Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Guest speakers: Daniel Pinchbeck and Michael Garfield

Daniel Pinchbeck speaking at the first Palenque Norte Lectures during the 2003 Burning Man Festival.Photo by Lorenzo

Date this lecture was recorded: August 30, 2017

Today’s podcast features the author Daniel Pinchbeck and some friends at the 2017 Palenque Norte Lectures that were held during the Burning Man Festival. Besides discussing his books, ibogaine, and ecology, they also give us their thoughts about evolution and culture.

Entheogenesis Australis 2017 Outdoor Psychedelic Symposium
http://www.entheogenesis.org/

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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.

00:00:24

And I’d like to begin today’s program by thanking David F.,

00:00:28

who recently made a donation to the Salon to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.

00:00:35

Also, I’d like to thank my new supporters over on Patreon.

00:00:39

If all goes well, I plan on finishing my new book soon,

00:00:42

and will be making the final manuscript available to my patrons to edit so that I can publish it into the public domain before

00:00:49

the end of this year. And that means that thanks to these good people, you’ll be able

00:00:54

to download it for free. And for what it’s worth, this is only Volume 1 of Lorenzo’s

00:01:00

Chronicles, so the fun is just beginning. Now today I’m going to play the

00:01:06

recording that a fellow salonner Frank Nunzio made of Daniel Pinchbeck’s Planque Norte lecture

00:01:12

at last year’s Burning Man Festival. And I should mention that Daniel was also a speaker at the very

00:01:18

first Planque Norte lectures back in 2003 when his topic was 2012, a change in how we experience time.

00:01:29

I hadn’t realized this, but it’s been over two years since we’ve listened to Daniel here

00:01:34

in the salon, and that was his 2014 Palenque Norte lecture.

00:01:39

And if you go to psychedelicsalon.com, on the podcast page, there’s a link to the categories.

00:01:45

And there you’ll find a link to our archive of Daniel’s talks here in the salon, including podcast number four, which is his 2003 Palenque Norte talk.

00:01:56

Now, here is Daniel Pinchbeck and a few of his friends talking at the most recent Burning Man Festival.

00:02:06

Our next speaker is Daniel Pinchbeck,

00:02:08

how to make it in psychedelic futurism.

00:02:16

Hey everybody, thank you for being here tonight.

00:02:19

Thanks for Palenque Norte to being persistent

00:02:22

and putting on this series every year.

00:02:26

So yeah, I mean, I don’t know how…

00:02:28

Are people here quite familiar with my work?

00:02:30

Have people read my books?

00:02:32

Some of them?

00:02:33

So I usually just give a kind of review summary

00:02:37

of my thinking and my…

00:02:40

up to the latest.

00:02:42

And then we can open it for a little bit of a dialogue.

00:02:47

Yeah. up to the latest. And then we can open it for a little bit of a dialogue. My first book

00:02:50

came out in 2002. It was called Breaking Open the Head.

00:02:53

That book was on psychedelic

00:02:54

shamanism. And for that book I visited

00:02:56

West Africa.

00:02:58

I went through a Bwidi initiation in Gabon

00:03:00

taking Iboga.

00:03:03

Known in the West as

00:03:04

Ibogaine

00:03:05

everybody here knows what iboga is

00:03:06

anybody not know?

00:03:08

so it’s a west african psychedelic

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it’s kind of the african equivalent of

00:03:12

ayahuasca in a sense

00:03:15

it’s very long lasting

00:03:16

it’s about a 20-25 hour trip

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and it’s being used in particular

00:03:20

as a treatment for addictions

00:03:22

particularly heroin addiction

00:03:23

under the name of ibogaine in the West.

00:03:25

There are clinics for it and so on.

00:03:28

So I also wrote about ayahuasca.

00:03:29

I visited a tribe in the Amazon, the Sequoia,

00:03:32

who have a really beautiful ancient ayahuasca lineage.

00:03:36

And I visited the Mazatec Indians in Mexico,

00:03:40

where the mushrooms were rediscovered by the West.

00:03:43

Hi, Mitch.

00:03:46

Mitch, I said we’re going to have a dialogue after, So if you want to get involved with the dialogue, that’d

00:03:48

be fun. My friend Mitch. Okay, cool. So yeah, so anyway, and I also explored, I mean, Burning

00:03:55

Man was a section of that book. The first time I came to Burning Man in 2000, I was

00:03:58

writing about it for Rolling Stone, which was a very unique way to come here because

00:04:02

I spent the whole week just ping-ponging around

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talking to everybody who started Burning Man

00:04:07

and all the artists and engineers and so on

00:04:09

and ever since then it’s been kind of part of my thinking

00:04:13

and my work in a way.

00:04:16

So breaking up in the head, the genesis of that book

00:04:18

was my own existential crisis in my late 20s.

00:04:21

I was working as a journalist in New York

00:04:22

and I’d grown up as a scientific materialist and a skeptic and I began to have a sort of crisis of nihilism.

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And I remembered psychedelic experiences in college

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as being very significant. So I decided to make that the subject

00:04:36

of my exploration. And that’s when I started getting these kind of journalism assignments

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to go to Africa and the Amazon and so on.

00:04:43

And over the course of writing that first book,

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I had a shift in my belief system,

00:04:49

in my ontology, I don’t know what you want to call it,

00:04:51

from skepticism to kind of recognizing

00:04:54

that there are these other levels of psychic reality

00:04:59

or consciousness that are interactive,

00:05:02

maybe with the physical reality

00:05:04

in the way that somebody like Carl Jung talks about.

00:05:07

And that was really profound for me.

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And I began to realize that the modern Western world

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had suppressed this whole aspect of visionary experience,

00:05:16

mystical experience, psychic phenomena, and so on.

00:05:20

And I began to feel that we had to take much more seriously

00:05:22

the knowledge systems of these indigenous cultures which had preserved a whole different understanding of the nature of reality.

00:05:30

And that led me to write a second book, 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl, which was looking at prophecies of cultures like the Maya and the Hopi in relationship to our time and covered a lot of different phenomena. Essentially, coming from a New York context, writing for the New York Times and Rolling Stone and places like that,

00:05:48

I had accepted a whole worldview.

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And when I understood through shamanism

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how much that worldview was just cutting out,

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that was of such incredible value,

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I had to rethink everything from the ground up.

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I was like, wow, at that point you couldn’t even talk about psychedelics

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in the mainstream culture without being ridiculed.

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And I realized that if our culture was totally wrong about such essential things,

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then we had to rethink it from the ground up.

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So that made me much more open to reconsider the indigenous prophecies,

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phenomena like extraterrestrials,

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the crop circles that appear in England.

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So that second book was a weaving together of a lot of pieces of a puzzle,

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along with looking at science and philosophy, like Nietzsche and Heidegger.

00:06:38

And ultimately I ended up agreeing with what I could understand

00:06:43

of these indigenous propheciescies that we are in this

00:06:45

time of incredible transformation a shift from maybe one world to the next one form of consciousness

00:06:50

to the next one dimension to the next perhaps although that’s all very abstract in a way and

00:06:57

hard to parse I mean even just recently I went to the eclipse festival in Oregon and I would say

00:07:03

that even that total solar eclipse felt somehow like

00:07:06

part of this kind of unfolding

00:07:08

of prophecy, this entry

00:07:10

into whatever this next reality

00:07:12

is and

00:07:13

for me one of the things that was really crucial about that festival

00:07:16

in Oregon was it was the

00:07:18

first time I’d really seen

00:07:19

our culture really honor the indigenous

00:07:22

perspective to the highest degree

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and give them a full equal platform to speak and share their wisdom.

00:07:29

It was very extraordinary and very beautiful.

00:07:33

So yes, this has been my ongoing kind of exploration.

00:07:37

I mean, in terms of why I feel that this time is so transformative,

00:07:41

I mean, on the one hand, we have this accelerating evolution of technology,

00:07:45

communications networks, you know, renewable energy systems, you know, nanotechnology,

00:07:51

everything that’s happening on that level. The rapid globalization that we’ve gone through is

00:07:57

also leading to the world’s mystical traditions coming together in a new way, creating kind of

00:08:03

like coherence, like in a way we can

00:08:06

see a coherence now between a scientific worldview and a mystical worldview in a way that I don’t

00:08:12

think was available like a few decades ago.

00:08:13

And more and more scientists are arriving at that from different disciplines, even biology

00:08:18

and so on.

00:08:21

Yeah, and then another issue that became more and more paramount in my thinking

00:08:25

was the ecological crisis that we’re facing as a species and that somehow that that that must be a

00:08:32

triggering event let’s say that either we’re going to rise to the occasion and figure out what we do

00:08:39

to preserve the integrity of the biosphere or we’re probably not going to last too much longer

00:08:44

as a species on the planet so as i finished the 2012 book which was quite philosophical and abstract and talked a lot

00:08:50

about esoteric ideas uh which was 10 years ago they came out 2007 2008 i became more and more

00:08:55

obsessed with this question of the ecological situation and what we could do to face it. And I felt there wasn’t really a good map

00:09:05

or a guidebook or a plan. And so it was like a huge idea to kind of bite off and chew on.

00:09:15

And it took me 10 years of trial and error to put together a book or a way of thinking

00:09:20

about it that felt sensible, coherent to me, that

00:09:26

looked at it in a multi-dimensional aspect.

