Program Notes
Guest speaker: John Gilmore
[NOTE: All quotations are by John Gilmore.]
“I thank medical marijuana for breaking down social resistance to recreational marijuana.”
“In medical marijuana states it was the gay community that developed political skills in working for their own liberation that then applied those skills to liberate marijuana in a medical context in the aids fight. Those people blazed a trail for us.”
“I think encouraging courage among people who are in the know to actually say what they know is a way to have positive social change. It’s a way that the powerful are vulnerable to the ordinary people.”
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Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
By John Markoff
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And today we get to listen
00:00:25 ►
to John Gilmore’s 2014 Palenque Norte lecture that was held at this year’s Burning Man event.
00:00:32 ►
Now over the years I’ve only been able to get a hold of a very few other talks by John, but
00:00:36 ►
whenever I do get one I podcast it. While John has had a long and productive career in the tech
00:00:42 ►
industry, today he’s probably best known outside
00:00:45 ►
of Silicon Valley as a co-founder of the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And if you don’t
00:00:51 ►
know about EFF, then well, what’s wrong with you? Of all the organizations that are working to keep
00:00:57 ►
cyberspace free, EFF is without a doubt, at least in my mind, the leader in the field.
00:01:07 ►
And by the way, here’s a little trivia for you.
00:01:10 ►
The other two co-founders of EFF are Mitch Kapoor,
00:01:15 ►
who, by the way, is the very first computer celebrity whose name I learned,
00:01:18 ►
and the other is John Perry Barlow,
00:01:21 ►
who, whether you know it or not, is indirectly remembered in the introduction to each and every one of these podcasts.
00:01:25 ►
You see, John Perry Barlow is credited with being the first person to use the word cyberdelic
00:01:31 ►
in print.
00:01:32 ►
And I am very pleased to mention that John Perry was also in attendance at one of the
00:01:37 ►
very first Planck and Orte lectures back in 2003.
00:01:41 ►
It was the Alex and Alison Gray talk, if I remember correctly. Now when I return,
00:01:47 ►
after we listen to John Gilmore’s talk right now, I’ll let you know about an interesting
00:01:51 ►
little coincidence from my past in which, unbeknownst to John, he played a part. And
00:01:57 ►
now let’s join Christopher Pezza as he introduces today’s speaker.
00:02:11 ►
introduces today’s speaker. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Palenque Norte. Day two. Thank you all so much for coming out. Just so you know, we’ll be doing pictures and photography, video in here,
00:02:17 ►
and these talks will all be podcast on the Psychedelic Salon after Burning Man. So if you
00:02:23 ►
want to go back and listen to them or check out Talks You Missed, you can find it there.
00:02:27 ►
So I’m very happy to introduce John Gilmore this morning.
00:02:31 ►
John is an activist and an entrepreneur with an incredible history.
00:02:35 ►
He was employee number five for Sun Microsystems, went on to get really deep in the encryption
00:02:42 ►
world, and then eventually found the EFF with a couple other people,
00:02:47 ►
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
00:02:55 ►
He’s also a drug policy activist
00:02:57 ►
and a board member for the Multidisciplinary Association
00:03:00 ►
for Psychedelic Studies, MAPS,
00:03:02 ►
and we’re honored to have him with us here today.
00:03:05 ►
So with that, I’ll give you to John.
00:03:07 ►
Wow. Well, thank you for that applause.
00:03:10 ►
How many people are EFF members?
00:03:12 ►
Yeah. All right.
00:03:15 ►
Thanks so much for the support.
00:03:17 ►
We can’t do it without you, right?
00:03:19 ►
We had the idea that we needed to work on civil rights and civil liberties in cyberspace,
00:03:27 ►
and we’ve now been struggling along working on that for more than 20 years.
00:03:33 ►
But what it takes is cultural change.
00:03:36 ►
What it takes is people like you understanding your rights
00:03:39 ►
and exerting them and explaining them and teaching them to the next generation.
00:03:45 ►
So thank you all so much for the support, and thank you for showing up.
00:03:52 ►
So this is a question-and-answer talk.
00:03:55 ►
I can never tell what people want me to talk about because I do so many different things,
00:04:00 ►
so I ask you guys what you want me to talk about.
00:04:03 ►
So as he explained, I’ve spent 14 years working in drug policy,
00:04:08 ►
trying to legalize pot and psychedelics,
00:04:11 ►
get 600,000 people out of prison every year for that.
00:04:15 ►
I’ve also been working on electronic civil rights.
00:04:18 ►
I’m a free software activist
00:04:20 ►
and worked on and maintained major pieces of free software.
00:04:24 ►
I’m a business guy from Silicon software. I’m a business guy
00:04:26 ►
from Silicon Valley. I’m a programmer and a geek. There’s all kinds of things we could
00:04:31 ►
talk about. What do you want to hear? Raise your hands. Talk to me. Yeah. Oh, sure. He
00:04:36 ►
said, it looks like we’re heading toward the end of the war on pot. So are we ever going
00:04:41 ►
to fix this for psychedelics? Who else? Yeah. Okay.
00:04:49 ►
How much do I attribute my out-of-the-box thinking to psychedelics?
00:04:50 ►
In the back.
00:04:51 ►
Okay.
00:04:55 ►
What kind of technology has been influenced by psychedelics? And can I name a few?
00:04:57 ►
Let’s see.
00:04:58 ►
There.
00:04:58 ►
Okay.
00:04:59 ►
Could I speak to encryption and how it can go forward at a grassroots level?
00:05:03 ►
Yeah.
00:05:03 ►
Right.
00:05:04 ►
So in cannabis
00:05:05 ►
policy, rather than going for true freedom, we seem to be heading toward a regulatory
00:05:09 ►
model that has a lot of rules, regs, and bullshit. And what do I think about that? Okay. Yeah.
00:05:21 ►
Okay. Merging of tech and psychedelics into other ways to alter our brains. Yeah. Okay. Merging of tech and psychedelics into other ways to alter our brains.
00:05:27 ►
Yeah.
00:05:29 ►
Okay.
00:05:29 ►
Freedom in cyberspace.
00:05:31 ►
Should we worry about Big Brother when we’re talking about him?
00:05:35 ►
You.
00:05:35 ►
Interesting question.
00:05:37 ►
So young hacktivists tend to be into dissociatives and hallucinogens.
00:05:41 ►
How do those effects relate to the mind of a person who’s a coder?
00:05:47 ►
Way in the back. Okay. Autism, psychedelics, and technology. And there is a nexus there.
