Program Notes
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Charlie Grob
Terence McKenna’s logo, Bruce Damer’s flight suit, Lorenzo and Charlie Grob
These lectures were recorded on Orcas Island during March of 2019.]
This podcast features two interviews that I conducted last March at the Orcas Island Convergence. The first is a conversation that I had with Dr. Bruce Damer, and that is followed by my interview with Dr. Charlie Grob. Between them, their scientific inquiries span a wide range of inquiries. Bruce, with his work for NASA and his research into the origins of life, works with mega issues. And Charlie, whose human research work includes studies using MDMA, psilocybin, and ayahuasca, works with human-sized issues.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize it, but in the fifties and into the early sixties psychedelic research was the cutting edge of psychiatry.” -Dr. Charles Grob
Bruce Damer’s Website
Bruce Damer’s Patreon Page
Charlie Grob - Publications
Download free copies of Lorenzo’s latest books
Previous Episode
627 - The Birth of a New Humanity – Part 2
Next Episode
Similar Episodes
- 683 - Psychedelics & Genius &+ Love - score: 0.81780
- 617 - Science Fiction Meets Science - score: 0.81230
- 276 - Peter Gorman Interviews Dennis McKenna Part 1 - score: 0.79758
- 227 - Shulgin-Watts_ Sasha at MIT plus Alan Watts - score: 0.77953
- 200 - A Few Words From Our Elders - score: 0.77774
- 277 - Peter Gorman Interviews Dennis McKenna Part 2 - score: 0.76593
- 243 - Beyond the Doors of Perception - score: 0.76465
- 233 - Ram Das and Timothy Leary – 1983 Harvard Reunion - score: 0.76244
- 500 - 500 Memories - score: 0.76200
- 058 - Cast of Characters - score: 0.76056
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
And I’m pleased to be able to play a couple of interviews for you that I did a while back.
00:00:28 ►
Last March, at the Convergence Conference on Orcas Island,
00:00:32 ►
in addition to my presentation about the Psychedelic Hospice Movement,
00:00:37 ►
which I podcast in Program 599,
00:00:40 ►
I also had the opportunity to record several conversations with
00:00:43 ►
two men who have been friends of mine for 20 years now.
00:00:47 ►
And I’m going to play those two conversations for you today.
00:00:50 ►
Before I begin playing the first interview, however, I first want to be sure to thank the team who organized these interviews
00:00:57 ►
and then did the recording, editing, and posting of the video on YouTube, which I’ll link to in today’s program notes.
00:01:04 ►
Now, this first conversation is to in today’s program notes. Now this first conversation
00:01:05 ►
is with my friend Bruce Dahmer, and if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, then
00:01:09 ►
you are already familiar with Bruce’s work. However, I have to admit that even though I
00:01:15 ►
thought I knew a lot about all he’s done, well, there were a couple new things he had to say here
00:01:19 ►
that have given me some new things to think about. So let’s see what you think.
00:01:22 ►
have given me some new things to think about.
00:01:24 ►
So let’s see what you think.
00:01:29 ►
Well, Bruce, you know, we’ve known each other a long time,
00:01:31 ►
so your flight suit doesn’t surprise me,
00:01:34 ►
but I think for people that don’t know you too well,
00:01:36 ►
particularly the ones that know you in the world of science,
00:01:39 ►
explain your flight suit to us, if you would.
00:01:42 ►
So this is a spiritual flight suit,
00:01:46 ►
and we are featuring wonderful patches, and this is the first patch from spiritual flight suit, and we are featuring wonderful patches.
00:01:52 ►
And this is the first patch from the flight suit, which is Terrence McKenna’s personal logo from his letterhead.
00:01:54 ►
And it’s called the Octoshroom.
00:01:58 ►
So you have a mushroom cap and an octopus bottom.
00:02:00 ►
With big eyes.
00:02:01 ►
Big eyes. And there’s a patch here that just came in that’s being added to the
00:02:05 ►
flight suit and it’s really just to kind of like these things that you used to wear
00:02:11 ►
in the Navy. I mean it represents places you’ve been and come back for and some
00:02:16 ►
you haven’t come back from. And the logo you got that from Terrance’s
00:02:21 ►
letterhead? Yes, so I have a collection of some of the last documents of Terrence McKenna.
00:02:28 ►
And on them, on his Apple LaserWriter inkjet printed,
00:02:34 ►
was this strange little logo.
00:02:36 ►
And I realized, this is Terrence’s identity.
00:02:40 ►
Because he placed it on his letterhead,
00:02:42 ►
the letterhead for both Hawaii letters and Occidental letters.
00:02:45 ►
It’s his logo.
00:02:46 ►
It’s his personal logo.
00:02:48 ►
So when we were thinking about the spiritual flight suits to be able to make all these patches for people and sell the patches,
00:02:56 ►
I rushed in and grabbed the letter and said, let’s do this.
00:02:59 ►
Let’s bring Terrence back to us and to Orcas here in Convergence.
00:03:05 ►
Well, those letters of Terrence back to us and to Orcas here in Convergence. Well, those letters of Terrence.
00:03:06 ►
Now, Terrence’s whole archive was destroyed by fire,
00:03:08 ►
but these letters were not in the archive.
00:03:11 ►
They weren’t in the archive.
00:03:12 ►
Where did you get the letters?
00:03:13 ►
They came through a rare books dealer,
00:03:15 ►
and they’re 15 years of correspondence.
00:03:18 ►
Wow.
00:03:19 ►
Yeah, that’s it.
00:03:20 ►
As we know, when the fire happened, I think I called you up,
00:03:24 ►
and I said that the elves have taken the incriminating evidence.
00:03:27 ►
That was a bad day.
00:03:28 ►
That was a bad day.
00:03:29 ►
So then we fought back by digitizing.
00:03:32 ►
That’s when we started the digitizing effort to save them what kind of work we could.
00:03:38 ►
And what we did, all those tapes Ralph gave us, I don’t know how many of them.
00:03:41 ►
Yeah, he gave us a big box of the trilogues.
00:03:44 ►
And so we ended up with that helped feed
00:03:45 ►
the salon early on. Right.
00:03:47 ►
So now we’ve done all the trilogues
00:03:49 ►
and 250 of Terrence’s
00:03:51 ►
things, but the salon’s grown
00:03:53 ►
into more now. You’ve
00:03:55 ►
appeared there quite a few times.
00:03:58 ►
And at Palenque Norte
00:04:00 ►
you were the very first Palenque Norte,
00:04:01 ►
one of our first speakers.
00:04:04 ►
You might want to mention where we met as well.
00:04:07 ►
Yeah, we met at Alchemical Arts, 1999.
00:04:11 ►
And it was an event that was prepared for by Ken Symington and Rob Montgomery
00:04:17 ►
as an alternative to Palenque.
00:04:21 ►
So it was the artsy one that was going to happen six months later after Palenque, or before Palenque. So it was the artsy one that was going to happen like six months later after
00:04:26 ►
Palenque, or before Palenque.
00:04:28 ►
And it had been planned, and then Terrence
00:04:30 ►
got ill. Terrence had a seizure.
00:04:33 ►
And
00:04:33 ►
we realized that this was goodbye.
00:04:36 ►
This was actually probably the last event
00:04:38 ►
you would see Terrence.
00:04:40 ►
So it was very emotional for him.
00:04:42 ►
For all of us. And I have
00:04:44 ►
to admit that even though I was a Terrence McKenna fan at the time,
00:04:47 ►
but I was also very geeky.
00:04:48 ►
And I probably told you that, but I went to the conference to meet you.
