
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Who have a nice smile.
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If you smile at any of these guys, they’ve got AK-47s, great big huge,
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I don’t know what even these things are, they’re huge, double barrel shotgun things.
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They’ll all crack a grin to you.
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And in the weekends, their guns are in their guard huts,
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and they’re playing cricket, and everybody’s out there.
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Or we’re bringing food out to them, because the guy is all night,
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and they’re guarding rich people or ambassadors or whatnot houses.
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And you can play tennis on actual clay tennis courts,
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the finest of the old British Empire,
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where sweepers and guys that really know what they’re doing
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make the perfect clay tennis court.
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If you want anything done with shoes, Pakistan is a rockin’ place.
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They know leather. They know how,
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they have skills that the rest of the world has lost. They can make brocade. So the royal family,
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brocade is this really elaborate kind of sewn garment stuff. They make it in Pakistan for the
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royal family because there are no tailors left in the UK, effectively. So it’s a trippy world.
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And what we do there also,
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and at six o’clock, I may tell you a story about going to the northwest area to the Pashtun area.
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But we drive, we get in the van, and we bump along on this highway called the Grand Trunk Road up
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into the pure Pashtun area where you reach a sign that says Peshawar and Kabul this way
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to go to Afghanistan or Tarbela this way,
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and you know you’re in the zone.
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You’re in the zone of the drones.
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But if you stopped at any, if your car broke down,
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I’ll tell you another thing.
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This is Pakistan.
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It’s a country under, it’s a pariah state, right?
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It’s like, why would you go there?
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But there are wonders there.
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For example, I observed what I think is the most efficient economy in the world in automobile repair.
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So you’re on the Grand Trunk Road, and the trucks next to you are covered with psychedelic paintings, enamel works, hanging jewels.
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These guys, these are their life works, these cars, these trucks.
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They’re all Bedford trucks.
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They sleep up above the cab.
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They have these curving fronts.
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They’re phenomenal.
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And I found out they’re chick magnets.
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So these guys impress the girls with the
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beautiful coloration of these damn trucks. But the trucks are all built in the 50s,
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Bedford trucks from the British Empire. If one is broken down, there are these enormous sort of
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circular compounds where you have little concrete repair houses. If you pull in with your car choking into one of these places, guess what happens?
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A guy runs out, puts a parasol up, puts a parasol up to shade you.
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A kid brings a table.
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Tea comes out from the Pashtun guy.
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You’re sitting there.
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They’re asking what is the problem.
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Oh, the truck is not starting or or
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it’s coughing or whatever there’s runners that go between these these hole in the wall places
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and within i i guarantee you the shortest time humanly possible they’ve identified the problem
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they have all the experts there they’ve rushed apart they’ve taken care of you as a guest and you’re back on the road and this is
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pakistan and i said do you take ever take cars to dealers and people said no you’d never do that
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you’d be crazy to take it to it that’s a whole western thing they’re going to stiff you you know
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these are the honest people and we have invented our own system that is beautiful and it works
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and so if you did your phd on this I mean, you’d find, you know,
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so-called third world countries, and you’d look at these places,
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and they look like they’re disaster areas.
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But underneath is the beating heart of a tremendously capable community.
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But it looks like a disaster area from outside.
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So going to Pakistan, it’s a huge thing.
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So when I, I’m immune to the news.
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I’m immune to the fear mongering and the this and the that that we get about most of those
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countries, because I’ve just, I’ve gone there, I’ve put on the garb. You know, I’ve, I’ve,
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I’ve been in the place and I’ve shut my mouth up and listened. And so that’s part of the shamanism.
00:17:07 ►
So other zones that I go to are,
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some of our softwares used to run the entire retail Swiss banking system.
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So you’re sitting with Swiss bankers,
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and they’re a whole other mentality.
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They’re bizarre people.
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The Swiss have a strange humor that it’s almost impossible to figure out.
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The Swiss are weird. They’re truly weird. Germans are figureable, audible, but the Swiss are,
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there’s some kind of sophistication to this. You can see why Albert Hoffman, Albert Hoffman was
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able, a Basel Swiss chemist. Now the Swiss would even describe a Swiss chemist as the most anal-retentive personality imaginable.
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And yet, because Albert Hoffman is Swiss, there’s a humor to him and an irony he’s able to hold
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that would allow him to come up with this compound, explore it, find out that it has a bizarre effect,
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and the whole world gets turned on.
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But for him, it’s okay he’s swiss
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he can deal with this kind of completely bizarre uh consequences because in some sense the swiss
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have spent a thousand years uh trying to uh stay out of the way of the external world and have their own little federation and they have four languages
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and anyway so switzerland another place burning man culture you know we think we know what this
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is all about but uh after a while if you’re going between these communities my christian friends my
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right-wing christian friends i tell you, they have found gold,
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alchemical gold. I mean, the ones that have, you know, they’ve found what they call Jesus Christ.
00:18:52 ►
And when they do that, they have this huge rush that comes in that is so powerful. I say that
00:19:00 ►
it’s as powerful as anything you would do with psychedelics. Something overwhelms these people,
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and it’s a super powerful energy source they attach into.
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They may get in trouble with it later,
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but don’t we get in trouble when we tap into energy sources?
00:19:16 ►
So all these communities, the bankers, there’s a rush.
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Nerds have a tech rush for things.
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So everybody, in a sense, is looking for their alchemical gold,
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and they find it, you know, the Christian neocons find it one place,
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the, you know, the Twitter Muslims in high tech in Pakistan find it another place.
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The NASA engineers find it after very arduous hazing exercises,
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they find it in another place.
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You know, and we’re out here trying to figure it out too.
00:19:47 ►
And I think all these communities have this common property.
00:19:51 ►
And to suspend, to put yourself on the shelf,
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after a while you can start doing another trick.
00:19:59 ►
And it’s very, very subtle, and you should never tell anybody you’re doing this.
00:20:02 ►
If you get to know somebody pretty well,
00:20:06 ►
you can open yourself such that you can invite into yourself,
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and this has only happened to me a few times,
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where you get a flash inside yourself where you feel that other person.
00:20:17 ►
And it’s an opening where you become them.
00:20:22 ►
You simulate them for an instant.
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It’s hard for me to maintain it,
00:20:28 ►
but you get an insight, a flash insight.
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You are that person for an instant.
00:20:33 ►
And suddenly you’re seeing the world through their eyes,
00:20:35 ►
and then it falls away
00:20:37 ►
because your own structures are pretty strong about…
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It’s almost like you have antigens against that,
00:20:44 ►
so you have to kind of make the systems allow that allow that form but you get this rush
00:20:50 ►
too that’s some of the biggest rushes I’ve ever gotten is feeling like I was
00:20:53 ►
that other person just for an instant and then you have an incredible
00:20:57 ►
softening you have a deep insight into that person they don’t know that you
00:21:02 ►
pull this trick off but suddenly a wall comes down,
00:21:07 ►
and instead of a person, sometimes you just have chemistry with people, and you just go.