00:09:28

I felt you find books

00:09:30

that are on maybe sustainability

00:09:31

or energy or this idea

00:09:34

of new consciousness or new paradigm,

00:09:36

but you don’t really find

00:09:38

them all kind of coming together

00:09:39

in the way that they would have to.

00:09:43

So yeah,

00:09:43

that book is called How Soon Is Now?

00:09:45

And it came out in February.

00:09:49

And yeah, essentially the book has two main kind of theories or theses, I guess.

00:09:54

One is that we can look at this ecological crisis

00:09:56

as something like an initiation or a rite of passage

00:09:59

for humanity as a species.

00:10:03

In the same way, in tribal cultures,

00:10:05

initiations are necessary

00:10:07

to kind of shift the individual member of the tribe

00:10:12

from a kind of adolescent and immature state of being

00:10:15

to a state of adult responsibility

00:10:17

where they’re not just trapped

00:10:19

in their own egoic, self-interested consciousness,

00:10:22

but really feel that part of their role

00:10:24

is to take care of the collective.

00:10:26

I feel that humanity is on the same journey as a species

00:10:28

where, particularly in the modern world,

00:10:32

we lost access to initiation.

00:10:37

And we tend to think about,

00:10:39

because we’ve kind of suppressed interest

00:10:43

in these indigenous and shamanic cultures,

00:10:46

we tend to think about initiation as just like a cultural thing, like something they just do because it’s part

00:10:51

of their mythology or something.

00:10:53

But some thinkers think that initiation may have much more of almost like a neurophysiological

00:10:57

function, that there’s something about how our brains develop, like the part of our brains

00:11:02

that make us most distinctly human, the prefrontal

00:11:05

cortex, which allows us to process abstract symbols, plan for the future, have this very

00:11:12

strong sense of individual identity.

00:11:16

But it also tends to kind of alienate us and make us feel that only our personal interests

00:11:22

matter.

00:11:23

And because modern society got rid of initiation rights

00:11:27

that all these other cultures have, like tribal societies,

00:11:30

we got sort of trapped in that adolescent, egoic state.

00:11:34

And we’re trying to find our way back now

00:11:36

to a state of cooperative interdependence,

00:11:39

but the guideposts are not clear.

00:11:45

So yeah, that’s one of the main ideas in the book,

00:11:47

is that we can look at this ecological crisis

00:11:49

as a kind of collective initiation for humanity

00:11:51

that can trigger us,

00:11:53

it’s almost like a force,

00:11:54

a kind of collective mutation

00:11:55

where we have a shared sense of responsibility

00:11:58

for the whole, for our human family

00:12:01

and for the ecology of the earth as a whole system.

00:12:04

And in fact, I guess another part of the theory would be that

00:12:07

ultimately what we’re going to come to realize is that we are a giant planetary superorganism,

00:12:12

that humanity is in a constant symbiotic relationship with the Earth’s ecology as a whole system,

00:12:19

and in a sense we’re going from the unconscious inertia of our physical evolution

00:12:24

and our cultural history

00:12:25

to some type of conscious evolution where we really recognize that we’re in the driver’s

00:12:31

seat now in terms of steering the evolution of the planetary environment the evolution of our

00:12:36

own species and so on so yeah so those are some of the basic themes of the book and what I sort

00:12:43

of had to do and what took me a long time in a way was to find a systems way to think about it.

00:12:50

I’m really inspired by Buckminster Fuller as one of my favorite thinkers.

00:12:54

He wrote two books in the 60s, one that I think are really easy to read and short and fun and amazing.

00:13:00

One is called Utopia or Oblivion, where he kind of really came to this understanding

00:13:05

that humanity really had two choices.

00:13:08

Either we were going to use our design brilliance

00:13:11

to redesign our world so that resources were shared appropriately

00:13:15

without incredible excess of wealth and privilege,

00:13:18

or we probably wouldn’t make it as a species.

00:13:22

And he really saw that we were approaching that crux point.

00:13:24

And he noted a lot of

00:13:25

reasons that we got into this mess.

00:13:27

And one reason he felt is that

00:13:29

as human beings, our nature is to be

00:13:32

generalists and comprehensive thinkers.

00:13:34

But in modern

00:13:35

society, we created a system

00:13:37

of highly specialized knowledge.

00:13:40

So you might have somebody whose

00:13:41

their whole life is focused on

00:13:43

one part of a DNA strand

00:13:46

and they’re deep in that

00:13:49

but they’re not

00:13:50

they’re just seeing the little leaf

00:13:52

they’re not seeing the forest anymore

00:13:53

so I kind of felt like maybe I would just take on the job

00:13:56

of trying to get up above

00:13:58

and just see the forest and integrate a lot of ideas

00:14:00

from different disciplines and approaches

00:14:02

so yeah, so to sort of come up

00:14:06

with that and you know it gets a little abstract and even though it’s actually very wet i think in

00:14:10

a way it actually might sound a little dry because you need to get to a certain level of abstraction

00:14:14

just to have a model like a way to think about what’s happening um first of all i like to depress

00:14:21

my audiences for a few minutes with a quick discussion on how bad the ecological crisis is.

00:14:27

Because it always intrigues me what people know and don’t know about it.

00:14:31

Just because I feel it shows you how the knowledge that we need to have for our own future survival is sort of culturally suppressed in some sense.

00:14:39

Like, for instance, do people know how many species are estimated to be going extinct every day?

00:14:45

What’s that?

00:14:48

Sorry?

00:14:50

Yeah, it’s 100 to 150 species are going extinct every day.

00:14:54

And they estimate, anybody know the rough estimate of how many species on the planet?

00:14:59

It’s like a little over 8 million, 8.2 million or something.

00:15:03

So if you do the math, I’m not a great mathematician, but it’s not that hard with a calculator or whatever.

00:15:08

It turns out that we’re losing about 10% of the Earth’s remaining biodiversity every 10 to 15 years.

00:15:13

And that’s because we’re really doing a lot of negative stuff to the rainforests,

00:15:18

which are drying out and burning and being turned into soybean plantations for cattle.

00:15:22

The most biodiverse parts of the planet are under attack really profoundly.

00:15:28

Do people know what’s happened?

00:15:29

How much more acidic the oceans are now than they were 40 years ago?

00:15:36

They’re 30% more acidic.

00:15:38

The entire body of the ocean has become 30% more acidic.

00:15:41

That’s because it’s absorbing a large amount of the excess CO2

00:15:44

that our industrial systems

00:15:46

produce

00:15:46

it’s so funny I mean

00:15:49

this nice boy is walking out the door

00:15:51

and it’s just this thing like as soon as

00:15:54

you start talking about this stuff like

00:15:55

it creates a negative

00:15:58

like people don’t want to it’s really I mean

00:15:59

I bring it up all the time now just because I

00:16:01

know how important it is that we sort of learn

00:16:03

to focus on it or be able to hold our attention on this.

00:16:06

But generally I see people immediately want to go into like a distraction mode

00:16:10

when you start to drill into the specifics about what’s happening ecologically.

00:16:15

But I do feel it’s like basic literacy that we need to know at this point.

00:16:18

And the good news is I honestly believe that we’re at the cusp of the potential.

00:16:22

We have the potential to create scalable,

00:16:25

exponentially scalable solutions

00:16:27

to pretty much all of the problems

00:16:29

where we’ve constructed, you know,

00:16:31

if we get to work on it now,

00:16:33

but it’s going to require a kind of collective refocus

00:16:36

as part of that initiation process

00:16:37

where we’re no longer maybe so focused,

00:16:40

like, you know, maybe you had the idea

00:16:42

that you wanted to have, like, a certain level of living

00:16:44

and, you know, have a certain type of boat or something, you know, maybe instead of that,

00:16:50

the idea would be to start thinking about what, how do I take my genius, my creative capacities,

00:16:55

and use them, you know, in the most kind of powerful way to impact, you know, positively,

00:17:01

you know, whatever my skill set is, you know, if you’re a lawyer or a gardener or a media maker,

00:17:07

from whatever angle you’re approaching the situation.

00:17:11

So there’s a set of these ecological factors that are really quite dire.

00:17:16

And even ones like the methane under the Siberian permafrost in the Arctic.

00:17:23

So we’re really at this cusp where we have to make a rapid transition.

00:17:27

And so then when we scale back and we look at the impacts we’re having on the planet,

00:17:31

you know, we can see these different areas that are making these impacts, right?

00:17:34

And, you know, we could look at it as like there’s the technical aspects, like, you know,

00:17:39

areas like agriculture and industry and energy.

00:17:42

You know, then we can think about the ways that those would have to change in the next you know 10 20 30 years so that we can address the problems that we’ve

00:17:50

created over the last century and a half during our industrial growth and capitalism and so on

00:17:55

and then we can think about the the changes we would have to make to our governments our

00:18:00

political systems our economic systems in order to bring about those technical changes

00:18:06

in the times that they have to happen.

00:18:08

And then we can also think about the changes we would have to make

00:18:11

in ideology, in consciousness, in culture, in media,

00:18:16

to kind of get people on board this adventure, in a way.