00:04:54 ►
And Terrence was frosting on the cake.
00:04:57 ►
And it worked out well.
00:04:59 ►
We’ve had 20-some good years together.
00:05:01 ►
The spirit of the Internet was written.
00:05:03 ►
We were doing virtual worlds with avatars.
00:05:07 ►
And for Terrence, this represented his dream of invisible landscapes
00:05:12 ►
made visible by language.
00:05:15 ►
And so six months before we’ve been at his house and done this alchemical
00:05:19 ►
virtual powwow with a 3d world.
00:05:21 ►
And it’s online.
00:05:22 ►
There’s video of it.
00:05:22 ►
with a 3d world and it’s online. There’s video of it.
00:05:24 ►
And Terrence in an avatar named zone ghost doing the Macarena with a bug
00:05:31 ►
eyed green lawnmower, uh, with his son, uh, with him and in a DMT inspired
00:05:38 ►
world to compare what cyberspace cyberspace could deliver versus, uh,
00:05:44 ►
what his worlds and I was inexperienced with his
00:05:47 ►
worlds but you were very experienced in the world of what then was uh pre-virtual reality you know
00:05:53 ►
it was pretty primitive but uh i i think because a lot of people who who uh maybe are following
00:06:00 ►
your work now will never find out about some of that old VR work.
00:06:05 ►
Tell about the Biotic Conference.
00:06:07 ►
I mentioned it in the Spirit of the Internet
00:06:09 ►
because you had a psychedelic experience without taking drugs.
00:06:13 ►
Yeah, I, from age about 9 or 10,
00:06:16 ►
would have these, what I now call endotrips,
00:06:20 ►
endogenous visions.
00:06:22 ►
And it’s very common in human history.
00:06:28 ►
You know, Descartes, the founders of science did it through this method.
00:06:33 ►
It’s where Descartes saw the angel that told him measure and number.
00:06:36 ►
And, you know, Newton had visions like this. Einstein used thought experiments. So that’s how I thought things were done.
00:06:40 ►
That’s how I thought new things were brought into the world.
00:06:42 ►
As a child you thought that?
00:06:43 ►
Yeah. And so I had my first thought experiment when i was 14 when i asked the question how did life
00:06:51 ►
begin on the earth and in my mind’s eye was a seething mass of molecules moving suddenly i
00:06:59 ►
thought oh this is like one of einstein’s thought experiments when he was 16, he had the one where he was running alongside the beam of light.
00:07:07 ►
And I thought, oh, it’s arrived.
00:07:09 ►
And I was about to ask it the question, you know, how did life begin?
00:07:13 ►
Because I was trying to study how the molecules…
00:07:15 ►
This is during one of these vision experiments?
00:07:17 ►
Yeah, when I was 14.
00:07:20 ►
And I was about to ask it the question,
00:07:22 ►
can you show me how things can assemble from scratch and become life?
00:07:29 ►
When it asked me the question, figure out how I made a copy of myself.
00:07:34 ►
And that’s when you were 14.
00:07:36 ►
When I was 14, I was like, and then my brain tricked out.
00:07:40 ►
I was like, wait a minute, you’re a machine, just like me, and you need a big
00:07:47 ►
machine to make a copy of a little machine.
00:07:49 ►
Like automobiles are made in automobile factories.
00:07:52 ►
And I don’t see a big machine around you, you’re just sitting there.
00:07:55 ►
And it winked, as much as a bundle of molecules can wink, and basically said to work on it.
00:08:02 ►
And 38, 40 years later, it came in another endo vision i saw it i saw the whole
00:08:08 ►
system downloaded one one day 2013 it was in it was it was one of the happiest moments of my life
00:08:16 ►
i imagine because this is a dream you’ve had since 14 of trying to figure out how life actually began
00:08:23 ►
and from what i know of it you’re getting
00:08:26 ►
very close can you tell us a little bit about that yeah so um i had the vision and i met dave
00:08:33 ►
deemer in 2009 and i’ve done my phd work on computational simulations of complexity
00:08:39 ►
and i met him and it was the perfect partnership. And here was this 72, 73-year-old senior renowned membrane biophysicist,
00:08:50 ►
chemist, and me that had all this work on computational systems,
00:08:55 ►
and I could think big.
00:08:56 ►
I could think in terms of big complex.
00:08:58 ►
Macro level.
00:08:59 ►
Macro level.
00:09:00 ►
We put ourselves together, had tea twice a month for years.
00:09:05 ►
And like gentleman scientists, we worked it out.
00:09:08 ►
So he gave me papers to study.
00:09:10 ►
He showed me the chemistry, you know, because that’s what we have to work with is chemistry.
00:09:15 ►
And then one day in 2013, it all just came.
00:09:19 ►
And I remember running upstairs and writing.
00:09:22 ►
I threw it all out.
00:09:24 ►
And then I wrote it.
00:09:27 ►
I said, this is what I’ve just experienced.
00:09:28 ►
I’ve become protocells moving in this pool, wet-dry cycling.
00:09:35 ►
I’ve seen how the polymers jump from the bubble phase into the dry phase,
00:09:42 ►
and then they get squeezed down by the bathtub ring of drying
00:09:45 ►
lipid and then they get ejected back into bubbles and i said this is a couple coupling of phases
00:09:51 ►
and i saw all of the polymeric evolution going it’s about a 45 minute completely immersive endo
00:09:58 ►
trip wow and i wrote it all out sent it to dave and he said, you found it, you found the kinetic trap.
00:10:05 ►
You found it.
00:10:07 ►
So then we published a year later,
00:10:09 ►
and now it’s being tested all over the world.
00:10:11 ►
And tell us about the testing, too, how that’s going on.
00:10:14 ►
First of all, this is a new sign.
00:10:17 ►
This is brand new.
00:10:18 ►
This is different from what we’ve been taught about Darwinian evolution.
00:10:23 ►
Not evolution, but the original.
00:10:26 ►
I’ve been taught that life started in the sea.
00:10:29 ►
Right.
00:10:30 ►
It would seem to be obvious
00:10:31 ►
because the planet has mostly the waters and the ocean.
00:10:35 ►
But chemists never like that proposal
00:10:38 ►
because stuff in water breaks down all the time.
00:10:42 ►
So until you have enzymes to make polymers, which are the stuff of
00:10:46 ►
life, you have to make them and grow them. But water is breaking them down. So you have things
00:10:51 ►
called enzymes that are fixing them all the time and making copies of DNA and RNA and enzymes and
00:10:58 ►
peptides and stuff. And so to get life started, you can’t be in water all the time. And it turns out that nature in pools on land,
00:11:07 ►
which is where Charles Darwin thought life would begin,
00:11:10 ►
in 1871, that’s what he wrote.
00:11:12 ►
I didn’t know that.
00:11:13 ►
Warm Little Pond.
00:11:14 ►
Really?
00:11:15 ►
He wrote two sentences that nailed it in 1871.
00:11:19 ►
What?
00:11:20 ►
Charles Darwin did.
00:11:21 ►
So we went back to…
00:11:22 ►
And people just ignored that all this time?
00:11:24 ►
Kind of.
00:11:25 ►
Yeah, so the field went down these rabbit holes,
00:11:28 ►
the spark chamber, Miller and Urey…
00:11:31 ►
The lightning and all.
00:11:32 ►
The lightning, that’s the subject
00:11:34 ►
of all scientific horror films, right?
00:11:37 ►
And then this idea of life in the deep oceans
00:11:39 ►
that hydrothermal bends, but nothing works.