00:05:55 ►
Next guy way in the back. Okay. Cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, an interesting topic. How about over here? Before I became internet
00:06:08 ►
famous, how did I make the leap to what? Oh, okay. How did I make my living before I got
00:06:14 ►
famous? Clearly, I’m just living on my fame at this point. Though, you know, I did talk
00:06:22 ►
to a guy last night who says, I just can’t buy a drink in a bar anymore.
00:06:27 ►
People just treat me everywhere.
00:06:29 ►
His name is Danger Ranger.
00:06:31 ►
There.
00:06:33 ►
Okay.
00:06:33 ►
Big challenges that EFF will face in the future.
00:06:37 ►
There.
00:06:38 ►
Right.
00:06:39 ►
So what are the health effects of psychedelics if we legalize them,
00:06:42 ►
and how much is too much, et cetera?
00:06:45 ►
Okay. Yeah. What’s the future effects of psychedelics if we legalize them, and how much is too much, et cetera? Okay, yeah.
00:06:46 ►
What’s the future for WikiLeaks,
00:06:48 ►
and will we be able to shift government policy just by leaking things?
00:06:53 ►
Right, how much should the average person be afraid of NSA and government spying?
00:06:58 ►
How about you?
00:07:00 ►
I’m not sure I quite heard you.
00:07:02 ►
Say again?
00:07:03 ►
Okay, so adding to the blockchain question, what are the effects of laws on crypto and crypto law?
00:07:12 ►
What do you mean by that?
00:07:14 ►
Right. What strategies can we use to avoid governments shutting down cryptocurrencies?
00:07:20 ►
Group psychedelic sessions over the Internet. What tech should we build for that?
00:07:25 ►
Well, you know, it’s remarkably similar to the tech we would need
00:07:29 ►
to make group participatory democracy sessions
00:07:33 ►
or reforming the government sessions or things like that.
00:07:38 ►
Pragmatic steps for non-techies on what topic?
00:07:42 ►
On Internet freedom.
00:07:44 ►
Future of quantum
00:07:46 ►
computing’s effect on encryption.
00:07:48 ►
That’s a pretty easy one. I don’t know.
00:07:52 ►
How does the war on
00:07:54 ►
terrorism impact the war on drugs
00:07:55 ►
in the U.S.? Good one.
00:07:58 ►
Okay, my personal
00:07:59 ►
possession as a computer scientist.
00:08:02 ►
Okay.
00:08:03 ►
It sounds like you guys are tending to quiet
00:08:05 ►
down. Maybe I can do some talking now. Well, let me start at the top and jump around a
00:08:17 ►
bit. The war on pot is showing some signs of ending. I would say, you know, we have two states
00:08:26 ►
where we’ve legalized pot under state law,
00:08:29 ►
and that’s been wonderful,
00:08:30 ►
and it’s opened a lot of people’s eyes.
00:08:34 ►
There are still 48 states and a bunch more territories
00:08:38 ►
and the monolithic federal government
00:08:40 ►
to break down the Berlin Wall in,
00:08:43 ►
so there’s still a lot of work to be done.
00:08:46 ►
But at least, yeah.
00:08:51 ►
After my first 10 years of working on drug policy,
00:08:52 ►
I got very disappointed.
00:08:56 ►
And I said, should I keep working on this?
00:09:00 ►
Like, 10 years, we’ve gone from 5 medical marijuana states in that time to 15.
00:09:02 ►
We haven’t legalized any marijuana anywhere. We haven’t legalized
00:09:06 ►
any drugs. We haven’t gotten anybody out of prison except a few medical marijuana patients.
00:09:11 ►
What are we, you know, is this really worth my time or should I go back and do some more
00:09:15 ►
tech or something? And, you know, just about when I got disillusioned is when it started
00:09:21 ►
to change. So, you know, maybe it’s darkest before
00:09:26 ►
the dawn, and now we’re seeing a bit of dawn. But the question, so besides continuing to
00:09:33 ►
do all the work to free up pot, now that the public is starting to be with us, it still
00:09:38 ►
takes an immense amount of work of convincing state legislators to change the law in half of the states where
00:09:46 ►
we don’t have citizen initiatives, right? In actually writing initiatives, bringing
00:09:52 ►
people who care about the issue together to form a common cause that we can actually get
00:09:57 ►
a majority vote for to change it in a given state. Raising the money to do those campaigns,
00:10:04 ►
to run the ads, to convince the people who are sitting on the fence
00:10:06 ►
to make sure we win those elections.
00:10:09 ►
Besides all of that work, that’s just for pot.
00:10:13 ►
What about psychedelics and the other drugs?
00:10:18 ►
Well, pot is three-quarters of the problem.
00:10:24 ►
And it took me a while to notice this.
00:10:29 ►
If you look at the popularity of different illegal drugs,
00:10:33 ►
three times as many people are pot users
00:10:38 ►
as all the other illegal drugs put together.
00:10:42 ►
Which means if you can solve this for pot,
00:10:46 ►
you’ve taken three quarters of the arrests,
00:10:48 ►
three quarters of the enforcement money,
00:10:51 ►
three quarters of the problem out of the criminal domain
00:10:54 ►
and into a more social or medical
00:10:56 ►
or some other religious whatever kind of domain.
00:11:01 ►
And I think that can have the effect
00:11:06 ►
of taking some of the wind out of the sails
00:11:08 ►
of the prohibitionist movement
00:11:10 ►
of taking away a bunch of the billions of dollars a year
00:11:14 ►
that are spent on this
00:11:15 ►
now
00:11:19 ►
the way we’ve made progress
00:11:23 ►
in the pot laws has been by convincing the public that they’re doing more harm than good.
00:11:35 ►
It’s basically taking the prohibition analogy, saying, well, it didn’t work for alcohol.
00:11:41 ►
It doesn’t seem to be working for pot.
00:11:42 ►
It’s filling the jails and prisons.
00:11:44 ►
It’s made us the biggest jailer in the world. And it’s wasting all this money. And it’s
00:11:49 ►
destroying a bunch of people’s lives. It’s totally racist. Maybe we can think of something
00:11:55 ►
better. The public is with us, is coming to be with us on pot. But if you do polls, when should LSD be legal? Should LSD be legal?
