Program Notes
Guest speaker: John Gilmore
[NOTE: All quotations are by John Gilmore.]
“Marijuana, it turns out, is three-quarters of the illegal drug problem, because it’s three times as popular as all the other drugs put together. So if you can move marijuana out of the black market and into a legal and regulated market you’ve gotten rid of three-quarters of the crime, three-quarters of the violence, and three-quarters of the black market money. It changes the dynamics for the other drugs. It makes it much more of a small potatoes thing.”
“If you move away from [Google’s] free services you can move away from the part of the Net that’s the most heavily surveilled.”
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)Defending Your Rights in the Digital World
John Gilmore’s Home Page
Google has been secretly harvesting the passwords of all Wi-Fi devices everywhere
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:32 ►
And to begin with, a big thank you goes out to Christopher, Maurizio, Penny, and longtime friend of the Salon, Auden.
00:00:39 ►
You have all started us well on our way to covering this month’s expenses here in the Salon, and I thank you all very much.
00:00:49 ►
So, today we’re going to get to listen to the first of the 2013 Palenque Norte talks that were held at this year’s Burning Man Festival.
00:00:54 ►
And it is perhaps the most timely talk that we’ve ever had here in the salon.
00:01:02 ►
The speaker is John Gilmore, who you may know as one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF, which is one of the primary organizations that are leading the charge
00:01:06 ►
to expose the massive amount of spying that the U.S. government is conducting on its own citizens,
00:01:13 ►
not to mention the citizens of almost every other country on this planet.
00:01:18 ►
What you may not know about John, however,
00:01:20 ►
is that he is also the person who created the alt hierarchy in Usenet and is a
00:01:26 ►
major contributor to the open source project. Now, if you’re a geek like me, that information
00:01:31 ►
will just blow you away. As a strong supporter of open source software myself and a long ago
00:01:38 ►
dedicated reader of the alt.drug streams on Usenet, I, for one, am deeply indebted to John
00:01:45 ►
for all he has done and continues to do for us all.
00:01:48 ►
But I’ll save the rest of John’s introduction for Chris Pezza,
00:01:52 ►
or Pez, who is the cornerstone of Planque Norte.
00:01:55 ►
And without Pez and all of the wonderful people
00:01:58 ►
that he recruited to help him this year,
00:02:00 ►
well, there simply would be no Planque Norte.
00:02:03 ►
So, Pez, I know I don’t say this
00:02:05 ►
enough, but we all deeply appreciate everything that you’re doing to keep our community as vibrant
00:02:10 ►
as it now is. The Palenque Norte talk that we were about to listen to was somewhat of a casual
00:02:17 ►
gathering where members of the audience asked questions along the way. So, John’s remarks were
00:02:23 ►
necessarily shortened by the amount of time
00:02:25 ►
that the questions took. In this case, his one-hour talk included almost 20 minutes of
00:02:30 ►
questions and comments, but unfortunately there was no microphone in the audience,
00:02:36 ►
and so they weren’t picked up clearly enough to include in this podcast.
00:02:40 ►
So as you’ll be able to tell in just a moment, I cut out the questions that we couldn’t hear very well,
00:02:50 ►
but fortunately, John was kind enough to repeat them, so I don’t think that we missed anything.
00:02:56 ►
Now, let’s listen to the first of the most recent collection of Palenque Norte lectures.
00:02:58 ►
Hey everyone.
00:03:01 ►
Hey.
00:03:03 ►
Welcome back to Palenque Norte.
00:03:07 ►
Ooh, we have a juicy talk here for you.
00:03:10 ►
It’s my great pleasure to introduce John Gilmore.
00:03:18 ►
John was the fifth employee for Sun Microsystems and later went on to found Cygnus Solutions.
00:03:23 ►
And from there went on to co-found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and he also serves as a board member for both the Marijuana Policy Project
00:03:28 ►
and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
00:03:36 ►
So with that, I’m very excited to introduce John.
00:03:40 ►
Thanks.
00:03:41 ►
So I didn’t bring a set speech for you folks.
00:03:44 ►
I decided I would ask you all what you want to hear about,
00:03:47 ►
because among even just the things EFF does,
00:03:52 ►
I couldn’t cover them all in an hour.
00:03:55 ►
And then when you add in marijuana policy,
00:03:59 ►
psychedelic research, and Silicon Valley history,
00:04:03 ►
and all the rest, just you guys tell me what it is you want to hear.
00:04:09 ►
There’s somebody.
00:04:10 ►
Introduce what EFF is.
00:04:12 ►
Sure.
00:04:12 ►
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a nonprofit public charity.
00:04:16 ►
It looks at basically civil rights in cyberspace.
00:04:21 ►
It’s how the advent of electronics and instant communications have changed public
00:04:28 ►
expectations about how we treat each other, what the laws should say, what the expectations,
00:04:35 ►
the mores, the social norms should be. And there’s all these gray areas between how we
00:04:42 ►
used to treat each other and what the laws used to say and what we’re doing now, and people fall into those gray areas all the time.
00:04:50 ►
We try to smooth that out to educate people, to educate the lawmakers, to go through the
00:04:57 ►
courts to remove some of the most egregious problems, and try to move us forward into the electronic age with all the same rights we had before the electronic age.
00:05:12 ►
And still getting along.
00:05:15 ►
Yes?
00:05:16 ►
So Pez asked me to restate the questions.
00:05:26 ►
but yeah basically the question is
00:05:29 ►
given that
00:05:33 ►
people who were really thinking about this
00:05:36 ►
already knew that the government was doing a lot of the evil stuff
00:05:39 ►
that Edward Snowden’s revelations have
00:05:41 ►
brought us more evidence of
00:05:43 ►
how can we structure things, structure our own lives and technologies and expectations
00:05:51 ►
so we can move forward into a less paranoid era?
00:05:56 ►
Yeah, that’s a good question.
00:05:58 ►
Anybody else?
00:06:03 ►
I’m trying to sort of get a survey before I dive into any of it
00:06:07 ►
good question
00:06:10 ►
some of the courts have held that
00:06:13 ►
if they’re doing screwy shit to everybody
00:06:16 ►
then nobody has standing to challenge it
00:06:18 ►
and what are we doing about that
00:06:22 ►
and how do we get a handle to get the courts to actually engage on these issues?
00:06:26 ►
Another good question.
00:06:27 ►
How about over here?
00:06:30 ►
Congratulations.
00:06:31 ►
Yes, legalized marijuana in Washington State.
00:06:34 ►
Okay.
00:06:35 ►
Where do we stand on getting the rest of the psychedelics legalized?
00:06:39 ►
Great question.
00:06:41 ►
Who else back here?