00:11:43 ►
And the chemists, you’re against what’s called the second law of thermodynamics.
00:11:47 ►
And if you’re against that…
00:11:49 ►
So Dave, in the 80s and 90s, figured out that if you drive solutions down
00:11:56 ►
in the presence of these membranous lipids,
00:11:59 ►
they squeeze all those building blocks together like a zipper,
00:12:03 ►
and then they form the long polymers.
00:12:06 ►
And we’ve done that for 10 years in the lab,
00:12:08 ►
and then I started taking it out to hot springs.
00:12:10 ►
So I put on my floppy Indiana Jones astrobiologist hat
00:12:15 ►
with a different flight suit,
00:12:17 ►
and I go to Yellowstone with permits,
00:12:19 ►
because you have to have this property permit,
00:12:21 ►
and we take acidic and alkaline waters,
00:12:25 ►
and we formed the compartments, we formed the vesicles.
00:12:29 ►
And then I took all of that science down to Rotorua in New Zealand last June,
00:12:35 ►
and we immersed 100 experimental vials in a heat block
00:12:39 ►
into a 95 Celsius bubbling, spitting, hot pool, slightly acidic.
00:12:46 ►
And then I hydrated and dehydrated, just like we think was happening
00:12:50 ►
in the early earth. And it worked, it worked so well.
00:12:54 ►
And you’ll see that tonight, but it worked stunningly well.
00:12:57 ►
I mean, the results we got back. So we, so there’s little vials
00:13:03 ►
that had the dried films, like the bathtub rings in them, were cooking and making polymers.
00:13:09 ►
Every time I put a drop back in,
00:13:10 ►
a trillion compartments would butt off and be selected for,
00:13:14 ►
and then dry back down, squeeze back into the bathtub ring,
00:13:17 ►
make more and make more and make more.
00:13:19 ►
It’s an engine.
00:13:20 ►
Because anything in life or in mechanics has to be driven by an engine process
00:13:25 ►
and we found a natural engine
00:13:27 ►
because every time a geyser goes off
00:13:29 ►
it fills the pool
00:13:30 ►
and it’s very regular
00:13:31 ►
like old faithful
00:13:33 ►
so where is this being researched now?
00:13:38 ►
where are the labs
00:13:40 ►
testing taking place?
00:13:41 ►
it’s everywhere
00:13:42 ►
Georgia Tech, University of Paris,
00:13:46 ►
University of Washington here in Seattle,
00:13:49 ►
UC Santa Cruz where we started this thing,
00:13:52 ►
in Japan, in India,
00:13:54 ►
in University of New South Wales.
00:13:56 ►
And this is all research going on right now.
00:13:58 ►
As we speak.
00:13:59 ►
And we met up with geologists from Australia
00:14:02 ►
four years ago,
00:14:03 ►
and they took us to the site of the oldest evidence for life on Earth.
00:14:08 ►
And tonight I’ll bring…
00:14:09 ►
Talk about that trek a little bit, because, you know,
00:14:10 ►
people sometimes think, well, these scientists sit around in the Ivy Tower,
00:14:15 ►
but you actually get out in the field.
00:14:17 ►
You went up to the shale up in Canada.
00:14:20 ►
The Virgin Shale for the Biotic Project.
00:14:22 ►
Right, and now Australia.
00:14:23 ►
Tell about the trip to the Outback, what you all did.
00:14:26 ►
That was amazing.
00:14:27 ►
So we took this very bizarre bus that was a converted truck
00:14:31 ►
with a bus shell on the back because it’s Outback.
00:14:35 ►
It’s a really rough country.
00:14:37 ►
And we drove from Shark Bay in Western Australia
00:14:41 ►
where you find these rock towers pointing out of the water and
00:14:45 ►
they’re called stromatolites and they’re modern versions of the ancestors 3.5 billion years
00:14:51 ►
ago.
00:14:52 ►
So it’s a saline bay and these rock towers are spongy on the top.
00:14:57 ►
You can push them and that’s microbial mats that mineralize the layers underneath them
00:15:03 ►
so they don’t lose access to sunlight when sand blows over them or washes over them.
00:15:08 ►
And so then we drove from there to the North Pole Dome region of northwest Australia
00:15:14 ►
to find their deepest ancestors, 3.48 billion years old.
00:15:19 ►
The same thing as was at Shark Bay alive.
00:15:24 ►
There they were.
00:15:26 ►
I got to touch with my own hand the vein of rock that was discovered that was the hot
00:15:33 ►
spring.
00:15:34 ►
The oldest hot spring ever discovered, the evidence for it, where they did thin slicing
00:15:40 ►
and imaging and they found life evidence for a whole ecosystem in there in a hot spring on land
00:15:47 ►
so it was like that came out there was a smoking gun so he’s surprised and shocked the geologist
00:15:54 ►
that oh this whole region was a volcanic caldera that was a lake and it wasn’t a marine shore at
00:16:01 ►
all and there’s replete with living systems in the hot spring as far back as we can look.
00:16:07 ►
And it was like an arrow pointing back to the origin point, maybe 300 or 500 million years earlier.
00:16:13 ►
And we’d come up with the chemical theory that was working in the lab, and we formed a partnership with them.
00:16:21 ►
With the geologists.
00:16:22 ►
With the geologists, and then with planetary scientists
00:16:25 ►
so we could guide nasa where to land on mars on the next mission which is coming up in a year and
00:16:30 ►
a half now how did that interact with what you’re doing the origin of life how did that crossover
00:16:34 ►
come if um well a whole new hypothesis emerged that if life has to to arise around hot springs
00:16:41 ►
mars um had water had liquid water on the surface and everything for maybe
00:16:47 ►
three four five hundred million years and then the atmosphere started to get stripped away
00:16:52 ►
because it didn’t have that magnetic dynamo to protect itself and so it lost the liquid oceans
00:17:00 ►
and it became this incredibly desiccated mummmified place. So if life had started, it would have started around, we think,
00:17:07 ►
around hot springs, and as the oceans dried down,
00:17:10 ►
there’s still volcanism, and there’s still bubbling pools.
00:17:13 ►
Life would escape down the plumbing of those hot springs
00:17:17 ►
into what are called the refuge areas, which is rock.
00:17:22 ►
So the only place life would be able to survive on Mars now is in rocks, hot wet rocks.
00:17:28 ►
Not, never at the surface.
00:17:29 ►
So after this, some more research on Mars, if we see a headline that says life discovered on Mars,
00:17:35 ►
we don’t want people to think they’re little Martian men walking around.
00:17:40 ►
We’ll be lucky if we can drill and find.
00:17:43 ►
It’s unlikely we can find evidence in situ,
00:17:47 ►
like find those ripply rocks.
00:17:49 ►
It’s really tough. This is really tough work.
00:17:51 ►
So how is all this new theory being accepted by the scientific community?
00:17:55 ►
Well, there’s a set of colleagues that ignore us
00:17:57 ►
and don’t cite our work and don’t talk about us
00:18:00 ►
because we’re a threat.
00:18:02 ►
We’re a threat to their missions to the icy moons of Saturn because our argument is life cannot start in those icy oceans.
00:18:10 ►
So if it can’t start there it’d have to be delivered from elsewhere. So it’s a
00:18:17 ►
threat to ten billion dollar mission. So they kind of step around us. They’re not
00:18:21 ►
really doing science in a way. I wrote an email to one of them just
00:18:25 ►
before coming to Orca saying, you know, I posted to the list and you haven’t put it on the list.