00:21:12 ►
Other times there’s like an instant wall, an instant disconnect. This kind of somatic
00:21:18 ►
simulation of that other person can actually break down that wall because you partially become them. So then you become interlockable.
00:21:27 ►
Your system becomes compatible with their interfaces
00:21:31 ►
because you’re partially them for an instant.
00:21:34 ►
You have just enough insight to get over that hump
00:21:36 ►
and get into their space, and they suddenly think,
00:21:39 ►
wow, I really like talking to this person.
00:21:41 ►
I didn’t like them initially, and now we’re having a good old time.
00:21:47 ►
And the more you can do this, you know, Genghis Khan, it’s interesting.
00:21:50 ►
My wife Galen’s a lot like this.
00:21:53 ►
And her former bandmate used to say,
00:21:57 ►
you could have a deep all-night conversation with Genghis Khan, you know, or Paul Pott.
00:22:04 ►
You know, she’s like that too. She’s a very deep empath.
00:22:07 ►
I mean, there is no one that she can’t connect to. It’s harder, I think, for males.
00:22:12 ►
But having developed this skill also means you have absolutely to suspend all judgment.
00:22:20 ►
You must suspend all judgment and accept everything as equal value because what you’re
00:22:27 ►
trying to do is not determine whether the christian right is doing evil in the world
00:22:30 ►
or government or bad or everything you’re just trying to fully represent and feel and see their
00:22:37 ►
worldviews that’s the highest value then after that after you’ve done all that, you can move freely between these communities.
00:22:46 ►
Like, you’re now, you know, you’ve got a kind of club card for different communities.
00:22:52 ►
And if the world’s ever to figure out how to work better, it’s going to be these kind of intermediators,
00:22:58 ►
these kind of people who move between these communities who, like, for instance, in the banking system,
00:23:05 ►
you know, our software is used by a lot of these big banks.
00:23:08 ►
And here we’re about to burn Wall Street and all that stuff.
00:23:11 ►
And I’ll cheer and scream and everything, too, like everybody else.
00:23:15 ►
But truthfully, most of the people in the banking system
00:23:18 ►
didn’t create a conspiracy to create the disaster.
00:23:21 ►
It was everybody got into the rush of the bubble
00:23:24 ►
and in making these instruments
00:23:26 ►
and just a madness overtook them.
00:23:30 ►
And of course, there was no adult supervision.
00:23:32 ►
So the banking system blew itself up.
00:23:35 ►
And there’s people who love bubbles.
00:23:38 ►
And there’s people who prepare for the bursting of bubbles
00:23:41 ►
and bet their whole careers on them.
00:23:44 ►
So there’s a bubble-loving community.
00:23:46 ►
And, of course, they do quite a bit of damage.
00:23:49 ►
But if you get into that mindset, there’s a guy who predicted the property market crash.
00:23:55 ►
I predicted it in a Pentagon seminar in 2003.
00:23:59 ►
We were talking about the consequences of the Iraq invasion, which was three months away, we thought.
00:24:06 ►
And I almost got into a fist fight
00:24:08 ►
with a guy from the Army War College,
00:24:10 ►
which is ironic because the Army War College
00:24:12 ►
is a bastion of liberalism in the military,
00:24:15 ►
but this guy was so black ops-y.
00:24:18 ►
He was so offensive to the Muslims in our team.
00:24:23 ►
You know, these are Muslim academics
00:24:24 ►
who are experts in the region.
00:24:26 ►
This guy was saying, like,
00:24:27 ►
well, we should just bomb all the region
00:24:29 ►
back to the 7th century where they belong
00:24:31 ►
and blah, blah, blah.
00:24:32 ►
And I said, you know what, Tom?
00:24:34 ►
If I put, I could put this,
00:24:36 ►
this is not classified.
00:24:38 ►
This is a public event.
00:24:40 ►
I could just blog this.
00:24:41 ►
There were no blogs then,
00:24:42 ►
but I could put this online
00:24:44 ►
and you’d be in
00:24:45 ►
trouble. Do you really want to go on record as saying this? And the Muslim lady come up to me
00:24:51 ►
later and she said, thank you. These black ops, gung-ho people are just terrible. We have to keep
00:24:58 ►
our mouths shut, but they’re so offensive. They’re so scary. And we don’t know what to do. And in the post-9-11 period, these Muslims working hard in the government
00:25:10 ►
were under huge discrimination and attack by their colleagues,
00:25:15 ►
and they were unable to say a thing.
00:25:17 ►
And I said, you know what, we’re all here to work on a bigger problem.
00:25:22 ►
That seminar was to work on a challenge,
00:25:25 ►
which is how to get the U.S. onto sustainable energy
00:25:28 ►
instead of petroleum, importing and burning up petroleum.
00:25:32 ►
A serious workshop started and supported by Andrew Marshall.
00:25:36 ►
You won’t find anything about Andrew Marshall on the Internet.
00:25:41 ►
This guy started in forebrain thinking about the whole world history
00:25:47 ►
in the United States in 1948. He ran the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, which is the kind
00:25:52 ►
of big think tank of the West Coast. Then in 68, Richard Nixon appointed him to a major office
00:25:58 ►
called Net Assessment, which looks forward 50 years. Everyone calls Andy Marshall for advice before doing anything.
00:26:07 ►
So at the time that he sponsored this workshop,
00:26:10 ►
he had gone in front of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
00:26:12 ►
which is all the generals in the war room,
00:26:14 ►
and said this Iraq thing is terrible.
00:26:17 ►
This is a disaster.
00:26:19 ►
And they all listened because this guy is the forebrain of the Pentagon.
00:26:24 ►
He has the institutional knowledge and he has the balls to say anything.
00:26:28 ►
At the time he was 85 years old.
00:26:30 ►
He may be passed away by now. I’m not sure.
00:26:33 ►
Again, no information on Andrew Marshall.
00:26:36 ►
And, of course, the Joint Chiefs said, we don’t have a vote.
00:26:39 ►
We know this is a mess and a disaster.
00:26:42 ►
We don’t have a vote.
00:26:43 ►
And whether this thing goes ahead or not.
00:26:45 ►
We’ve got an out-of-control executive branch.
00:26:48 ►
So Andrew Marshall is one of these, he’s a shaman.
00:26:52 ►
He goes very quiet between communities.
00:26:56 ►
And what he decided to do, get how ballsy this is,
00:27:00 ►
he goes out to North and South Dakota,
00:27:04 ►
and he meets with tribal elders.
00:27:07 ►
They bring Andy, and they bring a bunch of Pentagon senior planners and a couple of generals.
00:27:12 ►
Now, this is like, what was it, little Bighorn country.
00:27:16 ►
You know, there wasn’t a good encounter the last time between those tribes and the U.S. Army, right?
00:27:21 ►
Well, it turns out that the chemistry worked and Andy knew it would. They sat down
00:27:26 ►
with the elders and they said, let’s talk long term. Let’s talk 500 years. What is going to be
00:27:32 ►
the best for this continent, for the health of this land? And guess what they figured out?