00:06:43 ►
Do non-Americans have any rights in the modern era of the National
00:06:48 ►
Security Agency? How about over here? Right. Is there a jurisdiction somewhere in the world that
00:06:55 ►
actually has good rules on this stuff where people can move their companies and their businesses and
00:07:01 ►
their projects to escape this kind of bullshit.
00:07:06 ►
Yeah, Tron.
00:07:12 ►
Is there a difference in how we should approach government versus how we should approach corporations,
00:07:15 ►
particularly around privacy and things like that?
00:07:16 ►
Yeah.
00:07:18 ►
Okay.
00:07:21 ►
Where does EFF stand on civil disobedience? Do we encourage people to break unjust laws and suffer the penalties thereof?
00:07:27 ►
Good question.
00:07:29 ►
Yeah?
00:07:31 ►
Okay.
00:07:33 ►
Question is, what’s the prospect
00:07:35 ►
for a sort of do-it-yourself Internet
00:07:37 ►
that plugs together wirelessly
00:07:39 ►
and just works and connects us all?
00:07:42 ►
Good question.
00:07:44 ►
See, if I can keep you guys asking questions for the whole hour,
00:07:47 ►
I don’t have to answer any of them.
00:07:49 ►
Yes.
00:07:50 ►
Regarding Lessig’s lecture at the DMCA takedown situation,
00:07:55 ►
how do I think it’ll play out?
00:07:56 ►
That one I can tell you I’m not sure.
00:08:01 ►
Because I haven’t tracked that.
00:08:02 ►
I know he’s put out some stuff recently, and I haven’t had time to read it.
00:08:07 ►
Yeah, right.
00:08:08 ►
So if somebody sends a takedown notice to get your website or whatever taken down,
00:08:14 ►
and they lie in the process, how come none of them have been prosecuted for perjury?
00:08:19 ►
Good question, and we’ve done some work on that.
00:08:23 ►
What do I see as the end goal of the whole corporatocracy takeover?
00:08:27 ►
The NSA and the corporations, all of that stuff.
00:08:32 ►
It’s all an evil conspiracy.
00:08:36 ►
Okay?
00:08:37 ►
Well, that’s a pretty good survey.
00:08:42 ►
Since we only had one drug policy question, why don’t I knock that one off first,
00:08:47 ►
and then we’ll get all into the EFF stuff.
00:08:50 ►
And so that was, we’ve got legal recreational marijuana in two states, Colorado and Washington.
00:08:58 ►
What are the prospects for extending that to psychedelics?
00:09:02 ►
extending that to psychedelics.
00:09:12 ►
Well, first, we have an actual plan to spread the legal use of recreational marijuana from two states to ten states by 2016, which would include running initiatives in six states
00:09:19 ►
in the presidential election of 2016.
00:09:21 ►
presidential election of 2016.
00:09:26 ►
So, and we’re hoping that by about 2020
00:09:27 ►
or so we’ll have enough states that have moved
00:09:30 ►
that it will force the feds to have to
00:09:32 ►
fix the laws there.
00:09:36 ►
So,
00:09:37 ►
now, marijuana, it turns out,
00:09:40 ►
is three quarters of the
00:09:42 ►
illegal drug problem.
00:09:43 ►
Right? Because it’s three times as
00:09:45 ►
popular as all the other drugs put together. So if you can move marijuana out of the black
00:09:52 ►
market and into a legal and regulated market, you’ve gotten rid of three quarters of the
00:09:58 ►
crime, three quarters of the violence, three quarters of the black market money. It changes the dynamics for
00:10:06 ►
the other drugs. It makes it much more of a small potatoes kind of thing. And I think
00:10:13 ►
that will help in regularizing the rules for the other drugs. Now, for psychedelics, the
00:10:23 ►
reason that marijuana is legal in those states
00:10:26 ►
is because more than 50% of the people in those states voted to make it happen.
00:10:32 ►
We’re never going to get those kind of numbers this decade for LSD, for psilocybin, for MDMA.
00:10:39 ►
We can’t do that through the ballot box because the public is not with us.
00:10:44 ►
Marijuana, being three times as popular, is three times as popular as these other drugs.
00:10:50 ►
So the approach we’ve been taking is through clinical research,
00:10:56 ►
through the Food and Drug Administration,
00:10:58 ►
by showing that these drugs are valuable for treating medical conditions.
00:11:04 ►
And we have to jump through a lot of hoops and do a lot of paperwork.
00:11:08 ►
We have to find doctors and researchers who aren’t scared to work in this area.
00:11:14 ►
And we’ve been successful at doing that with the result that we now have completed two clinical trials
00:11:23 ►
using MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, both successful.
00:11:28 ►
And we have four trials currently in process, one in South Carolina, one in Boulder, Colorado, one in Vancouver, B.C., and the fourth in Israel.
00:11:40 ►
Ah, what will it take? Okay.
00:11:43 ►
Exactly how much science?
00:11:42 ►
Ah, what will it take?
00:11:44 ►
Exactly how much science?
00:11:48 ►
Well, so it’s not really science, right?
00:11:50 ►
It’s jumping through hoops.
00:11:57 ►
This community already knows that MDMA is good for increasing empathy in people who need to trust their therapist,
00:12:02 ►
who need to talk through major problems in relationship therapy.
00:12:06 ►
We’re working out how it’s useful in autism and a whole bunch of other things.
00:12:11 ►
We picked PTSD as a particular medical condition that’s been well studied, has other drugs that
00:12:20 ►
have been approved for it, and we’re following the same path that those drugs took, for Zoloft, actually.
00:12:27 ►
And what happens is you go through three stages of clinical trials.
00:12:31 ►
Phase one, you prove that humans can take it and not die,
00:12:35 ►
and you figure out the dosage.
00:12:37 ►
In phase two, you give it to people who have a medical condition,
00:12:40 ►
and you show that it makes them better.
00:12:42 ►
We are a non-profit are going through, we are a
00:12:46 ►
non-profit drug development company, MAPS, that is doing the same thing that any pharmaceutical
00:12:52 ►
company would do with some new drug that they’ve invented. None of those pharma companies want to
00:12:57 ►
take MDMA through that process because they’re currently making more money selling you something
00:13:03 ►
that you have to take every day for years if you have PTSD.
00:13:07 ►
Whereas with MDMA, in our trials, you take it three times.
00:13:12 ►
And doing that with talk therapy can get you over the hump and significantly reduce your symptoms
00:13:19 ►
and in some cases get you past the symptoms to a cure.
00:13:28 ►
So there’s no economic incentive to do that. The incentive is to push MDMA through the bureaucracy so that any doctor,
00:13:36 ►
any therapist can use it with their patients, can prescribe it to their patients. And then we can
00:13:42 ►
move, once we’ve demonstrated that we can save a lot of people’s angst
00:13:47 ►
and a lot of people’s lives that way.