00:18:31 ►
These are my colleagues. We must do science. I’m posting a challenge to you that will that
00:18:37 ►
NASA headquarters knows full well that we are the null hypothesis for finding life there that, that our approach is that you,
00:18:46 ►
they’re habitable, but sterile.
00:18:49 ►
And so, but this particular scientist is protecting.
00:18:53 ►
Well, of course, but I pointed out this, this is science and we must have
00:18:57 ►
alternate hypotheses and you must be challenged and I do it in a very nice way.
00:19:02 ►
But you’ve never done anything that wasn’t nice.
00:19:07 ►
You are a truly gentle man thank you
00:19:08 ►
and maybe expand a little bit
00:19:11 ►
on your work with NASA too
00:19:12 ►
because you’ve done more than just help
00:19:14 ►
find the proper landing sites on Mars
00:19:17 ►
which you’ve done
00:19:17 ►
but you’ve been associated with NASA for a long time
00:19:19 ►
a long time
00:19:20 ►
so I started by introducing
00:19:22 ►
the same three dimensional worlds
00:19:24 ►
that we introduced to
00:19:25 ►
Terrence the same year that we put Terrence into cyberspace. I put NASA into cyberspace
00:19:33 ►
because we showed worlds of recreating Apollo moon landing in 1969 with an Apollo astronaut
00:19:40 ►
being an avatar and walking around and talking about it all. He’s a Navy guy, by the way, of course.
00:19:47 ►
Anyway, but then a NASA chief scientist saw this and started funding us.
00:19:53 ►
So I had maybe 12, 14 years of funding.
00:19:56 ►
Did 25 projects, visualizing every space mission, even designing new ones.
00:20:03 ►
So I designed the reference mission to take people to an asteroid surface
00:20:07 ►
in 2007 to help steer NASA in that direction.
00:20:10 ►
So we used the press, covers of magazines to steer NASA toward asteroids.
00:20:15 ►
Which is what they’re doing now.
00:20:16 ►
That’s what they’re doing now.
00:20:17 ►
So we did a course correction on NASA.
00:20:19 ►
It was me working with an interior and an inside group.
00:20:24 ►
You had an insider?
00:20:25 ►
We had General Pete Warden, a two-star, right?
00:20:29 ►
You know, two stars.
00:20:30 ►
I’ve had some familiarity with him.
00:20:32 ►
Yeah, with him, yeah.
00:20:33 ►
So he basically, in his office at Paines Research Center, said,
00:20:37 ►
You can do this.
00:20:38 ►
You can’t get fired.
00:20:40 ►
You’re not a civil servant.
00:20:42 ►
You can’t fire civil servants very easily.
00:20:44 ►
But anyway, so we steered NASA in 2007 toward these targets.
00:20:48 ►
And then in 2014, I met Peter Janiskens from the SETI Institute.
00:20:55 ►
And we co-designed, along with a world-renowned balloon designer named Julian Knott,
00:21:01 ►
a radical new spacecraft which could open the solar system to human settlement and to life
00:21:07 ►
itself and it’s this it’s related to the origin of life because for life to start you have to have
00:21:14 ►
membranous enclosures like a little balloon or a little bubble around polymers to get them to
00:21:19 ►
interact in order to start life in space you need to do a membranous enclosure around an asteroid
00:21:25 ►
which contains all the building blocks for life because effectively life started because of all
00:21:31 ►
this stuff raining down on the earth into the pools to get us going so when we go out and we
00:21:36 ►
find trillions of small and big objects some of them have ice in them and methane in them and
00:21:42 ►
amino acids and fatty acids and metals and everything is there
00:21:47 ►
and so we could put a balloon around it put an atmosphere in we can control their tumble we can
00:21:53 ►
stop them from they’re all rotators and if they’re rotating you can’t work with them and then we can
00:21:58 ►
extract water by melting them and and that water is valuable to create fuel stations,
00:22:05 ►
which is what Elon Musk is going to need to go to Mars.
00:22:08 ►
So we’ve stood up a company now that’s being formed to do this,
00:22:13 ►
to work initially with the Department of Defense
00:22:16 ►
to do satellite servicing for their big birds.
00:22:19 ►
So instead of an asteroid,
00:22:20 ►
just encapsulate a great big satellite that’s out of control
00:22:23 ►
and they need to fix it.
00:22:25 ►
And we can move them around and we can service them in the gas-filled enclosures.
00:22:30 ►
So they finance the business and then we go after asteroids just in time for Elon’s Mars mission.
00:22:37 ►
We can say, you can launch all that fuel and water from Earth or we can deliver it to you.
00:22:41 ►
Give us a contract, give us a purchase order.
00:22:43 ►
And without drilling a hole in the Earth And without drilling a hole in the Earth.
00:22:45 ►
Without drilling a hole in the Earth.
00:22:46 ►
And we can then make a sustainable system for space flight.
00:22:51 ►
And my favorite of all, and you’ll see it in the talk,
00:22:54 ►
is this fantastic intermediate state where we have an icy, rocky asteroid.
00:23:01 ►
We melt it down, but we don’t take the water out into our tanks.
00:23:04 ►
We let it be a
00:23:06 ►
liquid globule. And just like those fishbowl, so those glass globe things that have shrimp in them,
00:23:13 ►
and they’re all in these light, and they’re sealed. Same thing. We make a biosphere. And then it’s a
00:23:18 ►
world. It’s a small world. It could be 500 feet across. It could be quite big or a mile across.
00:23:21 ►
It could be 500 feet across.
00:23:23 ►
It could be quite big or a mile across.
00:23:27 ►
Put life in there, and that sustains life.
00:23:32 ►
Huge space colonies, huge structures could be built with these things as a component.
00:23:36 ►
And you wouldn’t have to take a whole lot of equipment and material up?
00:23:37 ►
No, not a lot.
00:23:42 ►
And we can do gas mining of the nickel and iron out of the asteroids just with gas extraction.
00:23:44 ►
No grinding, no nothing like that.
00:23:46 ►
And then 3D print in space. So it’s called the Mond carb just with gas extraction. No grinding, no nothing like that. And then 3D print in space.
00:23:49 ►
So it’s called the Mond carbonyl gas process.
00:23:52 ►
And it’s a way of extracting minerals with gas,
00:23:54 ►
not with grinding up and smelting.
00:23:56 ►
Because I grew up in a mining town.
00:24:01 ►
And it’s impossible to imagine doing that kind of equipment in zero G. And no way.
00:24:04 ►
So we may have solved all three problems
00:24:07 ►
fueling stations and water and consumables gas mining to make big parts for big mega structures
00:24:13 ►
in space and then the food supply but you know bruce you’re involved in in really re writing
00:24:20 ►
the rules about the origin of life possibly if, if it tests out. You’re involved in all of these NASA projects.
00:24:28 ►
You’ve helped locate landing sites on Mars.
00:24:31 ►
You’ve done a lot of the training and stuff.
00:24:34 ►
And then you’ve done all of this virtual reality work.
00:24:38 ►
For young people that are watching today,
00:24:41 ►
I think it would be worthwhile for them to know that you weren’t born rich,
00:24:45 ►
you didn’t have a silver spoon in your mouth. And what did you, how did you go from a 14-year-old boy
00:24:50 ►
to thinking about the origin of life, to where you are now, but that first few steps, and I’d
00:24:58 ►
sure like to hear about the European adventure when you set up a lab over there. Yeah.
00:25:08 ►
So I’m going back to my hometown of Kamloops, B.C.
00:25:12 ►
next week to do a talk in a big theater in the round for the whole town
00:25:14 ►
and getting the Distinguished Alumni Award.