00:27:38 ►
That the elders had already been thinking of giant wind farms on their reservation. And the elders had kind of done
00:27:46 ►
back of the envelope calculations. So what did Andy do? He funded them $30 million in a study
00:27:52 ►
to be done to figure this out. It turns out that these elders in the Lakota, I think it was the
00:27:58 ►
Lakota and a couple of other nations had figured out, we’re not going to be we’re a sovereign land so all the barriers that
00:28:07 ►
happen to putting up giant wind farms elsewhere are not going to apply to us we can probably go
00:28:12 ►
ahead with this we can become they call it the gulf the gulf um uh like the middle east of wind
00:28:20 ►
for north america the wind just roars through that part of the country on a pretty
00:28:25 ►
continuous basis. There’s a wind belt.
00:28:28 ►
And they figured that they did
00:28:30 ►
the calculation, 100,000
00:28:32 ►
high capacity turbines
00:28:33 ►
on the res,
00:28:36 ►
not even anywhere off the reservation,
00:28:38 ►
and they’re generating one
00:28:39 ►
third of the electric power needs
00:28:41 ►
of the United States
00:28:43 ►
from the res. And one of the discussions
00:28:47 ►
was, do we want to do gambling, or do we want to become a very powerful influence in this country
00:28:54 ►
and help preserve this land? So Andy said, here’s $30 million. And the study started and was
00:29:01 ►
underway. Now, the problem, of of course that they had is that the transmission
00:29:05 ►
system is owned by the coal lobby and there you have the corruption. So what one of the
00:29:10 ►
elders said, and this gives you an idea of how hip people can be when they actually meet
00:29:15 ►
across boundaries. One of the elders said, we’ll build our own fucking transmission system
00:29:20 ►
and we’ll use semiconductor, low loss, the latest tech,
00:29:28 ►
because the old transmission system is for crap anyway,
00:29:31 ►
and we will take this thing on.
00:29:33 ►
I’m not sure where this has gone,
00:29:38 ►
but this is an example of the shamanic traveling between communities fearlessly as a listener,
00:29:40 ►
and it was mainly that the military people who arrived that day
00:29:43 ►
on the reservation
00:29:45 ►
just sat and they listened they listened for two or three days before they said anything and then
00:29:50 ►
finally just and and the elders respected that and and they determined at the end you know we’re both
00:29:56 ►
long-term thinkers we care about our kids and the generations down And the military people did too. We care about that. We got a fixed salary base.
00:30:07 ►
It’s not about we like to gain in rank,
00:30:11 ►
but our salaries are public.
00:30:13 ►
We’re just kind of people in a system.
00:30:16 ►
And so we think long-term preservation of the system.
00:30:20 ►
And we worry about our political branch
00:30:22 ►
sending us off into disasters.
00:30:24 ►
So next time you think about the military, especially the higher up,
00:30:28 ►
I tell you, I would say 70% of the people I’ve met high up in the military,
00:30:35 ►
I prefer them any time over a political character, political creatures that we get.
00:30:40 ►
They are much more solid individuals.
00:30:44 ►
So shamanic travel between these worlds.
00:30:47 ►
So does anyone have a comment or question on this kind of, I can tell you way more stories,
00:30:55 ►
but I want to give everybody a bit of a breather, including me, a question up front.
00:31:03 ►
I was curious about your background and how you got to work in the
00:31:07 ►
pentagon and nasa and what what you did for a living to put yourself in that situation
00:31:13 ►
the question is how did i uh be able to put myself in this position that’s an interesting
00:31:22 ►
question i i guess because i kind of made a life plan
00:31:25 ►
and there was no one there to tell me otherwise. And a lot of these things were sort of foolish.
00:31:33 ►
I mean, how can you expect to get into these worlds? You know, you think you can’t. No one
00:31:38 ►
was telling me you must do to take over the family business. You must get a law degree. You must
00:31:43 ►
do X and Y and Q.
00:31:45 ►
It was like I was on my own.
00:31:47 ►
I was an immigrant from Canada.
00:31:49 ►
I was an immigrant in Czechoslovakia for a while.
00:31:52 ►
I had to make my own way.
00:31:53 ►
I had $2,000 in my pocket going to graduate school here.
00:31:56 ►
I had no one in the United States.
00:31:59 ►
I didn’t know.
00:32:00 ►
All my Canadian friends said,
00:32:01 ►
you’re crazy going to the U.S.
00:32:03 ►
It’s a crazy place.
00:32:04 ►
I said, that’s exactly why I’m going to the U.S. It’s a crazy place. I said, that’s exactly why I’m going to the U.S.
00:32:07 ►
It’s a crazy zone because it’s open possibilities.
00:32:11 ►
So I had a dream as a kid that I might do something with NASA.
00:32:16 ►
And I did stuff in between.
00:32:18 ►
I did virtual worlds work.
00:32:20 ►
And then one day I got invited to present a virtual world reconstruction of the moon landings
00:32:26 ►
that we did with agents and stuff. And we just happened to have a senior scientist in the
00:32:31 ►
audience who at that very moment said, this is a career maker for me and my group. And he arranged
00:32:37 ►
the first funding and 25 grants later, 10 years later, we had built 25 projects for NASA. It was just phenomenal. And then what I
00:32:47 ►
did within NASA was using the shamanic practice of moving between the NASA centers, listening and
00:32:54 ►
keeping my freaking mouth shut and not making statements that I would be considered flaky.
00:32:58 ►
Because I watched people fall on the sword of flakiness where nobody would talk to them after that.
00:33:07 ►
And it’s like, really be careful.
00:33:13 ►
Make someone else look good, not you, because we were servicing all these groups. So there’s a whole strategy to penetrate NASA.
00:33:17 ►
And penetrate it we did at one point.
00:33:20 ►
This was the greatest project I was ever involved in.
00:33:23 ►
And this was the greatest project I was ever involved in.
00:33:34 ►
A guy that was a friend of mine that I just met casually got put in charge in 2007 of figuring out if NASA could go to somewhere else but the moon.
00:33:37 ►
And they picked asteroids.
00:33:45 ►
And this was very controversial because at the time George W. Bush had moon, go back to the moon, and everybody was on board with that.
00:33:47 ►
Of course, there was no funding, so it was a disaster.
00:33:51 ►
And so this group that involved all these people who cared about going out to see asteroids for a lot of reasons
00:33:54 ►
because it’s deep space.
00:33:55 ►
It’s part of the way to Mars.
00:33:57 ►
It’s a real new mission.
00:33:59 ►
It goes back to the heart of the birth of the solar system.
00:34:02 ►
What if an asteroid is coming toward us?
00:34:04 ►
It would be good to have the capability
00:34:06 ►
of actually sending heavy spacecraft out there
00:34:08 ►
and doing all that.
00:34:10 ►
It’s for, you know, Earth protection.
00:34:13 ►
Really good idea.
00:34:14 ►
So these people were in an underground.
00:34:16 ►
There was a Mars underground in the 80s.
00:34:19 ►
In the 2000s, there was this NEO underground,
00:34:22 ►
Near Earth Object underground.
