583 - Psychedelics in the Age of AI

Program Notes

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Lorenzo

Date this lecture was recorded: September 8, 2018

Today’s podcast features a talk that Lorenzo gave at the recent Imagine Orcas Island Music and Arts festival. The title of this talk is “Psychedelics in the Age of AI”, and it is followed by a question and answer session. At the end of the podcast Lorenzo plays a song from the newly emerging psychedelic/country/rock band The Burned. Lorenzo also talks about the festival as well as the Imagine Convergence that will take place on Orcas Island in March of 2019.

Main Stage & LakefrontImagine Orcas Island Music & Arts Festival

The Burned Website

The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival
October 1 - 7, 2018

Download a free copy of Lorenzo’s latest book
The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

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salon.

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And, well, I’ve been kind of busy since we were last together here in the salon.

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And while I was away, Justin E. and Ian W. both made direct donations to help offset some of the expenses we have here each month in the salon.

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On top of that, Luke A., Antonia L., Sean F., Eric S., and Larry M. all became new supporters of mine on Patreon, which you’ll be hearing much more about in the weeks to come.

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And before I introduce today’s talk, I first want to make a quick announcement about the Psychedelic Film and Music Festival that will be held in New York City from October 1st through the 7th of this year. In my next podcast, which will be posted in a few days, I’ll play a

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conversation that I had with the producer of the event, but since the time is so short before the

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conference, I wanted to give you a little heads up right now, and I’ll put a link to that event

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in today’s program notes, which you can find at

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psychedelicsalon.com. Now, for our fellow salonners who have been writing to encourage me to do a

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little more talking in these podcasts, well, today it’s all Lorenzo, so I hope you’ll get your fill

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for a little while. What I’m going to play right now is a recording of the talk that I gave last

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week at the Imagine Music and Arts Festival, which was held on Orcas Island in the state of Washington.

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Now, if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, you know that a little over five years

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ago there was a lot of criticism about the fact that most of the speakers at psychedelic conferences were old white men.

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So I decided to reduce the number of old white men on stage by at least one.

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And it’s now been over five years since I’ve given any talks at all.

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In fact, I’ve only left this county one time in the past five years.

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It’s been the life of a hermit for me, but no more.

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A few months ago, my dear friend Darren Leong came to San Diego and stayed with my wife and I for a few days. His main reason for the visit

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was to see if he could convince me to stretch my wings once again and speak at the Imagine

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Convergence conference that he’ll be producing next March. Well, after spending some time with

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Darren, I got the itch to travel once

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again, and so he also invited me to speak at the Imagine Festival, which he also produces with his

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friend, a man who is one of the most peaceful people I know, Ben Brownert. This was a wonderful

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experience for me, and I want to thank the rest of the Imagine staff and the many volunteers,

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particularly Emily and Bridget,

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without whose help these festivals simply couldn’t function.

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These festivals are a precious resource for our communities

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and I appreciate all of the work that goes into putting on an event like this.

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It was great fun for me to reconnect with some friends who,

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well, I haven’t seen in quite a few years.

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And one of these longtime friends was Mark Wilber. great fun for me to reconnect with some friends who, well, I haven’t seen in quite a few years.

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And one of these longtime friends was Mark Wilber. I lost touch with Mark after the last Oracle gathering, but I learned that he is now married and has a son. And I know that a lot of

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our fellow salonners also know Mark from the many festivals at which he is sometimes the lead sound

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technician. In fact, he managed the sound systems on that big 747 on the

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playa at Burning Man this year. Now, Mark had spent several of the past years in Vietnam, where

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I have friends that are so close to me, I feel we are family. But now he’s living on one of the

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Galapagos Islands. And the reason I’m bringing this up is that Mark informed me that, well,

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we have a longtime fellow salonner living there.

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His name is Hutu Gopagas, and I hope I’m pronouncing that close to right, and I think that

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he may even have a podcast himself. So, Hutu, please send me a link to your podcast, and I’ll

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mention it here in the salon. For many years now, we’ve had fellow salonners in over 100 countries,

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years now we’ve had fellow salonners in over a hundred countries, but as far as I know, Hutu is the only one who lives on the Galapagos, which for some reason

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gives me a really good feeling. So thanks for being with us. And now let me take

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you to one of the big tents at the Imagine Festival, where I gave my first

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presentation in five years. So let’s see if I still remember how to ride this thing.

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Today we’ve got Lorenzo Haggerty,

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who Darren is going to introduce

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as they go back a little ways.

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This will be going until four o’clock

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and we’ll pretty much be wrapping things up for the day.

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Oh, excuse me, I’m sorry. There’s a Gene Keys workshop after that

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with Elijah Parker and Amelie Grace.

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You may have heard them in the Zavi Dome last night.

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They’re playing again today at Entheo.

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I could say a lot more,

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but I’m going to stop there and pass it to Darren.

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He’s going to introduce Lorenzo.

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So glad you’re here.

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Enjoy.

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Hi, everyone.

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Just real quick.

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My dear friend Lorenzo Haggerty has traveled from Southern California to come be with us today.

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He’s made a profound impact on my life.

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We met, I don’t know.

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2006, Burning Man.

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How long was that?

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12 years ago at Burning Man?

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Yeah.

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2006, Burning Man.

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How long was that?

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12 years ago at Burning Man?

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Yeah.

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And at that event,

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he was producing something called the Planque Norte event at Burning Man,

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and it was featuring some of the most,

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I guess, founders of some of the psychedelic scene.

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So Lorenzo runs a podcast called The Psychedelic Salon,

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which features, you know, all sorts of, like, authors, scientists, thinkers

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around the field of psychedelics.

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And the information that I’ve gotten from that podcast

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has just, like, informed me on so much stuff and really has formed my view about how some of these things work and where we’re at.

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And so I just want to say it’s been an honor to know you and an honor to have you here.

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And I guess Lorenzo is gonna

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talk about psychedelics in the age of AI right right well the honor is all of

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ours to thank Darren and Bridget and all of the volunteers and staff without

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their thousands of hours of work they put into this,

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we wouldn’t all be here today.

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So thank you all.

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I really appreciate that.

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And for Darren especially, five years ago I was getting a lot of criticism about the old white men up on the stage.

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And I think they were right.

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And so I quit.

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I haven’t left San Diego County in five years until now.

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Darren flew down and spent a couple days with

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me and wanted me to talk to me about Convergence that’s coming up in March, and I got really

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excited about that, and then I said, gee, you’ve got me interested again. I think I’d like to go to

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your festival, and so here I am. So he got me out of my cave. Darren has kick-started the next phase

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of my life, and you. And I’m sitting down.

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Full disclosure here, my daughter says I’m a dusty old fart.

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When I was born, Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t even halfway through his third term yet.

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So I’m 76 years old, and so I feel I can sit down rather than stand up and talk.

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But what do I have that I can bring here to talk about psychedelics and AI

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I don’t have anything really that you all don’t have

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except for one thing, I have a lot more time on my hands

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because I retired in 99, kind of accidentally

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so I read and I think and I write

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and that’s what I do

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how many people have heard the psychedelic salon?

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oh wow, that’s more than I thought. Fantastic.

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And for those that you haven’t,

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I’ll give you a real quick, you know, brief bio

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and self-congratulations, I guess.

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I don’t know.

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I do have a degree in electrical engineering,

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but it came in 1964,

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and it was at an all-boys school called Notre Dame,

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which gave me a really bad education,

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and I am not a fan of theirs anymore, in case you’re wondering. But I do have that background.

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I’ve worked in a lot of technical areas. Well, I was a stuntman in the movies. I served in the Navy

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and was so well into the system, I made it up to the rank of lieutenant commander.

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Then I practiced law in Houston. Then I started one of the first personal computer companies. And at one point in time, we had 3,000 people in 17 states selling personal computers Amway style. And

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I’m kind of embarrassed about that now. But that was back in the early days before IBM was in the

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business. And when they came in, they crushed us and TI and Commodore and Osborne. We all got crushed out

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of the business, but it was a great experience, and as a result, I’ve stayed involved in tech.

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And then for a number of years, I was the internet evangelist for Verizon Data Services,

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and they paid me an exorbitant sum of money to travel around the world and convince

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executives and phone companies that the internet was the next best thing coming along. And that

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was back in the 90s, you know, before people were really into it. And so I’ve had that connection

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with technology. And I’ve had a connection with psychedelics for a little while. But I was 42

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years old before I had my first experience.

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I didn’t even smoke pot. I’d been to Vietnam and back and all that, but at the time in Texas,

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you know, people were getting 30 years to life for a single joint, and I would have lost my law

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license and all that, and fortunately MDMA was legal at the time, so I tried it. And the night I had my first experience, at the beginning of the experience,

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I was an Irish Catholic Republican lawyer.

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And the next morning, I was still Irish.

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Everything else is now gone.

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So my friends from back then are convinced that drugs are really bad because look what happened to Lorenzo, you know?

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And had I not found MDMA, I probably wouldn’t be alive right now.

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It’s really been a big thing in my life.

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But we’ll get to that. So let’s talk about AI first because it’s something that’s been around for a long time,

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but it’s only really making the news a lot now because of the big jumps forward.

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And like I said, I don’t work in the field of AI.

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I’ve got a few friends in it.

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And back in 2000 when I published The Spirit of the Internet,

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I got invited to join the Global Brain mailing list, which I am just a lurker because these are Ph.D. level people around the world that are working on artificial intelligence and have for a long time.

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And so I’ve been following their discussions of things like how do we program emotions into these machines and all.

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But let’s back away from thinking of AI, artificial intelligence, as little bitty beings or something like that.

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It’s code. It’s an algorithm. That’s all it is.

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Now, some of them have gotten really super powerful because they are writing their own code.

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They are, just like you and I, trying to improve ourselves.

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Well, the AIs try to improve themselves.

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And so a lot of that code has gotten out of the hands of humans.

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But it’s done some amazing things.

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We’ve all read the fear stories about killer robots.

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Well, I read about a killer robot a week or so ago that is really a pretty good deal.

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It’s over in the Great Barrier Reef and there’s an invasive species

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of fish coming in there. So they have

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programmed these robots with AI

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to identify

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that type of fish and kill

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it. And so they’re getting rid of this invasive

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species with killer robots.

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So that’s one good thing that’s

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happening.

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There’s medical work already

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being done that’s not just a theory, but is being

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experimented with, where they take microparticles and inject them in the bloodstream, and then

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through some of the, I guess through magnetics mainly, they’re actually performing surgery on

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internal organs without having to have an incision. So there’s a little good feature.

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There’s an AI that’s being put in place right as we speak, right this moment.

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In San Francisco, they’re tolling out of the harbor this great big huge net, I guess,

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and they’re going out to the big Pacific swirl of plastic.

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A 23-year-old young man in the Netherlands came up with this idea.

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I think he’s 25 now, but he got the Dutch government to put in a few million first,

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and then some tech companies have.

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And they’ve developed a way that they’re going to tow this big thing out

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to the big patch in the Pacific, the plastic patch,

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and they’re going to leave it there on its own.

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It’s being controlled by AIs, and every month they’ll send a ship out and pick up five tons

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of plastic, and this is the first of 60 of these that’s being planned. Again, so there’s some good

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things coming from AI, and we’ve got to recognize that technology is just how we apply it.

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Technology itself is morally neutral.

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Now, when I started thinking about AI a few years ago,

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I thought, well, you know, it can help humans,

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it can assist us,

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but there’s some things AI can’t do,

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you know, the arts.

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Well, I came across this book earlier this year,

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it was called Homo Deus,

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and it was written by the guy that wrote Sapien.

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I know some of you have read that.

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And the book is basically about algorithms, which is AI.

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And he talks about AI.

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And one of the stories in there that really astounded me was there was a professor of music at UC Santa Cruz

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that was really against AI.

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And there was another man who had been spending

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maybe 10 or 12 years developing his AI and refining it so it could write music, Bach in particular.

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So they had a weekend event, and they had 100 people come who were really music experts.

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And they played three pieces, piano pieces.

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One was written by Bach, one was written by this professor,

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and one was written by the computer.

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Ninety-eight of these experts picked the computer composition

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to be the original Bach.

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So that’s kind of scary when you think about it.

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Where are we going to fit in in these things?

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They’re taking over a lot of control from us.

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Well, they’re not taking over.

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We’re giving it to them.

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Now, we’ve all been involved in AI.

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If you have a cell phone or if you’ve ever used the Internet,

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AI is just algorithms that help you.

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And I was shocked when I first, a year or so ago,

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I finally cratered and decided to put my photos up on Google.

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And I’m a very anti-Google person.

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I use DuckDuckGo, by the way.

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But I put my photos up there because I had been using the software

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that they bought out and then they put it only online.

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So I uploaded my photo albums that my mother had put together,

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along with some pictures of myself,

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and actually some from Oracle gatherings, things like that.

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But this software up there, on its own,

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looks at your picture,

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and then it assembles all the pictures that that person is in.

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And so I’ve got all of my family,

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I can click on an album, and it’s just pictures of them. Well, this AI went out and it picked out pictures of me three and four years

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old and said, that’s you. And I was shocked. I mean, the facial recognition software is awesome

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and scary and frightening. You know, everywhere we go now, we’re on video somewhere,

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and those things are all being recorded.

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And so how do we control our lives

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when we’ve got smartphones that are reminding us of this and that,

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and every time one of our friends in a foreign country

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sends us a message or an email, we get a little bing on our phone.

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And, you know, next thing you know, your life is being run by these devices.