00:25:16 ►
Really?
00:25:17 ►
The local university.
00:25:17 ►
Congratulations.
00:25:18 ►
Yeah, it’s great.
00:25:19 ►
It’s not many people that get that from their hometown.
00:25:22 ►
I’m the weirdest thing that’s come out of that town, probably.
00:25:25 ►
That doesn’t surprise me.
00:25:27 ►
Other than train robbers and cattle rustlers.
00:25:30 ►
But they’re pretty standard.
00:25:32 ►
But I was very dreamy.
00:25:34 ►
So I was adopted at birth.
00:25:37 ►
So I didn’t know that until I was about eight or nine,
00:25:40 ►
until my father told me.
00:25:41 ►
But I always thought I was like a spaceship.
00:25:45 ►
That somehow I was connected but disconnected from the world because when i came home from the hospital my
00:25:51 ►
mother said you were in your own world like i was completely crossed over fully autistic i think
00:25:57 ►
like i was very non-verbal so in a way these kind of kids that end up starting up that way build internal landscapes.
00:26:07 ►
I think Terrence did.
00:26:08 ►
That’s why he could do what he could do, and he could tell the story.
00:26:12 ►
Helped to be Irish, too.
00:26:15 ►
But I found out I have at least a third of my genes are Irish.
00:26:19 ►
Of course.
00:26:20 ►
I knew that from when I met you.
00:26:23 ►
So I was very dreamy.
00:26:25 ►
I lived in the worlds of the imagination,
00:26:27 ►
and I learned how, and I think,
00:26:30 ►
I was actually chemically changing my brain.
00:26:33 ►
Because when I was nine…
00:26:34 ►
Just by thinking?
00:26:36 ►
Well, when I was about eight or nine,
00:26:37 ►
I would notice that if I came in from a really active day
00:26:41 ►
of playing spaceship or something,
00:26:44 ►
and I tried to close my eyes to go
00:26:46 ►
to sleep or take a nap I would see these color flashes just and people think oh that’s just
00:26:52 ►
hypnagogy or just overstimulation but for me it was like the best colored tv I ever saw
00:26:59 ►
and we didn’t have a color tv our neighbors did. I learned how to do the dials on my consciousness, to turn off my consciousness, to let the colors
00:27:11 ►
grow.
00:27:12 ►
So I shut down thinking altogether, language, words, I would shut all that off, turn it
00:27:18 ►
on, turn it off, and then the system would grow and become worlds.
00:27:22 ►
So I could tune the channel for that and just enter into these worlds.
00:27:27 ►
And when I was a teenager, I just escaped into those worlds and drew thousands of pictures of
00:27:32 ►
these places, like thousands. And then that became my profession. So in my own…
00:27:38 ►
Profession by, you know, computer…
00:27:41 ►
Everything, computer code, virtual worlds, doing the chemistry, designing spacecraft,
00:27:46 ►
I could use that dialing mechanism.
00:27:48 ►
And sometimes it would come as what I call an endotrip now,
00:27:51 ►
endogenous rather than exogenous tripping.
00:27:54 ►
It would just come as a huge download, like the origin of life.
00:27:58 ►
And I would just set my system up to prepare for those.
00:28:02 ►
And when they came, I had a whole system set up to draw them out,
00:28:08 ►
download them, experience them.
00:28:10 ►
And it was almost like an interaction with an entity.
00:28:14 ►
It was communicating back to you,
00:28:16 ►
or you could ask it a question?
00:28:17 ►
I could ask it questions.
00:28:19 ►
Yeah, and it would show me things.
00:28:21 ►
And I could ask it,
00:28:22 ►
why are we in cold water?
00:28:24 ►
Why are you showing me this?
00:28:27 ►
And it would come as a nonverbal knowing,
00:28:29 ►
but it was a dialogue with an ethereal, like an ether.
00:28:34 ►
And at the same time, I realized that the universe was complex.
00:28:40 ►
Like the living world would send us synchronous events constantly.
00:28:44 ►
So when I was 11 or 12 i did
00:28:46 ►
a b testing where i say i’m going to go into my mental state and walk down the street
00:28:51 ►
to try to find a kid that i need to return a baseball to but i’m going to try that and i
00:28:57 ►
would try that like i’m concerned worried about returning that baseball how old are you now when
00:29:02 ►
you did 11 oh boy and then i’m going to switch to the field version,
00:29:07 ►
which is just guiding.
00:29:10 ►
So I would just be guided, and it would always work better.
00:29:14 ►
So I’d do this over and over again to test,
00:29:16 ►
to decide which system to use.
00:29:18 ►
You’ve been a scientist a long time.
00:29:19 ►
Yeah.
00:29:20 ►
So I switched to the OS of being guided,
00:29:23 ►
because I would find the boy in the state of being guided
00:29:26 ►
and not worried about it and I would be in a better mood and that I would find them in exactly
00:29:31 ►
the right moment giving their baseball back and they became my best friend instead of like worrying
00:29:36 ►
about it and so that’s how I’ve led my entire life is really attuned to that field that’s always
00:29:44 ►
sending signals and messages
00:29:45 ►
the timing and everything it’s i call it the master choreography yeah the great dance the
00:29:52 ►
great dance yeah so we only have a couple minutes here in closing there’s going to be a lot of young
00:29:59 ►
people some of them are going to be inspired to be uh go into space work some into biology some
00:30:06 ►
into computers and what what kind of advice would you give to people who are multifaceted like you
00:30:13 ►
that are you know not sure which direction to go and then how do you get there i think that’s
00:30:18 ►
really just it’s quite a formula trust your own imagination trust your own visionary experience but test it verify it so a lot of people
00:30:28 ►
can get visionary downloads and go off off kilter on them really you have to find mentorship you
00:30:34 ►
have to find someone older probably that’s going to help you shape your ideas into something real
00:30:40 ►
and it’s true if they’re tripping i mean they have a vision when they’re tripping or when they’re
00:30:44 ►
meditating or whatever.
00:30:46 ►
It seems very vivid and real.
00:30:48 ►
You have to take it and test it.
00:30:50 ►
You need help for that. You need mentorship.
00:30:52 ►
Otherwise, you just create new religions and stuff.
00:30:54 ►
Right.
00:30:55 ►
We just don’t need it.
00:30:56 ►
We don’t need anymore.
00:30:57 ►
We need solutions.
00:30:58 ►
And so finding that mentor is key.
00:31:01 ►
And they’ll guide you into beautiful work work whether it’s in the arts or
00:31:05 ►
sciences or anything divine and elder actually i did the same thing that i had a mentor and and
00:31:12 ►
he guided me for many many years so uh i couldn’t have gotten along without him and i think that’s
00:31:17 ►
excellent advice yeah and i’ll leave you with one what the great, in a sense, the huge pay dirt,
00:31:26 ►
or form of this science, which has just occurred to us in the last few months,
00:31:31 ►
is that we have discovered, or we may have discovered,
00:31:34 ►
that we come not from a common ancestor.
00:31:37 ►
Because thinking to this point has been that life is red in tooth and claw and competing,
00:31:44 ►
and then developing its genes
00:31:46 ►
which is certainly true but in fact the origin of life uh was not you didn’t have these little
00:31:54 ►
cells to compete and fight it out and duke it out they didn’t have the technology to duke it out
00:31:58 ►
they only have the technology to get together and to collaborate. And what we’re seeing in our little dishes and in the progenote proposal that we’ve made
00:32:09 ►
is that life started as a common community.
00:32:12 ►
The common ancestor was a common community, and the community was in collaboration.