00:12:07 ►
10% of people will agree with you. We’re not going to do this in the voting booth. Not
00:12:12 ►
in the next 5, 10, 15 years probably. But there are other paths. And I ran across one
00:12:23 ►
of these paths years ago through a guy named Rick Doblin
00:12:26 ►
who runs MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
00:12:32 ►
Back in the 80s, he got really mad
00:12:35 ►
when the federal government put MDMA on Schedule 1
00:12:38 ►
because he said it doesn’t qualify for Schedule 1.
00:12:42 ►
It has medical uses.
00:12:43 ►
We have 1,000 therapists
00:12:45 ►
who are using it with their patients right now. And he tried to organize testimony, and
00:12:51 ►
he actually did succeed in rolling back the emergency scheduling of MDMA. But the DEA
00:12:59 ►
just went back and did a non-emergency scheduling and made it illegal. But he is a very persistent guy,
00:13:06 ►
and he’s been working now for more than getting up on two decades.
00:13:13 ►
He did a master’s thesis at Harvard
00:13:18 ►
on the regulation of psychedelic research,
00:13:22 ►
and he interviewed people in the FDA and the DEA
00:13:25 ►
and tried to figure out why did psychedelic research get shut down in the 70s.
00:13:30 ►
And what he figured out was it wasn’t a conspiracy theory.
00:13:34 ►
It wasn’t political.
00:13:35 ►
It was something much more mundane.
00:13:38 ►
The people in the FDA who were approving all the scientists to do psychedelic research
00:13:43 ►
did such a good job that they got promoted
00:13:46 ►
into a much more important role working on cancer drugs
00:13:51 ►
or something like that.
00:13:53 ►
And they were replaced by much more conservative,
00:13:56 ►
sort of drone-ish people who just started saying,
00:13:59 ►
no, no, don’t bother with that.
00:14:01 ►
That’s not important.
00:14:02 ►
We don’t want to see that research.
00:14:05 ►
Right?
00:14:06 ►
So his thesis was that if we actually make the case to the FDA,
00:14:12 ►
they would approve restarting psychedelic research.
00:14:16 ►
And that was his thesis, and they gave him a degree for it.
00:14:21 ►
And we have proved it out in the real world.
00:14:24 ►
It took us five years to get permission
00:14:26 ►
to do the first trials of MDMA in patients for post-traumatic stress disorder. And we
00:14:32 ►
did that study back in the 2000s. And it succeeded and had remarkably good results in South Carolina
00:14:41 ►
with Dr. Michael Mithoffer. Since then, we have started,
00:14:46 ►
we completely ran another study in Switzerland,
00:14:48 ►
and we have four studies in process now.
00:14:51 ►
The FDA has a process of approving drugs for pharma companies
00:14:56 ►
that if you invent a new drug and you think it’s good for something,
00:15:01 ►
you go through phase one studies
00:15:02 ►
to prove that it’s safe for people to take. Phase two studies to prove that it’s effective at solving somebody’s disease or
00:15:10 ►
problem. And then phase three studies in a broader population to look for odd side effects and
00:15:16 ►
replicate those studies, the first two, and make sure that it’s really good before it gets let out.
00:15:22 ►
If you go through those studies and you scientifically
00:15:25 ►
prove that it actually helps with a disease or condition, the FDA is required to approve the drug.
00:15:34 ►
And if the FDA approves a drug for marketing, the DEA is required to reschedule it out of Schedule 1 by law. And so Rick’s thesis was that if we went through all that work,
00:15:49 ►
would we get screwed by politics at the end where they would go,
00:15:52 ►
no, we’ll just change the rules, we won’t let that happen.
00:15:56 ►
And the research showed that it wasn’t political last time
00:16:00 ►
and that if we actually go through these steps,
00:16:03 ►
we will have career bureaucrats
00:16:06 ►
all the way up in the FDA that will say, no, the right thing to do is to do what the law
00:16:12 ►
says and make it legal and let therapists use it with their patients.
00:16:17 ►
And we’ve been following that path.
00:16:21 ►
As I said before, we have four studies in process process now each with something between 10 and 25 patients
00:16:27 ►
one is in Vancouver one’s in Boulder one is in Israel and the fourth in South Carolina
00:16:34 ►
when those studies are finished in about a year and a half we’ll submit the data from those studies
00:16:41 ►
to the FDA and apply to do our phase three, to design our phase three studies.
00:16:46 ►
And when those are done in about 2021 or 2022, we expect the FDA to make MDMA legal in the United
00:16:55 ►
States for use in medicine. This is the first time anyone has tried to do this with MDMA.
00:17:01 ►
Now, one of the reasons that traditional pharma companies haven’t wanted to do this with MDMA is because it’s off patent.
00:17:09 ►
So there’s not as much financial gain that you can get from being the guy who spends all the money to push it through the FDA.
00:17:18 ►
Another reason is big pharma companies are making large amounts of money selling antidepressants to PTSD patients,
00:17:26 ►
which they have to take every day to keep their symptoms under control,
00:17:31 ►
and it doesn’t actually resolve their issue.
00:17:33 ►
In our trials, we’re finding that with two or three doses of MDMA
00:17:39 ►
in a supportive therapeutic setting,
00:17:41 ►
you can make huge progress in somebody’s PTSD and in some cases cure it.
00:17:48 ►
And there’s a lot less money to be made in selling somebody three doses and then they don’t need
00:17:54 ►
any more. So we’re doing it as a non-profit, as a public benefit thing. We’re raising money from the public to make this happen. And so far, it’s working.
00:18:08 ►
And so we think that the medical path is a way to get this first MDMA
00:18:14 ►
and then other psychedelics legalized.
00:18:18 ►
The Hefter Research Institute is sort of a sister nonprofit
00:18:23 ►
that has been working on similar things with psilocybin.
00:18:27 ►
And they are currently doing clinical trials using psilocybin for a variety of conditions,
00:18:33 ►
trying to figure out which ones they’re going to zero in on to try to get FDA approval.
00:18:38 ►
We have researchers who want to also do this with LSD. And there are, you know, Sasha Shulgin,
00:18:48 ►
among other people, gave us over his lifetime hundreds and hundreds of psychoactive compounds,
00:18:55 ►
some of which will be useful for things like this and that can be tested and used to help people.
00:19:08 ►
So she’s asked,
00:19:10 ►
so how do you make the transition from medical to recreational?
00:19:14 ►
Because a lot of people in the room will never need it medically.
00:19:21 ►
Well, first, I suspect probably 10% to 15% of the people in this room will need to use psychedelics medically sometime in their life.
00:19:26 ►
Incidence of PTSD is remarkably high, and people have a lot of other conditions.