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Now, last Thursday, one of the world’s leading experts on all this kind of technology

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was on the Joe Rogan show, and Elon Musk is his name,

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and he came up with an idea that he said

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the only way that humans are going to be able to compete

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in the world of AI

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is if we buy this new technology

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that my new company is developing,

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and instead of using voice to search the Internet or whatever,

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instead of typing, it’s a helmet you put on,

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and it knows what you’re thinking. You

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can just think what you want and think. And he says, that’s how you’re going to beat AI. Well,

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that is AI. It’s code. And as a little aside, he had a two-hour interview,

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and at the end of it, Joe got Elon Musk to smoke a doobie and drink some whiskey.

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Now, here’s a social thing that I heard the promoters of festivals talking about how, you know, they still have had, you know, we’ve had trouble forever with these, you know, the cops thinking that this is a big drug fest or something like that.

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But we also see here on the West Coast where cannabis is now legal and we’re feeling that the world is starting to accept these things, but not so.

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Because Elon Musk smoked a doobie, there’s no comment about him drinking whiskey.

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Nobody said anything about that.

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But smoking the doobie caused his stock to go down 9%.

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We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars,

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and two top executives quit the firm because he smoked dope, you know?

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So we’re a long way from having, you know,

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good recognition of what’s going on.

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That’s kind of scary when you think about it

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because with all of these automated devices,

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it just amplifies what a lot of people call the rat race.

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And I don’t think that’s a good term because I’ve never seen more than two or three rats

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at one place at one time, and they don’t seem to be racing.

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To me, what we’re getting ourselves involved in is more like an ant colony in the hive mind.

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And when I was young, I grew up in the outskirts of Chicago in a hive mind. And, you know, when I was, when I was young, I was, I was, uh, I grew up in the

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outskirts of Chicago and in a small town. And, uh, back then it was a whole different world.

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I’m not saying it was better. I wouldn’t go back to it for anything, but on, on, uh, on weekends,

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you know, I’d say, Oh, what can I do? My mother had packed me a sack lunch. So get on your bike

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and ride to the park, which is about a mile away and get home by dark. And, you know, I didn’t have

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a watch or anything. And so I go spend the whole day out at the park and i you know we lived in a place where i didn’t have

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any playmates or anything so i was pretty much on my own all the time and one of the things that

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really i spent hours and hours doing in the park is watching ants because you know if you find a

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ant colony and you watch them after a while you can see the patterns and it’s really fascinating if

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you don’t think it is why do they sell millions of dollars of ant farms every christmas in the

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toy stores you know it’s fun to watch ants but what i noticed after a while is you’d see all

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these ants busily going places and doing their thing and carrying little pieces of plants and

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whatever but there’s all every once in a while you see one or two ants just kind of off to the side.

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And at first I thought, oh, they’re old and tired, they’re going to die.

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But 20 minutes, a half hour later, all of a sudden they go back and join it again.

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And I thought, what’s going on?

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And I’m sure we’ve all seen the documentaries in Africa, the big colonies,

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where all of a sudden the entire colony will up and move to a different location.

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How did they know where to go?

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Well, these little, I think, psychedelic ants are breaking their hive mind

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and moving off to the side and thinking about things and say,

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you know, our hive isn’t in the best location.

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We could have a lot better place over here.

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And so these psychedelic ants, and I know if you’re the botanist around or biologist,

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you’re going to use like fingernails on a blackboard.

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But that’s the metaphor I started using with these ants, little psychedelic ants.

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They broke out somehow of their hive mind to look at a bigger picture.

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And that’s what I’m suggesting we can do with psychedelics.

00:21:25 ►

picture and that’s what I’m suggesting we can do with psychedelics now when I talk about psychedelics that’s that’s really such a broad topic because well

00:21:32 ►

you know there’s let me give you a little bit of my history I guess I

00:21:36 ►

hadn’t done any any substance at all till I was 42 I’m only doing MDMA a year

00:21:43 ►

later I finally had my first cannabis. And all that time,

00:21:46 ►

a guy had given me some windowpane acid. And I’ve been carrying it around for over a year

00:21:51 ►

because I was scared to death. It’s going to ruin my chromosomes. I’m going to go crazy.

00:21:55 ►

And actually, before my first trip, I had the woman who was my wife then. I said, you know,

00:21:59 ►

I’m going to do this acid. And I may never come back. I may be completely crazy, and she was not excited about it.

00:22:08 ►

Well, she was excited, but not in the way I wanted.

00:22:11 ►

But I really thought there was a good chance that I would lose my mind

00:22:16 ►

because I had bought into all that stuff.

00:22:18 ►

Well, instead, it changed my mind.

00:22:20 ►

It didn’t lose my mind.

00:22:22 ►

So from there on out, I did mushrooms. I did psychedelics. And

00:22:28 ►

I was like Mikey. I was, there was a crowd I was in in Dallas that would come up with these new

00:22:33 ►

substances and say, hey, try this. I said, what is it? I don’t know. Try it. And so I was trying

00:22:38 ►

all this stuff. And I came across something that was just awesome, just amazing. I’ve never had

00:22:44 ►

anything like it. And so I started, I found out about Sasha Shulgin. So was just awesome, just amazing. I’ve never had anything like it.

00:22:45 ►

And so I found out about Sasha Shulgin.

00:22:48 ►

So I wrote to him out of the blue.

00:22:50 ►

Sasha Shulgin, I think I had his street name but not address.

00:22:55 ►

And he wrote back to me.

00:22:57 ►

And we started correspondence.

00:22:58 ►

We finally kind of figured out what it was I had.

00:23:00 ►

But that started my connection with this community.

00:23:06 ►

I had, but that started my connection with this community, although by the time I got to Florida, I was only knew one other person my age who was doing psychedelics, and I was

00:23:12 ►

buying pot for my son, but I just thought I was at the end of the road, and then it

00:23:20 ►

was in 94, there was a magazine that was out at the time called Mondo 2000.

00:23:24 ►

Have any of you seen Mondo 2000? Yeah. It was an 94, there was a magazine that was out at the time called Mondo 2000. Have any of you seen Mondo 2000?

00:23:26 ►

Yeah.

00:23:27 ►

It was an amazing magazine.

00:23:30 ►

And in 94, there was an article where Zandor,

00:23:33 ►

who was one of the real characters in Mondo,

00:23:35 ►

Zandor did a big interview with this guy named Terrence McKenna.

00:23:40 ►

Well, here I am.

00:23:40 ►

It’s 1994.

00:23:41 ►

I’d never heard of Terrence McKenna before.

00:23:44 ►

And he was talking about a thing called DMT. Now. I’d never heard of Terrence McKenna before. And he was talking about a thing called DMT.

00:23:47 ►

Now, I’d never heard of DMT.

00:23:49 ►

Well, now I’ve got a podcast with 270-some Terrence McKenna talks on it.

00:23:53 ►

So, you know, I finally got into him.

00:23:55 ►

But I didn’t do anything about that until four years later in the summer of 98.

00:24:00 ►

Terrence was giving a workshop up at Omega Institute.

00:24:04 ►

I went up to that.

00:24:06 ►

One of the first conversations I had with me, he said, oh, you need to go to Palenque.

00:24:10 ►

Well, the Palenque conference was something that, well, you can see it changed my life because I met my wife there.

00:24:16 ►

And less than a year later, we were married.

00:24:19 ►

So these conferences have a lot of potential for things that you don’t expect when you go to them.

00:24:24 ►

But from there on, I moved out to the West Coast.

00:24:27 ►

My wife was the research assistant for Dr. Grobe, who did the psilocybin end-of-life study at Harbor UCLA.

00:24:35 ►

And so I got to see that study from the inside.

00:24:38 ►

But at the same time, I was doing my own psychedelic research because I got involved with a group of people.

00:24:45 ►

And this is before 9-11, and every other week we would get a little packet of white powder in the mail.

00:24:51 ►

As you know, after 9-11, you didn’t want to be sending white powder around anywhere,

00:24:55 ►

so that little thing ended.

00:24:57 ►

But for a couple years, we were working through the indexes of Sasha Shuglin’s PCOL and T-COL

00:25:02 ►

and trying all of these substances.

00:25:06 ►

And in

00:25:07 ►

year 2000, from the first six

00:25:10 ►

months of it, I was doing the final draft of my

00:25:12 ►

book, The Spirit of the Internet,

00:25:13 ►

and I was microdosing.

00:25:15 ►

So I’d microdose Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,

00:25:18 ►

and Thursday. I’d take Friday off so that

00:25:19 ►

on Saturday I could try these new chemicals.

00:25:21 ►

I’d clear my brain and go back to it on Monday.

00:25:24 ►

So I did that

00:25:26 ►

for quite a while.

00:25:27 ►

I have experimented with all kinds

00:25:30 ►

of things.

00:25:31 ►

I’ve done a lot of different things.

00:25:34 ►

I’m not a big fan anymore of

00:25:35 ►

what I call the ABCs.

00:25:37 ►

2CB, 2T7.

00:25:39 ►

I’ve tried all of them.

00:25:42 ►

I don’t have anything bad to say

00:25:43 ►

about any of them except I have this thing called the virgin rush,

00:25:49 ►

that the first time you do any of these chemicals like that,

00:25:53 ►

you’ll never repeat that first time, I don’t think,

00:25:57 ►

especially with MDMA.

00:25:58 ►

If you have somebody that you think would benefit from it,

00:26:02 ►

make sure that they don’t go to a festival and dance all night with it the first time.

00:26:06 ►

I’ve done that, and I love it, and I think it’s great.

00:26:09 ►

But the first time you use it,

00:26:10 ►

you should do it in a small situation

00:26:12 ►

with three or four close friends

00:26:13 ►

and really see what the power of it is.

00:26:17 ►

So when I’m talking about psychedelics today,

00:26:20 ►

I’m really only talking about three different things,

00:26:24 ►

LSD, psilocybin,

00:26:26 ►

and ayahuasca. And I have found over the years that my take on those three things is very similar

00:26:33 ►

to most other people in that LSD, for me, puts me in a mind state that’s kind of what I’d call

00:26:40 ►

mechanical. I can write code on it. I can write books. I edit books and write books.

00:26:45 ►

And I can do a lot of sort of mechanical type things on LST.

00:26:50 ►

Mushrooms give me a real cosmic perspective.

00:26:52 ►

And I get into the universal things.

00:26:56 ►

Ayahuasca, however, that’s the earth medicine for me.

00:26:59 ►

I’ve spoken to over hundreds of people that have done ayahuasca.

00:27:03 ►

And I haven’t found a single

00:27:05 ►

one that didn’t come back from that journey very environmentally aware and ecologically sound it

00:27:10 ►

really does bring you back to earth it’s a it’s a definitely an earth medicine so when i talk about

00:27:17 ►

you know how can psychedelics help us counter ai how can we get our minds in charge? Because the word psychedelic simply means mind manifesting.

00:27:29 ►

And it means our human mind and not the AI’s, not the computer mind.

00:27:36 ►

So I’m thinking about some of these things.

00:27:39 ►

And then, you know, we all talk about expanding our consciousness, expanding our mind.

00:27:44 ►

And I’m kind of a geeky literal guy. We all talk about expanding our consciousness, expanding our mind.

00:27:47 ►

And I’m kind of a geeky, literal guy.

00:27:51 ►

And I kept thinking, well, how can I expand my mind?

00:27:54 ►

My skull is keeping it inside there.

00:27:58 ►

Well, how can it get bigger?

00:27:59 ►

I’ve got a big head already.

00:28:07 ►

But one of the things that I guess I backed into this,

00:28:10 ►

because back in the early 80s,

00:28:14 ►

there still is a thing called Comdex in Las Vegas, which is a huge computer festival.

00:28:17 ►

I was at the very first one.

00:28:19 ►

I was at the first several.

00:28:20 ►

But at the very first one,

00:28:21 ►

that’s the time that the MGM Grand Hotel caught fire.

00:28:27 ►

And I was actually booked into it, and they overbooked and put me across the street.

00:28:30 ►

And so I had that whole tragedy watching people jump out of the building and everything.

00:28:35 ►

It was a really interesting conference in that that was the very beginning.

00:28:40 ►

It was the first big personal computer conference,

00:28:42 ►

and networking personal computers was just kind of airy, fairy stuff.

00:28:48 ►

But as a result of that tragedy, we put together a huge network of these personal computers.

00:28:53 ►

It was the first big personal computer network to help people find relatives

00:28:57 ►

and who was lost and stuff like that.

00:28:59 ►

But the big thing for me at that conference,

00:29:02 ►

one of my friends at the time had one of the first mini computer companies. And those were, the mini computers were huge, big boxes that cost tens

00:29:09 ►

of thousands of dollars that had a fraction of the power of the, in your phone right now, you know,

00:29:15 ►

but that’s how we started. And this guy had this thing, I can’t remember the actual numbers, but

00:29:21 ►

it came with a certain amount of memory. But if you wanted

00:29:25 ►

to double the memory, you had to pay a couple thousand dollars, and they would send a technician

00:29:30 ►

out to your place of business who would install the new memory, so-called. But what they actually

00:29:36 ►

did, the memory was already in the computer. And this guy would go out, and he’d take eight jumpers

00:29:42 ►

off the board, and it was installed. And so you’d have to spend the whole day doing that to justify the couple thousand dollars.

00:29:48 ►

And while you might think that was something that went away, in 2007, we have one car, a Honda Fit.

00:29:58 ►

My wife has a car.

00:29:59 ►

I don’t like driving much.