00:13:49 ►
I mean, I think the military loses more people to suicide from PTSD
00:13:55 ►
than they lose to combat casualties, right?
00:13:59 ►
It’s insane.
00:14:00 ►
And half the people who have PTSD, there’s no effective treatment for them.
00:14:05 ►
So if we come up with something that can help even a tenth of those people,
00:14:09 ►
we’re saving tens or 20,000, 30,000 lives a year with that stuff.
00:14:15 ►
Well, so anyway, we have a process and a timeline.
00:14:18 ►
Our four current studies are designed to sort of perfect the exact dosage and the protocol, the treatment method,
00:14:28 ►
that will prove to the FDA in a Phase III trial with hundreds of patients that this really works.
00:14:35 ►
And once we’ve proved it to them in that trial, which would probably end about 2021 or so,
00:14:42 ►
if we can raise the money to do it, then FDA will have to approve it
00:14:48 ►
and have to take it out of Schedule 1.
00:14:51 ►
And then what happens is a little interesting because it turns out the Food and Drug Administration,
00:14:59 ►
you can’t get a patent on MDMA because it was invented in the early 1900s and the patents have run out.
00:15:06 ►
But if you’re the first company to take a drug to market as a medical drug, you get
00:15:12 ►
a five-year window of exclusive marketing where nobody, even though it’s generic and
00:15:19 ►
off-patent, nobody can market it for that five years.
00:15:23 ►
So, no, they can’t sell it. So the deal is,
00:15:30 ►
we want to use those five years of exclusivity. We want this to be broadly available, right? The
00:15:36 ►
whole idea of MAPS was free MDMA up so that its full potential can be used in society.
00:15:43 ►
so that its full potential can be used in society.
00:15:47 ►
But in those five years, we can accumulate revenues that we’ll use to get the next psychedelic through that process.
00:15:52 ►
And so we can bootstrap that for psilocybin or for LSD or for something else.
00:15:57 ►
And so that’s the theory.
00:15:59 ►
It still has years to work it out.
00:16:03 ►
So that’s me kind of wrapping up what’s the plan for making legal
00:16:07 ►
psychedelics. To get through the phase three trials, so the phase two trials now are costing
00:16:14 ►
us about a million and a half a year, and the phase three I think will cost us about 15 million
00:16:20 ►
over four or five years. We have five million of that because one of our board
00:16:26 ►
members died unexpectedly and left five million dollars to us, which we have dedicated to
00:16:36 ►
bootstrapping that phase three research. But so we have about 10 million more to raise plus
00:16:42 ►
the ongoing costs of the current studies. So right, with marijuana, we have about 10 million more to raise plus the ongoing costs of the current studies.
00:16:50 ►
So, right, with marijuana, we have problems at the federal level,
00:16:52 ►
and we’re solving the problems at the state level.
00:16:55 ►
With MDMA, it’s going the opposite way.
00:17:00 ►
The reason that we’re working at the state level with marijuana is because the federal level is totally jammed up by politics.
00:17:04 ►
with marijuana is because the federal level is totally jammed up by politics.
00:17:11 ►
People have tried over and over to submit the right papers to the right agency to say,
00:17:19 ►
this drug is not unsafe for use under the care of a doctor, so it can’t be in Schedule 1.
00:17:22 ►
This drug has medical uses, so it can’t be in Schedule 1. And the agencies lie and basically say,
00:17:28 ►
no, we don’t believe any of that.
00:17:30 ►
Look at all this evidence of other stuff,
00:17:31 ►
and they keep it in exactly the current state.
00:17:35 ►
With MDMA, it’s not so politically charged as marijuana.
00:17:40 ►
And so the agencies so far have been willing to actually follow their own rules.
00:17:47 ►
Yes, yeah, the federal law is unchanged on medical marijuana.
00:17:52 ►
It’s unchanged on recreational marijuana.
00:17:54 ►
It’s all illegal according to the feds.
00:17:57 ►
The thing is, 98% of the police officers report to the states,
00:18:04 ►
and they have to follow state law
00:18:07 ►
so you’ve eliminated
00:18:09 ►
98% of the problem
00:18:10 ►
if you fix this at the state level
00:18:12 ►
and the feds will still
00:18:15 ►
come in and do a few high level
00:18:16 ►
I mean they’ll still bust people
00:18:18 ►
and people will go to prison for 10 years
00:18:20 ►
or 20 years for it
00:18:21 ►
and that’s a travesty
00:18:23 ►
but the other 98% will not have
00:18:26 ►
that happen to them, and that will be a big improvement. Well, they’ve had like 50 or
00:18:33 ►
60 years to build up a whole set of terrible rules about marijuana, and all of those rules
00:18:40 ►
are being applied to medical marijuana, you know, one after another. So like if you
00:18:45 ►
sell marijuana to somebody and you take the money and you put it in a bank account, according
00:18:51 ►
to the feds, you’re committing a crime called money laundering for putting your money in
00:18:55 ►
a bank. And so dispensaries can’t have bank accounts, so they can’t take charge cards
00:19:01 ►
and they have to deal in cash and then they have robberies and they have other issues.
00:19:07 ►
And all of this stuff will have to get unwound slowly because the public has shifted to say,
00:19:15 ►
we want people to be able to get medical marijuana, but the feds are doing this holding action of like,
00:19:20 ►
well, but they can’t go to a bank, you know.
00:19:22 ►
of like, well, but they can’t go to a bank.
00:19:23 ►
You know?
00:19:28 ►
So gradually, all that stuff will get untwisted,
00:19:31 ►
but it’ll take some fraction of 60 years to do it.
00:19:36 ►
Okay, should we move on to electronic frontier stuff?
00:19:38 ►
Enough of that? Okay.
00:19:42 ►
So to restate the question,
00:19:46 ►
people have been sort of withdrawing from cloud-based services because they discovered that NSA is monitoring all of them.
00:19:51 ►
But that’s sort of like letting the terrorists win, letting the bad guys win.
00:19:56 ►
And so what can we do about that?
00:20:01 ►
Why don’t I start with that?
00:20:03 ►
Why don’t I start with that? There’s been a fundamental trust issue all along with the sort of ad-supported Internet model
00:20:12 ►
that’s been going on the last decade or so, where you sign up for something,
00:20:16 ►
a company gives you a mess of free services,
00:20:19 ►
and they make their money selling your eyeballs to somebody else. Basically, they’re under no obligation to you
00:20:27 ►
to do anything in particular.
00:20:31 ►
You aren’t their customer.
00:20:34 ►
You have no contract with them.
00:20:36 ►
You can’t hold them to anything.