00:19:31 ►
Once we get MDMA approved for PTSD,
00:19:36 ►
therapists can choose to use it for many other conditions.
00:19:40 ►
The feds regulate the dispensing of so-called dangerous drugs or prescription drugs,
00:19:46 ►
but they don’t regulate what medical purposes a doctor can put them to.
00:19:51 ►
That’s regulated in the states.
00:19:54 ►
And so they call it off-label prescription, and it is extremely common.
00:19:59 ►
Most of the drugs that your doctor would prescribe to you
00:20:02 ►
have never been tested for the condition that
00:20:06 ►
they prescribed it for. The doctor tried it with some patients, discovered it seemed to
00:20:10 ►
work, then the patients get better, and they keep prescribing it. And so I expect a lot
00:20:16 ►
of that to happen. There’s another path to social acceptance of psychedelics,
00:20:25 ►
which is the religious path,
00:20:27 ►
and other people are blazing those trails.
00:20:31 ►
Initially, the Native American church,
00:20:33 ►
which was one of the religions founded by Native Americans
00:20:38 ►
for the sacramental use of peyote,
00:20:41 ►
they succeeded in winning Supreme Court cases decades ago that gave them the
00:20:48 ►
constitutional right to use that sacrament in their religion. Those decisions have been
00:20:55 ►
upheld and extended by ayahuasca churches, which have brought native religions from Brazil to the United States to use ayahuasca in religious
00:21:08 ►
settings, that acceptance is sort of the result of the religious loophole in the Constitution
00:21:18 ►
that says the government can’t prohibit the exercise of religion. It doesn’t say they can’t prohibit the exercise of recreation,
00:21:27 ►
right? But as these substances, as I really credit medical marijuana for breaking down
00:21:36 ►
social resistance to recreational marijuana. When people have been exposed to 30 or 40 years of government propaganda that said,
00:21:47 ►
this is evil, one toke, and you ruined your life, etc., etc.,
00:21:52 ►
it’s hard for them to overcome that much cultural conditioning.
00:21:58 ►
And what overcame it for many people is having someone who they love and trust,
00:22:03 ►
some member of their family or their
00:22:05 ►
close friends, who used marijuana when recommended by a doctor because they got cancer, because
00:22:10 ►
they had AIDS or something, and who didn’t turn into a dope fiend and ruin their life.
00:22:18 ►
And they realized, they’ve been lying to me about this. Maybe marijuana is okay
00:22:26 ►
even for people who aren’t sick.
00:22:29 ►
And in medical marijuana states
00:22:30 ►
where, and I have to say
00:22:33 ►
it was the gay community
00:22:35 ►
that developed the political skills
00:22:37 ►
in working for their own liberation
00:22:39 ►
that then applied those skills
00:22:42 ►
to liberate marijuana
00:22:43 ►
in a medical context in the AIDS fight.
00:22:46 ►
Those people blazed a trail for us.
00:22:49 ►
And when they made it legal in a given state,
00:22:54 ►
public support for recreational marijuana would go up about 1% a year
00:22:58 ►
in any state where you had medical use.
00:23:01 ►
And I think it was because people had personal experience
00:23:05 ►
to overcome the propaganda. So as we get medical use of psychedelics, I think there may be
00:23:13 ►
a corresponding shift in public attitudes that say, well, if MDMA was good for you to
00:23:19 ►
take to resolve that issue, why is it so bad to take it if you don’t have an issue?
00:23:24 ►
to resolve that issue, why is it so bad to take it if you don’t have an issue?
00:23:28 ►
That’s my hope and my theory.
00:23:34 ►
So the question is, you know, some people, whether for biological reasons or whatever,
00:23:38 ►
can’t handle some drugs.
00:23:43 ►
And public policy has been set to deny those drugs to everybody because some people can’t handle it.
00:23:45 ►
And how do you adapt that to a new regime where you want people to be able to have it?
00:23:52 ►
It’s an interesting question.
00:23:54 ►
I mean, there are many, not only substances, but there are many activities in life that some people can’t handle.
00:24:02 ►
Some people have addictive personalities, whether genetically or through the experiences they’ve had.
00:24:08 ►
They can’t handle alcohol in their lives.
00:24:11 ►
They can’t handle some legal drugs.
00:24:14 ►
They can’t handle some illegal drugs.
00:24:16 ►
And we’ve developed some social mechanisms
00:24:18 ►
to try to support those people when they have trouble
00:24:22 ►
and to provide safe context for them and to
00:24:25 ►
educate everybody to say, okay, this is something you have to watch out for. If you have a history
00:24:32 ►
of compulsive gambling in your family, maybe you should not move to Las Vegas.
00:24:40 ►
In the back. Oh, yeah. Hello. Okay, so basically I tried curing my PTSD with various psychotherapy,
00:24:48 ►
all types of Eastern and Western medicine, spiritual, pharmaceutical,
00:24:52 ►
but the MDMA really worked for me.
00:24:54 ►
And I think that waiting until 2012, I mean 2022, is a bit too late for most.
00:25:00 ►
And I’m trained in psychology, and I recently, you know, illegally,
00:25:05 ►
did a session with my friend who suffered from extreme depression uh with mdma and it was her first
00:25:10 ►
time on any drug and it really really did work for her as well it was very healing for her and
00:25:15 ►
i’m just saying that there’s so much um good things and like results in my life and other
00:25:20 ►
people’s lives i just think that 2022 is a bit too late. So how would we do this?
00:25:26 ►
Would we have to be necessarily illegal?
00:25:29 ►
Well, okay.
00:25:31 ►
So I’m really glad that MDMA was able to help you with PTSD
00:25:36 ►
and your friend with her depression.
00:25:40 ►
But actually what we’re doing would not have even solved your problem
00:25:44 ►
because we’re only trying to make it legal
00:25:46 ►
in the US and Europe
00:25:48 ►
we haven’t even reached out to Asia yet
00:25:50 ►
to try to work on those laws
00:25:51 ►
I wish we could do it by the stroke of a pen
00:25:55 ►
and just change it
00:25:56 ►
there is one person in the country who can do that
00:25:59 ►
his name’s not Obama actually
00:26:03 ►
it’s Eric Holder
00:26:04 ►
the Attorney General of the United States and his name’s not Obama, actually. It’s Eric Holder.
00:26:08 ►
He, the Attorney General of the United States,
00:26:11 ►
has written into the law, the drug laws,
00:26:14 ►
he has the personal authority to reschedule the drugs.