00:18:22

And I guess that’s part of it for me,

00:18:24

and maybe I’m not even the most successful

00:18:25

at this, but ultimately I think it has to be

00:18:27

pitched as like this great adventure for the

00:18:29

human species that we can make this

00:18:31

incredible evolution.

00:18:34

Which is what Buckminster Fuller foresaw

00:18:35

back in the 60s. And we’re seeing

00:18:37

all these co-factors right now

00:18:39

happening. Like for instance, super advanced

00:18:42

automation is coming.

00:18:43

One way that Trump won this election was by saying he was going to bring back the golden age of industrial jobs to the U.S.

00:18:52

When we all know that that’s bullshit, right?

00:18:53

Because we have actually a lot more automation.

00:18:55

More automation is coming.

00:18:57

So what’s the largest workforce in the U.S.?

00:18:59

Does anybody know?

00:19:02

Truck drivers.

00:19:03

Three and a half million truck drivers.

00:19:05

If you get in a Tesla, it’s already like half a self-driving car.

00:19:08

If you get on the highway, you just click a button and it drives itself.

00:19:11

So within like two to three years, we’re going to have self-driving vehicles.

00:19:15

Within five, seven years, we’re going to have no need for those three and a half million truck drivers.

00:19:20

And it’s like that in many, many fields.

00:19:23

And obviously people are scared of that

00:19:26

and frustrated and fearful and so on

00:19:29

but in actuality we can look at it a different way

00:19:32

and say wow, isn’t this kind of what we’ve been looking forward to

00:19:35

in a way if we could liberate people

00:19:38

from these drudgery tasks

00:19:40

wouldn’t they actually have the capacity for the first time

00:19:43

to cultivate their unique essence, their unique individuality

00:19:46

which is why I think we all come to Burning Man

00:19:49

we want to cultivate our unique self, our unique essence

00:19:52

our creative spirit and so on

00:19:55

so ultimately we want to create a world system

00:19:58

where everybody has that capacity

00:19:59

not that everybody is going to be a great artist

00:20:01

but everybody could be given the time, leisure, opportunity to cultivate their human relationships, take care of their families, take care of their communities, and cultivate themselves to the highest degree.

00:20:15

One of my favorite essays, which I actually think could be a Burning Man manifesto, is an essay by Oscar Wilde, his one political essay, which is called The Soul of Man Under Socialism.

00:20:25

And he really, over 100 years ago, foresaw this.

00:20:28

He was like, you know, look, like, you know,

00:20:31

in the past, it was the, you know, in the 18th or 19th century,

00:20:34

there were these amazing artists.

00:20:36

And they were often people who had the family money,

00:20:39

which gave them the freedom to really cultivate their unique self

00:20:43

and their unique essence and express themselves fully.

00:20:45

But most people didn’t have that ability.

00:20:48

So in a way, sometimes the art was threatening to the ordinary people or whatever.

00:20:52

And Oscar Wilde said, well, in the future, what we should have is automation,

00:20:56

like automate everything, end the drudgery tasks,

00:20:59

and liberate humanity to cultivate themselves.

00:21:02

I think he believed that the final destination for humanity

00:21:06

was a state of cultivated leisure.

00:21:09

And I think when we come to these festivals,

00:21:11

we’re aware of how happy we could be

00:21:13

if we had full time to cultivate love,

00:21:16

to cultivate creativity, and so on.

00:21:20

So it’s this interesting situation.

00:21:23

We’re on this cusp of this, you know, apocalyptic negative potential

00:21:29

and this truly remarkably utopian potential,

00:21:33

which is legitimately available in every area.

00:21:36

Like we know, for instance, like solar, you know,

00:21:38

has reached grid parity with fossil fuels.

00:21:41

You know, there’s no reason why we couldn’t switch over to fossil,

00:21:46

to renewable energy,

00:21:48

not in like 50 or 70 or 100 years,

00:21:49

but in 10 or 20 years. It would just require something like a massive investment

00:21:53

of human energy and time.

00:21:55

And we’ve seen that happen before, right?

00:21:56

I don’t know if you know about,

00:21:57

after Pearl Harbor and the Second World War,

00:22:00

the United States had to shift all of its factories

00:22:04

to wartime production.

00:22:06

They stopped making private cars and so on.

00:22:08

And they taxed the wealthiest members of the population at 94%.

00:22:12

And they took all of that financial resource and they put it into the collective war effort to defeat the Nazis.

00:22:18

So we ultimately need something like that within the next few years, probably, on the global scale to address these different

00:22:25

areas that we have to address. And then we could definitely scale up renewable energy,

00:22:30

for instance. Farming is another area. Industrial agriculture, extremely problematic. According

00:22:38

to the UN, there’s only 60 years of harvest left because of the depletion that’s happening to the topsoil.

00:22:45

But if we shifted away from industrial monoculture farming to regenerative farming practices,

00:22:51

we could start to sequester a lot of carbon back in the soil and replenish the soil.

00:22:56

Also using techniques like biochar, which is a way of creating energy from organic matter.

00:23:02

By the way, is this all very familiar to you or is this like good information

00:23:05

and useful? All right, cool. I mean, we kind of on top of this or like, all right, cool.

00:23:12

Yeah, so then, you know, so that I can go through it. I mean, industry will be a shift to cradle to

00:23:16

cradle manufacturing. This guy, William McDonoghue, who’s kind of a Buckminster Fuller follower,

00:23:20

wrote a book, Cradle to Cradle, where he really argued that we could transition all of our

00:23:25

manufacturing so that it either fed back neutrally or even positively into the ecosystems. And it’s

00:23:31

like a new idea. I mean, in the same way, 150 years ago, we didn’t really think that we’d ever

00:23:36

be able to fly an airplane, but then we figured it out. If we were to focus our creative and

00:23:40

technical genius as a species on recreating our industrial processes that they fed back benevolently

00:23:46

and even increased

00:23:48

enhanced the health of the biosystems

00:23:50

and so on, we could

00:23:51

potentially do that.

00:23:55

McDonough talks

00:23:56

about even very simple things like you could have

00:23:58

all the wrappers that we use

00:24:00

could be compostable and have seeds in them

00:24:01

so when you eat an ice cream or buy

00:24:04

something from Amazon,

00:24:10

you then bury the package and fruits and flowers grow out of it.

00:24:15

So there’s the potential for this really radical shift in our thinking and our practices, which we could bring about relatively quickly

00:24:21

when the focus shifts in this direction.

00:24:26

And that’s really how Soon as Now attempts to offer the blueprint

00:24:28

kind of manual for how we would bring about

00:24:29

these types of changes.

00:24:32

Politically and financially,

00:24:34

now we’re on the social side of the thing.

00:24:36

That’s more difficult

00:24:38

obviously to think about.

00:24:39

Unfortunately, the financial system

00:24:42

that we currently have is essentially

00:24:44

a kind of suicide mechanism for the planet.

00:24:47

You know, a corporation could be looked at as something like an artificial life form that’s made of kind of data, financial capital, you know, which is virtual numbers whirling in the virtual casino of the stock market.

00:25:02

You know, legal code, you know, brand insignia ideas.

00:25:05

It’s like an artificial life form that has to maximize its own capacity to survive in a game

00:25:13

that we created for it called the stock market. You know, so essentially what we’re, and the rule

00:25:17

of that game, the only rule we’ve given the artificial life form that we’ve created is that

00:25:21

it has to maximize financial value so so therefore that’s

00:25:25

what it seeks to do so in a sense you can’t even really blame corporations abstractly for what

00:25:31

they’re doing you know to the environment and so on that’s if you’re going to maximize financial

00:25:35

value then you’re going to have to corrupt environmental restrictions you’re going to have

00:25:40

to buy off governments and so on so ultimately we would have to have a sort of system redesign of the financial system

00:25:47

so that it wasn’t just financial value that was prioritized.

00:25:52

It was also resilient local communities, biodiversity, and so on.

00:25:58

In terms of government, I think we have to look at the form of government we have now

00:26:02

as something that is very recent.

00:26:03

The nation-state liberal democracy began in the late 18th century

00:26:08

when information moved much slower than it does now.

00:26:14

Like horse and buggies and scooter ships were as fast as any information could move.

00:26:20

And innovation happened much slower.

00:26:22

So I feel in a way these forms of government are more and more clearly kind of like outmoded social technologies.

00:26:29

And in a way what we could do is use the Internet to potentially restructure them,

00:26:36

sort of create a launch, like let’s say a new operating system for how we organize resources,

00:26:41

for how we accomplish collective tasks and so on.

00:26:44

And there’s some very interesting kind of initial experiments to do that. for how we organize resources, for how we accomplish collective tasks and so on.

00:26:49

And there’s some very interesting kind of initial experiments to do that.

00:26:53

One is Democracy OS, which is from Argentina.

00:26:59

This idea is that people can vote on a municipal level, on a bigger level.

00:27:02

They can proxy their votes in different areas.

00:27:05

So let’s say I’m not an expert on water, but I know that Michael knows a lot about water.

00:27:07

I can give Michael my vote on water issues,

00:27:10

but then if I find out that Michael

00:27:11

is actually getting a kickback from Pepsi,

00:27:14

I can take my vote back right away.

00:27:15

I don’t have to wait four years

00:27:17

to vote for another politician.