00:34:24 ►
So this guy called me up one day and said,
00:34:28 ►
we’ve done a whole design study for the administrator in Washington
00:34:31 ►
on how to send a heavy human spacecraft to a near-Earth object,
00:34:36 ►
you know, 100 to 500 meters in length.
00:34:39 ►
It would be a six-week journey out, and we would either,
00:34:46 ►
they didn’t know what to do when they got there.
00:34:52 ►
They were going to try to just do imaging, and they hadn’t thought about docking.
00:34:54 ►
You can’t land on an asteroid.
00:34:55 ►
The gravity is too low.
00:34:57 ►
You have to attach yourself.
00:34:59 ►
It’s like the problem insects have.
00:35:01 ►
Insects don’t have the problem of flying.
00:35:03 ►
They have the problem of not flying.
00:35:06 ►
They’re getting blown off of surfaces all the time because the air is such a dominant force in their lives.
00:35:10 ►
They have to develop techniques to hold on to walls
00:35:12 ►
and they have all these hooks and all that stuff.
00:35:14 ►
So I knew that, so I said to Rob,
00:35:18 ►
is anybody working on the problems of docking a spacecraft,
00:35:23 ►
a 50-ton or 30-ton spacecraft, with people aboard,
00:35:28 ►
with jets firing, with robotic arms, to connect to this asteroid surface.
00:35:34 ►
And he said, no, no, that’s too much imagination.
00:35:37 ►
We can’t do that as civil servants because we would have to get really flowery and do
00:35:43 ►
all this stuff that is way beyond our envelope of
00:35:45 ►
what we’ve been asked to do. And I said, did you ask anybody else? He said, well, we asked this
00:35:50 ►
other team and they were going to charge us a humongous amount of money. And what, could you
00:35:55 ►
at least try to visualize this so we can put it in the report and communicate? And I said, sure.
00:36:02 ►
And we’ll do it for free. And so he came over to my house and we sat
00:36:06 ►
and drew this thing out in about a half an hour he took it back to Johnson Space Center they said
00:36:11 ►
looks plausible and the way I did that was we had already modeled all the missions NASA did
00:36:17 ►
I knew about airbags I knew about holding stuff down I knew about operations with astronauts. I knew about teleoperations,
00:36:26 ►
reaching out with a robot arm, all this stuff. And we just, I went to our team and said,
00:36:31 ►
it’s a freebie project. Just go as fast as you can. We need to have total, this totally worked
00:36:37 ►
up. And then I asked Rob, I said, has NASA ever done anything like this? He said, no,
00:36:43 ►
this will be the first design of taking humans to another body in the solar system
00:36:47 ►
since Wernher von Braun designed the lunar lander in 1962.
00:36:53 ►
And the whole strategy, and I said, good on you, you know.
00:36:56 ►
And this is not Bruce Willis.
00:36:58 ►
This is not Deep Impact.
00:36:59 ►
This is not fakery.
00:37:00 ►
This is a real thing.
00:37:02 ►
And so that was the high point of my entire time.
00:37:04 ►
I got to do it.
00:37:06 ►
Now, the tricky thing was it had to be embargoed because if the information had come out, people’s
00:37:12 ►
careers would have been in jeopardy. So the way we did it was this backdoor thing. General Pete
00:37:19 ►
Warden at NASA Ames was a two-star, who was fired over his comments from the Iraq War. See how these things get connected?
00:37:26 ►
He became the head of
00:37:27 ►
NASA Ames, and he was a
00:37:30 ►
renegade. He used to
00:37:32 ►
run Space Command, for God’s sake.
00:37:34 ►
He cared about asteroids a lot.
00:37:36 ►
And I went to see him at his office and said,
00:37:38 ►
you know, Pete, here’s
00:37:40 ►
this design we’ve worked up.
00:37:42 ►
It’s really powerful.
00:37:44 ►
If we put this out to the public, it’ll change the whole dialogue on the future of space exploration,
00:37:49 ►
get us out of this moon craziness.
00:37:51 ►
And he said, you know what? We can’t put it out.
00:37:54 ►
But you’re not a civil servant. You’re outside.
00:37:57 ►
So what we’ll do is you put it out.
00:38:00 ►
And we’ll go through our public affairs officer.
00:38:03 ►
We’ll do it as this sort of backdoor thing.
00:38:06 ►
So I had to arrange this whole thing with CNN, with Space.com,
00:38:11 ►
with Popular Science, with our own sites.
00:38:15 ►
We had a launch date of July 31st.
00:38:17 ►
And it was interesting because the public affairs office in Washington got wind of this,
00:38:23 ►
and it was even set up to the point where our press release had been reviewed by all the senior scientists inside,
00:38:29 ►
so they knew that it wouldn’t bounce.
00:38:31 ►
The PAO has a huge amount of power because they keep political appointees from getting in trouble.
00:38:36 ►
So the PAO got blindsided, and the administrator got told by their own Public Affairs Office
00:38:44 ►
that they needed to protect him from the results of this study,
00:38:47 ►
and he came down with a sledgehammer on them saying,
00:38:50 ►
I commissioned this study.
00:38:52 ►
So then it went out, and I did,
00:38:54 ►
and this is the most fun thing you can imagine.
00:38:57 ►
The place that we premiered this was at Industrial Light and Magic
00:39:00 ►
in the big theater in San Francisco where where they they make the films they make like
00:39:06 ►
star wars films and everything and as i was walking in it was it was a it was a presentation
00:39:11 ►
for ilm animators they’re interested in space and stuff because we had real-time animation of the
00:39:17 ►
spacecraft contacting guys going out and everything and i as i walked out of the hallway i looked and there was darth vader in the glass
00:39:26 ►
case and i called i went out of the building before i went and i said pete because pete was
00:39:32 ►
called darth vader as the head of space command you won’t believe this but your namesake is
00:39:37 ►
standing right here darth vader and so we did that and then we did a public talk and he came in with his own PAO in tow.
00:39:47 ►
And basically she was watching me to see if I would make any mistake that might jeopardize his career.
00:39:54 ►
And yet the next day we had 10 billion hits. It was the top of AOL. It was on the cover of these magazines.
00:40:02 ►
And I was in a restaurant in Sunnyvale, and I was just peeing.
00:40:08 ►
And this little kid came in.
00:40:09 ►
This was about two days later.
00:40:10 ►
And he turned to me, and I don’t know why, and he said,
00:40:13 ►
NASA’s going to go to an asteroid.
00:40:16 ►
I said, this is great.
00:40:17 ►
And we changed the discourse.
00:40:19 ►
We changed the discourse, and three years later,
00:40:22 ►
NASA adopted that as their next deep space target. But the ins and three years later NASA adopted that as their law as their next deep space target but the ins and outs I mean these are not what this
00:40:31 ►
is really saying is an organization like NASA like the World Bank like you know
00:40:37 ►
the incredibly ineffective US Congress all these organizations are full of
00:40:41 ►
individuals they’re not full of a cabal.
00:40:47 ►
There is no dominator culture.
00:40:48 ►
I’m sorry, Terrence.