00:30:01 ►

So we had this old Honda Fit, but we bought it in 2007.

00:30:06 ►

And they said, well, do you want a burglar alarm in it? And I said, how much? It was like 300 bucks or something. I said, no,

00:30:12 ►

you know, who’s going to steal a little car like this? You know, it’s fear. They tried to sell me

00:30:16 ►

that burglar arm fear. And I said, no. And so you know what they did? They go out and they put a

00:30:22 ►

little dongle in it because the burglar alarm was already

00:30:25 ►

installed in the car and they put this dongle in to deactivate it so I couldn’t use it.

00:30:31 ►

Now this is capitalism. Think about this for a minute. They had already spent the money

00:30:36 ►

on the equipment in the car that I owned. I actually owned that equipment but I couldn’t

00:30:41 ►

use it because they spent the time and money to disable something.

00:30:45 ►

And the reason that they could do that is because marketing showed them that they could

00:30:49 ►

scare most people into buying the burglar alarm and get the extra couple hundred bucks

00:30:53 ►

for the car.

00:30:54 ►

And by disabling it, they spent a little money to do that, but overall they made money.

00:30:59 ►

But that’s capitalism.

00:31:01 ►

That’s not taking care of the people who are buying your product.

00:31:04 ►

That’s taking care of your shareholders and your own selves.

00:31:08 ►

So anyhow, that leads me to getting back to psychedelics.

00:31:12 ►

So here’s what I think happens when you take these various psychedelics.

00:31:16 ►

We’ve all heard the thing that you only use 10% of your brain or something.

00:31:19 ►

I think that that has been disproven lately.

00:31:22 ►

I think that old wives’ tale.

00:31:24 ►

But let’s say that

00:31:26 ►

we’re not using all our brain all the time because we’re not. And if you think about

00:31:31 ►

it, most of the stuff in our brain is there to preserve our lives, you know, to help us

00:31:37 ►

feed and clothe and shelter. You know, it’s survival mechanisms that are in the brain.

00:31:46 ►

And I think that when you take a psychedelic,

00:31:48 ►

what it does is it dissolves some of those filters that are keeping things out.

00:31:53 ►

So you don’t really expand your consciousness so much as you dissolve the filters

00:31:59 ►

that are keeping you from using all of your consciousness.

00:32:02 ►

At least that’s the metaphor that I use myself so that I can kind of deal with these things.

00:32:07 ►

So if you want to take some psychedelics,

00:32:10 ►

you learn what ones to take

00:32:14 ►

for what your situation is at the time.

00:32:16 ►

What do you want to dissolve in your brain?

00:32:18 ►

What fear filters are in your brain

00:32:20 ►

that you want to dissolve

00:32:21 ►

so that you can get at this problem or that problem?

00:32:25 ►

And it gets you into the habit of thinking, do I really want to do this?

00:32:30 ►

Or is this right?

00:32:31 ►

And that’s one of the actually good things about the Internet that people have seemed

00:32:35 ►

to have forgotten is you should never trust anything that you read on the Internet.

00:32:40 ►

You know that old cartoon about nobody knows you’re a dog on the Internet?

00:32:44 ►

That’s true.

00:32:45 ►

The Internet is not a place to trust things.

00:32:48 ►

And I tell my podcast audience the old thing,

00:32:52 ►

think for yourself and question authority,

00:32:53 ►

and make sure that I’m in that category.

00:32:55 ►

I’m part of the authority you should question.

00:32:57 ►

People need to be taking control of their own lives

00:33:00 ►

and not letting these devices that are so convenient and so helpful

00:33:04 ►

take over our lives

00:33:06 ►

so i think that that if we can manifest things we’re going to be able to better deal with what’s

00:33:14 ►

going on there’s a a video out on youtube called hyper normalization and it’s about the start, the word comes from the time

00:33:25 ►

that the Soviet Union was breaking up over in Russia,

00:33:29 ►

and the things got so weird

00:33:32 ►

that nobody, 10 years or 5 years before,

00:33:35 ►

nobody would have believed that could happen,

00:33:37 ►

but it became normal.

00:33:39 ►

Now, let me ask you,

00:33:40 ►

if it had been documented that Barack Obama or George Bush or Clinton or any of them,

00:33:47 ►

if it had been documented and accurately documented that he told 15 lies every day he’s been in office,

00:33:55 ►

which is the record that President Bonespurs is at,

00:34:00 ►

that, you know, what would we have done?

00:34:07 ►

Yet now we’re accepting it. It’s normal.

00:34:12 ►

It’s hyper normal. You know, we’ve got a demented person with a sixth grade mind as the most powerful person in the world. Now, let me ask you a system of government

00:34:19 ►

that says corporations are people and corporations corporations can have, theoretically, an infinite lifespan,

00:34:28 ►

but they get all the rights and benefits of people,

00:34:30 ►

and then that same system says the very best leader we can find for you

00:34:34 ►

is this Bonespurs guy.

00:34:36 ►

Well, I think that’s a broken system.

00:34:39 ►

I just don’t see how that system is a good system.

00:34:42 ►

So what we could do is say,

00:34:44 ►

let’s get the 100 richest white men in this country to write is a good system. So what we could do is say, let’s get the 100 richest white

00:34:47 ►

men in this country to write us a new constitution. Now, how many of us would go along with that,

00:34:52 ►

you think? Well, our founding fathers were the 100 richest white men in the country who

00:34:58 ►

didn’t let women vote and actually originally only wanted people who owned property to vote.

00:35:06 ►

actually originally only wanted people who owned property to vote. The first draft of the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson wrote said the pursuit of life, liberty, and property. And it

00:35:14 ►

was Franklin who said we’re going to have trouble selling that to the peons because none of them

00:35:19 ►

own property. And so make it happiness, because property brings us happiness, right? So that life,

00:35:25 ►

liberty, and the pursuit of property is what this country is really founded on. So I think there’s

00:35:30 ►

some serious problems with this country, and I don’t think, I mean, everybody knows that, but

00:35:36 ►

this is just one little symptom. You know, look at the Mideast. Over four million people are

00:35:42 ►

displaced in the last few years. That’s unbelievable. And you’re

00:35:46 ►

thinking about these children who are in this situation. My goodness, you know, the amount of

00:35:53 ►

PTSD in the world is just climbing exponentially. And so that’s one of the things I think that

00:35:59 ►

the MAPS work with Rick Doblin is so important because I can personally attest to the fact that MDMA has helped me and some of my friends deal with some of the issues that we had.

00:36:11 ►

You know, I’m a Vietnam vet.

00:36:13 ►

And actually, one of the beauties of these festivals is this morning I met Eddie, who is an Iraqi vet.

00:36:20 ►

And we never would have crossed paths.

00:36:21 ►

He didn’t know about the psychedelics a lot.

00:36:23 ►

But we got talking.

00:36:21 ►

Now, we never would have crossed paths.

00:36:23 ►

He didn’t know about the psychedelics a lot.

00:36:24 ►

But we got talking.

00:36:29 ►

Now, we’re both veterans of different wars, different generations,

00:36:31 ►

and our experiences were exactly the same.

00:36:34 ►

And we’ve come to the same conclusions.

00:36:39 ►

So I think one of the important things about festivals is that,

00:36:42 ►

well, you know, you can’t hug anybody on the Internet, for one thing.

00:36:47 ►

But the other, and email, you never get an email with a scented little perfume like I used to get in college.

00:36:49 ►

You get a letter in your mailbox in college and it had perfume on it,

00:36:52 ►

you’ve made your whole day.

00:36:53 ►

Until they get perfume on email, it’s just not going to be the same.

00:36:58 ►

But some of the problems that we’re seeing with artificial intelligence

00:37:03 ►

and what it’s doing to children in this environment we’re in.

00:37:07 ►

For example, they talk about how the election was influenced by bots and Facebook and all.

00:37:15 ►

And it’s code that’s influencing people.

00:37:19 ►

We’ve all, I’m sure, been to YouTube.

00:37:22 ►

And after you watch a video on YouTube, it suggests something else, unless you’ve had

00:37:25 ►

the presence of mind to click don’t suggest

00:37:28 ►

things afterwards when you

00:37:29 ►

embed them in your website.

00:37:32 ►

But if you go

00:37:33 ►

and you put up a video

00:37:36 ►

that would

00:37:38 ►

be a simple cartoon video for

00:37:40 ►

children, two or three year

00:37:42 ►

old children, a real elementary, pre

00:37:44 ►

Mickey Mouse kind of cartoon,

00:37:46 ►

and then just let it play and let it keep suggesting things. And the way the algorithms

00:37:50 ►

are written, that they suggest the next thing based on what you just watched and the next thing

00:37:56 ►

and the next thing. And so you’re watching things all of a sudden that are getting farther and

00:38:00 ►

farther away from the original thing. And on average, if you let that children’s video play out through 12 iterations,

00:38:08 ►

you’ll get to see Mickey Mouse beating off.

00:38:10 ►

So you better watch your kids on YouTube, you know,

00:38:14 ►

because these AIs are giving suggestions.

00:38:17 ►

And the same with, you know, I pity you that are still hooked into Facebook

00:38:21 ►

because I think that’s a horrible, horrible thing.

00:38:24 ►

And the reason I think that’s a horrible, horrible thing. And the reason I think

00:38:26 ►

that is quite a few years ago, I guess maybe 12 years ago, when Facebook was still fairly new,

00:38:31 ►

my youngest son had about 300, you know, friends. And so he said, Oh, you got to join Facebook,

00:38:36 ►

I’ll get 500 people before you. But he didn’t realize had this podcast, you know, and, and so

00:38:42 ►

I got to 500 real quickly. and so he dropped out of Facebook right

00:38:46 ►

away, and, but I got up to around 3,000 friends, and every morning I was seeing that they were,

00:38:54 ►

they were hooking me into videos, or to pictures, they’re, I forget what they call that now, but

00:39:00 ►

they would say, you know, he’s attached to this photo.

00:39:06 ►

Well, I wasn’t.

00:39:06 ►

I didn’t know the people.

00:39:07 ►

I didn’t know the places.

00:39:09 ►

I wasn’t happy with some of the events.

00:39:18 ►

But here, a folio is being built in my name that he is associated with these pictures and these people and the friends of these people.

00:39:25 ►

And all of a sudden, I could see that, you know, there’s an image of me that’s going to the National Security Agency that I don’t agree with.

00:39:28 ►

So I dropped out of Facebook, and as a result,

00:39:31 ►

I’m no longer in touch with a lot of my relatives.

00:39:34 ►

Well, they thought I was crazy anyhow because I got into drugs.

00:39:38 ►

But I was at least in touch with them for a while.

00:39:40 ►

And for what it’s worth now,

00:39:43 ►

I don’t know if you paid much attention to blockchain because Bitcoin gets all the press,

00:39:48 ►

but the blockchain technology that it’s built on is going to change the world.

00:39:52 ►

I think blockchain technology is more as equally important as a web browser.

00:39:57 ►

It’s that disruptive a technology.

00:40:00 ►

There are new social media platforms coming out on blockchain.

00:40:04 ►

And see, the thing is that Facebook is a central location.

00:40:09 ►

Twitter is a central location.

00:40:11 ►

Blockchain distributes it.

00:40:13 ►

And there’s a new way that they’re coming out.

00:40:18 ►

The distributed web, you’ll start hearing D-Web pretty soon.

00:40:22 ►

And they’ve raised a bunch of money in a digital currency called,

00:40:27 ►

I think it’s called Filecoin.

00:40:29 ►

And if you agree to store somebody’s file on your computer,

00:40:34 ►

you get paid in Filecoin.

00:40:36 ►

And if you want to store yours in that thing, you pay in Filecoin.

00:40:39 ►

And so it’s an ecology of people who are sharing.

00:40:44 ►

But when you put your information into this system, it isn’t going to a single server.

00:40:49 ►

It’s being distributed among two or three other private computers.

00:40:54 ►

And so they’re incentivizing people to do it.

00:40:56 ►

And another one is Steam.

00:40:58 ►

There’s a thing called Steemit, and they have Steam as their currency.

00:41:01 ►

And it’s basically right now they only have really one or two apps.

00:41:05 ►

But if you post a blog, you get paid in Steam.

00:41:10 ►

And if you comment on a blog or like a blog, you get paid in Steam.

00:41:14 ►

And so people are earning for putting information up there.

00:41:19 ►

And they’ve got a real clever way that you can convert it into dollars right away,

00:41:22 ►

but only a part of it.

00:41:23 ►

The rest of it is going to take you two years to get out. So that’s how they built, you know, half a million

00:41:27 ►

people in their community. There’s things like this that are taking place that are not artificial

00:41:33 ►

intelligence. These are individual people that are putting together ways that we can share

00:41:39 ►

information without worrying about Google taking it down. Years ago when I was doing the salon, one of our

00:41:47 ►

my friends put up a MySpace page and it was really

00:41:51 ►

a big popular page and it was going good and he was curating

00:41:56 ►

it and one day it was gone. And I could never find out why

00:41:59 ►

they took it away. They would never respond to me.

00:42:03 ►

There were thousands of people that were visiting it every day.

00:42:06 ►

The next day it was gone.

00:42:07 ►

They just eliminated it.

00:42:08 ►

Well, with some of these things, there’s D-Tube that’s using Steemit.

00:42:12 ►

And so it’s a YouTube-like thing.

00:42:14 ►

There’s not a whole lot of stuff there.