00:27:20

So in a way, we have to come to a realization of where we are, figure out how we use these incredible tools we have to, you know, kind of design and launch a new operating system that will get us past this crisis point and move us into something else.

00:27:38

And, you know, some very interesting tools are coming online that have a lot of potential and a lot of complexity.

00:27:45

You know, this whole People are into blockchain.

00:27:48

People know about blockchain

00:27:50

at this point?

00:27:52

So essentially blockchain is like

00:27:54

a distributed ledger system

00:27:55

where every exchange

00:27:57

is recorded transparently

00:27:59

and it can be used to create

00:28:01

currencies like Bitcoin

00:28:03

but it can also be used to create smart contracts.

00:28:06

So you can then create things that are like distributed and autonomous companies or organizations that function according to rules that people define together.

00:28:16

And it allows for a lot of potential innovation in nearly every field. And it’s like a feeding frenzy right now with blockchain initiatives

00:28:26

raising hundreds of millions of dollars

00:28:28

every month almost right now

00:28:31

to experiment in this area.

00:28:35

But it’s a little bit like,

00:28:36

I mean, essentially it’s like in some ways

00:28:37

like a return of the dot-com moment from,

00:28:39

when was the dot-com thing?

00:28:41

90s, not long ago, 2000, right.

00:28:43

Yeah, so it’s like there’s the feeding frenzy

00:28:45

there’s that liberational potential and then there’s that unfortunate tendency or capacity

00:28:50

that the whole thing gets subsumed back into the corporate control system you know so that i think

00:28:56

that’s a very real battle that’s playing out right now and it’s quite fascinating and has many

00:29:00

dimensions to it so um yeah so those are some things I could share with you.

00:29:06

I guess the other thing I was going to mention is

00:29:08

how would we change collective consciousness?

00:29:13

There’s an idea that I got very excited about.

00:29:15

There’s an Italian political philosopher, Antonio Negri,

00:29:19

who was a sort of post-Marxist thinker,

00:29:23

and he noted how in like the 19th century

00:29:26

during Marxist time,

00:29:28

like the most important form of production

00:29:30

was material things, material production,

00:29:33

like typewriters and sewing machines

00:29:35

and eventually cars and everything.

00:29:38

And since the post-war, post-industrial era,

00:29:41

we’re now in a time when

00:29:42

the most important form of production

00:29:44

is more immaterial production.

00:29:46

So production of ways for people to connect, to exchange value, to do all sorts of things.

00:29:52

And we’re at a point now where the biggest company that manages accommodations doesn’t own a hotel room, which is Airbnb.

00:30:02

The biggest transportation company doesn’t own a vehicle, which is Uber.

00:30:07

And this is like

00:30:08

a new and interesting phenomenon.

00:30:10

But what Negri notes

00:30:12

is that in a

00:30:14

society where immaterial production

00:30:16

has become the most important form of production,

00:30:18

what’s actually being produced

00:30:19

is subjectivity itself.

00:30:22

And people are not really aware

00:30:24

generally that their subjectivity is really

00:30:27

almost like factory produced

00:30:29

and handed to them for the most part.

00:30:32

So for something like Fox News, let’s say,

00:30:34

as an extreme example,

00:30:36

is producing a certain form of subjectivity

00:30:38

or a certain level of consciousness.

00:30:40

It’s constantly re-imprinting it,

00:30:43

indoctrinating people over and over again with a certain understanding of themselves, a certain understanding of how they relate to the world, what types of relationships are good for them, how they should relate to authority, what are the objects they need to buy, and so on. So the mass media system is a factory that produces human subjectivity, human consciousness.

00:31:08

And on the one hand, it’s kind of maybe in a way scary to realize that.

00:31:12

I mean, Terence McKenna talked about how culture is our operating system.

00:31:16

But what’s exciting about it is it means that potentially if the tools of media reproduction were to become available to other hands on a large scale,

00:31:27

maybe we could produce a different kind of subjectivity,

00:31:30

one that’s more engaged and participatory, responsible.

00:31:34

And I think we see that very clearly at Burning Man, right?

00:31:36

Because once you come in here and people shift to the ten principles, it’s like automatic.

00:31:41

It’s like they don’t even, after a day or two, they don’t even think about it anymore.

00:31:44

It’s like participation, radical day or two they don’t even think about it anymore it’s like participation

00:31:45

radical inclusiveness, leave no trace

00:31:48

actually human beings are very

00:31:49

permeable and very quick

00:31:52

to adapt to new

00:31:53

ideas or new constructs

00:31:56

particularly if they make their lives better

00:31:57

more fun, more enjoyable

00:31:59

and I think that’s one of the

00:32:01

deep lessons of Burning Man

00:32:04

proves that.

00:32:06

So maybe I’ll take some questions or comments.

00:32:08

We can have a little bit of dialogue, engagement.

00:32:10

Yeah, you want to come and sit and talk?

00:32:11

This is my friend Michael Garfield.

00:32:13

Thanks so much for listening.

00:32:19

So in this discussion of the movement of the economy from the material to the immaterial,

00:32:24

In this discussion of the movement of the economy from the material to the immaterial,

00:32:31

it seems like right now the limiting resource on all of this is the attention that we’re able to devote to a particular cultural operating system, right?

00:32:35

So right now attention is the limiting resource of an attention economy.

00:32:40

And it seems there’s people like, I think through you I found out about Peter Russell and this notion that we’re moving, you know, out of an information economy and then possibly through an India.

00:32:52

Let me explain that idea really quickly.

00:32:53

So Peter Russell was a really fun, interesting thinker.

00:32:56

He wrote a book called Waking Up in Time.

00:32:58

And he, one of the ideas he has in that book is that we’re seeing these successive revolutions in human society and human consciousness.

00:33:09

And they’re happening exponentially faster so we had like the agricultural revolution which maybe took 10 000 you know 5 000 years you know then we had the industrial revolution which

00:33:16

took you know 500 a thousand years then we’ve had the information revolution which has taken like 50

00:33:21

years you know and peter russell suggests that we’re on the cusp of another revolution

00:33:26

that might be exponentially faster.

00:33:28

And he posits that would be the shift

00:33:29

from information to wisdom.

00:33:32

He also points out that each

00:33:33

of these former revolutions

00:33:35

requires the previous one. It’s like built on it

00:33:38

as like its structure. So you couldn’t have had

00:33:39

the information revolution unless you had

00:33:41

the tools of the industrial revolution to

00:33:43

make the cell phones and the laptops. You couldn’t have had an industrial revolution

00:33:47

unless you had the surplus from agriculture to make stuff like that.

00:33:52

And so, yeah, so this idea of a shift from information to wisdom is now that we can

00:33:55

process all this data and observe the whole planet, you know, in real time and

00:33:59

see all the connections, where all the resources are, you know, wisdom would be really

00:34:04

acting with forethought

00:34:05

in the ways I’ve been talking about,

00:34:09

sort of a comprehensive systemic approach

00:34:11

to maximizing the benefit both for our human family as a whole

00:34:15

and for the Earth’s biodiversity.

00:34:19

Yeah, so I’m curious what you think about

00:34:21

all of that in light of Richard Doyle’s argument

00:34:25

that psychedelics are basically training for a transhuman condition

00:34:28

because they fold the subject and object together

00:34:31

and that we’re getting to a point where we have to adopt an attitude

00:34:35

where we see technology through the lens of ecology

00:34:38

and ecology through the lens of technology

00:34:41

and that we…

00:34:43

What do you think it would look like

00:34:46

or how can we begin to like

00:34:47

like stage

00:34:50

like a

00:34:51

preparatory release of

00:34:54

an economy that

00:34:55

actually responds to

00:34:58

the crisis by

00:34:59

the like the production

00:35:01

of attention through like

00:35:04

initiatory psychedelic techniques.

00:35:06

That seems like the next major stage of things.

00:35:08

I’m curious what you have to say about that.

00:35:10

There’s a bunch of ideas.

00:35:11

I’m not sure that I’ve got…

00:35:12

But yeah, I definitely agree that

00:35:15

the psychedelic experience is going to be crucial

00:35:18

to this…

00:35:20

If we’re going to make this evolutionary mutation

00:35:21

on many levels.

00:35:25

And one area… I was just at the MAPS camp,

00:35:28

and we were talking about all the research that’s being done.

00:35:32

They’re basically about to do Phase III clinical trials

00:35:35

of using MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder,

00:35:38

and they’re on track to have that approved as a medicine by 2021.

00:35:43

And they been studying veterans

00:35:46

from the Iraq and Afghanistan war.

00:35:47

They’re having a more than 60% cure rate

00:35:50

of PTSD,

00:35:52

treatment-averse forms of it.

00:35:53

Well, you know, whatever, even with the best

00:35:56

possible scenario, what I’m talking about

00:35:57

in terms of addressing

00:36:00

the ecological crisis,

00:36:01

there’s still going to be a lot of

00:36:03

mess and chaos in the next years. There’s going to be a lot of refugee populations. There’s going to be a lot of mess and chaos in the next

00:36:05

years.

00:36:05

There’s going to be a lot of refugee populations.

00:36:07

There’s going to be a lot of turbulence.

00:36:09

And having these tools that can reset people and break out of their PTSD and so on is going

00:36:15

to go from being something marginal to probably something totally essential.