00:20:38 ►
If they lose all your data, it’s not their problem.
00:20:42 ►
And if they turn over all your data to the government, it’s not their problem either.
00:20:49 ►
You’ve been trusting people who you didn’t really have any reason to trust.
00:20:54 ►
And so I think it’s a good move for people to back away from that and say,
00:20:59 ►
well, okay, if I’m going to have an email account on a server somewhere,
00:21:04 ►
maybe I ought to pay those guys $10 a year for the service, right,
00:21:09 ►
and have a contract with them and hold them to it,
00:21:12 ►
as opposed to, oh, I’ll just, I trust Google because they give me so much free goodies.
00:21:19 ►
Right?
00:21:20 ►
The other thing is the government has been pretty good about co-opting the huge companies that provide these services.
00:21:29 ►
They have not been so good at co-opting all the little companies.
00:21:33 ►
And so you can both protect yourself and improve the situation for everybody by instead of going to one of the big guys for your cloud services,
00:21:46 ►
go to a little guy.
00:21:48 ►
Give them your business.
00:21:50 ►
Get to know those people.
00:21:53 ►
Build a trust relationship.
00:21:54 ►
Build an economic relationship.
00:21:57 ►
Make a world…
00:21:58 ►
I mean, the Internet is a distributed system.
00:22:01 ►
The idea is that the whole thing
00:22:03 ►
doesn’t depend on some central point.
00:22:07 ►
Almost single-handedly, Google has managed to turn that upside down to where when you
00:22:13 ►
go to the average website, Google finds out about it. If that site uses Google Analytics,
00:22:21 ►
your browser reports you to Google. If that site has a CAPTCHA on it,
00:22:26 ►
Google acquired CAPTCHA, and they get records of every CAPTCHA you fill in. If there’s
00:22:32 ►
an ad from Google on that page, Google knows you went to that page. They have centralized
00:22:38 ►
a lot of that stuff by providing free services, and if you move away from those free services,
00:22:48 ►
you can move away from the part of the net that’s the most heavily surveilled.
00:22:55 ►
So little guys, to restate the question,
00:23:00 ►
so moving to these little services doesn’t work because the government
00:23:05 ►
comes after them and then they shut down. Well, the first thing is you found out when
00:23:11 ►
they shut down. Google didn’t tell you. Yahoo didn’t tell you. They just co-opted your data,
00:23:18 ►
sent it off to the government, and they didn’t tell you. You needed Snowden to tell you.
00:23:21 ►
tell you, you needed Snowden to tell you.
00:23:24 ►
The little guys at least are honest.
00:23:27 ►
There was an
00:23:28 ►
anonymity service in Finland
00:23:30 ►
back in the 90s
00:23:31 ►
that got
00:23:34 ►
a subpoena, I think it was related to
00:23:35 ►
Scientology,
00:23:37 ►
to break the anonymity.
00:23:40 ►
And the guy who ran
00:23:42 ►
the service
00:23:42 ►
honored the subpoena and responded with that one thing
00:23:48 ►
and then shut the service down for everybody because he said,
00:23:51 ►
I cannot guarantee the anonymity of this service.
00:23:54 ►
I’m not going to pretend to offer you an anonymous remailer.
00:23:59 ►
But it’s not rocket science to set one of these up. You could set one up, and you could serve your friends with it,
00:24:10 ►
and you could grow to a certain point.
00:24:12 ►
You could also set this up in a free country.
00:24:17 ►
I’m not an expert on which jurisdiction,
00:24:19 ►
but I will point out that there’s an active legislative effort in Iceland led by Birgitta, John’s daughter, who was close to WikiLeaks,
00:24:31 ►
to deliberately craft the laws there to make it a haven for alternative media,
00:24:38 ►
to make it a place where the government surveillance and censorship laws are good instead of bad,
00:24:45 ►
to try to encourage businesses to set up and move there.
00:24:49 ►
So it’s going to be hard to find big countries that do that well,
00:24:54 ►
but lots of small countries will see an advantage in building an infrastructure that will attract business. Yes, so various people have been working on distributed cloud-like services
00:25:11 ►
that are done peer-to-peer, that are done person-to-person.
00:25:15 ►
And the best of these…
00:25:18 ►
Is that his question, basically?
00:25:19 ►
Well, sort of, yeah.
00:25:21 ►
The best of these services only make Internet connections
00:25:27 ►
between people who are already friends,
00:25:29 ►
who already know and trust each other.
00:25:36 ►
Because it’s less likely that your friends will rat you out secretly than some faceless company you’ve never met.
00:25:44 ►
So there’s this theory that people are all six hops from everyone else in the world,
00:25:50 ►
by six friendships away from everybody.
00:25:53 ►
If you apply that on a network level, it means if I want to get a message to you,
00:25:58 ►
and I don’t know you personally, but you know her, and she knows Pez, and I know Pez,
00:26:04 ►
but you know her and she knows Pez and I know Pez.
00:26:10 ►
If the software can work out that route, then I can make a connection to Pez,
00:26:13 ►
Pez can pass it to her, she can pass it to you,
00:26:18 ►
and a message will get between me and you with no direct trace between me and you.
00:26:24 ►
And all done through people who each of us trusts.
00:26:29 ►
So there’s a couple of networks like this.
00:26:30 ►
They are reasonably small.
00:26:32 ►
They’re still being debugged.
00:26:36 ►
But people are working on trying to scale them up and make them useful, much more broadly useful.
00:26:39 ►
Well, but see, no, because all of these services
00:26:43 ►
work on your own computer in your own home.
00:26:46 ►
So the government would have to come to each home and tap them.
00:26:49 ►
Now, the government has gotten pretty good at writing malware.
00:26:53 ►
And one of the things they will probably try is infecting all your computers.
00:26:59 ►
So besides technical fixes to this, we also need legal and social fixes.
00:27:05 ►
To say it’s illegal for the government to break into all of your computers. besides technical fixes to this, we also need legal and social fixes, right?
00:27:09 ►
To say it’s illegal for the government to break into all of your computers to spy on what you’re doing without getting warrants from a court
00:27:13 ►
that specify what crime you’re being investigated for
00:27:16 ►
with probable cause to show why they think you did it, right?
00:27:20 ►
And there has to be social expectations that say,
00:27:24 ►
if a bureaucracy does this, then that bureaucracy needs to be shut down.
00:27:32 ►
That bureaucracy needs, you know, in Japan, when something bad happens in an agency, the agency head resigns.
00:27:42 ►
and they basically take the fall for their superiors to say
00:27:46 ►
don’t blame the president for this
00:27:49 ►
my agency did it, I’m getting out of here
00:27:52 ►
blame me
00:27:53 ►
and it’s a form of taking responsibility
00:27:56 ►
that our government has not learned
00:27:59 ►
our government denies responsibility for everything
00:28:03 ►
right up to the last minute
00:28:04 ►
until we manage to put them in prison for it, which is way too rare.