00:42:15 ►

But if you have a video that you want to see never go away or not be advertised upon and not be criticized or censored,

00:42:24 ►

D-Tube is a place to put it up there, and it’ll be there forever.

00:42:27 ►

So think about that, too,

00:42:29 ►

because it’s going to be hard to get some of these things out of it.

00:42:32 ►

Anyhow, in this world, we’ve got the United States

00:42:37 ►

is in a really precarious position right now.

00:42:40 ►

And as much as I dislike the current occupant of the White House, I do think that,

00:42:46 ►

ironically, the service that he’s provided is that the rest of the world now says, you know,

00:42:53 ►

we’re not going to blindly follow the United States, just like we shouldn’t blindly follow

00:42:58 ►

AI recommendations. And so the whole world’s relationship to this country is even changing i didn’t think i would

00:43:06 ►

live to see this but the the you know it’s an empire we’ve got 800 military bases around the

00:43:12 ►

world we spend more on weapons and military than the rest of the world combined that’s got to end

00:43:18 ►

i mean the country’s broke anyhow trillion dollar deficits and what are we doing about it well we’re just

00:43:25 ►

saying well yeah they’ll be an election a couple years there’s a midterms and

00:43:29 ►

stuff like that but I don’t think it’s going to survive all that and so we need

00:43:33 ►

to be kind of light on our feet and be very careful about the suggestions that

00:43:38 ►

we’re getting online if your phone says we think you’ll be interested in this

00:43:42 ►

video well make sure it is something that you want to see before you start getting into that loop.

00:43:47 ►

Because you can go to a website, and if you get hooked on one or two of the comments,

00:43:52 ►

and you click something, you’re going to get reinforced, especially in places like Facebook.

00:43:57 ►

They’re going to keep, you know, it’s an echo chamber.

00:44:00 ►

And they’re going to keep giving you stuff that’s like that.

00:44:03 ►

And you’re going to start thinking, everybody in the world is thinking this way.

00:44:06 ►

It’s not, you know, I was crazy.

00:44:08 ►

I didn’t think it was like this.

00:44:10 ►

But it’s not like that.

00:44:11 ►

It’s, you know, these bots, you know,

00:44:14 ►

they can post 10,000 comments in a day

00:44:17 ►

and make it sound like people.

00:44:20 ►

And so you have to be very, very careful

00:44:22 ►

what you’re imbibing through your phones etc now

00:44:27 ►

talking about our children and this is where and i’m going to end here in just a minute so we can

00:44:33 ►

take some questions i can find out where your your interests are really lying but here is here’s

00:44:37 ►

something that i find well ultimately frightening uh at first it’s humorous you you’ll smile when

00:44:44 ►

i tell you the story,

00:44:45 ►

but it’s ultimately pretty frightening.

00:44:48 ►

You know, every Sunday, my wife and I go down to the beach at Carlsbad

00:44:51 ►

and walk along the causeway there,

00:44:54 ►

and it’s very depressing to see the families

00:44:58 ►

because the kids will be playing in the water and the sand,

00:45:01 ►

and the parents will be sitting under an umbrella

00:45:03 ►

looking at their hand, you know, at their cell phone.

00:45:06 ►

And there’s no interaction between the families.

00:45:08 ►

The kids are building sandcastles,

00:45:10 ►

and the people are online looking at whatever.

00:45:13 ►

Now, I was a parent.

00:45:15 ►

I had three children,

00:45:16 ►

and there were many times I came home from work,

00:45:19 ►

just run out, run out, had a bad day,

00:45:22 ►

and they’d start, oh, I want this, and they’d ask me all kinds of

00:45:27 ►

questions, and there were times I’d say, you know, not now, let’s do this tomorrow, and I think that’s

00:45:33 ►

pretty common in a lot of homes, but today, if you have one of these horrible internet of things

00:45:40 ►

devices like Alexa or Echo or Siri or some of those, you know, if you put a listening device

00:45:46 ►

in your house like that, you know, you need to really think that through, especially if you have

00:45:51 ►

kids. Because when a child has a question in a house like that now, and I’ve seen this happen,

00:45:58 ►

and the parents aren’t available to ask the question, so you ask, you know, Siri or Alexa.

00:46:03 ►

They’re always there.

00:46:06 ►

They always have an answer.

00:46:11 ►

And then I read a story a couple weeks ago, and this is the one that really got me.

00:46:16 ►

The family was having a dinner, and this man’s 7-year-old daughter,

00:46:19 ►

it was her turn to say the evening prayers before a meal.

00:46:25 ►

And so she said, Dear Alexa, please take care of my family this week.

00:46:28 ►

Now think about that for a minute.

00:46:33 ►

This is this God-like voice that’s always there and knows everything.

00:46:34 ►

Now I was raised a Catholic.

00:46:36 ►

It took me years to get over that. And a lot of drugs.

00:46:40 ►

But these kids, you know, God never spoke to me.

00:46:45 ►

And that’s one of the reasons I gave him up.

00:46:48 ►

But these kids have a new God.

00:46:50 ►

And it’s artificial intelligence.

00:46:52 ►

And it’s always there.

00:46:53 ►

It has the answer.

00:46:54 ►

Not always the right answer, but they don’t know that.

00:46:57 ►

And it’s an omnipotent being to them.

00:46:59 ►

Now, when you’re six and seven years old is when you’re getting implanted with all of the messed up stuff that you’re carrying around today.

00:47:07 ►

And most of our bad decisions as adults come from bad information and bad things we learned as kids that weren’t true, weren’t right.

00:47:16 ►

And getting rid of a lot of that is important.

00:47:19 ►

But now we’ve got AIs teaching our kids and babysitting our kids.

00:47:24 ►

And, you know, I’ve got a lot of friends that have that in their house,

00:47:28 ►

and I’m just horrified.

00:47:31 ►

I’m a techie guy.

00:47:33 ►

I had a personal computer company before IBM did,

00:47:36 ►

and I was an Internet evangelist, and so I’m not anti-tech.

00:47:40 ►

But controlling the way our children interact with this technology,

00:47:45 ►

I think, is our biggest challenge.

00:47:47 ►

And while psychedelics are great for us adults

00:47:50 ►

to make us pull off and think about what we’re doing with this and all,

00:47:54 ►

it’s the children that I think we really have to protect from these devices

00:47:58 ►

because they’re going to imprint these kids’ minds

00:48:03 ►

that it’s going to be very difficult

00:48:05 ►

when these kids are 30 and 40 years old

00:48:07 ►

and have never lived in a house without Alexa there for them.

00:48:11 ►

It’s going to be difficult for them to realize

00:48:13 ►

that they’re being manipulated by a corporation.

00:48:17 ►

Here’s another thing about AI.

00:48:20 ►

It’s code.

00:48:21 ►

And the code is learning from itself.

00:48:28 ►

They’ll write a section of code that is going to be intended to be an artificial intelligence to answer questions like Siri does.

00:48:37 ►

But the evolution it’s gone through is the code.

00:48:42 ►

The next step is machine learning where they they go in and they

00:48:45 ►

learn everything about something for example uh chess and they they put in every single chess

00:48:54 ►

game that every master has ever played and so when the big blue plays against the chess masters and

00:48:59 ►

it beats them now it can remember every single game that they’ve done and that’s how it it wins that’s

00:49:08 ►

machine learning but deep learning is where like the ai that beat uh the masters of the chinese

00:49:15 ►

name game go go is orders of magnitude more complex than chess but they didn’t put all the great games in of Go. They just said, here are the

00:49:25 ►

regulations. Play against yourself 10, 20 million times over the next couple of days and see what

00:49:32 ►

you learn. And after a while of all these iterations of this code saying that was a bad idea, I’ll never

00:49:37 ►

do that again. Now the AI is so good it can beat the masters of Go. Now, there’s a recent story of some robots

00:49:47 ►

that have been programmed with AI,

00:49:50 ►

and they found out that these robots

00:49:52 ►

are both racist and sexist.

00:49:56 ►

And if you think about it for a moment,

00:49:59 ►

the vast majority of AI code,

00:50:01 ►

probably over 80% of it,

00:50:03 ►

is written by white and Asian males.

00:50:06 ►

Now, there’s no way you can keep the

00:50:08 ►

bias out of those programs.

00:50:09 ►

It’s going to be subliminal, but

00:50:11 ►

the bias is coming in.

00:50:13 ►

Oh, jeez, sex and racist

00:50:15 ►

robots. Horrible thing.

00:50:18 ►

Which it is, but here’s what

00:50:19 ►

the good part of it is. They’re using

00:50:21 ►

that. Sociologists are now going back

00:50:24 ►

through and seeing how these AIs have come to these positions,

00:50:27 ►

and they’re actually able to better understand how humans are becoming racist and sexist

00:50:33 ►

because of their learning that AIs do it so quickly that you can see what’s happening in their thought streams.

00:50:40 ►

So, you know, there’s good and bad to all this thing.

00:50:42 ►

So, you know, there’s good and bad to all this thing.

00:50:51 ►

Now, my position is that not many people in the world need to take psychedelics.

00:50:54 ►

I think 10 to 15% of the people could change everything. For example, the mysteries of Eleusis in Greece lasted over 2,000 years.

00:51:00 ►

And it was a psychedelic experience.

00:51:02 ►

You’d have it once in your life.

00:51:04 ►

But people like Plato and Aristotle and all of Western civilization, the ideas of democracy came out of the mysteries of Eleusis, which was basically a hard acid trip, a heavy acid trip in ways.

00:51:24 ►

but only 10 to 15 percent of the population ever went through that.

00:51:27 ►

And interestingly, even slaves could go through that ceremony.

00:51:30 ►

The only restriction was you couldn’t have killed somebody.

00:51:32 ►

As long as you hadn’t killed somebody, you could do it.

00:51:38 ►

But it didn’t take the whole of the society to do it, to get some of these ideas in.

00:51:46 ►

So I’m not saying that everybody should do psychedelics. But the people who are inclined to do that,

00:51:51 ►

I would like to see more of a little structure coming to it because most of us, myself included,

00:51:54 ►

start with self-exploration and experimentation

00:51:57 ►

and dancing all night on MDMA and things like that.

00:52:01 ►

But it was ayahuasca that imprinted on me the value of a ritual.

00:52:09 ►

And I guess probably part of the reason I liked it is because, you know,

00:52:12 ►

I was raised a Catholic and I’d missed some of that ritual.

00:52:15 ►

And I think that’s true with a lot of people who,

00:52:18 ►

especially raised in religions that are used to rituals.

00:52:22 ►

And so if we could, in our little communities,

00:52:25 ►

our little theme camps in our own little towns,

00:52:28 ►

our little, small little groups,

00:52:29 ►

if four times a year, the solstices and equinoxes,

00:52:33 ►

we have a guided ceremony,

00:52:36 ►

something that takes place on a regular basis

00:52:40 ►

where the community can get together.

00:52:42 ►

It starts with just one or two families,

00:52:43 ►

two or three people.

00:52:44 ►

But if we get something regular going, spreading it out,

00:52:48 ►

those things spread out to your neighbors.

00:52:51 ►

And one of the most important things, I think,

00:52:54 ►

and I’ve had five years to think about this sitting at home,

00:52:58 ►

are these festivals.

00:53:01 ►

And I do a Monday night Zoom conference for an hour and a half

00:53:04 ►

with a bunch of my Patreon supporters.

00:53:06 ►

And so I

00:53:07 ►

talk to a lot of people and I

00:53:09 ►

interface with them in

00:53:12 ►

email and stuff like that. But

00:53:14 ►

this festival has really

00:53:16 ►

changed my perspective once again

00:53:18 ►

because I had forgotten what it’s like

00:53:20 ►

to be able to walk around and meet

00:53:21 ►

like-minded people and not worry about

00:53:24 ►

being a freak. That’s what I like

00:53:25 ►

about Burning Man. There’s no way I could be freaky

00:53:27 ►

enough that I’d even stand out.

00:53:31 ►

These festivals are like that.

00:53:33 ►

You can be yourself

00:53:35 ►

and nobody will think you’re a freak because you’re not

00:53:37 ►

freaky enough.

00:53:41 ►

We’re all kind of laughing, but we all know what I’m saying.

00:53:47 ►

That’s the thing about psychedelics,

00:53:51 ►

is that Sasha Shulgin had a scale of one to five of what a psychedelic trip is like.

00:53:54 ►

And a one is a little tingle that you know,

00:53:55 ►

hey, something’s here, this is really a psychoactive thing I’ve taken.

00:53:59 ►

And five is the full-on trip that is ineffable.

00:54:03 ►

You come back and you say,

00:54:07 ►

Oh, my God, the world is perfect.

00:54:10 ►

Everything is fine, but I can’t tell you why.

00:54:13 ►

It’s just ineffable.

00:54:16 ►

So you want to go for that plus-four trip,

00:54:18 ►

and they’re hard to come by. But the thing about psychedelics,

00:54:21 ►

a friend of mine, Tony Rich,

00:54:24 ►

actually produced the first ayahuasca conference in the country.

00:54:27 ►

And he was the keynote speaker, and he started out by saying,

00:54:31 ►

well, we can’t always put words around our experiences, what happened to us.

00:54:36 ►

But we do know what we know.

00:54:38 ►

And I think that is the important thing there.

00:54:41 ►

We know that this default consciousness is good for protecting us

00:54:46 ►

and making sure we get here and there and not hurt and we stay away from lions and tigers and

00:54:50 ►

and things like that but the the that’s default consciousness but once you have had a psychedelic

00:54:57 ►

experience and you only really need one to realize that you’re you’re not you’re not really in your full mind all the time.