00:36:20

I could even imagine, actually last time I did ayahuasca, I could see vertical farms

00:36:24

of ayahuasca in every city in the world.

00:36:27

It’s just going to be necessary to deal with the rate of change that’s happening.

00:36:31

People are going to have to keep being able to reset, I think.

00:36:34

Does that answer your question-ish?

00:36:39

Hey, Daniel.

00:36:40

This is my friend Mitch, everybody.

00:36:41

This is my friend Mitch, everybody.

00:36:56

So having just been at the Eclipse with you, I just wanted to mention that for me, it felt like it was interesting.

00:37:05

I feel like I share with you a tremendous optimism and faith in the potential of the human software cultural programming capacity.

00:37:09

And I think I really felt like the Eclipse experience,

00:37:11

it was almost like, if I can be a little bit weird,

00:37:12

almost like there was a… How many people here saw the total Eclipse just out of curiosity?

00:37:15

Nice.

00:37:16

Like, almost like a drum was beaten earlier in the year,

00:37:20

was beating and then summoning people.

00:37:23

And I feel like I was shown something.

00:37:27

And to me, in my experience,

00:37:30

was I felt like I was shown that a lot of the answers

00:37:35

and a lot of the healing are just absolutely available to us,

00:37:39

provided that we basically find a way to just tap in by removing a lot of the constraints and viruses and things.

00:37:51

For example, Daniel turned me on to a lot of thinkers through his book, like Tara Desjardins.

00:37:57

There’s some weird ideas that, as I’ve gotten older, start to actually seem real and make sense,

00:38:03

like Marshall McLuhan’s retrieval

00:38:06

of previous modes

00:38:08

of being with the new technologies.

00:38:09

I feel like the magical in Gebser,

00:38:12

for example, the retrieval of the magical

00:38:13

is actually a much more important thing than I gave

00:38:16

it credit for. And I think that

00:38:17

finding a way to balance that moving

00:38:20

forward is going to be really important.

00:38:21

Just to give a little gloss or explanation,

00:38:23

Gene Gebser is an Austrian philosopher.

00:38:25

He wrote this really extraordinary book,

00:38:27

really deep book called The Ever-Present Origin

00:38:29

where he was looking at the evolution of human

00:38:31

consciousness through

00:38:33

these kind of different stages or structures

00:38:35

that were different ways of relating

00:38:37

to time and space. And he argued

00:38:39

that each of these structures really

00:38:41

you could accomplish

00:38:43

different things in them. They work differently.

00:38:46

Like magic actually is real

00:38:48

for somebody who’s in the magical

00:38:49

tribal state of consciousness.

00:38:51

When you’ve gotten to our state of consciousness

00:38:53

which you call the mental rational structure

00:38:55

magic doesn’t really work as well.

00:38:59

So he

00:39:00

listed four structures of consciousness

00:39:02

that had existed

00:39:04

in different ways

00:39:06

in the past. Aboriginal,

00:39:07

the idea of aboriginal is of the origin.

00:39:10

So the idea is that for somebody in that state of consciousness

00:39:12

there’s no real history,

00:39:14

there’s no progress. Every moment

00:39:16

is the sacred moment. You’re always in the

00:39:18

continuum. And the idea of ceremony

00:39:20

is really just to

00:39:21

keep that connection to the

00:39:24

sacred, to the continuum.

00:39:25

Then there’s kind of tribal magical consciousness

00:39:27

where there’s some sense of a time.

00:39:30

And then there’s the mythological structure of consciousness,

00:39:34

which are societies like Egypt and the Hindu culture and the Mayan culture.

00:39:40

And they view time as vast cycles that repeated,

00:39:44

or maybe spirals is better.

00:39:46

So the Egyptians talk about the procession of the equinoxes.

00:39:49

The Mayans had the long count calendar,

00:39:51

these 5,125 year cycles.

00:39:53

The Hindus talk about the yugas,

00:39:55

this being the Kali Yuga, the age of destruction,

00:39:58

which ultimately then flips into the next Satya Yuga.

00:40:02

And then after the mythological structure

00:40:05

comes the mental rational structure,

00:40:06

which is where we are now.

00:40:08

And for Gebser, in a sense, what happened was,

00:40:11

you know, in a way, if you look at medieval art

00:40:13

or Egyptian art, there’s not really any sense

00:40:15

of perspective or space.

00:40:16

And the Renaissance, as we discovered space,

00:40:19

in that sense, we discovered perspective,

00:40:21

we discovered the material world,

00:40:23

we discovered science.

00:40:25

But this also led to us almost getting

00:40:28

possessed by

00:40:29

space. And we began to

00:40:32

confuse and see everything as spatial

00:40:33

and material. So we think about time

00:40:36

as a spatial and material quality.

00:40:38

So we talk about wasting time or

00:40:39

spending time or running out of time or

00:40:41

time is money. So we’re constantly conceiving

00:40:43

of time as this quantity

00:40:45

that there’s never really enough of, that’s like running through our fingers.

00:40:48

And he really argued that that was a misconception

00:40:50

and that we were on the cusp of another mutational break

00:40:54

into a structure of consciousness that he called the integral or the aperspectival,

00:40:59

where we would really see that all these ways of perceiving time

00:41:02

are all legitimate or valid in their own way. They’re like veils

00:41:05

that help us or lenses

00:41:07

that help us perceive.

00:41:10

So at the moment we could say that

00:41:11

we’re in this ever-present origin.

00:41:14

This is the sacred continuum.

00:41:15

It’s the quantum

00:41:17

infinitude that we’re in.

00:41:20

It’s also this

00:41:21

magical time of the tribal societies.

00:41:24

It’s also the mythological cycles.

00:41:26

It’s the Kali Yuga.

00:41:27

It’s the end of the Mayan lung count.

00:41:29

It’s, you know, and so on.

00:41:31

And we’re also in the mental, rational, historical structure,

00:41:34

at least for the time being, as long as that’s still useful.

00:41:37

So that was a really, that was a great overview.

00:41:40

So Daniel and I are both New Yorkers, so this is the thing.

00:41:44

New York is sort of like the crucible for this kind of time, this world market.

00:41:50

And the whole world is now living on this clock.

00:41:53

And every time I live in Santa Fe and in New York and I go back and forth,

00:41:57

and it’s been this meditation, and I actually think this really is the way we have to go forward,

00:42:01

is the commerce between the two at least those two worlds

00:42:05

so you have to preserve

00:42:07

you have to be in tune with the sacred

00:42:09

and sacred magical time but

00:42:11

also be going back and forth

00:42:13

in order to gradually heal that

00:42:15

bond I think they were right about

00:42:17

I don’t think Gipser could actually see exactly what it

00:42:19

would look like but I think it’s becoming clear now

00:42:22

and the main thing the main

00:42:23

point that I took away from that

00:42:25

was something like, if you think about genetically

00:42:27

modified foods, we try to

00:42:29

avoid GMOs now.

00:42:31

It felt like it was a cultural

00:42:33

GMO, like a cultural

00:42:35

you want to, like GMC

00:42:38

or something like that, genetically modified

00:42:39

culture. If you could have culture

00:42:42

that is organic. What felt like

00:42:43

the Eclipse Festival you’re talking about? Yes, the experience of the Eclipse

00:42:46

Festival, if you

00:42:48

remove the modifications,

00:42:50

that actually the answers and the healing

00:42:52

and the wholeness are there. So if we can

00:42:54

create infrastructure that is

00:42:56

that allows for that, and I think

00:42:58

the festivals are beginning to get

00:43:00

to the point where it might be something

00:43:01

that might be possible,

00:43:03

that some of the weirder things like the noosphere

00:43:05

for example

00:43:06

Hold on a second. People know about the

00:43:09

noosphere as an idea?

00:43:12

So Teilhard de Chardin

00:43:13

was this Catholic mystic and philosopher

00:43:16

and

00:43:17

he sort of came up with this philosophy that

00:43:19

there’s a biosphere

00:43:22

there’s the atmosphere

00:43:23

there’s like theosphere, which is the

00:43:25

mineral sphere, and he kind of

00:43:27

proposed there was also a noosphere.

00:43:29

Noos is from the Greek word meaning mind.

00:43:31

So he’s kind of suggesting there’s like a layer

00:43:33

of thought or a thought envelope,

00:43:35

a mental envelope around the planet.

00:43:37

All of our ideas and everything we talk about

00:43:39

is like feeding into this noosphere.

00:43:41

And he believed that humanity’s

00:43:43

trajectory was to ultimately become consciously,

00:43:48

kind of consciously activate the new sphere,

00:43:50

to create kind of like a globally new atmospheric consciousness,

00:43:53

which would be kind of like a unity state of consciousness.

00:43:56

Yeah, very beautiful.

00:43:58

Jose Arguelles is one of my favorite thinkers.

00:44:01

He was a big thinker about the Mayan calendar and so on.