00:26:18 ►
Okay, he has delegated that down into the DEA, but if he had the balls and he thought it would stick,
00:26:22 ►
he could actually move MDMA or marijuana out of Schedule 1 today.
00:26:32 ►
I’ve actually seen his testimony to Congress about the federal reaction to the legalization of marijuana.
00:26:41 ►
And one of the congressmen pressed him on, on like why did you just put out these useless
00:26:46 ►
little memos that have no legal effect why don’t you do something that actually improves you know
00:26:52 ►
the law at the federal level and you know first it was interesting to have a congressman going
00:26:57 ►
why don’t you improve the marijuana laws but second he basically said we did what we did, I’m not going to say any more,
00:27:06 ►
and if you read between the lines,
00:27:07 ►
it’s because, I think,
00:27:11 ►
the anti-drug people in Congress
00:27:14 ►
would have changed the laws.
00:27:16 ►
If he had used the law to legalize pot,
00:27:20 ►
they would have changed it back.
00:27:21 ►
It’s too early for him to just do it with the stroke of a pen because there’d be a counter reaction. So he’s creeping up on it with small changes,
00:27:29 ►
small changes. And he’s hoping to make some, and he has actually like cracked the Berlin
00:27:35 ►
Wall of federal pot prohibition, right? It’s not down, but he’s made cracks in it. Now,
00:27:43 ►
Right. It’s not down, but he’s made cracks in it.
00:27:52 ►
Now, to your point of how do we there are many people suffering and how do we get them help before 2022?
00:27:58 ►
I wish I knew this is the fastest way I know to improve these laws. There are billions of dollars on the line for bureaucrats and researchers and the federal government, cops,
00:28:06 ►
prisons. All of those people don’t want to see their livelihood go away and they are resisting
00:28:11 ►
any kind of change here. The National Institute on Drug Abuse spends literally more than a billion
00:28:18 ►
dollars every year funding scientific studies to prove that illegal drugs are bad for you.
00:28:28 ►
All that money would disappear if these drugs were legal.
00:28:32 ►
All that patronage that they can hand out to their friends,
00:28:36 ►
all those staffers in those big buildings in Bethesda,
00:28:40 ►
would go away if we had our way and these things were legal.
00:28:44 ►
They don’t want to see that happen, at least not before they retire.
00:28:49 ►
So we’re pushing as fast as we can.
00:28:53 ►
And I also want to say, besides being thankful that you were helped with your condition,
00:28:59 ►
we’ve also heard from other people who tried MDMA on their own
00:29:04 ►
because they couldn’t get
00:29:05 ►
into trials and didn’t have positive experiences, didn’t have a sufficiently supportive context,
00:29:12 ►
weren’t able to do it with a therapist. They were, you know, they can re-trigger their
00:29:16 ►
PTSD and actually make it worse instead of better by sort of going into that experience without the proper support system.
00:29:25 ►
So I’m very glad that you had the support you needed and we’re trying to make this work
00:29:32 ►
for everybody. Thank you for the question and we’re a little short on time
00:29:48 ►
so let me pick a couple of others
00:29:51 ►
what technologies have been influenced by psychedelics
00:29:57 ►
well that’s an easy one
00:29:59 ►
John Markoff, a New York Times reporter
00:30:03 ►
who I happen to know, he lives in San Francisco, wrote a book about this.
00:30:06 ►
It’s called What the Dormouse Said.
00:30:09 ►
It’s a reference to the line in White Rabbit and to Alice in Wonderland.
00:30:18 ►
And he traced the roots of the 60s psychedelic culture in the roots of Silicon Valley and how a bunch of the inventions like the mouse and windows
00:30:30 ►
and networking, all of that stuff,
00:30:32 ►
was done by people who were serious trippers
00:30:35 ►
and who spent their weekends in Haight-Ashbury
00:30:40 ►
and their weekdays down in Silicon Valley inventing stuff.
00:30:46 ►
And so I recommend the book. And so that’s a quick answer to that. Let’s see. So freedom in cyberspace,
00:30:59 ►
should we worry about Big Brother as we’re talking in cyberspace? Yes, absolutely.
00:31:05 ►
We should be worried about this.
00:31:10 ►
Edward Snowden was not exiled in vain.
00:31:15 ►
He brought out information about what the national security agencies
00:31:20 ►
and the other secret agencies were doing.
00:31:24 ►
That really is relevant to our
00:31:27 ►
culture. And the relevant part is that the culture of spying and the culture of national
00:31:35 ►
security secrecy has expanded in the last 20 years from spying on diplomats, spying
00:31:43 ►
on international criminal syndicates, to spying on everybody, to spying on diplomats, spying on international criminal syndicates,
00:31:45 ►
to spying on everybody, to spying on every citizen,
00:31:49 ►
and to try to, in a misguided effort to make terrorism never happen or whatever,
00:31:57 ►
to try to treat everyone as if they will be potentially guilty at some time in their lives.
00:32:04 ►
as if they will be potentially guilty at some time in their lives. So to get around the Fourth Amendment issue of we can’t spy on them until a court says,
00:32:11 ►
so we’ll just spy on everyone all the time.
00:32:14 ►
We’ll keep all those records in big data centers.
00:32:16 ►
And then later on when that person becomes suspicious to us,
00:32:20 ►
we can see everything they’ve been doing for the last 20 years.
00:32:23 ►
us, we can see everything they’ve been doing for the last 20 years.
00:32:32 ►
You know, that as a theory, you know, it’s an interesting way to sort of deal with problems in your society, people who go rogue, people who do bad things to other people.
00:32:37 ►
The problem is it’s way too easy to abuse for political purposes, for hatred, for…
00:32:48 ►
We’ve seen too many societies where, quote-unquote,
00:32:53 ►
bad people got into power and then used that kind of information
00:32:57 ►
to round up their political enemies and cement their power over everybody.
00:33:04 ►
In my mind, merely collecting that information
00:33:07 ►
doesn’t immediately make a danger
00:33:12 ►
of it being used against us.
00:33:13 ►
I mean, it does make that danger.
00:33:16 ►
So far, we have no concrete examples
00:33:19 ►
of NSA taking that information about ordinary citizens
00:33:23 ►
and using it to do bad things to people like me or you or you.
00:33:28 ►
We haven’t caught them trying to be totalitarian with it.
00:33:34 ►
But the problem is they work for the White House.
00:33:39 ►
They work for the military.
00:33:42 ►
And if bad people get into the military and the White House
00:33:45 ►
and order them to use that for purposes
00:33:48 ►
that are not supportive of public democracy,
00:33:53 ►
they will follow those orders.