00:28:14 ►
Okay, so how does EFF make progress against secret courts?
00:28:23 ►
curiously EFF was around when that secret court was set up and we were actually part of the process
00:28:28 ►
of writing the law that eventually set up that secret court
00:28:32 ►
it was the foreign intelligence surveillance act
00:28:36 ►
and it was a reform of the previous practice
00:28:41 ►
which was that the president asserted
00:28:44 ►
that he had inherent authority to order
00:28:49 ►
wiretaps, even though no law gave him that authority because of the separation of powers,
00:28:56 ►
because he’s the commander-in-chief, etc. It was a bogus legal theory, and one of the ways to rein
00:29:03 ►
in that legal theory was for Congress to create
00:29:06 ►
a method that he required the president to go through
00:29:09 ►
to do these taps that involved
00:29:12 ►
at least some semblance of oversight by a court
00:29:15 ►
now
00:29:16 ►
15 years of watching
00:29:21 ►
what that court did there are some problems with how the
00:29:24 ►
court was set up.
00:29:26 ►
It really shouldn’t,
00:29:28 ►
everything it does really shouldn’t be secret.
00:29:32 ►
And in particular,
00:29:35 ►
the facts about which person is being tapped,
00:29:39 ►
which person is being suspected
00:29:40 ►
in a given classified circumstance
00:29:44 ►
might have to be kept secret,
00:29:46 ►
but the legal rationales, the rules that say,
00:29:49 ►
well, to tap this kind of person,
00:29:52 ►
you need to make these factual findings
00:29:55 ►
and you need to invoke that law,
00:29:57 ►
that stuff has also been kept secret.
00:30:00 ►
And we think there’s pretty broad agreement
00:30:03 ►
that that stuff can be public and indeed the court
00:30:07 ►
itself realizes it’s kind of fighting for its life here it’s fighting for its reputation it has
00:30:14 ►
deliberately EFF made the first filing to that secret court this year that any outside group has ever made. It’s always been the Justice Department filing
00:30:27 ►
wiretap requests, and we sent them a motion that said, we’re asking you to unseal your opinions
00:30:33 ►
so that we can get them by the Freedom of Information Act. And the court wrote a very
00:30:39 ►
nice opinion pretty quickly, actually. It took them less than a month, that said, well, if there’s anything classified in those opinions,
00:30:47 ►
it’s not because of us.
00:30:48 ►
It’s the Justice Department that is keeping those classified,
00:30:53 ►
and we believe if there’s something in there
00:30:58 ►
that they don’t think needs to be kept secret, it should be public.
00:31:02 ►
And the result is, last week, we got an 80-page decision declassified
00:31:07 ►
by the Justice Department in which that court found that NSA had unconstitutionally done
00:31:14 ►
surveillance on Americans. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, right? That’s one opinion out of 15,000 orders that court has issued over the last 15 years.
00:31:33 ►
So there are proposals now in Congress.
00:31:36 ►
There are laws in the hopper in Congress that would change that court to change the rules of it.
00:31:43 ►
None of them is perfectly satisfactory.
00:31:46 ►
EFF’s position on this is that it’s too early to try to craft fixes for the problem.
00:31:52 ►
We don’t understand the problem yet.
00:31:55 ►
We need to see what the court’s been doing, what the agency’s been doing,
00:31:59 ►
what’s really been going on behind that curtain of secrecy
00:32:02 ►
before we can craft a workable means to do oversight
00:32:06 ►
on it while still keeping quiet the stuff that needs to stay quiet.
00:32:12 ►
And I think our preferred model for that is a congressional investigation with full subpoena
00:32:19 ►
powers along the lines of what’s colloquially known as the Church Commission.
00:32:24 ►
along the lines of what’s colloquially known as the Church Commission.
00:32:29 ►
This was set up in the era after Watergate to figure out what the spy agencies were doing,
00:32:34 ►
and they discovered that they were reading all the telegrams
00:32:38 ►
that went in and out of the United States
00:32:40 ►
in a thing called Operation Shamrock
00:32:42 ►
and had been doing it for decades.
00:32:42 ►
in a thing called Operation Shamrock and had been doing it for decades.
00:32:45 ►
And they discovered the surveillance
00:32:50 ►
of Martin Luther King and John Lennon
00:32:52 ►
and all these other anti-war people.
00:32:56 ►
There was a whole lot of stuff
00:32:57 ►
that came out of that investigation
00:33:00 ►
that only came out because
00:33:02 ►
the investigators had the power to go into those
00:33:07 ►
agencies and say see that file cabinet over there I want to read what’s in that file cabinet it
00:33:13 ►
doesn’t matter what your classification on it is we’re going to read it and we will decide
00:33:17 ►
whether to tell the public about it so I think it’s that kind of investigation that will have to happen before we can say,
00:33:31 ►
well, okay, now we have a new regime that has this kind of court with this kind of arguments and this kind of publication that can really protect us against the abuses.
00:33:37 ►
Yeah.
00:33:38 ►
Right.
00:33:39 ►
So the question is, do we go after, like, the government institutions,
00:33:43 ►
or do we go after the people who are
00:33:45 ►
running them the people who are doing these bad things for the most part we have gone after
00:33:51 ►
institutional reform it’s fairly hard to succeed at holding a public servant accountable
00:34:01 ►
it’s just if you look at the history of people who have tried, it’s an uphill battle. We would rather win a case that forces them to change what they’re doing than to get back at the particular guys who did it.
00:34:23 ►
There are other non-profits that don’t take that attitude.
00:34:28 ►
And in particular, there are ongoing efforts, for example, to indict President Bush and Vice President Cheney for war crimes, for torture,
00:34:34 ►
for invading countries that never did anything to us, wars of aggression.
00:34:41 ►
All of these things are illegal under international law, and there are active
00:34:48 ►
efforts. In the United States, these things are supposed to be illegal, but the people
00:34:56 ►
prosecuting them work at the Justice Department, and they’re not interested. Now, this is true
00:35:02 ►
in many countries where war crimes are committed.
00:35:05 ►
And so the rules are that if there is no serious chance of bringing people to justice for this in their own country,
00:35:15 ►
then there is what they call universal jurisdiction where any country can try the case.
00:35:21 ►
can try the case.
00:35:26 ►
And some particularly courageous judges in Spain have taken on that universal jurisdiction
00:35:31 ►
in various cases of war crimes in other parts of the world.
00:35:36 ►
It’s possible they would also do that
00:35:38 ►
in relation to the war crimes of the United States.