00:44:03

And he talked about a transition from the biosphere,

00:44:06

which was the pristine condition of organic life on the planet,

00:44:09

through what we’re in now, which is the technosphere,

00:44:12

where humanity has created this artificial girdling of technologies

00:44:16

and radiations and communication systems,

00:44:19

and that the technosphere is actually this bridging mechanism

00:44:22

to bring us to this newospheric state,

00:44:24

which Jose

00:44:25

in his characteristically

00:44:27

visionary, idealistic way

00:44:29

foresaw as something that would be like a post-technological

00:44:32

reality, which I

00:44:34

still think is a very fascinating concept

00:44:35

because we’re so hooked into the

00:44:38

technology idea, we don’t really think about

00:44:40

this idea that we could have a post-technology

00:44:41

reality.

00:44:43

That’s what I’m getting at.

00:44:45

So like 10 years ago or whatever,

00:44:46

when I was working on my master’s thesis studying festivals,

00:44:49

and I did a section on Terre des Chardins,

00:44:51

I remember my mentor, who is a quantum physicist and a meditation guy,

00:44:55

and he read my passage on Teilhard Noosphere,

00:44:59

and he’s like, it’s really beautiful, isn’t it, Mitch?

00:45:01

And I was like, yeah, and it’s so interesting

00:45:03

how the Internet seems to be manifesting that.

00:45:05

And he said, yeah, well, you know,

00:45:08

the idea I take away from Teilhard and Steiner as well,

00:45:12

Rudolf Steiner, I’m not going to give an overview of that,

00:45:14

is that actually, in many ways,

00:45:16

the technologies are actually getting in the way

00:45:19

of what the new sphere really would be.

00:45:22

And I knew there was something true in that at the time,

00:45:25

but I couldn’t really wrap my head around it.

00:45:27

Now, I absolutely think that is true

00:45:29

because there was something about disconnecting the way we did

00:45:32

that I was so disconnecting from the New York time.

00:45:36

I was so able to actually tap into the wind,

00:45:40

just the flow of time,

00:45:41

and it felt like time unfolding in place as if it was just…

00:45:45

I wrote about that in my 2012 book.

00:45:48

If you think about what’s the core problem

00:45:50

in our society, a lot of people

00:45:52

would say patriarchy or

00:45:54

capitalism. What do people think is

00:45:56

the underlying problem,

00:45:58

the worst problem that we have?

00:46:00

Is it patriarchy? Is it capitalism?

00:46:03

Is it exploitation?

00:46:05

What’s that?

00:46:06

Eating meat. Okay, that’s interesting.

00:46:08

I mean, I…

00:46:09

Identification with our concepts.

00:46:12

Okay. I mean, I think…

00:46:14

I mean, I guess what I arrived at was that it’s actually our relationship

00:46:16

to time.

00:46:17

We put ourselves

00:46:20

in a kind of

00:46:21

limited time construct

00:46:23

that doesn’t give us

00:46:25

the opportunity

00:46:27

to really work through

00:46:29

the issues that we have. Like in

00:46:31

tribal societies, they would have these tribal

00:46:33

councils. So if they had some big issue

00:46:35

that they had to deal with, they would come together

00:46:38

and they would just sit together

00:46:39

for as long as it took for them

00:46:41

to reach coherence about what the answer

00:46:44

is. But in our culture, everything is super rushed.

00:46:47

If you have a debate, like a political debate,

00:46:49

it’s like 90 minutes and scripted and every answer is two and a half minutes.

00:46:53

Well, some things are fucking complicated.

00:46:55

You’re not going to reach a level of deep coherence

00:46:58

when you only have fucking an hour to talk about something.

00:47:06

have fucking an hour you know to to talk about something you know maybe and you know and maybe in a way like i guess in a way when i look at what’s happening with trumpocalypse i almost feel

00:47:11

it’s this unconscious push towards like breakdown you know so so once we break break down maybe

00:47:18

that’s going to be the point where we’re forced to reconfigure like we’ll have to be like oh like

00:47:21

okay that that didn’t work at all you know so what do we do now what’s next you know and and i think part of that would be even going to the question

00:47:29

of like you know how do we relate to time and what is time for you know anybody else want to

00:47:35

chat or ask a question yeah come on up my question about what’s your name uh My name is Tatiana. Hi. About Burning Man and wisdom.

00:47:46

Do you think the Burning Man spent lots of resources, isn’t it?

00:47:51

The footprint is huge.

00:47:53

Is it wisdom from wisdom position?

00:47:58

What do you think about that?

00:47:59

I think you have to look at Burning Man’s resource expenditure in relative terms.

00:48:03

I mean, one, like, you know, military exercise is probably way more resources than Burning Man’s resource expenditure in relative terms, I mean one military exercise

00:48:05

is probably way more

00:48:07

resources than Burning Man uses in a year

00:48:09

and it gets us

00:48:11

here. For me, Burning Man

00:48:13

is clearly part of some type

00:48:15

of evolutionary process

00:48:17

like the shift in awareness that happens

00:48:19

here, people coming back into

00:48:21

presence and so on, people

00:48:23

rebuilding community and tribe

00:48:25

experiencing together

00:48:27

as I said it really

00:48:30

brings to life this Oscar Wilde

00:48:32

vision but I think it’s transitional

00:48:34

and there were things about the

00:48:36

Eclipse Festival that were improvements

00:48:38

like for instance they did

00:48:40

composting toilets

00:48:41

that a friend of mine had been trying to do for 10 years

00:48:44

I think at Burning Man 90% of their toilets were composting toilets that a friend of mine had been trying to do for 10 years at Burning Man

00:48:45

90% of their toilets were composting

00:48:48

and Burning Man

00:48:51

keeps making advances

00:48:52

they have a Burning Man solar, Black Rock solar

00:48:55

they have the burner bus

00:48:56

and not everybody has to use these cars

00:48:58

I would say in general

00:48:59

to took so much people

00:49:02

so many people in a

00:49:04

desert it will take a lot of resources took so much people so many people in a desert

00:49:06

it will take a lot of

00:49:08

resources from each of us, isn’t it?

00:49:10

Yeah, but I think underlying that

00:49:12

is like we can become, I mean I think it’s

00:49:14

clear that there’s a reason we’re doing this

00:49:16

like it’s not even we’re doing it, it’s almost like

00:49:18

this was like a

00:49:19

local native people, this is like the

00:49:22

hinge point, this area is like

00:49:24

where their creation myth stems from.

00:49:26

You know, something is happening here that’s like bigger.

00:49:29

You know, it’s part of the evolutionary process on every level.

00:49:32

And yeah, it is wasteful.

00:49:34

It keeps transforming.

00:49:36

It’s going to keep transforming.

00:49:38

You know, maybe in 10 years it’ll be all solar and biofuels.

00:49:43

And, you know, we’ll be feeding back productively into

00:49:46

the ecosystem like evolution is happening that fast right now how’s it going okay good my name

00:49:54

is joel love um joel yeah i’m wondering um uh what the fuck is up with pyramids and like why

00:50:01

are they everywhere and nobody knows anything pyram Pyramids? Yeah. I was hoping maybe you knew more than me.

00:50:06

I mean, I do have a theory, which I’ll share.

00:50:08

Oh, okay. Yeah.

00:50:09

Yeah. I mean, this was more the subject of the 2012 book that I wrote.

00:50:13

But my favorite theory about the Great Pyramid is that it’s a lot older than we think.

00:50:19

It’s probably like maybe 12,000 years old, maybe even older.

00:50:23

You know, we know that the level of construction, the perfection of it,

00:50:27

is more than even our engineers can accomplish now.

00:50:31

It wasn’t a tomb.

00:50:33

It was a device.

00:50:36

I can’t remember.

00:50:37

There’s one really great book by an engineer who really looks about it

00:50:40

as like some kind of energy device that was concentrating energy.

00:50:44

My developed hypothesis after thinking about this for many years it as some kind of energy device that was concentrating energy. My

00:50:45

developed hypothesis after thinking about

00:50:48

this for many years and working

00:50:50

at Graham Hancock’s work, The Sign

00:50:51

and the Seal and so on, is that

00:50:54

somehow we previously

00:50:56

had a piece of technology

00:50:58

that was based

00:51:00

on a different form of energy, maybe quantum

00:51:02

fluctuations of the vacuum or

00:51:03

the quantum field or something.

00:51:07

And maybe

00:51:08

this was somehow something

00:51:09

that we gained in relationship to

00:51:11

an extraterrestrial

00:51:13

community that

00:51:15

was communicating with us.

00:51:19

There’s this shaman

00:51:20

Hank Wesselman.

00:51:21

He was able to do a shamanic kind of

00:51:23

drumming circle in the king’s chamber in the Great Pyramid.

00:51:27

He was lying in the kind of box there.

00:51:30

And he had a total out-of-body experience

00:51:31

that he writes about

00:51:32

where he suddenly found himself transported

00:51:34

into the body of a tall, spindly alien woman,

00:51:39

kind of dressed Egyptian

00:51:40

and kind of like with a crazy loincloth and stuff.

00:51:43

And this being was kind of in this vertical

00:51:45

cave complex and

00:51:47

telepathically he was

00:51:49

aware that all of the other

00:51:51

beings were

00:51:53

aware that this was happening

00:51:55

and were kind of waiting for it. They were like

00:51:57

anticipating this moment

00:51:59

and kind of the download he got was that

00:52:01

this was kind of like an elder

00:52:03

you know similar to us in many ways species that had become post technological and they kind of the download he got was that this was kind of like an elder, similar to us in many ways, species that had become post-technological.