00:40:55 ►
Terrence used to describe a lot of the conspiracy theories that he was presenting,
00:40:57 ►
including UFO theories. He used to call them cartoon epistemologies,
00:41:01 ►
that they were so simplified as to be palatable, be highly palatable,
00:41:06 ►
but they’re actually not true.
00:41:07 ►
They don’t really represent what goes on.
00:41:09 ►
And in this community, we fall victim to this all the time.
00:41:13 ►
Is it because psychedelics give us powerful and potentially delusional insights?
00:41:19 ►
Is it because we feel we’re outsiders and therefore we don’t go on these journeys
00:41:23 ►
and find out and deeply ingrain ourselves into these communities,
00:41:28 ►
that we are then a victim of our own delusions.
00:41:31 ►
But then, you know, you’ll see speakers that come up with the same tired conspiracy theory
00:41:36 ►
about the world’s going to end because, you know,
00:41:40 ►
these evil agencies are setting up universal surveillance and blah, blah, blah.
00:41:45 ►
Yes, they are setting up surveillance,
00:41:47 ►
but I have a friend who worked for Homeland Security,
00:41:50 ►
and for the first four years they had no functional email system.
00:41:55 ►
It was so fraught with problems with contractors
00:41:58 ►
and just total fuck-ups and mismanagement
00:42:01 ►
that it’s a good thing nobody was actually planning any attacks against this country
00:42:06 ►
because I don’t think they would have been able to do anything about it
00:42:09 ►
because they set up a super agency that had a huge block of funding,
00:42:13 ►
but it was chewed up by all these other agencies that had interests in it.
00:42:16 ►
It’s almost like if you were to set up a really good watchdog
00:42:21 ►
that was really low-key and everything,
00:42:23 ►
the Homeland Security would be the exact wrong
00:42:26 ►
way to do it. You know, that’s just the way that bureaucracy sort of, everyone jumped on the bandwagon,
00:42:32 ►
they get a piece of that pie, all look good on paper, and so they made this thing that was hugely
00:42:36 ►
inefficient, you know, and ineffective. So I think you can kind of lose your illusions and your fears about the great big daddy,
00:42:48 ►
the great big force that is going to surveil,
00:42:52 ►
is going to know that these organizations are very ineffective.
00:42:56 ►
They’re fragile also.
00:42:58 ►
They’re subject to opinion.
00:43:01 ►
The Soviet Union, if you roll back the clock,
00:43:03 ►
the old Soviet Union for a period of time was able
00:43:06 ►
to affect total informational freeze out on a huge landmass a friend of mine set up the first
00:43:14 ►
global telephone company in the ussr after gorbachev was liberalizing and he told me i
00:43:19 ►
said well how many phone lines go out of the USSR? It was like 64.
00:43:27 ►
64 phone lines.
00:43:28 ►
That’s all they had.
00:43:30 ►
How can a country even operate?
00:43:35 ►
And he was funded by George Soros because George Soros was in Moscow trying to desperately make a phone call to his wife.
00:43:37 ►
He couldn’t because he couldn’t get a connection
00:43:40 ►
because he needed paperwork and probably apparatchiks and all this.
00:43:43 ►
And he found Joel with a mac se able to send email and and joel didn’t know who he was this billionaire
00:43:51 ►
and this guy funded uh joel to set up global telesystems so the soviet union was able to do
00:43:58 ►
this uh but i don’t think anywhere the world is now so full of chaos and information flowing
00:44:07 ►
that the time of total tyrannical control from the top down, I think, is fading into the rearview mirror.
00:44:16 ►
And we are at a time, as Terence McKenna said, where nobody is in control.
00:44:22 ►
He would say the more horrifying truth is no one is in control. No, he would say the more horrifying truth is no one is in control.
00:44:29 ►
But that’s an opportunity. And that should allow you to either lose sleep at night or sleep better
00:44:35 ►
at night. But I think what you have to do is when there’s a speaker, including me, who makes a
00:44:42 ►
claim, there’s a very strong claim, you can feel it in your gut.
00:44:46 ►
They say something.
00:44:47 ►
It sounds a little conspiracy or it’s a very hard claim.
00:44:51 ►
It’s a claim that demonizes a population or group or identifies an enemy.
00:44:57 ►
That’s a strong claim.
00:44:58 ►
And in science, there’s this saying, you know,
00:45:01 ►
strong claims require even stronger evidence.
00:45:07 ►
And what I would, you know, strong claims require even stronger evidence. And what I would, you know,
00:45:11 ►
say that you should do, just so you don’t fall into the spell of these things, is question,
00:45:16 ►
you know, the back, and I think if we have a healthy future civilization, we will always do this. Somebody makes this audacious claim or statement to the public, they immediately go
00:45:22 ►
into a bit bucket where they’re now under scrutiny.
00:45:26 ►
There was a guy that called me up who had this theory about a face on Mars based on
00:45:32 ►
fuzzy photographs of this rock outcropping.
00:45:36 ►
And I remember he was trying to get to speak at one of our space conferences.
00:45:39 ►
And I said, I don’t know.
00:45:42 ►
I didn’t want to say flaky, but I was doing the NASA thing of just politely deflecting and whatever
00:45:49 ►
because the flake flag was already flying.
00:45:53 ►
And then he was on Art Bell.
00:45:56 ►
And I remember being on the, and this is a national radio program called Coast to Coast.
00:46:00 ►
I remember I was supposed to be on with Art talking about uh avatars in 97 or 98
00:46:07 ►
and i called him up getting he said put on the all-night coffee and you know just we’re going
00:46:13 ►
till dawn you know do you have the stamina to talk all night and i do which is something you
00:46:19 ►
should have dread terror about sitting right here but art and then art then said art said wait a minute
00:46:26 ►
wait a minute you know he’s on his slow modem connection to his house trailer in paramp namada
00:46:32 ►
in the middle of the desert he said oh boy we’re gonna have to do a different show i’m sorry but
00:46:37 ►
the face on mars scam has been revealed i said what do you mean he said well take a look at this
00:46:43 ►
link and there was a nice high res photo of rock outcroppings and stuff like that. And so what do you, I said, what are you
00:46:48 ►
going to do, Art? He says, I’m going to have them back on the show and we’ll take them down. He said,
00:46:54 ►
Art, you, you get them on the way up and you interview them as though they held God’s truth,
00:47:00 ►
or they have the secrets of the universe in this face on Mars thing. Then when it breaks,
00:47:04 ►
you take them down. He says, you when it breaks, you take them down.
00:47:06 ►
He says, you get them going, you get them coming.
00:47:08 ►
It’s airtime.
00:47:10 ►
Now, you know, it’s sort of like, that’s how this works.
00:47:14 ►
Then what happened to Art?
00:47:16 ►
You know, so he had a career of doing this, giving these people airtime.
00:47:21 ►
But guess what happened to Art?
00:47:22 ►
Art got his comeuppance.