00:35:44 ►
Yeah.
00:35:42 ►
relation to the war crimes of the United States.
00:35:44 ►
Yeah.
00:35:50 ►
So foreign investment in the U.S. has dropped significantly, he says. Has begun dropping since the Snowden revelations
00:35:55 ►
because of a perception that it’s a rigged game,
00:35:59 ►
that the thing you’re investing in is actually corrupted.
00:36:03 ►
Now, part of my response to that is
00:36:06 ►
what the U.S. government is doing is not unique.
00:36:11 ►
The U.S. has the biggest surveillance apparatus in the world that we know of,
00:36:16 ►
but every state has a surveillance apparatus.
00:36:21 ►
All of them surveil their own citizens.
00:36:23 ►
All of them surveil foreigners. citizens all of them surveil foreigners
00:36:25 ►
I think, now this is me personally talking
00:36:30 ►
I think part of the problem
00:36:32 ►
is the scale, is the size of the United States
00:36:36 ►
particularly the military budget
00:36:38 ►
most countries don’t choose
00:36:43 ►
to spend their money on doing widespread surveillance of everyone in the world, including all 300 million of their own citizens.
00:36:52 ►
They don’t think it’s a wise use of their tax revenues.
00:36:57 ►
Also, most countries are a lot physically smaller than the U.S.
00:37:02 ►
And so I don’t know about you folks, but
00:37:05 ►
I live in San Francisco.
00:37:08 ►
I really have the
00:37:10 ►
idea that the people in Washington, D.C.
00:37:12 ►
don’t care at all about what
00:37:14 ►
I think about what they’re doing.
00:37:16 ►
They’re 3,000 miles away. They suck
00:37:18 ►
the money out of me, whether I like it or not.
00:37:20 ►
And if I don’t like it,
00:37:22 ►
they take it to hell with me.
00:37:24 ►
In a small country, it’s much harder to do that
00:37:27 ►
right because you know somebody who knows the minister of whatever right and you can go and
00:37:33 ►
complain to them at a cocktail party and say why the fuck are you wasting my money on this
00:37:37 ►
and if they get enough of that they would actually change what they do. But in Washington, they really don’t care.
00:37:46 ►
So anyway, I think probably if the drop in investment in the United States
00:37:53 ►
is related to the Snowden stuff, it’s probably an overreaction.
00:37:57 ►
Because it’s a more pervasive problem than just the United States.
00:38:02 ►
I mean, part of what we discovered is that
00:38:06 ►
the uk because they have lax laws about wiretapping is wiretapping every fiber optic cable that comes
00:38:14 ►
into the country and storing every bit of it for days at a time right they don’t have enough storage
00:38:22 ►
apparently to store it all forever, but they’re
00:38:26 ►
storing it for some fraction of a week so that they can go back and see exactly what
00:38:30 ►
everybody sent to everybody if they go in there soon enough to look. They couldn’t legally
00:38:36 ►
do that here, I believe, though, you know, secret court interpretations may give them a different idea.
00:38:46 ►
Yes?
00:38:52 ►
Right, so how do you deal with a borderless internet in a world full of different jurisdictions that all have the right to tap?
00:38:58 ►
I think that the debate that Edward Snowden set off
00:39:02 ►
is causing debates in a lot of countries about this.
00:39:07 ►
And I think there will be sort of new norms for what’s acceptable by the populace.
00:39:13 ►
I mean, when a lot of the laws about surveillance were written, you know, local calls cost you, you know, 10 cents a minute or something.
00:39:24 ►
And long-distance calls were
00:39:25 ►
too expensive to, and it’s like calling another country? Forget it. You know, people only
00:39:30 ►
did that twice a year on holidays. You know, nowadays, when you can send a packet six times
00:39:37 ►
around the world in a fraction of a second, the expectations of what is reasonable behavior on the part of security agencies need to shift.
00:39:47 ►
And the process of revealing what they’ve been doing and finding out how people feel about that
00:39:53 ►
is part of the process of coming to a new balance.
00:39:58 ►
So that if they are actually working to protect us from bad things,
00:40:05 ►
they can keep doing that while not setting us up for a totalitarian takeover.
00:40:11 ►
Okay?
00:40:12 ►
So what do I think about Bitcoin as a way to sort of get beyond the state-based model?
00:40:24 ►
Bitcoin is an interesting technology,
00:40:26 ►
and I’m quite curious to see where it’ll go.
00:40:30 ►
As with all money, it depends on trust.
00:40:35 ►
The idea of a dollar or a pound
00:40:40 ►
is that it will get you,
00:40:43 ►
if you take a pound from somebody in return for something, that you know that that pound will get you if you take a pound from somebody
00:40:45 ►
in return for something
00:40:46 ►
that you know that that pound
00:40:47 ►
will get you something later
00:40:49 ►
the problem with any kind of currency
00:40:53 ►
is establishing that level of trust
00:40:58 ►
because it’s way too easy
00:40:59 ►
to manipulate a currency
00:41:01 ►
if you created it
00:41:02 ►
and the US government manipulates the currency all the time
00:41:06 ►
but they’re constrained
00:41:08 ►
in how much they can manipulate it
00:41:10 ►
because if they did it too much
00:41:11 ►
people would lose trust in it, they’d say
00:41:14 ►
oh, that loaf of bread is going to cost you
00:41:16 ►
ten of those dollars, not one of those
00:41:18 ►
dollars, right
00:41:20 ►
and as you can see
00:41:21 ►
I’m now in my
00:41:24 ►
late 50s in years.
00:41:28 ►
The U.S. dollar has inflated significantly, I think by about a factor of 20 since I’ve been born.
00:41:38 ►
So what used to cost a dollar now costs $20.
00:41:41 ►
The trust in that currency has been eroded by the manipulation. And the challenge
00:41:49 ►
for any kind of virtual currency like Bitcoin is to show a long-term track record that the
00:41:56 ►
trust will be honored. Nobody really knows if that’ll happen with Bitcoin or not.
00:42:02 ►
A more interesting thing about Bitcoin, and then I think I have to end, I’m out of time.
00:42:07 ►
The implementation of Bitcoin is a mathematical thing
00:42:11 ►
that depends on a solution
00:42:17 ►
to a long-standing problem in cryptography
00:42:20 ►
called the Byzantine Generals Problem.
00:42:24 ►
And what it means,
00:42:28 ►
the Byzantine Generals is a,
00:42:31 ►
suppose you have a city, Byzantium, and it’s surrounded by six different
00:42:36 ►
armies. And if they all attacked at the same time, they could take over the city.
00:42:41 ►
But if they attack at different times, the city can fight each
00:42:44 ►
one separately, the city will But if they attack at different times, the city can fight each one separately.