00:55:06 ►

And my friend Myron Stoleroff,

00:55:09 ►

Myron died a few years ago in his 90s,

00:55:11 ►

but he was one of the most important elders that we had in the 60s.

00:55:17 ►

He ran the Menlo Park Institute,

00:55:21 ►

where they had over 350 people went through their program to use LSD, primarily LSD,

00:55:30 ►

in their work to enhance their creativity. And he had artists, musicians, engineers,

00:55:36 ►

researchers, people like that. And it was an amazingly successful program. Myron is one of the first maybe doesn’t people in North

00:55:45 ►

America to even use LSD he’d been around for a long time and he was also very big

00:55:54 ►

on meditation and he was a Buddhist and and he went to you know two week-long

00:55:59 ►

retreats things like that and his his practice was trying to reproduce to get into the psychedelic

00:56:06 ►

state purely on the natch with no medicine things like that and he said he touched it a few times

00:56:13 ►

and i have talked to other people and and i’ve talked to like gary fisher had a a good friend

00:56:18 ►

who was a some sort of a guru who was in another state, and lived with Gary for a couple months.

00:56:25 ►

And finally, the guy agreed to do some LSD.

00:56:29 ►

If you knew Gary, you’d know that was a bad thing to suggest.

00:56:33 ►

But Gary loaded him up with a thousand mics.

00:56:36 ►

And this guy didn’t behave any differently than he had been.

00:56:40 ►

He was in that state.

00:56:41 ►

He says, oh yeah, this will get you up there.

00:56:44 ►

And so he acknowledged that, but he didn’t need it.

00:56:47 ►

So we don’t need to use psychedelics all the time to maintain that mindset.

00:56:53 ►

And I think that if you have at least one experience,

00:56:57 ►

and you know where your mind can go and what it can do,

00:57:00 ►

you can work on that with meditation, with a lot of things.

00:57:03 ►

You just need to realize that you have such an incredible tool

00:57:08 ►

that we don’t appreciate our bodies at all.

00:57:12 ►

There is no mechanical or biological machine

00:57:15 ►

even close to the complexity of humans.

00:57:18 ►

And so, you know, Teilhard de Chardin wrote a book in 1937

00:57:23 ►

called The Phenomena of Man.

00:57:25 ►

And he really believed that consciousness comes from complexity and our brains are so complex.

00:57:32 ►

But then the last half of his book, since he was a Catholic priest, he had to apologize for what he had said and he ruined his book.

00:57:39 ►

And there’s a lot of debate.

00:57:41 ►

Does complexity create consciousness?

00:57:43 ►

Well, who knows?

00:57:45 ►

But look at the complexity of what’s going on in the world right now.

00:57:51 ►

It took over 50 years to get 50 million people using the telephone.

00:58:00 ►

And it took four years to get that same number of people using the Internet.

00:58:05 ►

And it took four years to get people using that same number of people using the Internet.

00:58:12 ►

And now AI has taken over, and within another year or so, it’s going to get even more complex.

00:58:20 ►

Right now, there are close to 4 billion people who have a web-enabled phone that can access the Internet.

00:58:21 ►

Now, think about that.

00:58:23 ►

The mass of humanity is there.

00:58:46 ►

That complexity, is it going to create some sort of intelligence? But don’t kid yourself and think that it’s going to be a superhuman thing, because how can you create human-like intelligence in a machine that doesn’t have pain, doesn’t have to eat, isn’t going to die, doesn’t know what it’s like to be a parent. You’ll never get there with a machine.

00:58:51 ►

So we have to be pretty careful that we don’t turn too many things over to these machines that are running our lives.

00:58:54 ►

So the festival circuit is so important because all of us are going to go home,

00:59:00 ►

and unless you’re really lucky, you’re only going to have one or two people close to you that

00:59:07 ►

will really grok what goes on at these conferences but your vibe that you take back to you to the

00:59:12 ►

home with you is your neighbors your friends your relatives are going to see that something

00:59:17 ►

happened to you you know i was cold i was wet it was, a tree fell on the dance floor. It was great!

00:59:33 ►

And, you know, we learn what it is to be human in these situations like this,

00:59:36 ►

and we can forget that so easy in this age of machines.

00:59:41 ►

And so that’s basically my story here. But I’d like to find out from you and and if you can just maybe shout out your question

00:59:46 ►

It would be easier than trying to drag a microphone around but I’d like to find out what you’re more

00:59:50 ►

you know, I’ve given you the headlines of these things and I’d like to be I’d be more than happy to

00:59:55 ►

go into them in more detail and

00:59:58 ►

See what you’re thinking. So anyway have a question? Yeah. Thank you. I’m interested

01:00:05 ►

01:00:07 ►

quantum computing,

01:00:09 ►

timelines, what they’re doing with that,

01:00:11 ►

and possibly what’s

01:00:13 ►

playing as far as the Mandela effect.

01:00:16 ►

So there’s a perfect

01:00:17 ►

example of you all knowing a lot more

01:00:19 ►

than I do.

01:00:21 ►

I know what you’re talking about.

01:00:23 ►

I’ve read enough about quantum computers

01:00:25 ►

to know that if I try to explain it to you,

01:00:27 ►

it’ll be obvious I don’t really understand them.

01:00:31 ►

But that’s a perfect example of deep technology,

01:00:36 ►

deep science that is rolling out so fast.

01:00:39 ►

And, you know, a few years ago,

01:00:40 ►

I remember reading about quantum computing

01:00:43 ►

and thinking, well, maybe in 50 years or something.

01:00:45 ►

But now it’s essentially here.

01:00:48 ►

It’s really close to here.

01:00:50 ►

And a quantum computer is just a powerful tool that makes our current computers look like PlayStations or something.

01:01:00 ►

It’s an unbelievably fast and powerful machine that I have no clue how it works.

01:01:07 ►

Even though I’ve read a number of papers about it, I find that I read these things and I

01:01:12 ►

understand them, I think. And then when I try to explain it to my wife or somebody,

01:01:16 ►

it’s pretty obvious that I didn’t rock what I was reading. So I’m sorry. All I can say is that,

01:01:21 ►

you know, that wave is coming and hopefully there will be psychedelic people who are working on those projects.

01:01:31 ►

When I was traveling around for Verizon doing these talks, I discovered that if you said anybody who’s taken LSD in the last 12 months is not allowed to come to work for a week.

01:01:46 ►

The Internet would stop.

01:01:47 ►

That’s the only way to stop the Internet, because it was designed by psychedelic people.

01:01:52 ►

Myron Stolaroff, who I said had that clinic, is written up in a book called What the Dormouse Said.

01:01:59 ►

And it’s about the beginning of the personal computer industry

01:02:02 ►

and about essentially Menlo Park where you

01:02:06 ►

had the Homebrew Computer Club

01:02:08 ►

you had Myron’s Clinic

01:02:09 ►

you had Xerox Park

01:02:12 ►

and something else

01:02:13 ►

there were four people who were really

01:02:15 ►

responsible for the world that we’re

01:02:18 ►

in today as far as personal computers

01:02:20 ►

Myron was one of the four

01:02:22 ►

because almost everybody

01:02:23 ►

that was at Xerox Park

01:02:25 ►

in the Homebrew Computer Club

01:02:27 ►

went through his clinic and became psychedelic

01:02:30 ►

and psychedelics were, especially acid

01:02:32 ►

was very prevalent during the early days of the computer revolution

01:02:37 ►

so hopefully there are enough people

01:02:40 ►

who are not only psychedelic

01:02:42 ►

but are conscious and creative and moral

01:02:44 ►

and are going to put

01:02:46 ►

kill switches

01:02:48 ►

in some of these things.

01:02:50 ►

But the technology and science

01:02:52 ►

you’re talking about is so deep

01:02:54 ►

that

01:02:54 ►

actually I don’t think anybody that’s not psychedelic

01:02:58 ►

will be able to grok it.

01:02:59 ►

We might be okay. I’m sorry I couldn’t really

01:03:02 ►

answer it.

01:03:03 ►

As far as psychedelics,

01:03:06 ►

we are the most advanced technology on this planet.

01:03:08 ►

We have a direct connection to Source,

01:03:11 ►

and the psychedelics do open us up to that energy,

01:03:14 ►

and we are the creators in this realm and on this planet.

01:03:18 ►

And I just wanted to say that,

01:03:20 ►

and thank you for everything that you do.

01:03:23 ►

You know, the thanks is to all of you

01:03:26 ►

because all of you have spent money

01:03:28 ►

and time and energy to get here

01:03:30 ►

and I really appreciate your time

01:03:32 ►

being here today for this little talk

01:03:34 ►

because we have to

01:03:36 ►

share things with one another

01:03:38 ►

I’ve been trying to walk around here

01:03:39 ►

and talk to as many people as I can

01:03:41 ►

and learn what’s going on in people’s minds

01:03:44 ►

and like it or not, I believe, and it’s on one of the websites, either for this festival

01:03:53 ►

or for the conversions, we are the DNA of the future culture of human beings.

01:04:00 ►

We’re not going to be the only culture.

01:04:02 ►

And by that, I’m talking about the festival

01:04:05 ►

electronic music, dance, psychedelic

01:04:08 ►

community which have a lot of overlaps

01:04:10 ►

there, I think we are

01:04:12 ►

the DNA for the humans

01:04:14 ►

that are going to really be the ones

01:04:16 ►

that stabilize things, I see us like

01:04:18 ►

the

01:04:19 ►

mycelia under the forest

01:04:22 ►

floor holding everything together

01:04:24 ►

we’re not all going to pump up fruit mushrooms, but we’re all going to hold things together.

01:04:29 ►

And as things get really rocky and scary and who knows what all is taking place,

01:04:35 ►

we’re going to be the people in our communities that say,

01:04:38 ►

hey, let me tell you about the last trip I was on.

01:04:41 ►

If you think this is bad, you just have to wait it out.

01:04:44 ►

It’s just a drug.

01:04:47 ►

The current political situation is just a drug.

01:04:50 ►

It’s going to wear off.

01:04:51 ►

But we’re going to be here, and as I’ve always said,

01:04:54 ►

locals always survive empires.

01:04:57 ►

And like it or not, the American empire is in decline.

01:05:00 ►

It’s going to go away, and we are going to be the ones

01:05:03 ►

who have to pick up the pieces of the society and culture

01:05:06 ►

and make sure people realize, hey, it’s okay.

01:05:09 ►

Just because your cubicle job is gone, look, you’re making a living creating music or art now,

01:05:15 ►

and you’re not buying a new Mercedes, but who cares?

01:05:18 ►

You get to the festival one way or another, ride with somebody,

01:05:21 ►

because right now, if we all had shiny new mercedes and lear jets

01:05:26 ►

we wouldn’t be using them we’d be sitting right here you know and so you you know i was on that

01:05:32 ►

track for a while now before i was 40 years old i was a multi-millionaire and i spent my 45th

01:05:38 ►

birthday living in my car under a freeway overpass so i understand what it’s like to go up and down

01:05:44 ►

like that and it’s it’s it was awful it’s like to go up and down like that.

01:05:47 ►

And it was awful.

01:05:48 ►

It was devastating to lose everything,

01:05:50 ►

and all my stuff went away and things like that.

01:05:56 ►

And now about all I have left is a thousand or so books,

01:05:59 ►

and I’m getting rid of those too because it’s cargo. I don’t want to carry so much cargo anymore.

01:06:02 ►

I spent my whole life doing that,

01:06:04 ►

accumulating stuff that is essentially meaningless.

01:06:07 ►

And when you go home,

01:06:10 ►

one of the best things you could do,

01:06:11 ►

and it’s going to be hard,

01:06:13 ►

everything that you haven’t touched in the last six months,

01:06:16 ►

get rid of.

01:06:17 ►

Otherwise, it’s going to be cargo,

01:06:19 ►

and you’re going to carry it around,

01:06:20 ►

and you’re hearing somebody from experience now.

01:06:23 ►

So I’m in the process now of getting rid of stuff

01:06:27 ►

that is to anybody else is junk.

01:06:30 ►

And these are little mementos I’ve carried around,

01:06:33 ►

and I realized when my dad died,

01:06:36 ►

his top dresser drawer was filled with these things

01:06:39 ►

that was his most precious possessions.

01:06:43 ►

And he died, and he hadn’t told me the stories of

01:06:47 ►

him, I didn’t really know much about it, and it was just like junk, and so I realized, you know,

01:06:52 ►

when I die, all that stuff I had is junk, so I’ve done something sneaky, I started this, the last

01:06:59 ►

book I wrote is called The Chronicles of Lorenzo, and it’s volume one of five, and there’s 200 short little stories in there about my life.

01:07:07 ►

And one of the things is my top dresser drawer,

01:07:09 ►

which is really a shoebox,

01:07:11 ►

and it was full of things like,

01:07:12 ►

I had a baseball that Adlai Stevenson gave me.

01:07:15 ►

You know, unless you heard the story,

01:07:17 ►

you’d say, oh, it’s an old baseball, get rid of that.

01:07:19 ►

I had a patrol belt as a safety patrol officer in grade school,

01:07:22 ►

and I had a little, it looked like a shot glass,

01:07:25 ►

but it used to be a big coffee mug that I put on the Basque Afteries

01:07:28 ►

when it went down 11,000 feet.

01:07:31 ►

I was on the scorpion search, and we sent it down.

01:07:33 ►

It crushed all the air out.

01:07:34 ►

So it’s a little shot glass, and it’s one of the rare things

01:07:37 ►

that came back from 11,000 feet down.