00:33:55 ►
They’ve shown it before.
00:33:56 ►
When Nixon ordered them to spy on drug dealers,
00:34:00 ►
they spied on drug dealers
00:34:01 ►
because the president said to do it.
00:34:04 ►
When Dick Cheney shepherded a memo through that Bush signed that said,
00:34:11 ►
you’re going to spy on every phone call in America and see who’s calling who
00:34:16 ►
because that will help stop the terrorists in 2001, they did that work.
00:34:22 ►
They didn’t come back and say, no, I’m sorry, Mr. President,
00:34:25 ►
we can’t do that because that would be destructive
00:34:28 ►
to an open society.
00:34:30 ►
They did it.
00:34:32 ►
They’re part of the military.
00:34:33 ►
They follow civilian orders.
00:34:36 ►
If civilians tell them to do destructive things,
00:34:39 ►
they’ll do them.
00:34:40 ►
And so we have to structure the system
00:34:43 ►
so that that temptation isn’t there.
00:34:46 ►
And part of the way we do that is by reforming what goes on in the government
00:34:51 ►
and preventing them from building those databases.
00:34:55 ►
And part of it is how we build our own infrastructures outside the government.
00:35:00 ►
We built the Internet in an environment where we weren’t thinking
00:35:05 ►
too hard about security
00:35:06 ►
we were pedaling as fast as we could
00:35:08 ►
just to get it to work at all
00:35:09 ►
and then to expand to global scale
00:35:12 ►
without breaking
00:35:13 ►
and it’s still working
00:35:16 ►
but now we have a little breathing room
00:35:18 ►
to think okay how do we go back and re-engineer it
00:35:20 ►
so that somebody
00:35:22 ►
in the middle of the wires there
00:35:24 ►
can watch what everybody’s
00:35:25 ►
doing now. How do we fix it so that they can’t tell what everybody’s doing?
00:35:30 ►
And I think the key there, we will never be able at the current state of technology to
00:35:38 ►
make encryption that cannot be penetrated that if you want to talk to him over the Internet and never
00:35:47 ►
be spied upon, no matter how much suspicion you come under by how powerful a person, we
00:35:55 ►
can’t actually do that. Right? There are too many ways in the physical world
00:36:01 ►
to spy on you, too many ways in the online world to subvert
00:36:05 ►
your systems, to go in through your friends, to have people who you trust who betray you.
00:36:17 ►
You can’t get absolute security no matter what you’re doing.
00:36:20 ►
But what we can do is try to engineer the infrastructure that everybody
00:36:25 ►
uses to avoid mass surveillance, to make it that they have to target individuals that
00:36:32 ►
they don’t have enough resources to target everybody.
00:36:36 ►
And so that is the realm that I’m trying to work in and catalyze things in.
00:36:43 ►
So, for example, HTTPS Everywhere is a plug-in
00:36:46 ►
you can put in your browser. It’s written by EFF. And any time you access a website
00:36:54 ►
that offers encryption, it will switch you to the encrypted site so that you, your communication
00:37:00 ►
with Facebook or Google or Yahoo or whoever or another several thousand major sites will
00:37:09 ►
not be spy on, be spyable on by people in between you and them. That’s one example.
00:37:16 ►
And we have now, I think, three or four million people using that. And we’re trying to get
00:37:21 ►
it built into the next generation of browsers so it happens automatically.
00:37:26 ►
Yeah.
00:37:31 ►
Should we trust Google, Yahoo, et cetera, with our information?
00:37:36 ►
Since I’m running low on time, I just have to give you a one-word answer.
00:37:38 ►
Guess which it is.
00:37:43 ►
Their interests are not your interests.
00:37:44 ►
Right? You’re not even their customer in most cases.
00:37:48 ►
You don’t have a contract with them.
00:37:50 ►
They are not obligated to even serve you.
00:37:53 ►
They are obligated to serve themselves.
00:37:56 ►
No, don’t trust them.
00:37:59 ►
Let’s see.
00:38:02 ►
Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.
00:38:04 ►
Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology I didn’t know much about cryptocurrencies for a long time
00:38:11 ►
Bitcoin kind of snuck up on me
00:38:13 ►
and I didn’t have an opinion on it for several years
00:38:15 ►
until someone who really knew the tech explained it to me
00:38:18 ►
and the root of the tech behind Bitcoin
00:38:23 ►
is a solution to what’s called the Byzantine generals problem,
00:38:27 ►
which is a way how can a bunch of people who aren’t physically together decide when they have reached a majority decision, right?
00:38:39 ►
We in this room could go around and do shows of hands and say, what do you think on this?
00:38:44 ►
What do you think on that? We see enough hands in the room go up. We know we’ve got a majority. But if we’re scattered
00:38:49 ►
around the internet, how do we know that somebody is not faking our communication? Who’s not claiming,
00:38:56 ►
oh yeah, yeah, we all agree with you, but actually they don’t. In Bitcoin, what that technology is used for is to decide who owns which Bitcoins.
00:39:07 ►
We have a majority that agrees that this guy minted that coin and then he sold it to that guy and they sold it to that guy and he owns it now.
00:39:16 ►
And the majority is worked out by who has put a majority of computing resources into running hash functions in a particular way.
00:39:27 ►
But that technology is not limited to digital currency.
00:39:33 ►
It can be used to figure out where we have a majority on a whole variety of topics,
00:39:38 ►
whether political, social, or whatever.
00:39:42 ►
And I’m expecting to see a bunch of interesting social impacts come
00:39:47 ►
out of that, of how people can figure out, well, I seem kind of isolated in my local
00:39:53 ►
environment, but actually there’s a bunch of people who agree with me out in the world
00:39:57 ►
and we can make things happen because of that. We can feel empowered and we can build technology
00:40:02 ►
to find our points of agreement and move forward
00:40:06 ►
on them. So that’s where I see blockchain technology having an interesting impact.
00:40:13 ►
On cryptocurrencies, it’s still pretty much a wild card to me. I’m glad people are experimenting
00:40:19 ►
with it. I really have no idea where it’s going to go. Let’s see. So, future of WikiLeaks,
00:40:29 ►
you know, can we shift government policy by leaking? I think the answer there is yes.
00:40:40 ►
What that takes is people who are in on the secrets who have both morality and courage.
00:40:49 ►
It’s something that our educational system tries to encourage in people,
00:40:54 ►
that we be moral beings and that we be responsible to our society,
00:40:59 ►
that we try to do good things for the world,
00:41:01 ►
and that we’re courageous enough to do some hard things.