00:42:45 ►
The city will win. So how can those generals decide when to attack? Because if they send
00:42:53 ►
runners to each other and say, let’s do it on Monday, the city will send out spies and
00:42:58 ►
kill their runners and send substitute runners that say, oh, let’s do it on Thursday. How
00:43:03 ►
can they trust the messages they’re getting to
00:43:05 ►
and from each other?
00:43:07 ►
So, somebody came up
00:43:10 ►
with an inventive way
00:43:11 ►
to solve that problem of
00:43:13 ►
finding out when you have a
00:43:15 ►
majority consensus on a question.
00:43:18 ►
And with Bitcoin, the majority
00:43:20 ►
consensus they’re coming to is
00:43:21 ►
who, which accounts
00:43:23 ►
own which Bitcoins. But but you could use that same
00:43:28 ►
technology to to answer other questions like which candidates won this election or which social
00:43:37 ►
policies should be followed or which drugs should be legal, or whatever.
00:43:48 ►
So I think a much more interesting thing will be how to apply that distributed consensus-making technology
00:43:54 ►
to new social problems,
00:43:55 ►
in addition to just how you make a currency.
00:44:00 ►
Okay, I think I’m out of time.
00:44:02 ►
Thank you all so much.
00:44:06 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:44:13 ►
So, let me begin my comments by saying that I know there are a lot of our fellow salonners who are still in school,
00:44:20 ►
whether it’s high school, college, or grad school.
00:44:25 ►
of the school, whether it’s high school, college, or grad school. And if that’s where you are right now, and if you have any interest at all in laying the foundations for the type of trusting networks
00:44:31 ►
that John was just talking about, well then now, right now, is the time for you to begin your work.
00:44:37 ►
Don’t think that you should wait until you get some kind of a corporate job where you’ll be able
00:44:42 ►
to work on projects like that. This is work that’s going to be done in basements, garages, and bedrooms.
00:44:48 ►
And I’m not just talking here about the technical side of this.
00:44:52 ►
I’m also talking about all of the different kind of things that need to be considered
00:44:56 ►
when building the tech.
00:44:58 ►
The policies and procedures that are going to be required are not the exclusive realm
00:45:02 ►
of us geeks.
00:45:03 ►
Everybody needs to get involved, and I’m positive, at least as positive as I am about anything, Thank you. a lot of our fellow salonners, like me, who were working in some area of networking when
00:45:25 ►
Tim Berners-Lee published the initial specs for the web. I still remember sitting at a
00:45:30 ►
bar one night and talking with some guys that I was working with at the time, and we were
00:45:34 ►
all thinking of ways to implement that spec. But, you know, we got bogged down in our day
00:45:39 ►
jobs and were too tired at night to think about it much anymore, and eventually we just
00:45:44 ►
kind of forgot about it.
00:45:45 ►
And I’m sure that the same scenario took place thousands of times all over the tech world.
00:45:50 ►
But down in southern Illinois, not far from the farm on which my dearly departed mother was born,
00:45:56 ►
there was a grad student who inspired a bunch of guys to write a GUI interface for the web spec.
00:46:02 ►
They called it Mozilla, and subsequently they left the university
00:46:05 ►
and founded a company called Netscape. They actually did something about their ideas, and
00:46:10 ►
you should too. You know, you’re every bit as capable of working out some of these things as
00:46:16 ►
was Mark Andreessen and his friends. And sometime I’ll have to remember to tell you about the day
00:46:21 ►
that I was fortunate to get to work with Mark when he was at Netscape and I was at Verizon. But let it suffice for now to say that he is one of the kindest,
00:46:31 ►
most gentle, and all-around nice guys that I’ve ever met, unlike some of the other inflated egos
00:46:36 ►
that came out of the dot-com era. But it shows that nice guys like you and the rest of our
00:46:42 ►
salonners are capable of doing great things.
00:46:45 ►
We don’t have to be jerks in order to get our way in the tech world.
00:46:50 ►
Now, where was I?
00:46:52 ►
Oh, referring back to what John said in his talk about Google knowing whenever you visit what he calls a normal website.
00:47:01 ►
And what I want to do is to let you know that the salon site is definitely not normal.
00:47:06 ►
Ever since I began these podcasts, there haven’t been any connections to Google that I know about
00:47:11 ►
anyhow. I don’t allow Google Ads, nor have I installed any Google Analytics on any of my sites.
00:47:18 ►
But now, after listening to John’s talk, I remember that I do have a search box that is
00:47:23 ►
powered by Google, as well as their
00:47:25 ►
code to translate the page into 50 or more languages. So here’s a question I have for any
00:47:31 ►
of our fellow salonners who might know something about this. The question is, do those two services
00:47:37 ►
also tie a particular user back to the files that Google already has on them? So if you know the
00:47:44 ►
answer to that question,
00:47:45 ►
I and all of our fellow slaughters will be much obliged if you’d let me know.
00:47:50 ►
If it’s a problem, I’m going to get rid of those two services right away.
00:47:54 ►
Now that I’m on the topic of Google,
00:47:57 ►
I guess it’s a good chance for me to also mention one of my pet peeves.
00:48:01 ►
And that is the fact that so many people seem to not care about
00:48:05 ►
this at all.
00:48:06 ►
What I’m talking about is personal privacy.
00:48:10 ►
Here’s the thing about keeping as much of your personal information private as possible,
00:48:15 ►
and why people don’t.
00:48:17 ►
It’s been my experience that most people are just simply too lazy to do so.
00:48:22 ►
For example, on quite a few occasions I’ve offered to my friends and
00:48:26 ►
family a free unlimited storage email account if they will just give up Gmail. And yet, not one,
00:48:34 ►
not a single one of them has taken me up on the offer simply because they are so happy about
00:48:41 ►
getting all of those so-called free services by letting Google have access to everything that they do online.
00:48:47 ►
They actually think that those goodies make it worth having no personal privacy anymore.
00:48:53 ►
It’s insane, I tell them, but nonetheless, they pass on my offer.
00:48:57 ►
Now, I realize that there are quite a few of our fellow slaughters who currently work for Google,
00:49:02 ►
and I want you to know that I in no way mean to suggest that you aren’t honest
00:49:06 ►
or that you’re doing something wrong.
00:49:09 ►
Heck, I spent 11 years working for a company that’s, well, it’s now called Verizon.
00:49:15 ►
I wasn’t a bad guy, but I do admit that even while I worked for them,
00:49:18 ►
they were doing, well, a lot of things that I thought were just flat wrong.
00:49:22 ►
But as you know, us peons who work in the
00:49:25 ►
belly of the beast and keep the wheels turning for them, well, we actually have next to no power to
00:49:32 ►
change things in these huge beasts. And yet we can’t quit our jobs because our families are
00:49:37 ►
depending on our support. So I’m not trying to impinge on the reputations of any corporate
00:49:43 ►
employees, at least employees that are below the level of the top management.