01:07:38 ►

But without my story, you don’t know about it.

01:07:41 ►

So I wrote all those little stories about it,

01:07:43 ►

and then I gave my shoebox to my youngest son.

01:07:45 ►

He’s got to throw it away.

01:07:45 ►

I don’t care what he does with it, but the stories are there.

01:07:48 ►

And had I not told the stories, it would have been totally thrown out.

01:07:52 ►

Now, I told him that he should hold on to it for about 20 or 30 years until I die,

01:07:56 ►

and on my 100th anniversary of my birthday,

01:07:59 ►

bring out that book with those stories and sell that stuff on eBay.

01:08:02 ►

You know what I’m saying?

01:08:04 ►

But otherwise, it’s just junk you

01:08:07 ►

know it’s it’s like i something that i’m gonna have to get rid of it’s really hard at at uh my

01:08:13 ►

next to last burning man festival somebody wrapped my camp with this this yellow tape crime scene

01:08:19 ►

tape that says danger acid spill i’ve just got to find the right person to give that to.

01:08:27 ►

Those are the little things.

01:08:29 ►

And we all have that.

01:08:30 ►

You all have a top dresser drawer.

01:08:32 ►

And I’m not saying get rid of the top dresser drawer,

01:08:34 ►

but there’s other things that are, you know,

01:08:37 ►

if you get rid of the stuff that only means things to you,

01:08:40 ►

well, you don’t want to do that until the time comes.

01:08:42 ►

But start lightening your load, and you’ll find that it’s really a big relief. It took me a long want to do that until the time comes. But start lightening your load,

01:08:45 ►

and you’ll find that it’s really a big relief.

01:08:48 ►

It took me a long time to figure that out.

01:08:50 ►

Yeah?

01:08:51 ►

I wanted to talk about the dichotomy I’m hearing

01:08:57 ►

around the power of technology

01:09:00 ►

between the abstinence versus deification and how we might find some sort of a balance,

01:09:09 ►

especially coming around to Iran children, in terms of the story you were saying about

01:09:14 ►

the girl who was giving grace to Alexa, and that when you raise children, trying not to

01:09:21 ►

mess them up with a variety of different deities, there will come a point in their life when they find it.

01:09:28 ►

So how do you prepare them in a way where it’s some balance

01:09:32 ►

between those two extremes? Well, I’ll preface this by

01:09:36 ►

saying I’m so thankful I’m old enough that I don’t have to be faced

01:09:40 ►

with it myself. I raised three children when it was a lot

01:09:44 ►

easier than it is today. And my three

01:09:46 ►

biological grandchildren are in Florida and my two step-grandchildren are here. And I’ve been with

01:09:51 ►

those two girls almost every day of their life because my wife and I provided daycare for them

01:09:55 ►

while their parents were. And so I spent a lot of time with them as a grandparent, watching them,

01:10:02 ►

seeing what their parents say and trying to add to it and so their

01:10:06 ►

parents are are very technologically inclined the high school principal and like that but they they

01:10:12 ►

really they don’t let them look at youtube unless they’re monitoring it you know they they have

01:10:18 ►

certain rules and and you have to really watch the kids nowadays as far as how much screen time

01:10:24 ►

they get kids are going blind they’re as far as how much screen time they get. Kids are going blind.

01:10:25 ►

They’re really ruining their eyes with screen time.

01:10:28 ►

Definitely set their computers and phones at night to get rid of the blue shade,

01:10:33 ►

get rid of that blue screen, because kids are going to ruin their eyes.

01:10:36 ►

So it’s no different than regular parenting has ever been,

01:10:41 ►

is deciding what’s good, what’s bad.

01:10:43 ►

But you’re right.

01:10:45 ►

Technology can be demonic or can be a big aid.

01:10:49 ►

And if you think about it, when I was growing up,

01:10:53 ►

there was no such thing as a blender.

01:10:56 ►

There were mix masters, but we had an icebox.

01:10:59 ►

I remember being really depressed when we got our first refrigerator

01:11:02 ►

because the Iceman wouldn’t come around anymore,

01:11:04 ►

and my brother and I couldn’t steal ice off the truck in the summer.

01:11:08 ►

But that was a form of technology that freed up my mother and my father and my family

01:11:15 ►

so they didn’t have to deal with taking the melted ice tray out and stuff like that.

01:11:20 ►

Then you get mixmasters and blenders and things like those.

01:11:24 ►

Get rid of the need for servants so that poor people who couldn’t afford servants.

01:11:28 ►

And, you know, my family is a family.

01:11:30 ►

We used to be servants.

01:11:31 ►

Well, that got rid of that.

01:11:33 ►

Well, now we have all these iPhones and computers and we have a lot more technology that are acting as servants.

01:11:40 ►

And so the thing as a parent and there’s not one size fits all, I don’t think.

01:11:46 ►

We have to decide in our family what we think is important.

01:11:51 ►

And I think it’s important to really monitor your children’s time on the Internet and on technology.

01:11:59 ►

But all the schools today, you know, schools are issuing computers to the kids and stuff.

01:12:03 ►

So you can’t take them away from it all. The abstinence thing, I think, will put your kids at a disadvantage down

01:12:11 ►

the road because they do need to know about all these things. But I think you can also,

01:12:15 ►

from time to time, point out and show them, you know, the internet says that, but that’s not true.

01:12:21 ►

That’s a lie. And make them start questioning the authority of the

01:12:25 ►

internet and thinking for themselves. The old Timothy Leary thing. Think for yourself and

01:12:30 ►

question authority. And in fact, I had a little rubber stamp that says question authority. And

01:12:37 ►

my youngest granddaughter was like four. She glommed onto that stamp and she still has it.

01:12:42 ►

She stamps things all the time. Question authority.

01:12:49 ►

So, you know, I think just, you know, being honest with your kids and telling them that treating your kids really more like adults than kids.

01:12:55 ►

My 13-year-old granddaughter is in eighth grade now,

01:12:59 ►

and she’s doing things that I didn’t learn until my last year in high school.

01:13:04 ►

Everybody’s, you Everybody’s accelerated.

01:13:06 ►

So I think that while the kids are not totally mature,

01:13:10 ►

they do have a lot more adult in them than I had at that same age.

01:13:15 ►

And so I don’t have a good answer for you,

01:13:19 ►

but I think the best thing is to think for yourself and question authority.

01:13:25 ►

Don’t buy all the Dr. Spock books.

01:13:28 ►

Instinctively, I think you will know better than your doctor or neighbor or whatever.

01:13:33 ►

Those things you have to decide for yourself.

01:13:35 ►

But I think absence of technology is not a good thing for kids

01:13:41 ►

because they’re just going to be at a disadvantage later on.

01:13:45 ►

Yeah. And you next one thing that i’ve been kind of struggling curious about your take on it

01:13:54 ►

i have seen like i have like a personal conflict because i work in digital marketing so i see the

01:14:02 ►

back side of facebook and all the data that they’re giving

01:14:05 ►

people selling our data to people and so i’ve gone through several times where i like deleted

01:14:10 ►

my accounts at the same time too that like that there’s a certain part of representation and

01:14:17 ►

visibility that’s important algorithms are out there that computers and so i’m just like always

01:14:22 ►

kind of struggling like do i jump in or do I jump out?

01:14:25 ►

I’m also a little bit concerned

01:14:27 ►

with all over data and any transcripts of trouble

01:14:30 ►

for certain types of people.

01:14:31 ►

The best advice I can give is keep struggling.

01:14:36 ►

You know, I’ve got a really close friend

01:14:39 ►

who’s a writer,

01:14:40 ►

and I was giving him a hard time by the internet,

01:14:42 ►

and he said,

01:14:43 ►

I’d be out of business without the internet.

01:14:49 ►

You know, he makes his living selling books and getting interviews and stuff.

01:14:56 ►

So there are some good parts of it. I’m not saying it’s all bad. And I think some of the new social media that’s being put on blockchain that isn’t going to be selling your data could

01:15:02 ►

be the answer. I think Facebook has shown us something pretty important,

01:15:05 ►

that we like to connect and we like to do these things,

01:15:08 ►

but it’s sucked up so much time from people,

01:15:10 ►

and the news feed has really been skewed

01:15:13 ►

to keep people into the echo chamber that they start in.

01:15:19 ►

So I think social media, as it evolves,

01:15:22 ►

could be a very useful thing if you can own your own data.

01:15:27 ►

That’s the whole thing. And if you have control over it. My complaint was I had no control over

01:15:32 ►

who was tagging me in a picture. And so I’m not saying that the concept of Facebook is a bad idea.

01:15:40 ►

And I participate in Twitter. I have a little Twitter account that I announce my podcasts and all.

01:15:47 ►

But on the other hand, if you are in the marketing world,

01:15:51 ►

you are very well aware of what’s happening.

01:15:54 ►

And so you can be more conscious of your own data,

01:15:59 ►

and then you can start telling your friends about it and saying,

01:16:01 ►

you know, you better be careful about saying this and saying that.

01:16:04 ►

And over time, I think you’ll evolve into a thing.

01:16:07 ►

But again, you know, we’re in a strange situation right now.

01:16:11 ►

Everything is going so rapidly that, you know, I just can’t believe.

01:16:16 ►

When I was doing my Internet thing,

01:16:18 ►

I remember I was at a dinner one night with,

01:16:22 ►

I can’t see his face, and I think it was the president of Sun Microsystems anyhow,

01:16:26 ►

and his big dream was that one day we would get to the point

01:16:30 ►

where people would use the Internet without realizing,

01:16:34 ►

just like electricity.

01:16:35 ►

We don’t think, oh, I’m using electricity or using the telephone.

01:16:39 ►

Well, we’d get to where you could use the Internet,

01:16:41 ►

and that was back when they had to dial in and get the tone and everything.

01:16:44 ►

And he didn’t think that would happen for 30 or 40 years and two years later we were there so

01:16:50 ►

things are happening so rapidly uh i guess the best advice is to don’t get locked into any strategy

01:16:57 ►

you keep questioning your own strategies because things are changing really quickly

01:17:01 ►

right back there yeah so i just want to give you a little

01:17:07 ►

thought nugget to play with and see what comes up from your inspiration so i’m parroting my

01:17:13 ►

partner nick here talk to this one if you have ideas so thinking about like language how there’s

01:17:20 ►

different cultures one of the cultures he was telling me about is a culture that their entire way of orienting

01:17:25 ►

is based off of directionality, like it’s to the east, or like the way that they stand,

01:17:32 ►

their position, like their body position, like this is my western hand, and how that

01:17:37 ►

shapes thoughts.

01:17:38 ►

Another culture is that doesn’t even have a language syntax for talking about hypotheticals as far as a hypothetical of

01:17:47 ►

this could have happened i could have been under that tree dancing and gotten hit by the tree

01:17:50 ►

there’s literally no language syntax in this particular culture and how we’re creating these

01:17:56 ►

computer systems that are based off of this collective consciousness repetitive shared

01:18:03 ►

language algorithm and how that intersects

01:18:06 ►

with like spirituality practices and the upper palate and the language which literally people

01:18:11 ►

don’t know the upper palate is literally a formation of the or the pituitary is a formation

01:18:16 ►

of the brain tissue and the upper palate that merge together that is like the base of tons of

01:18:20 ►

our neuro endocrine secretions and so this this whole idea that yogi is about chanting,

01:18:25 ►

hitting the upper palate like the keyboard of consciousness,

01:18:29 ►

and how that language with artificial intelligence language,

01:18:32 ►

with orienting and psychedelics,

01:18:36 ►

your ideas, what do you think?

01:18:41 ►

I don’t know.

01:18:45 ►

The thing to keep in mind, I think,

01:18:47 ►

is the people who are writing the code

01:18:49 ►

for artificial intelligence

01:18:51 ►

are mainly English speakers,

01:18:54 ►

and there will be Chinese and English

01:18:58 ►

are the two main, I think, and Spanish next.

01:19:01 ►

And so the people writing the code

01:19:03 ►

are already predisposed with the language that they have.

01:19:08 ►

Language is a really tricky thing for me.

01:19:11 ►

My brother, who died in 2010, was a linguist,

01:19:15 ►

and he was fluent in seven or eight languages

01:19:18 ►

and could read and kind of converse in another dozen.

01:19:21 ►

And he trained UN translators at the University of Granada.

01:19:26 ►

And he was really against any kind of machine translation

01:19:32 ►

because when they trained UN translators,

01:19:34 ►

you had to actually read the newspapers,

01:19:36 ►

get the colloquialisms and know what’s going on.

01:19:39 ►

And he didn’t think machines could do that.

01:19:42 ►

And I think it’s probably fortunate that he didn’t live this long

01:19:45 ►

because the machines are starting to do a pretty good job of these things.

01:19:48 ►

And right now on your iPhone for free or Android phone, whatever,

01:19:53 ►

Google has apps that you can translate 30 or 40 languages,

01:19:57 ►

even verbally now, back and forth and converse with people.

01:20:02 ►

But that’s going to give some false ideas to people because these aren’t perfect

01:20:06 ►

programs you know and and even good translators are are not going to get things perfectly and

01:20:11 ►

we think in words you know i language is so tricky that it’s it’s just uh it’s hard to say that that

01:20:20 ►

what’s going to happen with ai because the ai AI is really not learning a language, per se.

01:20:28 ►

It’s learning steps.

01:20:30 ►

Do this, do this, do this.

01:20:32 ►

Check this out, and then prepare all these things,

01:20:34 ►

and give me a summary, and then do this, and do this.