00:47:24 ►
He had a guy on the show this was a
00:47:26 ►
only about six months later than this whole face on mars thing by the way this guy went on to
00:47:32 ►
propose that he sees a civilization on the moon at that point you know this guy should actually
00:47:36 ►
not be able to get any airtime anywhere his flake his flake flag is flying and sorry we don’t believe
00:47:42 ►
you anymore you know these guys actually should be just kind of they should have a little online system uh where people just say this guy just
00:47:50 ►
don’t believe him just he shouldn’t be able to find a sucker the next time but what happened
00:47:54 ►
to art bell was very serious six months later it was no laughing matter there was a guy who claimed
00:48:00 ►
that there was a spacecraft in the tail of this comet coming in.
00:48:05 ►
I can’t remember the name of the comet.
00:48:06 ►
Was it Hale-Bopp?
00:48:11 ►
Yeah, in fact, I saw it from a flight over Greenland.
00:48:14 ►
It was really cool from the airplane.
00:48:16 ►
He claimed there was a spacecraft coming in
00:48:18 ►
that was going to do something to the Earth, right?
00:48:21 ►
And, well, guess what?
00:48:23 ►
There were 39 people in some mansion in a bizarre situation,
00:48:27 ►
cultic circumstance in San Diego County were listening to this. Guess what? They all took
00:48:33 ►
poison Kool-Aid before this happened. They died. It was horrendous. It was horrific. These people
00:48:39 ►
were in this delusional capture by someone who then got delusionally captured by this crazy art bell show
00:48:46 ►
it shook art to the core and art there was a period where art was off the show and he would
00:48:53 ►
always say the air conditioner is broken but this just rocked his world and he finally had the guy
00:49:00 ►
back on the show and then the guy admitted well i just i just made all this shit up
00:49:05 ►
and what art did and the emotion in his voice he said then their blood is on your hand sir and it
00:49:12 ►
is on mine why do i give you people airtime why do i do this and that started the end of art’s
00:49:20 ►
career as a and there’s a new guy named george nori doing this and they call this paranoid
00:49:25 ►
paranormal radio but if even the people who are doing it have serious doubts about why they’re
00:49:33 ►
giving these people airtime we should too they’re sitting in front of them across and on a microphone
00:49:38 ►
so you should question always question don’t take it as faith. Don’t let yourself get panicked or under the spell of people who make these strong claims.
00:49:48 ►
Immediately, I would say, just like you were a NASA engineer,
00:49:52 ►
you become the skeptic and you tick that thing like,
00:49:56 ►
hmm, let’s watch that person and see other claims they make.
00:50:00 ►
They may switch direction and make another strong claim in a whole other area
00:50:04 ►
which they have no background in.
00:50:07 ►
And you find out, is this person an expert in asteroids?
00:50:09 ►
Are they claiming that an asteroid is going to impact the Earth?
00:50:12 ►
And next week they’re claiming that all jars of milk will be poisoned.
00:50:17 ►
Are they an agricultural expert?
00:50:19 ►
So as they make these strong claims,
00:50:22 ►
and especially people who stack claims together,
00:50:24 ►
I think there’s a guy who thinks that the whole world
00:50:26 ►
is run by lizard brain people or something.
00:50:29 ►
And these conspiracy theories,
00:50:32 ►
they’re breathtaking in scope and audacity.
00:50:36 ►
They’re like the most, you know,
00:50:39 ►
they make a claim that’s tied to 30 other claims in the future,
00:50:44 ►
and each one of them lessens the probability down to a ridiculous level.
00:50:49 ►
And I think if we have a good, healthy mental civilization in the future,
00:50:54 ►
those people will, their presentations will be run on the comedy hour
00:50:59 ►
because they do a lot of damage to society
00:51:02 ►
because it’s not just kind of people who are making shit up like, you know,
00:51:07 ►
Hale-Bopp and stuff like that.
00:51:09 ►
People make shit up all the time and make these claims.
00:51:12 ►
You know, in the Pentagon or the CIA,
00:51:14 ►
they were making up shit about Soviet power for years.
00:51:17 ►
It wasn’t true.
00:51:19 ►
You know, I had a friend who flew in the Blackbird,
00:51:22 ►
and it was a high altitude.
00:51:24 ►
Oh, yeah, she flew in the SR-71B Blackbird.
00:51:28 ►
And she proved that a lot of the bunkers and the facilities in the USSR were not even functional.
00:51:34 ►
And so there were all these people making these claims, and guess what?
00:51:36 ►
They spent 1 trillion of your future on bogus military spending.
00:51:42 ►
So across the board, we have to become better at people make a strong claim,
00:51:46 ►
take them to the mat for it.
00:51:48 ►
We need to return to kind of an objective, skeptical thinking.
00:51:51 ►
Because you just don’t want to fall under these spells and these kind of memes.
00:51:55 ►
They create a meme and it changes and it morphs like an idea in an ecosystem.
00:51:59 ►
It bounces around and flows and it morphs and it takes a life of its own.
00:52:04 ►
And then the original creator is not even around and the bloody idea is still around
00:52:08 ►
and it’s causing problems everywhere you look.
00:52:12 ►
It’s like a Pac-Man.
00:52:14 ►
You’ve got to sort of shoot these things down occasionally.
00:52:17 ►
So does that make any sense?
00:52:22 ►
So I think we can come to sanity if we can come to sanity which is people
00:52:27 ►
who are slightly insane who are giving us all this stuff we kind of identify
00:52:32 ►
they might be slightly nuts or have an agenda and we should just kind of you
00:52:39 ►
know if we all started doing this these guys would just lose their airtime and
00:52:43 ►
then we have real discussions of what’s airtime. And then we could have real
00:52:45 ►
discussions of what’s going on in the world. We could actually get down through this mass of
00:52:52 ►
weirdness and actually get down to the core of why the U.S. was attacked on September 11th and
00:52:58 ►
what we really should have done about it instead of what we did. Because that was a huge, costly
00:53:02 ►
mistake. Because someone took control of the dialogue
00:53:05 ►
and drove it into a 300,000 casualty war
00:53:10 ►
and just devastation.
00:53:12 ►
And the early end to the United States’ hegemony was a huge cost.
00:53:17 ►
But it’s only a few people who took control of that
00:53:19 ►
and were never challenged.
00:53:22 ►
So I think we’re running down to time for a couple of questions.
00:53:29 ►
Or you can challenge me on this approach too.
00:53:34 ►
Where to begin?
00:53:36 ►
I think in your own life.
00:53:38 ►
If somebody tells you something that sounds really cool,
00:53:44 ►
but they’re telling you and they don’t you know
00:53:46 ►
but it also scares you a little bit or whatever think before you tell somebody else and pass on
00:53:53 ►
the meme because and think how do they know this and how are they able to say this and challenge
00:54:00 ►
them and say you know and we don’t do that because of political correctness, but we have to do this. This stuff is tearing. It’s an epidemic. It’s insane. And to tell you the truth,
00:54:12 ►
if the sanitary engineers, thank goodness, sanitary engineers are not subject to these
00:54:18 ►
conspiracy theories and memes because suddenly city sewers would stop working, they’re objectivists,
00:54:23 ►
right? You know know they have a belief
00:54:27 ►
that something’s living in the crocodiles are living in the sewer system therefore you you
00:54:31 ►
can’t touch that line or you know they get into delusional beliefs thank goodness they don’t thank
00:54:37 ►
goodness airline pilots don’t get into this so there’s a whole class of humanity that is
00:54:41 ►
very very skeptical and we got to protect them because they
00:54:45 ►
keep our world going. But, you know, we shouldn’t waste our minds on this crap. We really shouldn’t.