00:32:18 ►
And that this is actually the metric on which life began.
00:32:22 ►
And when you start seeing through this lens, and I’m going to present this in the University of Cambridge
00:32:26 ►
in a week and a half,
00:32:27 ►
to the center of evolutionary biology,
00:32:31 ►
that
00:32:31 ►
there are no individuals.
00:32:35 ►
And the
00:32:35 ►
individual is a fiction of
00:32:38 ►
the human mind.
00:32:39 ►
Because birds don’t feel their
00:32:41 ►
individuality. They’re part of a network
00:32:44 ►
of singing birds.
00:32:45 ►
And when we were tribal, we were not individual.
00:32:48 ►
We were in this network body.
00:32:50 ►
And so in the last 2,000 years,
00:32:52 ►
we’ve made this fiction up of an individual separate from others.
00:32:57 ►
And the separation has created this grief on the planet,
00:33:01 ►
this myth of separation.
00:33:03 ►
And so if science shows in the 2020s
00:33:08 ►
that we come from a common community
00:33:10 ►
and that communities and networks and collaboration
00:33:13 ►
are the predominant and sole mechanism
00:33:16 ►
of our creation and our evolution,
00:33:19 ►
it will roll into the culture like relativity did
00:33:22 ►
in the 1920s for Albert Einstein.
00:33:24 ►
It has powerful
00:33:25 ►
spiritual and transformative
00:33:27 ►
cultural power.
00:33:30 ►
And you know, there’s no better place to be talking
00:33:31 ►
about this than at the Convergence here on
00:33:33 ►
Orcas Island, because it’s a community that’s
00:33:35 ►
converging together, and who knows
00:33:37 ►
what will come out of the new life out of this.
00:33:39 ►
Who knows, yeah. So, Bruce,
00:33:41 ►
I really thank you for your time and for
00:33:43 ►
your long friendship, and I look forward to our next adventure together.
00:33:47 ►
I look very much looking forward. It might be tonight.
00:33:50 ►
It could well be.
00:33:52 ►
Be well, my friend.
00:33:53 ►
Happy Nat
00:33:57 ►
Happy Nat
00:34:01 ►
Happy Nat If you only take away one thing from the many ideas that Bruce just spoke about,
00:34:19 ►
I hope that it’s what his takeaway has been from his origin of life work.
00:34:24 ►
If, like me, when you were
00:34:26 ►
taught about the theory of evolution, you were told that all life originated from single cells
00:34:32 ►
in the ocean, and they competed for life. However, the work that Bruce and his colleagues are doing
00:34:38 ►
points in a different direction. If their new theory is correct, then the cornerstone of life, all life, is community and cooperation.
00:34:48 ►
And it seems to me that our communities are still what sustain our lives,
00:34:52 ►
which seems to indicate that we should perhaps give a little more thought to ways in which we can strengthen the various communities in which we participate.
00:35:02 ►
And now I’d like to play the recording of another interview that I did
00:35:05 ►
while at the Convergence on Orcas Island, and this one is with my friend Dr. Charlie Grobe.
00:35:12 ►
And at the end of this conversation, Charlie tells me a story about Ralph Messner
00:35:17 ►
that simply blew me away. So let’s listen to that now.
00:35:29 ►
listen to that now. Charlie, you know, we’ve known each other a long time, so it’s kind of hard to interview somebody you really know, but I do know some things about you that probably
00:35:33 ►
hasn’t been widely spread, and I think one of the most important things, particularly for young
00:35:38 ►
people watching today, is how did you get into psychedelic research? What prompted you to do
00:35:44 ►
this? I mean, that’s a huge thing to do when you were young.
00:35:48 ►
I mean, nobody was talking about psychedelics.
00:35:50 ►
What prompted you to do it?
00:35:51 ►
Funny you should ask.
00:35:54 ►
Because I do have a story.
00:35:56 ►
Good.
00:35:56 ►
So, you know, in the late 60s,
00:35:58 ►
I was with many others of my generation.
00:36:01 ►
I went off to college.
00:36:03 ►
I went to Oberlin College in Ohio, a very
00:36:05 ►
progressive school. And it was, you couldn’t miss the fact that psychedelics were a big phenomena.
00:36:12 ►
Now, what year was this?
00:36:13 ►
00:36:14 ►
00:36:14 ►
And I noticed that some of the most interesting, adventurous of my peers
00:36:20 ►
were talking about their experiences. So inevitably, my interest grew and I had some
00:36:27 ►
experiences. But I also learned that taking a powerful mind-altering drug like this in the
00:36:33 ►
context of a college dormitory, where there are all sorts of uncontrolled factors, was not an
00:36:39 ►
ideal setting. So I put my interests aside in regards to my own experience for a number of years.
00:36:46 ►
But fast forward, I, at Oberlin in my junior year, I left school.
00:36:51 ►
I was ill for a while, had infectious mononucleosis, took some time off, and did a lot of traveling,
00:36:59 ►
returned to New York, and got a job at the Maimonides Medical Center Dream Research Laboratory.
00:37:06 ►
So that was Stanley Krippner’s place. Stanley Krippner and Montague Ullman,
00:37:10 ►
Chuck Onerton. That was their operation. They ran it for almost 10 years. They did fascinating work
00:37:16 ►
studying the phenomena of dream telepathy. And our study was actually funded by NIMH. And at a
00:37:22 ►
certain point, there was also military funding involved.
00:37:25 ►
So this was around 1972.
00:37:29 ►
And it was Dream Research, the military actually put some funding out for it?
00:37:33 ►
They were very, Dream Telepathy, they were very interested in topics like remote viewing
00:37:39 ►
and whether sensitives could pick up or manifest this phenomena.
00:37:44 ►
And what was your your my job was
00:37:46 ►
they when i was in need of a job it just so happened a job opened up there and uh i was the
00:37:55 ►
all-night research tech who monitored the eegs set up the structures for the for the telepathy study, put the dreamer in a sensory isolation chamber,
00:38:07 ►
hooked them up to EEG leads,
00:38:10 ►
had the sender in another room down the hall
00:38:13 ►
and instructed them.
00:38:15 ►
They were supposed to send an image?
00:38:17 ►
An image, yeah.
00:38:17 ►
The sender would open up an envelope
00:38:21 ►
contained a picture,
00:38:24 ►
and I was not aware of, usually a reproduction of a piece of
00:38:27 ►
art i was not aware of what was in the sealed envelope and um and and so all night long i was
00:38:34 ►
monitoring eegs from my control room there was more than one person sleeping i just wanted well
00:38:40 ►
just one that i was monitoring the sender had his instructions to send at a certain time.
00:38:45 ►
Then he or she could just go to sleep.
00:38:47 ►
But the dreamer, we were monitoring.
00:38:51 ►
I was monitoring his sleepy EEG.
00:38:54 ►
And I could easily identify when a dream, a REM episode would occur.
00:38:58 ►
I’d wait for the REM episode to slowly end.
00:39:03 ►
And then I would wake the dreamer up by an intercom and i would tape record
00:39:08 ►
and i’d say lorenzo lorenzo what’s going through your mind and then i’d record your dream so to
00:39:18 ►
yeah this so my job basically was from about uh at night to 6 in the morning.
00:39:25 ►
So I had to stay up all night.
00:39:28 ►
And there wasn’t much excitement going on.
00:39:30 ►
Not as it’s in the basement of a psychiatric building at a big hospital.
00:39:36 ►
So no other stimulation, nor should there have been for this kind of study.