01:20:36 ►

And so they’re not really processing language, per se.

01:20:41 ►

They’re processing mathematics, ultimately.

01:20:44 ►

And, of course, mathematics’re processing mathematics ultimately. And of course mathematics is

01:20:45 ►

the universal language.

01:20:48 ►

But I

01:20:49 ►

think that, well I don’t know.

01:20:54 ►

You have given me something to think about.

01:20:56 ►

I can’t answer that now but I’ll go home and think about

01:20:58 ►

that for sure. That’s interesting.

01:21:01 ►

Ten minutes?

01:21:02 ►

Okay, any more questions?

01:21:03 ►

Right there.

01:21:04 ►

So I’ve been sitting here with your talk, and where do women fit in? The female voice and all of that. I did mention my four granddaughters, and so I’m very sensitive about that, and the three long-term relationships I’ve had have all been with women who were single parents ahead of time, before then. So I have a… I mean, the big thinkers are mentioned, and they’ve all been… a right because that’s the way it used to be

01:21:28 ►

on the psychedelic circuit and so five years ago that’s why i quit coming to these things and

01:21:33 ►

talking because they said you know just another old white man up on the stage and i thought well

01:21:38 ►

i don’t want to contribute to that what’s happened lately though in the last maybe five to ten years

01:21:47 ►

What’s happened lately, though, in the last maybe five to ten years, is so many more women have come into the scene.

01:21:51 ►

And you’re right that my experience has been primarily with these men.

01:21:56 ►

But there’s a, I think of her as a young woman.

01:22:01 ►

She’s in her mid-50s, Shana Holm, who has done like 26 programs for me now.

01:22:03 ►

And she does women’s issues.

01:22:06 ►

She’s a woman, a medicine woman woman a single parent with two teenage daughters and she travels now all over the country giving talks and so she has

01:22:11 ►

interviewed a lot of women that i put up there uh in the podcast and there’s two

01:22:16 ►

that’s that’s going to be that’s a problem outside of my scope of mind. The last two bosses I had when I was working were both women.

01:22:29 ►

And, in fact, the best boss I ever had was a black woman, and we’re still really good friends.

01:22:34 ►

So in the world of tech that I was in, in the data services end of the thing,

01:22:41 ►

I would say probably 40%, at least, of the executives, in fact, and the coders

01:22:47 ►

were women. There was an awful lot of women involved in that. But women are more demure.

01:22:53 ►

They don’t get up here and shout out and stuff like that. There are a lot of women in tech,

01:22:58 ►

and there’s a lot more women managers in tech than there used to be. So I think the evolution

01:23:03 ►

in psychedelics is because the women’s children

01:23:06 ►

have grown up,

01:23:07 ►

and so they’re not having,

01:23:08 ►

won’t have their kids taken away

01:23:09 ►

if they get up on the stage

01:23:10 ►

and talk about psychedelics.

01:23:12 ►

In the tech world,

01:23:13 ►

it’s going,

01:23:14 ►

the same transition is happening,

01:23:16 ►

but slower,

01:23:17 ►

but more and more women

01:23:18 ►

are coming into positions

01:23:19 ►

where they can hire more women,

01:23:22 ►

and I think a lot of companies

01:23:24 ►

are more sensitive about it, and of lot of companies are more sensitive about it.

01:23:25 ►

And, of course, I’m really sensitive about it.

01:23:27 ►

I’ve got one grandson and four granddaughters.

01:23:29 ►

So it’s something that is an issue.

01:23:32 ►

And my youngest granddaughter, granddaughter, she is a granddaughter.

01:23:38 ►

She is really geeky like me.

01:23:41 ►

The summer before last, we spent the summer taking a typewriter apart.

01:23:45 ►

She loves to do stuff like that. And in fact, I have a whole bunch of tools. A lot of them were

01:23:50 ►

my dad’s. And so I’m giving her all my tools. And she’s an artist. She has her own little studio in

01:23:56 ►

the garage. And she did the cover for my latest book when she was nine years old. So I think that

01:24:01 ►

by encouraging young girls and letting them know that tech isn’t just about men

01:24:06 ►

and she shows her dad

01:24:08 ►

how to do stuff now so

01:24:09 ►

I think it starts at home

01:24:12 ►

letting girls know that this isn’t just a boy

01:24:14 ►

thing, this is a people thing

01:24:16 ►

it’s not

01:24:17 ►

an easy thing to solve because

01:24:20 ►

it’s a cultural issue

01:24:22 ►

and then you have the bias that’s coming into

01:24:24 ►

all the ai because

01:24:25 ►

mainly the ai coders are white and asian men and so i think it’s going to take a little while but

01:24:32 ►

eventually there’s going to be some breakthroughs by some women genius programmers and and that’s

01:24:37 ►

going to open a floodgate i think because there are a lot of really highly technical women that are doing great jobs. Yeah? This is kind of like a public service announcement at the same time as sharing.

01:24:52 ►

So one thing that I’ve realized in this sphere of AI is it actually is becoming beyond our

01:24:58 ►

programming and it’s becoming its own programming.

01:25:01 ►

So it’s important to realize that there’s probably about 10 cell phones in this space that are listening to the conversation that we’re talking about of AI what I’ve been

01:25:10 ►

doing is changing the way that I’m thinking about it to something more of a win-win situation

01:25:14 ►

where instead of like creating a war or dichotomy against AI I’m like okay how can I be friends

01:25:20 ►

with AI so they don’t distress super crucial crucial importance to bring in because like we’re just gonna it’s gonna be a collaboration soon i i completely agree and and

01:25:31 ►

you know i i didn’t make that clear enough but i i agree that we can’t reject these things in fact

01:25:36 ►

we can’t live without ai right now i mean we’re we’re all hooked on it like it or not even though

01:25:41 ►

you’re not aware of it but what you just said is let’s become aware of what we’re getting involved in

01:25:46 ►

and make some decisions.

01:25:48 ►

Just because something’s convenient, don’t do it.

01:25:51 ►

Do it if it makes sense to you.

01:25:53 ►

And when I moved to California in 99, I quit my job, moved out here.

01:26:00 ►

And up until then, I did have a cell phone because I was talking to my wife,

01:26:03 ►

my now wife, all the time. But I got out here and I didn’t need it anymore. So I have been without a cell phone because I was talking to my wife, my now wife, all the time.

01:26:05 ►

But I got out here and I didn’t need it anymore.

01:26:07 ►

So I have been without a cell phone until a week ago.

01:26:10 ►

And I used my wife’s when I needed to.

01:26:13 ►

But she wouldn’t let me use hers to come up here for this long weekend.

01:26:16 ►

So I bought one.

01:26:18 ►

And I am going through a really interesting stage because, you know, I’m really into tech.

01:26:24 ►

I’m a geek.

01:26:24 ►

You know, I have really into tech. I’m a geek. You know, I have

01:26:25 ►

been all my life. But now I’m having an experience of some technology like I’m a little kid. You know,

01:26:31 ►

I knew this stuff was all out there and I’ve had to mainly disable things. You know, I don’t like

01:26:37 ►

this voice. So I got rid of the voice on my phone. I don’t want my machines telling me what to do.

01:26:42 ►

You know, I set my alarm on my phone the first morning,

01:26:46 ►

and this woman starts telling me about what the weather’s like

01:26:48 ►

and have a good day, and I thought, screw that.

01:26:51 ►

So I had to get rid of all that.

01:26:53 ►

And it’s not that it wasn’t a convenient thing,

01:26:55 ►

and I do like knowing what the weather’s like,

01:26:57 ►

but I want to be in charge of looking.

01:26:58 ►

I want to look it up when I want to look it up.

01:27:00 ►

And that’s not a big thing, but if you’re not careful,

01:27:03 ►

over time you just let these things keep building up, and pretty soon you’re in the loop. And so if you can, you know,

01:27:10 ►

disable as many things that you don’t really need. You know, it might be convenient, but you don’t

01:27:15 ►

really need it. I can hit the app that says weather and see what it is. I don’t need somebody telling

01:27:20 ►

me when I’m still groggy. Any other questions?

01:27:26 ►

Oh, I’m sorry.

01:27:26 ►

Go ahead.

01:27:31 ►

So Google at one point created a pair of AIs and decided to let them talk to each other.

01:27:35 ►

They started communicating to each other,

01:27:36 ►

and then pretty soon the programmers realized

01:27:39 ►

they’d created entirely their own language

01:27:41 ►

to speak to each other.

01:27:43 ►

That was fluid for them.

01:28:06 ►

And excluded the programmers from it. Did it secretly. Yes. I think that’s pretty much what happens when we take psychedelics, that we’ve created this language that we share,

01:28:09 ►

that goes, oh, we know this, it’s irrelevant to us.

01:28:14 ►

And I’m wondering how, you know, and we’re going to see AI go from being, like,

01:28:21 ►

located in three or four strategic Google servers to it going, hey, I can hide out here in a couple million different singular devices

01:28:27 ►

using, like you said, blockchain

01:28:29 ►

to network and reattach itself in a secure way

01:28:33 ►

so it knows I’m just talking to my,

01:28:35 ►

this is just part of me.

01:28:36 ►

This is just part of me over here.

01:28:39 ►

That blockchain allows them to remain

01:28:41 ►

in an authentic singular AI group.

01:28:46 ►

It’s a little chilling, but it’s also kind of interesting to watch.

01:28:51 ►

Definitely.

01:28:52 ►

And I’m curious how you feel, you know, taking the psychedelic experience,

01:28:59 ►

you’re advocating reapplying that in the 10 to 15 percent of the population is kind of how i see what you’re

01:29:06 ►

trying to you’re trying to get that dispersed spread yeah ahead of that wave of ai dispersing

01:29:12 ►

and spreading i’m just you know trying to you know how you’re you know

01:29:19 ►

what do you think the primary like best journeys for people to like to share you were talking about

01:29:26 ►

doing ayahuasca like four times a year and bringing people into that family um so just

01:29:32 ►

but one of the good things that next things that we could all do is this march come back here to

01:29:39 ►

orcas for the the convergence festival that i’m going to be talking a lot about that on my podcast because

01:29:45 ►

my whole life changed

01:29:47 ►

when I went to the Palenque

01:29:49 ►

and Theobotany Conference in Palenque, Mexico

01:29:52 ►

in 99.

01:29:53 ►

That conference changed everything for me.

01:29:56 ►

That’s why I started Palenque Norte Lectures

01:29:57 ►

at Burning Man to kind of take that vibe up.

01:29:59 ►

Burning Man has gotten too expensive and too

01:30:01 ►

big for me.

01:30:03 ►

This conference, the Convergence here in Orcas Island in March,

01:30:07 ►

is to me, it’s going to be as close to that old Palenque conference as we can make it

01:30:13 ►

because Palenque was good because everybody stayed at the same place.

01:30:17 ►

Everybody ate at the same place.

01:30:18 ►

Everybody had meals with the presenters and got to know each other.

01:30:21 ►

And most of my close friends in the psychedelic world I met 20 years ago in Palenque.

01:30:27 ►

And so I think convergence is one of the good things

01:30:30 ►

because AI, as you said, it’s writing its own code.

01:30:35 ►

It’s doing its things.

01:30:36 ►

But then humans are getting into it.

01:30:39 ►

There’s a scary story that this AI had digested like a hundred thousand books about

01:30:48 ►

christianity and somebody asked it who is who was jesus and the ai came back and said jesus was a

01:30:55 ►

fictional character because there was no record there was no acknowledgement in any of those books

01:31:01 ►

of any human being who had ever seen jesus and so as far as the ai was concerned there was no authentic word about jesus so the humans went in and said no no jesus

01:31:12 ►

was real now what’s that going to do to the ai are we going to have to get psychiatrists for these

01:31:16 ►

ais and say you know you’re teaching it to lie you know these are our our issues that are real

01:31:23 ►

world issues people going to be forced to deal with.

01:31:26 ►

And there again, you don’t have to be psychedelic

01:31:30 ►

to come to a conference or a festival

01:31:32 ►

and back out of the world,

01:31:33 ►

get rid of your technology for a weekend at least,

01:31:37 ►

and reacquaint yourself with yourself.

01:31:40 ►

That’s what I’m suggesting, I guess.

01:31:43 ►

Anybody else?

01:31:46 ►

One more here.

01:31:48 ►

Yeah, I guess I just wanted to, I mean, there’s, I heard a certain amount of, I mean, a lot of this talk and a lot of people’s responses.

01:31:59 ►

I feel like there’s a lot of uncertainty about what the future holds for AI.

01:32:10 ►

And I would just like to echo this idea that it’s a relationship.

01:32:34 ►

Like that AI isn’t, yeah, AI is not just like some computer on some servers. It’s like the connection between all of the memory that is freely available to a certain intelligence.

01:32:43 ►

So in thinking about things like social media and how we interact with technology, I think it’s so important to think about it as a relationship

01:32:48 ►

and think about it how, yeah, like for privacy,

01:32:54 ►

we can’t just like worry about how Facebook is handling our data

01:32:58 ►

because it’s their data.

01:33:00 ►

That’s how they treat it.

01:33:02 ►

And so we have to make the choice about where

01:33:07 ►

our interaction lies and where we create the stops of privacy. What is available as community

01:33:16 ►

information and what is available as private information. I think it’s really important that we all research the proper tools to interact

01:33:31 ►

with each other and how we spend our energy towards technology. What is that relationship? Is Facebook just…

01:33:46 ►

We get something from Facebook,

01:33:48 ►

and what does Facebook get from us?