00:49:47 ►
But if you happen to be Larry or Sergi, well, shame on you.
00:49:52 ►
Did you know that if you’re using a phone that is running the Android operating system
00:49:56 ►
that Google so generously gives away,
00:49:59 ►
that every time you access a Wi-Fi network for which you have the password,
00:50:03 ►
well, your password’s being forwarded
00:50:05 ►
to Google, who now most likely has the access passwords to millions of private Wi-Fi networks.
00:50:11 ►
So I ask you, Larry and Sergey, is that an example of what you mean by do no evil?
00:50:17 ►
Shame on you guys. You’re giving us geeks a really bad name. Now, getting back to the email problem, while I can’t provide accounts
00:50:26 ►
for everyone here in the salon, any 12-year-old can set up their own account with a web hosting
00:50:32 ►
company for around six bucks a month or so, and have unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth
00:50:37 ►
transfer, and a thousand or more email accounts with unlimited storage. So there’s really no
00:50:43 ►
excuse for you and a few of your friends to
00:50:45 ►
not get together and, you know, pay a few dollars a year to escape the evil empires of Google, Yahoo,
00:50:51 ►
Apple, and all the rest of the big corporate email providers. As for another issue that John raised,
00:50:59 ►
that of bringing war criminals like Bush and Cheney and the cowardly Obama, a serial killer who uses drones
00:51:05 ►
as his preferred murder weapon, well, as much as I would like to see the whole lot of them put in
00:51:10 ►
prison for life, that’s simply not going to happen. So the only thing that we can do is to teach our
00:51:16 ►
children and grandchildren that these men and their accomplices have completely perverted the
00:51:22 ►
U.S. Constitution by starting wars of aggression,
00:51:25 ►
making human torture a standard American practice,
00:51:28 ►
and who have murdered several thousand innocent civilians,
00:51:31 ►
including hundreds of very young children,
00:51:34 ►
with these cowardly drone attacks.
00:51:36 ►
These are men whose names should live in infamy.
00:51:41 ►
But the only way that’s going to happen
00:51:42 ►
is if you take the teaching of history into your
00:51:45 ►
own hands. We should never let our descendants forget what horrible people have taken charge
00:51:50 ►
of this country. But I guess I’d better move on before my blood pressure shoots up again like it
00:51:57 ►
does every time that I think about those clowns in Washington. However, there is one last thing
00:52:02 ►
that I want to mention, and at the risk of once again alienating our fellow salonners who have a strong dislike of me mentioning anything in the realm of geeky tech things,
00:52:13 ►
well, I’d like to point out one more time that we just heard John say that he expects the government goons to begin attempting to infect our computers with malware.
00:52:22 ►
to infect our computers with malware.
00:52:26 ►
And since I’ve already had a bad malware experience,
00:52:28 ►
I know how totally insane it can make you until you find a way to clear it from your machine.
00:52:31 ►
So I’m going to say it just once again,
00:52:33 ►
it’s time for you to dump Windows and move on to Linux.
00:52:37 ►
No viruses and no malware that I’ve discovered so far,
00:52:41 ►
unlike Windows, which seems to be a virus and malware magnet.
00:52:45 ►
Okay, end of techie stuff.
00:52:48 ►
Now, just two more things and I’m out of here.
00:52:50 ►
First of all, I’d like to apologize to several people that I’ve had a brief email exchange
00:52:55 ►
with and then just kind of dropped the ball.
00:52:58 ►
The fact is that my intentions are good, but I just can’t keep up with it all.
00:53:02 ►
In fact, last weekend, Dr. Charlie Grobe stopped
00:53:05 ►
by for a visit, and he said that the same thing is true with him, that there’s just too much email
00:53:10 ►
to keep up with. So it’s kind of a real hit and miss proposition with us both. It isn’t that we
00:53:16 ►
mean to be rude, it’s just that, well, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything
00:53:20 ►
that needs doing. Actually, there have been also quite a few offers to help out here in
00:53:25 ►
the salon in all kinds of ways that I haven’t been able to respond to, which means that sometime in
00:53:31 ►
the years ahead when I finally have to give up doing these podcasts myself, well, when that day
00:53:36 ►
arrives, I know that there’s going to be more than enough people to pick up the baton and keep the
00:53:41 ►
salon going indefinitely. So I really do appreciate all of your offers,
00:53:45 ►
even though I may not be responding to you in ways that you expect. In fact, one of the really
00:53:51 ►
wonderful offers I’ve received comes from our friends at the London Real podcast. That’s
00:53:57 ►
l-o-n-d-o-n-r-e-a-l, londonreal.tv podcast. And in fact, I’ve already played one of the interviews that they sent me.
00:54:06 ►
And these guys have made more of their great podcasts available for me to use here in the salon.
00:54:11 ►
But at the moment, I’m already stacked up with a big backlog of talks to podcasts.
00:54:16 ►
And so what I want to do is to point you to their program, which, as I said, you can find at LondonReal.tv.
00:54:23 ►
They’ve produced a whole raft of truly fascinating podcasts
00:54:27 ►
and are one of my favorite stops on the net.
00:54:30 ►
So rather than having me repodcast some of their programs
00:54:33 ►
instead why don’t you just surf on over to their site right now
00:54:37 ►
and subscribe to their show.
00:54:39 ►
I’m sure that you won’t be disappointed.
00:54:42 ►
And finally I want to mention once again
00:54:44 ►
the Psychedelic Salon magazine.
00:54:46 ►
It’s free, by the way, and no longer do you have to access Flipboard to read it.
00:54:51 ►
Just go to our program notes, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us,
00:54:56 ►
and right near the top of the sidebar on the right-hand side, you’ll see a link for it.
00:55:00 ►
In fact, here are just a few of the most recent items that I’ve posted there.
00:55:05 ►
These are the headlines, anyhow. Why the elderly should get marijuana. Universities warned of
00:55:12 ►
explosion and use of smart drugs. Mexico City considers creating marijuana smoking clubs.
00:55:19 ►
Cannabis Career Institute hits Chicago to help residents cash in on the new gold rush.
00:55:27 ►
Institute hits Chicago to help residents cash in on the new gold rush. And a 27-year-old man gets 20 years of hard labor for half an ounce of pot. And there are over now over another 280
00:55:36 ►
articles like that in our magazine, and they’re all there for your reading pleasure. Well, that’s
00:55:42 ►
going to be it for today. I’ve got to go back and still try to
00:55:45 ►
beat this little head cold that I’ve got. So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from
00:55:51 ►
Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.