00:39:41 ►
But I found that one of the chief investigators, Stanley Krippner,
00:39:47 ►
had a wonderful library, which really had everything written on psychedelics, books,
00:39:52 ►
articles in the professional literature. And I had already established some interest in this area,
00:39:58 ►
just from my limited experience in college a few years earlier. And I started to read,
00:40:06 ►
experience in college a few years earlier, and I started to read, and I read voraciously. And around this time, my father, who’s a physician, was very concerned about what he perceived as my
00:40:13 ►
evident lack of direction. So he said, son, if you ever figure out what you want to do with your life,
00:40:25 ►
I want you to call me.
00:40:27 ►
I don’t care what time of the day or night it is.
00:40:29 ►
You call me.
00:40:30 ►
So here I am one night reading this fascinating material on psychedelics.
00:40:35 ►
And it just hit me.
00:40:37 ►
I had this epiphany.
00:40:38 ►
I knew what I wanted to do.
00:40:40 ►
And my dad had said, call him.
00:40:42 ►
Well, it was three in the morning, but he said, any time.
00:40:44 ►
And I took him at his word. I called him. I woke him up from a deep sleep. and my dad had said call him well it was three in the morning but he said any time and
00:40:45 ►
i took him at his word i called him i woke him up from a deep sleep and he finally figured out what
00:40:51 ►
i was calling about i said well son what is it i said dad i figured out what i want to do
00:40:55 ►
what i want to study psychedelics they’re fascinating there’s so much we could learn
00:41:00 ►
about the brain interface between brain and mind we could learn so much
00:41:06 ►
more about mental illness and there’s remarkable treatment models that help people with conditions
00:41:12 ►
that conventional treatment seemed to fall far short this is what i want to do and so my father
00:41:18 ►
paused for quite a while and he said well son there might be something to what you say but no one will listen
00:41:26 ►
to you unless you get your credentials oh i knew i had to go back to school which i was trying to
00:41:31 ►
avoid but the writing was on the wall because this this was a vision i i knew in my heart
00:41:37 ►
is what i had to do so i uh you know i i went back to school. I went to Columbia. I went through their pre-med program.
00:41:45 ►
I went to medical school.
00:41:48 ►
But I tell you, in medical school,
00:41:52 ►
we had, in my second year of medical school,
00:41:54 ►
this would be 1976,
00:41:56 ►
when psychedelic research was completely halted.
00:42:01 ►
Nothing was being permitted.
00:42:01 ►
completely halted.
00:42:03 ►
Nothing was being permitted.
00:42:11 ►
And I, we had, everyone in my medical school class was instructed to find an article in the research literature
00:42:15 ►
and then distill it and present it,
00:42:18 ►
present the methodology, the rationale, the methodology,
00:42:22 ►
the findings, the implications to the class.
00:42:26 ►
So I knew exactly what article.
00:42:28 ►
I made a beeline to Stanislaw Grof’s 1973 very important article
00:42:35 ►
in the International Journal of Pharmacopsychiatry
00:42:38 ►
describing in depth his work at Spring Grove, Maryland,
00:42:42 ►
part of the University of Maryland system,
00:42:44 ►
the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, where he was treating individuals with terminal cancer who had
00:42:50 ►
overwhelming existential anxiety and depression with either LSD or another psychedelic DPT,
00:42:57 ►
dipropyl tryptamine. And he got remarkably good results from a patient population that would be
00:43:03 ►
generally regarded as fairly
00:43:05 ►
hopeless and for whom very little effort was being applied to help their kind of psychological or
00:43:11 ►
psycho-spiritual status. So I presented this article to my class and I was really excited.
00:43:18 ►
What kind of, I was wondering, what kind of questions are they going to ask me? What kind
00:43:22 ►
of comments are they going to have about psychedelics and medicine and i presented and then i waited for hands to go up nothing dead silence dead
00:43:34 ►
sign then i realized oh i’m not supposed to talk about this and that was your new career choice
00:43:39 ►
how’s my new career this is this is a tab. And so for years, I just kept my interest to
00:43:45 ►
myself. I remember every month I had a little ritual. The first of the month, I go to the
00:43:50 ►
medical library and I take out the latest issue of Index Medicus before the internet and
00:43:59 ►
plug Medline. This is how you found out what was going on with particular topics in the entire field of medicine, the other sciences. So I’d look up terms like lysergic
00:44:11 ►
acid, diethylamide, mescaline, hallucinogens, and there was never anything of great…
00:44:16 ►
Nothing showing up.
00:44:17 ►
Basic animal stuff like the effects on the retina of a cat or the reflex of a salamander,
00:44:23 ►
but nothing on the human experience
00:44:27 ►
because it simply wasn’t being permitted. But I maintained my interest. My father said
00:44:35 ►
I needed credentials. And while I was on a path of getting credentials, I finished college. I went
00:44:41 ►
to medical school. I did some medical training. I went into, I did some medical training. I even
00:44:45 ►
did some neurology training. And then I went into psychiatry. And then I actually trained
00:44:49 ►
in child psychiatry as well. Got full-time faculty positions, first at Johns Hopkins,
00:44:54 ►
at UC Irvine, and finally for the last 26 years at UCLA. And it’s been at UCLA that I’ve really
00:45:01 ►
been able to dive into what I really wanted to do
00:45:05 ►
from the get-go. You know, Charlie,
00:45:07 ►
I’ve never really heard you tell anybody
00:45:09 ►
this, but I tell people about it all the time.
00:45:12 ►
As far as I know, not
00:45:13 ►
many, if anybody else, has ever done
00:45:15 ►
a government-sanctioned
00:45:17 ►
human study with
00:45:19 ►
three different substances. MDMA,
00:45:22 ►
psilocybin, and
00:45:24 ►
ayahuasca, which was in another country, but it was a government-approved.
00:45:26 ►
So you have done human studies with three different substances,
00:45:31 ►
government-approved.
00:45:32 ►
How did you push that string uphill?
00:45:34 ►
How did you get those things done?
00:45:35 ►
Well, I think this was starting off in the very early 90s
00:45:41 ►
when it simply didn’t seem to be possible
00:45:44 ►
until, I must say, a precedent was set by Rick Strassman at University of New Mexico
00:45:49 ►
getting permission to run a basic DMT study of normal volunteers,
00:45:54 ►
Deborah Mesh, University of Miami, with Ibogaine.
00:45:58 ►
Actually, she came after me.
00:46:00 ►
Strassman was my kind of example I followed.
00:46:04 ►
And it was just persistence.
00:46:07 ►
You know, I’ve always worked with very talented colleagues
00:46:11 ►
who shared the vision, shared the passion,
00:46:14 ►
and these protocols would become collaborative efforts.
00:46:18 ►
And I would submit them to the regulatory agencies,
00:46:21 ►
starting with the FDA, and generally within a month
00:46:24 ►
they’d be bounced back with a long list of critiques. And I just very carefully, methodically addressed
00:46:33 ►
each of the critiques. I made protocol adjustments when it was necessary and kept resubmitting and
00:46:39 ►
developed a dialogue. And eventually my first study, which was an MDMA study, was approved.
00:46:45 ►
And it was just really persistence. You have a vision, you know what you want to do. You just
00:46:52 ►
need to get from here to there and you need to work through the system and you need to do so in
00:46:57 ►
a collaborative manner. And again, at the end of the day, my experience with the FDA, I felt was
00:47:03 ►
very positive. They didn’t necessarily give me sanction to do what I initially said I wanted to do.
00:47:10 ►
But with the back and forth, I think they helped me create a better and safer protocol.