00:54:51 ►
There’s too many more, far more interesting real things going on. One last example. We
00:54:56 ►
have time for one last. There was a fellow we met down at Arcosanti who’s a really cool archaeologist,
00:55:06 ►
and he was giving us this show of the pyramids in Egypt.
00:55:10 ►
Well, guess what?
00:55:11 ►
He had gone to Egypt in the 1970s funded by some cult.
00:55:16 ►
I think it was Raelians or Pyramidians or something
00:55:19 ►
that believed that the pyramids were built by UFOs.
00:55:24 ►
And he didn’t have a PhD or anything.
00:55:26 ►
He was sort of sent there as some kind of collect evidence, you know,
00:55:30 ►
so we can build these media packages.
00:55:33 ►
And somehow, you know, we’re talking about this.
00:55:35 ►
It’s our big selling thing, but we don’t even have pictures of the pyramids.
00:55:38 ►
So, you know, go out and do this.
00:55:40 ►
This guy went out there, and he got in touch with the reality of the pyramids
00:55:44 ►
and the challenge of how they were built. and he met the head of antiquities.
00:55:49 ►
And the guy took him out and said,
00:55:50 ►
we believe that under this sand here is the city of the people who built the pyramids
00:55:57 ►
because of some radar imaging or whatever.
00:56:00 ►
And this guy quit the Raelians, or the Pyramidians,
00:56:04 ►
went back to university, got a PhD in archaeology,
00:56:07 ►
because he was so fascinated of being able to have a chance to actually answer the real question.
00:56:12 ►
And between the mid-70s and into the 90s, they excavated this huge area, and they found the truth.
00:56:17 ►
And the truth about how the pyramids were made is stunning.
00:56:21 ►
It’s absolutely stunning.
00:56:22 ►
No slaves were used.
00:56:24 ►
That was an invention sort of of Hollywood.
00:56:27 ►
So they cut through all the crap.
00:56:29 ►
They found the technology that these people of 5,000 years ago
00:56:34 ►
used to build these enormous structures.
00:56:37 ►
And it was like Burning Man.
00:56:40 ►
Do you know that the pyramid construction was like annual Burning Man festival?
00:56:44 ►
What would happen is the Nile Delta would get flooded,
00:56:47 ►
irrigation systems would go, everyone would do their thing,
00:56:51 ►
get the crops in, and then they’d just wait for stuff to grow.
00:56:55 ►
Young men and women had put in their application to compete,
00:57:00 ►
to get into the project, to go to this place to build pyramids.
00:57:03 ►
It was a major social deal.
00:57:06 ►
There were gangs.
00:57:07 ►
There were clubs.
00:57:09 ►
How do they know this?
00:57:10 ►
They found graffiti inside the pyramids that said,
00:57:13 ►
the drunken friends of Khufu has reached this point first.
00:57:17 ►
We won.
00:57:19 ►
Graffiti inside the pyramids of these people who are having a rocking good time.
00:57:24 ►
It was a great work of their lives.
00:57:27 ►
And the city next door was so organized.
00:57:31 ►
He showed us these slides of excavated streets.
00:57:34 ►
He says, here’s the bakery.
00:57:35 ►
It made giant cone-shaped bread.
00:57:37 ►
The guys slung them on the backs, and they ate when they were way up,
00:57:40 ►
200 feet out, 300 feet up.
00:57:42 ►
That was what fed them.
00:57:43 ►
Here’s a full-on clinic, hospital, probably the best in the ancient world.
00:57:48 ►
Here’s, you know, housing.
00:57:50 ►
Here’s artisans.
00:57:52 ►
Here’s stone cutters that made the stone cladding.
00:57:54 ►
And he said, here’s a modern map of Cairo and the maze worn of streets and chaos.
00:58:00 ►
And here’s the Giza Plateau, artisan city.
00:58:07 ►
And it was so much better laid out and well thought through it was a full you know state enterprise it was like a moon launch
00:58:11 ►
so you know here he went from a delusional thing and he convinced himself that reality is far more
00:58:19 ►
interesting and and so just just the stories about this when you really question sometimes
00:58:27 ►
you get alchemical gold and you can and and that’s the the the real value of questioning
00:58:35 ►
those that propose things that don’t quite feel right you might get through to the true alchemical
00:58:40 ►
gold thanks bruce chemical gold. Thanks, Bruce. You’re listening to the psychedelic salon where people are changing
00:58:52 ►
their lives one thought at a time. So I’m sure that I don’t have to ask you if you are constantly
00:59:00 ►
questioning things that just don’t quite sound right. What I’ve found over the past eight years or so of doing these podcasts is that,
00:59:08 ►
well, we’re all part of a very large group of people who seem to question almost everything.
00:59:13 ►
But I should remind you that, as the Bard McKenna once said,
00:59:17 ►
being a psychedelic person means that you have learned to live with many questions
00:59:21 ►
that will forever remain unanswered.
00:59:24 ►
In fact, I’ve come to be quite wary of people who not only have all of the answers,
00:59:29 ►
but who also refuse to question any of their deeply held beliefs.
00:59:33 ►
I, for one, grew up in a somewhat conservative and very patriotic family.
00:59:39 ►
Over the years, however, my childhood views have changed considerably.
00:59:44 ►
Having a father who served in the Pacific during
00:59:46 ►
World War II, I grew up repeating the phrase, it’s my country, right or wrong. But after my
00:59:53 ►
own tour of duty in Vietnam during the American war there, I realized that my country was committing
00:59:59 ►
some horrific atrocities on a people who had, well, they’d done absolutely nothing to us to provoke
01:00:05 ►
such a terrible war. But since it was my country, I felt that I had an obligation to do what I could
01:00:11 ►
to get the owners of this land to change direction and cease these endless wars. Obviously, I failed
01:00:18 ►
miserably. And over the years, as more and more things became clear to me, I realized that we the people have very little say in what goes on here.
01:00:28 ►
So what I would add to Bruce’s warning that we should be more skeptical about things that just don’t sound right to us,
01:00:35 ►
is that we should also be considerably more skeptical about anything, as in anything,
01:00:41 ►
that comes out of the mouths of politicians and their bureaucratic minions
01:00:45 ►
who have so much control over our lives.
01:00:48 ►
For example, way back in 1963, when John Kennedy was murdered,
01:00:53 ►
I was fortunate to have quite a few friends in the upper echelons of Texas society.
01:00:58 ►
And the stories that they told me about the assassination just didn’t fit with the official story.