00:41:06 ►
things for the world and that we’re courageous enough to do some hard things. And it’s a very hard thing when you’re in a system and you realize it’s gone corrupt to turn your back on all the
00:41:12 ►
people you’ve been working with and rat them out to the rest of society. It’s a very hard thing.
00:41:19 ►
Not only inside yourself, but also in the reaction you’re going to get from the world and what
00:41:25 ►
it will do to your life. But we have, I think, enough people in this society who have those
00:41:32 ►
resources in their own personalities who provide a check on power that has not been checked any other way, right?
00:41:46 ►
Whether it’s people leaking out of corporations
00:41:49 ►
about environmental crimes,
00:41:51 ►
whether it’s people leaking out of governments
00:41:52 ►
about people overstepping their authority.
00:41:58 ►
I think encouraging courage
00:42:02 ►
among people who are in the know to actually say what they know is
00:42:09 ►
a way to have positive social change in these realms.
00:42:14 ►
It’s a way that the powerful are vulnerable to the ordinary people because they can’t
00:42:18 ►
exert that power without employing a whole bunch of people and letting them in on some
00:42:23 ►
of the secrets. And we can carry those secrets back out
00:42:26 ►
to give that power to the public.
00:42:30 ►
So my personal progression or regression
00:42:33 ►
as a computer scientist, I have two minutes left.
00:42:36 ►
These days I only get to program a couple of weeks a year.
00:42:40 ►
I used to do this full time,
00:42:42 ►
and when I was working in startups,
00:42:44 ►
I was doing it
00:42:45 ►
like 90 hours a week. So I have almost gone back to being a layman about computer science.
00:42:52 ►
In fact, I never was a computer scientist. I never went to college. I was a programmer.
00:42:58 ►
I learned my trade from doing it, from being mentored and having people teach me how to do it and following their examples.
00:43:09 ►
One thing that really was a powerful enabler for me was free software.
00:43:18 ►
Richard Stallman has been the biggest proponent of this concept,
00:43:22 ►
the idea that people who write software should release it with full permission for the public to use it,
00:43:29 ►
share it, learn from it, and improve it.
00:43:40 ►
And he sees this as an ethical stance,
00:43:43 ►
and it is an ethical stance, And it is an ethical stance.
00:43:45 ►
But it’s also a very practical stance.
00:43:48 ►
Because as a new programmer, it gives you a big body of code to work with, to read, to learn from.
00:43:57 ►
And that you can mess around in and make improvements in and build your own skills.
00:44:02 ►
and make improvements in and build your own skills.
00:44:08 ►
And when you make an improvement to some piece of software that everybody uses because you want it to do something slightly better for you,
00:44:13 ►
you can submit that change to the people who are maintaining it.
00:44:16 ►
And they will tell you, oh, well, I agree, that’s a good change,
00:44:21 ►
but the way you did it, it’s totally screwed up.
00:44:24 ►
You’ll mess this thing up, you’ll create these six bugs.
00:44:27 ►
Here, let me help you.
00:44:29 ►
If you change it over in this module,
00:44:32 ►
then that makes a clean way.
00:44:33 ►
Oh, and by the way, you forgot to update the documentation
00:44:36 ►
to tell people the features in there.
00:44:38 ►
So here, if you make the change this way,
00:44:41 ►
we’ll put it in and everyone can use it.
00:44:43 ►
And so it’s a mentoring process for anyone in the world who wants to be able to contribute. And one
00:44:52 ►
of the beautiful things that I’ve seen is how a lot of the free software originally
00:44:56 ►
was written by Americans and university professors and grad students. And now I’m seeing more and more people from the third world,
00:45:08 ►
from Eastern Europe, from Russia,
00:45:11 ►
are all contributing to this software
00:45:14 ►
who weren’t part of the Western computer industry,
00:45:17 ►
but they have glommed on to free software
00:45:19 ►
and learned that they can learn and contribute
00:45:21 ►
and make it do what they want it to do
00:45:23 ►
and make it better for all of us. So how do you put food on the table with free
00:45:28 ►
software? Right. Many of the people who contribute to free
00:45:34 ►
software do it because they love it. It’s a hobby with them and they make their
00:45:38 ►
money other ways. But also, actually to answer a different question, the way I am able to support myself these days
00:45:48 ►
is I got rich in Silicon Valley,
00:45:51 ►
and the way I mostly did that was not at Sun Microsystems
00:45:55 ►
but at Cygnus Support,
00:45:56 ►
which was a company that we started to write free software,
00:46:00 ►
give it away, and make our money
00:46:02 ►
selling support and development services for
00:46:05 ►
it to big companies who depended on that software. And we started that with three people. We
00:46:10 ►
grew it to 120 people. We took it, we sold it to a public company. And that company is
00:46:18 ►
Red Hat, which is still in existence, is making billions of dollars every year, writing free software and giving it away,
00:46:27 ►
and collecting money from people who benefit from it
00:46:30 ►
because they choose to give that money.
00:46:33 ►
Yeah, there are many other ways.
00:46:36 ►
Our company was one of the first to do that.
00:46:39 ►
And after people saw that you could succeed at this,
00:46:44 ►
people started dreaming up all kinds of great ways to do this.
00:46:47 ►
And now we have 1,000 different software packages
00:46:50 ►
all supported by hundreds of different business models.
00:46:54 ►
So there are ways.
00:46:57 ►
Well, yeah, as with many things,
00:47:01 ►
for example, you can be a great musician,
00:47:03 ►
and if you don’t understand the business of music,
00:47:06 ►
you’ll never make a living at it, right?
00:47:08 ►
You’ll need another job.
00:47:10 ►
So in addition to being good at programming
00:47:12 ►
or having a good idea for a program,
00:47:15 ►
you also have to have enough business skills
00:47:18 ►
to convince people to give you money for it,
00:47:21 ►
and not everyone has those.
00:47:24 ►
I’ve run out of time for your money for it. And not everyone has those. I’ve run out of time
00:47:25 ►
for your questions for me.
00:47:41 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:47:43 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:47:48 ►
When John was talking about the mentoring process of free software just now, I thought back to sometime in the early 1990s, well, it was a little before the web came along.
00:47:58 ►
At the time, I was writing some code for our company’s first computer-based training course, and we were using a new software tool that, well, it just wasn’t working as advertised.
00:48:08 ►
A deadline was crashing down on us, and so I went out to the old Usenet and floated my question.