00:52:09

And they kind of felt sadness that we were in this mess that we were in.

00:52:13

And we’d been previously in contact with them, and they were trying to reestablish communication with us.

00:52:20

And the Great Pyramid was somehow a device to communicate with them.

00:52:23

And the Great Pyramid was somehow a device to communicate with them.

00:52:32

And among the things that we’d gotten from them was this form of technology that, if you read Graham Hancock’s book, probably was ultimately the Ark of the Covenant.

00:52:41

Graham Hancock looks at, essentially, or Nassim Harami also studied this stuff. You know, that the Ark of the Covenant was probably an energy

00:52:46

device, had an anti-gravity

00:52:48

capacity, was probably the device

00:52:50

that was used to part the Red Sea.

00:52:52

Moses was the highest

00:52:54

initiate in Egypt, so he

00:52:56

was the one who had kind of knowledge of all

00:52:58

the secrets, and maybe that he stole

00:52:59

this device from the pyramid, and

00:53:02

that’s why the Jews were chased

00:53:03

across the desert and into the Red Sea

00:53:06

and he was able to part the Red Sea

00:53:07

with it and go through

00:53:09

there are earlier Egyptian legends

00:53:11

about how like

00:53:13

the Pharaoh’s daughter dropped her

00:53:15

bracelet in the lake and the

00:53:17

magicians were able to use a device

00:53:20

to open the lake and get the bracelet

00:53:21

so it seems like the same type

00:53:24

of technology.

00:53:27

And Graham tracks it very interestingly in the sign of the seal

00:53:28

and really follows all the byways of it.

00:53:30

That’s my governing hypothesis.

00:53:32

It could be totally wrong.

00:53:34

I think also there was a prehistoric connection

00:53:37

between the pyramid cultures.

00:53:39

There’s a really good book called

00:53:40

A Voyage of the Pyramid Builders by Robert Schock.

00:53:43

Have you looked at that? It’s cool.

00:53:44

Anyway, so you notice, for instance,

00:53:46

you find tobacco and cocaine traces in the Egyptian mummies,

00:53:52

which suggests that there had to have been a trading line

00:53:55

between Mesoamerica and Egypt,

00:53:58

which only makes sense,

00:53:59

considering how similar those cultures are architecturally.

00:54:05

So that’s just a hypothesis, obviously.

00:54:07

But yeah, I think there are a lot of pieces of a puzzle

00:54:09

that I think we’ll ultimately put together.

00:54:12

So hello, my name is Tanya.

00:54:14

Tanya?

00:54:15

Yes.

00:54:15

Hi.

00:54:16

Hi.

00:54:16

And can I ask you,

00:54:18

so we are here in the Burning Man,

00:54:20

and you told that it’s a place for evolution and for changes.

00:54:24

What is your personal challenges here?

00:54:27

Where are you evaluating?

00:54:30

My personal challenges?

00:54:31

You have.

00:54:32

What’s your personal goal to be here?

00:54:35

What’s your personal challenges

00:54:36

which you’re facing here?

00:54:38

Basically, communicating this material

00:54:40

is why I come here.

00:54:44

My personal challenge

00:54:46

is

00:54:46

in a way raising

00:54:50

not really the alarm.

00:54:52

On the one hand, the alarm, but also

00:54:53

what’s the opposite of the alarm?

00:54:57

The potential.

00:54:58

The carrot. It’s like a carrot and stick kind of phenomenon.

00:55:00

The stick is

00:55:01

we really are, we could

00:55:03

X ourselves out as a species.

00:55:07

Burning Man is full of the most wealthy and genius technologists

00:55:09

media makers on the planet

00:55:11

you know if we were

00:55:13

to like put our heads together as a community

00:55:16

we could probably make very very

00:55:17

rapid progress so I guess

00:55:19

that’s always that’s my challenge and in fact

00:55:21

if you look at the new book How Soon Is Now

00:55:23

it starts with my failed effort

00:55:25

to bring about a revolution at Burning Man

00:55:28

like 10 years ago while in a bunch of LSD

00:55:30

with this idea that everybody would stay here

00:55:32

and work together and create a new infrastructure

00:55:34

for a social network,

00:55:36

for humanity to work together and so on.

00:55:39

So yeah, I guess I still feel that was like

00:55:40

I had a lot of great ideas back then,

00:55:42

but I still feel that the potential here’ve had a lot of great ideas back then but I still feel that’s the potential

00:55:45

here is to figure out how to bring

00:55:47

the many tiers of

00:55:50

this community that are so brilliant

00:55:51

and have such access to resources and knowledge

00:55:54

you know how could it work

00:55:56

together more coherently to

00:55:57

bring about the changes that need to happen.

00:55:59

Do you usually after Burning Man analyze

00:56:02

was it a successful year for you

00:56:04

did you did your goals

00:56:06

and challenges?

00:56:07

No, not really.

00:56:09

I always make really beautiful

00:56:11

new friends here. My network

00:56:13

always increases. That’s one of the crucial

00:56:15

things for me. I would say along

00:56:17

with communicating ideas

00:56:19

and so on, it’s really for me about connecting

00:56:21

with friends and making friends.

00:56:24

Thank you. Yeah, for sure.

00:56:27

Yeah.

00:56:29

My name’s

00:56:29

Quentin. Quentin? Yeah, so

00:56:31

I was just wondering, when you’re talking about

00:56:33

government, like Terrence McKenna

00:56:36

talking about how culture is

00:56:38

an operating system, thinking about

00:56:39

the stage we’re in with government right now

00:56:42

when you’re looking at how the United States

00:56:44

specifically works. We’ve got our three… Can you get a little bit closer to the thing? Yeah, sorry government right now when you’re looking at how the United States specifically works.

00:56:45

We’ve got our three branches. Speak a little bit closer to the thing.

00:56:47

Yeah, sorry about that.

00:56:49

So you’re talking about the three branches of government right now.

00:56:52

Are we at a point where we have to move away from that?

00:56:55

What do you mean the three branches?

00:56:56

You mean judicial and legislative and executive?

00:56:58

The United States, basically.

00:57:00

Our government, the way it works here.

00:57:03

With the Trumpocalypse,

00:57:05

is that something that we are forced to move away from?

00:57:09

Or is it something we continue to refine and work with?

00:57:12

If you go back to Thomas Jefferson,

00:57:15

he recognized that the founding fathers

00:57:19

had this incredible excitement of being able to define

00:57:22

this new world for everybody else and this new system.

00:57:25

But they realized that it had a problem, because once it’s a legacy,

00:57:30

people get kind of stuck, like flies stuck in flypaper in that system.

00:57:34

And Jefferson, towards the end of his life, was like, uh-oh, we’ve made a big mistake here.

00:57:38

What we really need is a permanent or perpetual revolution

00:57:41

where the focus is on elementary republics, where everybody

00:57:46

feels like a continuous participant, which in a sense is very similar to anarchy.

00:57:51

Like, I would define myself more or less as an anarchist, and I feel ultimately we could

00:57:57

use the information technologies, the communication structures, to create a way for us to do a lot of the functions of government differently.

00:58:11

Yeah.

00:58:11

Yeah.

00:58:13

Thanks.

00:58:14

Yeah.

00:58:15

Daniel, hi, everyone.

00:58:17

My name’s Lighthouse.

00:58:19

Earlier in the talk, you were uh you’re talking about people and kind of everybody everything uh humanity

00:58:28

being stuck in an adolescent state not um not being able to advance uh to adulthood like there

00:58:35

how there was kind of a transformative like uh what process that used to be in place like

00:58:44

initiations that involved

00:58:45

fasting or walkabouts

00:58:48

or visionary plants or whatever.

00:58:49

And now we’ve seen in the modern world

00:58:51

people feel it very deeply

00:58:53

and intuitively they’re going on their own

00:58:55

initiatory journeys, but somehow

00:58:57

without a cultural context

00:58:59

like in a tribal society

00:59:01

you’d go on an initiation,

00:59:03

then the elders would hear your visions.

00:59:06

They would kind of place you in the culture’s mythology and process.

00:59:12

You would feel kind of situated.

00:59:14

So here people have been going on these initiation journeys, you know, through psychedelics or meditation or whatever.

00:59:19

But there isn’t really a – they’re not re-situated in a sense.

00:59:23

Like there isn’t a coherence around that.

00:59:25

So I guess I was wondering what kind of path or method,

00:59:30

it sounds like psychedelics obviously,

00:59:33

but maybe what that might look like for people,

00:59:39

what kind of initiations they could go on.

00:59:41

It sounds like you’re also saying that it needs structure around it.

00:59:45

So I guess for me, there’s two parts.

00:59:47

There’s one, the awakening

00:59:48

that probably everybody in this room

00:59:49

has already had to some extent,

00:59:51

where you recognize that

00:59:53

there’s deeper levels of consciousness,

00:59:56

like we’re connected to source in some respects,

00:59:59

however you want to phrase it.

01:00:00

But I think that really the initiation path

01:00:02

in this time is the ecological emergency and the geopolitical emergency.

01:00:08

The fact that a lot of humanity has been turned into idiot-level monstrosities in the Fox News era.

01:00:20

It’s very popular these days.