01:01:03 ►
Then came the infamous
01:01:05 ►
Warren Commission report, which claimed that for a few seconds on that November morning, the laws
01:01:11 ►
of physics were completely suspended, and somehow a magic bullet found its way to Daly Plaza and
01:01:17 ►
hit the president. Although I have a degree in electrical engineering with a minor in physics,
01:01:23 ►
it didn’t take all that education to convince me that the laws of physics are never suspended. Which, by the way, brings to mind the
01:01:31 ►
three rules for using psychedelic medicines. Do you remember them? The three things to always keep
01:01:37 ►
in mind while you are under the influence of a psychedelic are, number one, fire burns. Number two,
01:02:05 ►
psychedelic are, number one, fire burns. Number two, cars are real. And number three, the law of gravity is still in effect. But getting back to my point, ever since that magic bullet theory became the official government story, I no longer could accept the official story of that or any other little bit of US history that came out of the government. But by simply mentioning that I don’t agree with the Warren Commission, even though Congress
01:02:10 ►
in the 1970s also said that the report was crap, nonetheless, by not accepting the official
01:02:16 ►
story, I then became a conspiracy theory guy, which, in effect, once you’re branded that
01:02:22 ►
way, means that nobody will ever again take you seriously.
01:02:26 ►
Of course, it’s a really fine line between the truth of these matters
01:02:30 ►
and some of the flaky conspiracy theories that also abound.
01:02:34 ►
So, how do you tell the shit from the Shinola, so to speak?
01:02:38 ►
Well, with the Internet, it isn’t all that difficult anymore,
01:02:41 ►
at least if you are seriously interested in getting at the truth.
01:02:44 ►
all that difficult anymore, at least if you are seriously interested in getting at the truth.
01:02:51 ►
For example, right now there’s a story circulating around that the Catholic Church has an astronomical observatory on the top of the Vatican which houses a telescope named Lucifer through which
01:02:56 ►
they have somehow made contact with extraterrestrials who will be arriving shortly.
01:03:01 ►
To put it mildly, that story just didn’t feel right to me, and so I checked it
01:03:06 ►
out, which is something that you can do on your own if you’re interested, and if you do, you’ll
01:03:11 ►
see how cleverly someone has manipulated a few actual facts into this bizarre story,
01:03:17 ►
sort of like the Warren Commission’s magic bullet. Now I could go on, and in fact I’m really tempted
01:03:22 ►
to do that just now, but I want to guard against this podcast taking such a political tack.
01:03:29 ►
Personally, I think that there are a lot more interesting things for us to discuss here in the salon.
01:03:34 ►
So, I guess this is just a long-winded way of saying that I agree with Bruce that we should be skeptical whenever we hear something that just doesn’t quite sound right.
01:03:45 ►
be skeptical whenever we hear something that just doesn’t quite sound right. But that means being skeptical not only of crazy conspiracy guys, but also being equally vigilant about things that come
01:03:51 ►
from the government via the corporate-owned media. Well, I guess that was quite a tangent, so let me
01:04:00 ►
get back to Bruce Dahmer for a minute here and read for you an announcement about his very own new podcast.
01:04:06 ►
Here’s the announcement that went out about it.
01:04:09 ►
On the last day of 2012, frequent salonner Dr. Bruce Dahmer launched his own podcast called Dr. Bruce’s Levity Zone.
01:04:18 ►
Jump into the zone at www.drbruce.org
01:04:25 ►
or find it at iTunes and other feeds
01:04:28 ►
under Dr. Bruce’s Levity Zone.
01:04:31 ►
The key concepts for this podcast are
01:04:33 ►
vision plus science equals hope.
01:04:36 ►
And in Bruce’s words, and I quote,
01:04:39 ►
journey with me into the liminal zone
01:04:41 ►
between visionary science and the edge of magic.
01:04:54 ►
Levity is my gift to you for there is reason for hope End quote.
01:04:59 ►
Dr. Bruce will feature his fresh new insights and a variety of new voices, including the rediscovered Indian mystic, Dr. R.P. Kaushik.
01:05:05 ►
Podcasts are mixed with music and art donated by listeners,
01:05:08 ►
and you are invited to contribute your own thoughts into the stream.
01:05:12 ►
And the drbruce.org site was built with the latest HTML5 magic,
01:05:18 ►
so it is really easy to use on your mobile device or pad.
01:05:23 ►
So, if you want to listen to the second part of Bruce’s 2012 Planque Norte lecture,
01:05:28 ►
the first part of which we just now listened to,
01:05:31 ►
you can surf on over to Bruce’s show,
01:05:33 ►
and you’ll find that it is the very first program in that series.
01:05:37 ►
Now, I have one more announcement for you before I go,
01:05:40 ►
and that has to do with the screening of a new movie called Aya Awakenings, which is a
01:05:46 ►
documentary journey into the world and visions of Amazonian shamanism, adopted from the cult book
01:05:52 ►
Aya, A Shamanic Odyssey by Rock Razam, who, I should mention, is also one of our fellow salonners.
01:06:01 ►
Now, the next screening of this movie will be on April 17th in San Francisco.
01:06:06 ►
And I’m sorry that I didn’t get this announcement out to you sooner,
01:06:08 ►
because there have already been quite a few screenings in Australia,
01:06:11 ►
where we have a lot of fellow salonners.
01:06:14 ►
So, I apologize for not letting you all know about this sooner.
01:06:19 ►
Actually, these podcasts are not the best place for me to announce scheduled events like this,
01:06:23 ►
because, well, my podcasting schedule, as you well know, is somewhat erratic.
01:06:28 ►
And besides that, many of our fellow salonners don’t listen to these podcasts until some weeks after they’ve been posted.
01:06:34 ►
So I’ve begun a new experiment with a new way to pass these announcements along to you.
01:06:40 ►
If you have a web-enabled phone, you most likely already know about an app called Flipboard.
01:06:45 ►
If not, you may want to check it out, because in my opinion, it’s one of the best apps out there.
01:06:51 ►
And with their new release last week, they have made it quite easy for anyone to create their own magazine that can be read on a web phone or tablet.
01:06:59 ►
And so I have created the Psychedelic Salon magazine on Flipboard.
01:07:04 ►
So far, there have been a grand total of six people who have added it to their readers.
01:07:10 ►
And while I don’t know who you are, I certainly thank you for being such early adopters.
01:07:15 ►
Anyway, this is now where I’ll be posting things like that announcement that I just made,
01:07:20 ►
and also it’s where I’ll be posting the art, music, and other links that are sent to me by our fellow salonners.
01:07:27 ►
So, while this isn’t yet a widely viewed magazine,
01:07:31 ►
over time I hope to make this a place where I can help you get your own announcements out to our community.
01:07:37 ►
After all, there was a time when there were only six people who were listening to these podcasts.
01:07:41 ►
But here we are eight years later and, well, we’ve become quite a large family of fellow salonners.
01:07:48 ►
Hopefully the same progression will take place
01:07:50 ►
over the next few years on Flipboard.
01:07:53 ►
So check it out if you have a chance.
01:07:56 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo,
01:07:58 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:08:00 ►
Be well, my friends.