00:48:14 ►
Within hours, a woman professor at a university in Italy sent me the code to work around our problem.
00:48:20 ►
And that was the incident that led my boss to establish the very first internet development group for our company.
00:48:27 ►
And then the web came along a few months later and we were off to the races.
00:48:32 ►
And here is my little interesting coincidence.
00:48:35 ►
Although back then I didn’t know who John was,
00:48:37 ►
the place on the Usenet that led me into becoming one of the first internet geeks in our company was the Alt.Tree.
00:48:44 ►
becoming one of the first internet geeks in our company was the alt.tree.
00:48:50 ►
And if you are an old hand on the net, you know how important that newsgroup section was.
00:48:53 ►
And it was John Gilmore who set up the alt.group.
00:48:57 ►
So all these many years later, well, thank you, John.
00:48:59 ►
Your generous work certainly paid off for me.
00:49:08 ►
My guess is that most of us here in the salon are very familiar with the open source software movement that John was talking about.
00:49:20 ►
Interestingly, well, at least to me it’s interesting, just the other day I received a comment from one of our fellow salonners saying something to the effect that he appreciated me putting out these podcasts all on my own. And I guess that since the last step of these podcasts is to record them and then publish them
00:49:26 ►
on the net, it may seem like I’m doing this on my own. But after giving it a moment’s thought,
00:49:32 ►
I realized that such is very far from the reality of the situation. Not to mention all of the work
00:49:38 ►
that went into putting together the talks that we’re actually hearing, you see, all of the software that I use here is open source.
00:49:45 ►
From my word processor to Audacity, the audio software that I use,
00:49:50 ►
to WordPress, which I use for program notes,
00:49:53 ►
and even to my operating system, which is Ubuntu’s Linux distribution.
00:49:58 ►
On top of that, I use Tor when I’m surfing the web.
00:50:00 ►
All of that software, all of it, is user-supported open source software. I don’t know
00:50:07 ►
if anyone has ever compiled this information, but how many people do you think are currently
00:50:11 ►
involved or have been involved in past development of Linux, WordPress, Audacity, Tor, OpenOffice,
00:50:19 ►
and all the other open source software that I use? My guess is that the number is, well, it’s got to be well over 100,000.
00:50:27 ►
Several hundred thousand is my guess, and most likely the number is now in the millions.
00:50:31 ►
And they are all, even those whose only contribution was to report a bug,
00:50:37 ►
all of those people are providing support for us here in the salon.
00:50:41 ►
In effect, we have thousands of people in our tech support and software development
00:50:45 ►
departments, and most likely you are even one of them. So to everybody who has ever contributed to
00:50:51 ►
free software, I salute you, and I thank you very much. Finally, I’d like to make another brief
00:50:57 ►
comment on a book that John mentioned a few minutes ago. It’s What the Dormouse Said by
00:51:02 ►
John Markoff. Now, I’ve mentioned that book several
00:51:06 ►
times in the past, and now that John has brought it up again, I want to give it one more plug.
00:51:11 ►
If you have any interest at all about the 60s and the evolution of the personal computer, then,
00:51:16 ►
well, this is a must-read book for you. Unless you were there, you may not realize that the rise of
00:51:21 ►
the personal computer was in no small measure influenced by psychedelics.
00:51:26 ►
You probably know about the Xerox PARC, where much of the tech that we’re using today was first invented.
00:51:32 ►
And you most likely know about the legendary Homebrew Computer Club.
00:51:37 ►
Now picture this relatively small community of geeks,
00:51:40 ►
and in the middle of it, you find the Institute for Advanced Study in Menlo Park,
00:51:45 ►
often simply called the Menlo Park Institute.
00:51:49 ►
And what did they study in Menlo Park, you ask?
00:51:52 ►
Well, LSD, psilocybin, and other psychedelics.
00:51:56 ►
And they studied them by giving over 300 of these geeks low-dose psychedelic experiences
00:52:02 ►
while they worked on problems that they brought from their work,
00:52:05 ►
problems that they were having trouble with.
00:52:07 ►
Now, if you’re an old-timer here in the salon,
00:52:09 ►
you also know that the Menlo Park Institute was the creation of Myron Stolaroff,
00:52:15 ►
who is prominently featured in What the Dormouse Said.
00:52:18 ►
Now, Myron was a very close friend of mine,
00:52:21 ►
and before he died, I recorded some conversations that I had with him.
00:52:24 ►
And you can find them
00:52:26 ►
via our salon’s program notes, which
00:52:28 ►
you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
00:52:30 ►
Just click the
00:52:31 ►
Myron Stolaroff link in the
00:52:33 ►
category sidebar.
00:52:35 ►
And a good one to begin with is
00:52:37 ►
well, it’s one that was recorded before
00:52:39 ►
I knew him, actually. It’s podcast
00:52:41 ►
number 235, and
00:52:43 ►
features a conversation between Myron, Humphrey Osmond, and the legendary Al Hubbard.
00:52:49 ►
It’s really a historical gem and was actually recorded at the Institute on a day after the three of them had been tripping on LSD.
00:52:58 ►
It isn’t stretching things at all to say that much of today’s tech had its inception during a psychedelic experience of some kind.
00:53:06 ►
John touched on this as well, and
00:53:07 ►
well, without psychedelics, we wouldn’t be
00:53:09 ►
anywhere near where we are today in the realm
00:53:12 ►
of high tech. At least
00:53:13 ►
that’s my opinion, and I’m sticking to it.
00:53:16 ►
And after you read
00:53:17 ►
what Podormouse said, I suspect that you’re
00:53:19 ►
going to agree with me.
00:53:21 ►
Now in closing, I want to mention
00:53:23 ►
one more book. The title of the book is Babble,
00:53:26 ►
and it’s a beautifully produced book of art by fellow salonner Martin Whitfuth.
00:53:31 ►
Now, not being very well versed in art myself, I really don’t know the proper way to describe
00:53:37 ►
Martin’s work, but you can go to his website yourself and take a look at it. The address is martinwoodfuth.com. That’s M-A-R-T-I-N-W-I-T-T-F-O-O-T-H dot com.
00:53:50 ►
And there you’ll find some of his art,
00:53:52 ►
as well as a place where you can get a copy
00:53:54 ►
of what would probably be a most excellent holiday present,
00:53:57 ►
should you be in the market for something like that.
00:54:00 ►
So check it out if you get a chance.
00:54:02 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzozo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:54:07 ►
Be well, my friends.