01:00:21

What’s that?

01:00:22

That’s very popular.

01:00:21

It’s very popular these days.

01:00:22

What’s that?

01:00:23

That’s very popular. Yeah, so the initiation, I think, is contributing to the renewal,

01:00:28

not just separating from society and going deeper in.

01:00:34

You have to take that going in and then take it out.

01:00:38

And how does, I mean, the problem being the adolescent form

01:00:44

being self-centered, egocentric.

01:00:48

So what does it look like to be in the adult stage where, I mean, does that involve taking care of each other?

01:00:57

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, in a tribal society, people would, you know, the whole tribe would look after each other in a way.

01:01:05

society, people would, you know, the whole tribe would look after each other in a way. But now it’s beyond that, because we’re becoming aware that as a human family, we’re one tribe on the earth,

01:01:11

right? Like, genetically, we were from one family of Africans 60,000 years ago. The separation is

01:01:17

an illusion. And therefore, just as you want to take care of your immediate family, I believe you

01:01:22

should also want to take care of the human family and the biodiversity

01:01:25

of life on the planet.

01:01:27

That is a sense of responsibility

01:01:30

that we should just figure out how to

01:01:32

embody ourselves and

01:01:33

instill collectively.

01:01:37

Thank you.

01:01:38

So guys, oh, you have one more?

01:01:40

Last question.

01:01:41

Hey, I’m Devin, and I’m excited

01:01:44

to see you and also to read your new book.

01:01:46

I’m only familiar with Breaking Open the Head, but I really enjoyed it.

01:01:50

And so I just had a thought while you were speaking.

01:01:53

It’s less of like a question and more of like an opportunity for feedback.

01:01:57

But I’ve been finding myself really constrained in this weird predicament

01:02:02

where you’re aware of the evolutionary crisis but it’s hard

01:02:05

to know how to act because like it seems like everything that I do is contributing to the issue

01:02:11

because of the way that we’ve been brought up and there’s no option really to get out of it it’s like

01:02:16

with transportation with where you work you need money to survive and your place of work is not

01:02:22

being efficient or whatever and then so it feels like

01:02:25

out of my control and then on another level i was thinking like what if it’s out of humanity’s

01:02:30

control like nature has presented this crisis to us and and which allows us to maybe make the next

01:02:37

step and the next evolutionary step to move forward so maybe in turn it’s like it’s not

01:02:43

really even up to humanity it’s like as a

01:02:45

in a bigger picture nature has like made this happen so that we can move forward for itself

01:02:51

in a way and i was just interested in what you thought about that yeah no that’s a really great

01:02:56

point um yeah i mean i mean first of all what do i know ultimately but I mean you know I think first of all

01:03:06

we have to like really have patience with ourselves

01:03:08

and be forgiving

01:03:09

you know and

01:03:10

you know

01:03:12

understand I mean that’s hopefully what the new book helps

01:03:16

understand the

01:03:18

levels of the situation

01:03:19

and then really you know figure out how

01:03:22

we help out

01:03:23

in the best way that’s right for us.

01:03:26

So somebody might be a gardener,

01:03:28

and they’re just going to do permaculture on a small scale

01:03:30

and introduce that to communities,

01:03:32

and that’s an incredible gift to the world.

01:03:35

Somebody else has a skill for making structures,

01:03:38

and they can learn how to do that in a different way.

01:03:42

So not to panic.

01:03:44

Forgive yourself. You’re absolutely right.

01:03:46

Nature has put us in this position.

01:03:48

It’s probably totally perfect

01:03:50

and exactly what needs to be happening right now.

01:03:52

But we also have this capacity

01:03:54

to kind of

01:03:55

become more conscious of the process

01:03:58

and work with it

01:03:59

in a different way.

01:04:02

Yeah.

01:04:03

Thanks so much, guys. It was really nice talking to you.

01:04:06

Or with you.

01:04:13

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:04:15

where people are changing their lives

01:04:17

one thought at a time.

01:04:20

As Daniel just said,

01:04:22

in his latest book,

01:04:23

he talks about his infamous LSD episode at the 2005 Burning Man Festival.

01:04:29

I wasn’t at the burn that year, but, well, I can still remember laughing so hard that my sides hurt when my friend Cinnamon Twist told me the story.

01:04:39

I’ve always wished that someone would write about it from the outside, so to speak,

01:04:43

I’ve always wished that someone would write about it from the outside, so to speak,

01:04:48

because Daniel, in his book, remembers it as he saw it then,

01:04:52

but to those who weren’t so ripped on acid, well, it was hilarious.

01:04:56

Hopefully, others will now annotate Daniel’s version to help us get a better picture of a legendary Burning Man happening.

01:05:00

And I don’t mean to put down on what Daniel was thinking at the time.

01:05:05

Thought about in the light of a sober day, what he says is really important to think and to talk

01:05:11

about. But if you can find somebody who saw Daniel at the time and get them to tell you about it,

01:05:18

well, I’m sure that you won’t be disappointed. Isn’t it fascinating how completely different an event is seen

01:05:26

when viewed through someone else’s lens of this jewel that we call life?

01:05:31

And this makes a good point, I think.

01:05:33

Many of us have experienced really wonderful aha moments

01:05:37

when on deep psychedelic journeys.

01:05:39

But to bring those new ideas back to the world after you come down

01:05:43

takes a lot of work.

01:05:45

In Daniel’s case, it took almost a decade.

01:05:49

Before, having only heard Cinnamon Twist’s account of the way Daniel’s long trip unfolded,

01:05:55

I could only see the humor in what happened.

01:05:58

But Daniel, Daniel realized that while he may not have done his best job

01:06:03

presenting the thoughts that were flying through his mind at the time,

01:06:07

nonetheless, they were thoughts that were well worth pursuing.

01:06:11

And now we have them presented more formally in his new book.

01:06:15

Bravo, Daniel!

01:06:17

Now, before I go, I’ve got a couple of short announcements.

01:06:21

First of all, I’d like to let all of our fellow salonners from down

01:06:25

under know about a conference that’s going to take place in a couple weeks. It’s called

01:06:30

Entheogenesis Australis 2017 Outdoor Psychedelic Symposium, and it’s going to be held from the 8th

01:06:39

through the 10th of December. They have a really great lineup of speakers, including some that you’ve heard from

01:06:45

here in the salon. People like Rick Doblin, Ne’Shea Devenrow, Eric Davis, and Kathleen Harrison,

01:06:51

just to mention a few. It looks to be a great place to find the others. So if you live in

01:06:56

Australia and are looking for something fun and interesting to do in early December, well,

01:07:01

just surf on over to the program notes for today’s podcast,

01:07:10

which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.com, and there you’ll find a link to the conference website, which is just loaded with detailed information about this event.

01:07:15

The other thing that I’d like to do is to ask you if you would take a minute or two

01:07:19

out of your day and send a note or a postcard to Gene Stolaroff.

01:07:27

day and send a note or a postcard to Gene Stolaroff. If you go back to my podcast number 83,

01:07:33

you can listen to the first of the Lone Pine stories that were recorded in conversations with Gene and Myron at their home in Lone Pine, California. As you know, Myron died almost five

01:07:40

years ago, but what you may not know is that Gene, who is now 90 years old, is still living in

01:07:47

the house that they shared in Lone Pine for many years. I say that it’s in Lone Pine, but that’s

01:07:53

only where Jean receives her mail, because her house is way out of town at a quiet spot in the

01:07:58

high desert, and she lives there alone. Now Jean doesn’t have an internet connection, and so our way of staying in touch is by phone.

01:08:07

Last week when I called her,

01:08:09

the first thing that she wanted to do was to tell me

01:08:11

that she’d just received a letter from one of our fellow salonners in Colorado,

01:08:16

and he had thanked her and Myron for their important contributions

01:08:19

to the world of psychedelic research.

01:08:22

Now, if you’re new here to the salon, you may not be aware of it,

01:08:26

but a significant amount of the research that is documented

01:08:29

in Anne and Sasha Shulgin’s book, P. Call and T. Call,

01:08:33

was not only done by Myron and Jean,

01:08:36

but much of it also took place in that magical little house

01:08:39

just outside of Lone Pine.

01:08:42

Today, as far as I know, there are only three people who are still alive

01:08:46

that participated in those important experiments, and Gene is one of those three people. So if you

01:08:53

have ever benefited from an experience involving any of the molecules that Sasha created, researched,

01:08:59

tested, and then released to the world, well, you could show your gratitude by sending Jean a short note of thanks,

01:09:06

just as that wonderful salonner from Colorado did.

01:09:10

I know that I asked this once before,

01:09:12

but sadly, well, only three people sent Jean a note.

01:09:16

It may not seem like a big deal to you,

01:09:18

but believe me, it would be a huge deal to Jean.

01:09:23

Her mailing address is

01:09:24

Jean Stoleroff, S-T-O-L-E-R-O-F-F,

01:09:29

Post Office Box 742,

01:09:32

Lone Pine, California, 93545.

01:09:36

Let me repeat that.

01:09:38

Jean Stolaroff, S-T-O-L-E-R-O-F-F,

01:09:42

Post Office Box 742, Lone Pine, California, 93545.

01:09:51

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:09:55

Be well, my friends. Thank you.