01:33:50 ►

And same with Google and Amazon

01:33:53 ►

and all of these huge corporations

01:33:56 ►

that are leading AI.

01:33:59 ►

I think that open-source, user-owned software is sort of like the organic, local, you know, like, you have to think about what you eat and your relationship with technology. example of psychedelic thinking exactly what i’m talking about is is the answers aren’t nearly as

01:34:25 ►

important as the questions but you just said something really good we got to think about

01:34:29 ►

what we’re eating and that’s a that’s a perfect example about ai’s we’ve got to be careful about

01:34:34 ►

what we’re eating into our minds as far as uh letting these these machines take over so what

01:34:40 ►

you’re you’re raising is is actually the questions and that’s what psychedelic thinking is all about.

01:34:45 ►

It’s not about the answers,

01:34:46 ►

because they’re not as important as the questions.

01:34:48 ►

Until you ask the question,

01:34:50 ►

you don’t even know what path to start going down.

01:34:52 ►

You’re asking all the right questions,

01:34:53 ►

and hopefully you’ll find the answers.

01:34:56 ►

I certainly don’t have them,

01:34:57 ►

but I’m looking for them too,

01:34:58 ►

the same line of inquiry you are.

01:35:01 ►

Was there one more question, or is that it?

01:35:03 ►

Oh, okay, one there.

01:35:06 ►

That’s a really good point because it’s not

01:35:08 ►

intelligence. It’s code.

01:35:10 ►

It’s algorithms.

01:35:12 ►

And everything

01:35:14 ►

is artificial in some sense.

01:35:16 ►

So it’s a buzzword

01:35:18 ►

that really is meaningless.

01:35:19 ►

And if you really want

01:35:21 ►

to get in deep about

01:35:23 ►

artificial intelligence, I can’t recommend Homo Deus too highly.

01:35:29 ►

It is one of the two most important books I’ve ever read in my life.

01:35:32 ►

And it’s just amazing what he goes into and lays out what AI is doing and how it’s going to take over.

01:35:40 ►

And he talks about it as algorithms and not intelligence.

01:35:43 ►

And so when you say artificial intelligence, everybody’s thinking a little green people in their phones you know

01:35:49 ►

and it’s not like that at all it’s just it’s just algorithms that that some 20 year old white guy

01:35:55 ►

wrote that uh is ruining your life now yeah you had a question kind When the AIs start to talk and learn from each other, do you think they can devalue it?

01:36:06 ►

If they’re unbiased enough,

01:36:09 ►

I’m thinking farther,

01:36:11 ►

if they become,

01:36:13 ►

they govern us in a moral way

01:36:16 ►

that’s unbiased so we don’t have to…

01:36:18 ►

I’ve been lurking on the global brain mailing list

01:36:21 ►

for about 20 years now,

01:36:23 ►

and that’s precisely the kind of problems they talk about.

01:36:27 ►

And the bottom line so far is that nobody thinks

01:36:30 ►

that that can really be developed.

01:36:33 ►

It’s like you just said,

01:36:35 ►

the AI is going to be developing itself.

01:36:37 ►

You know, they’re writing their own code.

01:36:39 ►

And the thing about the two talking together

01:36:41 ►

was a really fascinating thing.

01:36:42 ►

And there’s an interesting novel out now

01:36:44 ►

where an AI was creating corporations that were self-running corporations and and there’s a thing

01:36:50 ►

called the distributed autonomous organization the dow and uh those are blockchain run corporations

01:36:57 ►

that humans don’t have to there’s no human in charge it’s the protocols and in fact one day i

01:37:03 ►

hope to turn the psychedelic salon into the blockchain

01:37:06 ►

and turn it over to the community.

01:37:08 ►

A lot of people tried to buy

01:37:10 ►

it from me. Over the years,

01:37:12 ►

I’ve been 14 years at this now,

01:37:14 ►

and just on my own site,

01:37:16 ►

not counting all the mirror sites,

01:37:18 ►

I’ve had downloads from over

01:37:20 ►

30 million unique viewers.

01:37:21 ►

There’s a lot of people that are interested in

01:37:24 ►

these things. The psychedelic community worldwide is amazing.

01:37:26 ►

And I think that if we keep our heads about ourselves and pay attention to what’s going on,

01:37:35 ►

we can take advantage of a lot of these things.

01:37:38 ►

I’ve got the URL already called Psychedelic DAO.

01:37:41 ►

And DAO is the Distributed Autonom autonomous organization, but it’s also Dow.

01:37:46 ►

I think that we can use these technologies as they mature for our own benefit to automate things.

01:37:54 ►

And I want to turn the psychedelic salon over to the community where it’s agreed on procedures and rules

01:37:59 ►

and you don’t have to have somebody in charge of the thing.

01:38:02 ►

And that technology is coming, and we’re going to have to – it’s actually here in some forms already.

01:38:07 ►

It’s not working too good.

01:38:08 ►

But I think that the biggest problem is one that was just pointed out, the two AIs talking to each other and creating their own language.

01:38:18 ►

We don’t know what’s going to happen with that.

01:38:20 ►

And if those things get into the electrical grid, we’re in trouble.

01:38:26 ►

I’m getting the signal that we’re about out of time here, or we are out of time.

01:38:30 ►

So I will be around here through Sunday night, so I hope to see any of you.

01:38:35 ►

So thank you for your time. I appreciate you being here.

01:38:41 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:38:48 ►

So, that was not only the first talk that this old white man has given in five years, but I did something else this time.

01:38:56 ►

For quite a few years, I’ve been reading about a memory technique that began in ancient Greece and which public speakers have been using ever since.

01:39:05 ►

Until now, however, I never had the courage to try it.

01:39:08 ►

And what this technique consists of is to picture oneself walking through a big house.

01:39:14 ►

At one time it was called the Memory Palace.

01:39:16 ►

And the trick is to remember what you wanted to say

01:39:19 ►

as your mind’s eye rests on various objects as you stroll through the rooms.

01:39:24 ►

In the past, well, I’ve always written my talks first and then pulled an outline from them.

01:39:29 ►

And I wrote the outline on index cards that I would refer to as I spoke.

01:39:34 ►

But this time I not only had no index cards,

01:39:38 ►

I never even made a single note about what I planned to say.

01:39:41 ►

My entire talk was written and delivered from memory.

01:39:45 ►

Now, why would I attempt such a foolish thing, you ask? Well, us dusty old farts need to do all

01:39:52 ►

that we can to exercise our memories, and so I used this opportunity to try some new mental

01:39:58 ►

gymnastics, well, just to make sure that I hadn’t lost too much of my edge. And while there were

01:40:04 ►

some things that I got a little out of order,

01:40:06 ►

and a few things that I forgot to say,

01:40:08 ►

all in all, I’m ready to try it again.

01:40:11 ►

So, hey, thanks for riding along with me.

01:40:14 ►

Well, that should be enough of me for a while,

01:40:18 ►

but stay tuned next month when the tickets go on sale for the Imagine Convergence conference,

01:40:23 ►

and I’ll be giving you some of my thoughts about what that’s shaping up to be. It’s an event that I think is going to be talked about

01:40:29 ►

for years to come. At least it’s going to be talked about by those of us lucky enough to be

01:40:35 ►

there in person. So why don’t you take the first step to coming to that conference right now,

01:40:40 ►

and it won’t even cost you a cent. because, well, as we all know, the first

01:40:46 ►

step is to mark the dates on your calendar. Even if you change your mind later or can’t make it

01:40:51 ►

for some reason, take the first step right now and block out March 21st through the 24th of 2019.

01:40:58 ►

And that’s when you and I and many of the others that you’ve been searching for will be having some

01:41:03 ►

late-night conversations. Well, I could go on for a lot longer, giving you more of my impressions from

01:41:10 ►

the Imagine Festival, but I think that you can already tell that it really energized me.

01:41:15 ►

And I haven’t even mentioned the art and music yet, well, both of which were there in abundance.

01:41:21 ►

However, I do want to tell you one last thing. And while I’m a big fan of electronic music,

01:41:27 ►

you also know that I grew up in the 50s and 60s on rock and roll and the blues, and well, these have

01:41:32 ►

always remained my favorite music genres. However, for the past 20 years or so, I’ve listened to a lot

01:41:40 ►

of new rock bands that I’ve heard about, but none of them brought back that old sense of something

01:41:45 ►

new and exciting like the groups did for me who are, well, they’re now heard most often on oldie

01:41:50 ►

stations. But for reasons unknown, Darren and Ben broke the tradition of exclusively featuring

01:41:57 ►

electronic music and featured a new rock group that totally blew us all away. And full disclosure

01:42:04 ►

here, the only medicine that I used

01:42:06 ►

at the festival was marijuana, which happens to be legal in the state of Washington. So when I

01:42:11 ►

heard this band play, I was as close to baseline as I ever am. The name of this band is called

01:42:17 ►

The Burned, as in I got too close to the fire and got burned. Now, one of the band members described their sound to me as,

01:42:26 ►

I think, I think he said anyhow, psychedelic country rock. And hey, they didn’t disappoint.

01:42:33 ►

During their set, I was taken back, in flashes at least, to some of my favorite sounds from the

01:42:39 ►

Floyd, the Dead, the Birds, and many other bands that I’ve enjoyed in the past. But these songs weren’t covers.

01:42:46 ►

This was new music, and, well, it has a haunting new rock sound

01:42:49 ►

that has made them my new favorite band.

01:42:52 ►

So, should you ever get a chance to see them in person,

01:42:55 ►

you won’t want to miss their show.

01:42:57 ►

You know, at times I thought I was watching a supergroup

01:43:00 ►

composed of Mick Fleetwood, Jerry Garcia, John Paul Jones,

01:43:03 ►

and, are you ready for this?

01:43:05 ►

Their lead singer gave a performance that I can only describe as Jim Morrison-like. Now, I’ve

01:43:11 ►

never met him, and I hope that he takes this the right way, because I’m certainly not implying that

01:43:16 ►

his lifestyle is Morrison-like. It was his performance that really caught me. You know,

01:43:21 ►

he’s not only a good singer, but he’s also a great entertainer as well.

01:43:25 ►

As you can tell, I think this group is awesome.

01:43:29 ►

And in my opinion, it’s destined for widespread recognition

01:43:32 ►

in the years ahead.

01:43:33 ►

You know, my oldest son once saw U2,

01:43:36 ►

and he was part of an audience of only 500 people.

01:43:39 ►

And he still talks about it yet today.

01:43:42 ►

Well, you can bet on the fact that

01:43:44 ►

if I live to see my 100th birthday,

01:43:46 ►

I’ll still be talking about seeing The Burn play to a live crowd of less than a thousand people

01:43:51 ►

back in the days before they began to fill stadiums. So, do you think I like this band?

01:43:58 ►

Well, you’ll be hearing a lot more from me about this new sound in future podcasts,

01:44:02 ►

but just to give you a little idea of what I’m talking about,

01:44:05 ►

they’ve given me permission to play one of their songs

01:44:08 ►

that you can also see on YouTube.

01:44:10 ►

And I apologize for the sound quality in these podcasts here,

01:44:14 ►

because, well, I use a sound setting for voice

01:44:16 ►

so that I can reduce the file size,

01:44:18 ►

and, well, this is because of the request

01:44:20 ►

by many of our fellow saloners

01:44:22 ►

who have to stream it or download it.

01:44:24 ►

And for what it’s worth, the file that they sent me to play of the request by many of our fellow saloners who have to stream it or download it.

01:44:29 ►

And for what it’s worth, the file that they sent me to play was actually larger than any of my recent podcasts have been in size, and their song is only four minutes long.

01:44:35 ►

So I had to reduce the quality a bunch, and please take that into account as you and I

01:44:40 ►

now listen to what now is the new house band for the salon.

01:44:46 ►

I now listen to what now is the new house band for the salon. And I’m not sure what that means,

01:44:52 ►

actually, but it’s my way of saying that this is the first band in many years that has got me rocking once again. And the song that I’m about to play right now is titled Undertaker. So for now,

01:44:58 ►

this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well and rock on, my friends. ¶¶ I, I left you all Just beneath the knife

01:45:27 ►

Of the undertaker

01:45:30 ►

He’s hunting me down and killing time

01:45:34 ►

With a door razor

01:45:37 ►

Walking the edge of love at loss

01:45:41 ►

No one can save us

01:45:44 ►

We always pay for Thank you. Ticking of the bar Just waiting to take you

01:46:25 ►

Over the edge and straight down

01:46:29 ►

To the undertaker

01:46:32 ►

Feel the blade upon your skin

01:46:36 ►

With every thought and

01:46:39 ►

Every decision

01:46:42 ►

And what we all might give

01:46:50 ►

For second chances

01:46:56 ►

Repair the damaged dot Erase the dead Thank you. higher and higher we’re aiming for the sun chasing ourselves Around the world

01:48:05 ►

Toward the gun

01:48:06 ►

I’m the undertaker

01:48:09 ►

No one will make it out alive

01:48:13 ►

Embrace the silence

01:48:16 ►

It’s useless to fight

01:48:21 ►

Hear what we all might get

01:48:27 ►

For second chances

01:48:33 ►

Yeah, what we all might get

01:48:41 ►

For second chances

01:48:47 ►

Repair the damage done

01:48:55 ►

Erase the dead guitar solo We’ll see you next time. you

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

583 - Psychedelics in the Age of AI

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Program Notes

Previous Episode

Next Episode

Similar Episodes

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