00:47:16 ►
And I learned a lot about the import of establishing, first and foremost, very strong safety parameters. So, you know, I hadn’t heard this from you before,
00:47:25 ►
but so you’re saying that perhaps the long delays
00:47:28 ►
and the hassles you got actually did provide some benefit.
00:47:31 ►
Oh, I think so. I think I had a better, you know,
00:47:33 ►
it really honed my focus, and I think at the end of the day,
00:47:36 ►
I think I had a better protocol than what I started out with.
00:47:40 ►
And then it was a matter of enacting, you know,
00:47:47 ►
manifesting the protocol in a research study.
00:47:50 ►
And I built up a team at my hospital.
00:47:53 ►
I’ve worked at Harbor UCLA Medical Center for the last 26 years.
00:47:58 ►
I’m actually the division director of child and adolescent psychiatry.
00:47:59 ►
That’s my day job.
00:48:06 ►
And, you know, on weekends I do my research cases. And actually, I got to see your Grand Rounds one time where you talked about the research case with end-of-life psilocybin.
00:48:09 ►
And I was very impressed with how receptive they were,
00:48:14 ►
which was different than your experience when you were a student, you know.
00:48:18 ►
Oh, with the…
00:48:19 ►
With your colleagues.
00:48:21 ►
My colleagues.
00:48:22 ►
Oh, I have another story for you.
00:48:23 ►
When I was being recruited
00:48:25 ►
to become the division chief
00:48:27 ►
of child psychiatry
00:48:29 ►
at Harbor UCLA,
00:48:31 ►
I met with the chairman,
00:48:32 ►
Dr. Milton Miller,
00:48:33 ►
very experienced,
00:48:35 ►
very wise man.
00:48:37 ►
And I met with him a few times
00:48:40 ►
and I finally said,
00:48:41 ►
you know, Dr. Miller,
00:48:42 ►
I have some unusual interests
00:48:44 ►
for a child psychiatrist and I think you need to know what they are. So I’ve brought with me some articles
00:48:50 ►
I’ve published, some manuscripts that I’d like to get published, and some protocols I’d like to do
00:48:55 ►
in the future of researching this area. So I gave it to him. I asked him to read it.
00:49:01 ►
I came back several weeks later and we’re talking and I say, well, Dr. Miller,
00:49:05 ►
did you have an opportunity to look at the material I gave you? And he said, yeah. And I
00:49:11 ►
asked, well, what do you think? He said, well, it’s interesting. And I still needed, I needed
00:49:16 ►
an answer. So I said, okay, so you know what I’m interested in doing. So I have to ask you,
00:49:21 ►
am I too crazy for you? And without batting an eye, he said, well, you know,
00:49:26 ►
you’re a lot crazier than I thought you were, but still well within my MNTI.
00:49:31 ►
And that was the moment I knew I had to accept this. I could not turn this job down. Now,
00:49:38 ►
years later, Dr. Miller told me a story that in the 50s, when he was a chairman at the University of Wisconsin, he had a patient,
00:49:46 ►
a very, very deeply depressed man who had been hospitalized for months. And none of the
00:49:52 ►
treatments of the time had made a dent in his depression. Then out of sheer desperation,
00:49:59 ►
one day he administered the man psilocybin, sat with him for a number of hours. The man said
00:50:04 ►
absolutely nothing
00:50:05 ►
he was just sitting there so eventually dr miller left he knew he was leaving the man at a safe
00:50:10 ►
place it was an inpatient psychiatric unit he came back the next morning couldn’t find his
00:50:17 ►
patient so he went to the nurse’s station and asked well where’s mr so-and-so Mr. So-and-so? Oh, Mr. So-and-so called his wife to pick him up, and he signed out.
00:50:27 ►
So Dr. Miller is very concerned and made repeated calls over the next days and weeks and months
00:50:33 ►
and found out that shortly after the man went home, he went back to work
00:50:37 ►
and had returned to completely normal function.
00:50:40 ►
The depression had entirely remitted.
00:50:43 ►
And this was with no conversation with his therapist
00:50:45 ►
no the service just sat there and no great in-depth discussion of what was going you know
00:50:52 ►
what had happened apart from the fact that he was ready to resume his life so dr miller understood
00:50:58 ►
he didn’t go around talking about his experiences but he understood the potential value when utilized in these compounds,
00:51:07 ►
when utilized in a safe setting
00:51:10 ►
with proper monitoring
00:51:11 ►
and with many people
00:51:13 ►
that need the opportunity
00:51:14 ►
for ongoing integration.
00:51:16 ►
So he knew what the potential was.
00:51:19 ►
And when I came along
00:51:20 ►
with my kind of wild,
00:51:22 ►
you know, out of left field ideas he got it he knew it and he he
00:51:28 ►
quietly supported me and and my and by the research institute at my hospital was always
00:51:35 ►
very supportive and um i think they uh they appreciated the value of what i was doing and
00:51:41 ►
even though we sometimes had to work under, you know,
00:51:45 ►
difficult conditions in terms of rooms we were provided and the like,
00:51:50 ►
we’ve, you know, we managed to do several studies there,
00:51:54 ►
which I think have had some value and have helped to move the field forward.
00:52:00 ►
But, you know, I was thinking as you were talking,
00:52:02 ►
how we were talking at breakfast about building this work on the shoulders of giants, you know, the people of the poor.
00:52:08 ►
Yeah, yeah.
00:52:09 ►
But even the chairman of your department who had that one experience back in the 50s, he was one of the leaders.
00:52:16 ►
We don’t really know who all is supporting our work.
00:52:20 ►
Exactly.
00:52:26 ►
work. Exactly. You know, what I think a lot of people don’t realize is that in the 50s and into the early 60s, psychedelic research was the cutting edge of psychiatry. And, you know, in terms of
00:52:33 ►
anticipating future treatment models, because investigators were finding remarkable positive
00:52:39 ►
responses in patient populations that you don’t expect to respond to your treatment. First and
00:52:45 ►
foremost, chronic alcoholics. Still one of the most vexing populations, most difficult population
00:52:52 ►
to treat. We have 12-step programs, which are of value to some people, but it’s not the right fit
00:52:58 ►
for all people. And for those whom it’s not the right fit, they’re kind of out of luck. There’s not a whole lot out there. But investigators starting with Humphrey Osmond in Saskatchewan in the 50s
00:53:11 ►
were getting astonishingly good responses.
00:53:16 ►
So the pioneer generation really established a foundation
00:53:21 ►
which we could learn a great deal from.
00:53:24 ►
And maybe this gives me the moment
00:53:26 ►
to plug my book or one of my books that i did with roger walsh called uh and also assistance from
00:53:33 ►
gary bravo uh higher wisdom eminent elders explore the continuing impact of psychedelics
00:53:39 ►
which is one of my favorite books of yours because it talks about all these people and i remember
00:53:44 ►
i got to be meet betty e Eisner in your office one time.
00:53:47 ►
You were interviewing her for the book.
00:53:48 ►
And what a thrill that was
00:53:50 ►
because she was one of the early pioneers.
00:53:53 ►
You knew so many of these people
00:53:55 ►
and we, in fact, just lost one of them.
00:53:57 ►
That’s right.
00:53:57 ►
One of my greatest friends and greatest teachers,
00:54:02 ►
Ralph Metzner, passed away a week ago yesterday, March 14th.
00:54:08 ►
And Ralph, you know, Ralph started off in this field as a graduate student in 1960, working with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at Harvard.
00:54:18 ►
And and when the Harvard experiment unraveled, Ralph continued with his life and became really a great scholar
00:54:29 ►
and a remarkably prolific writer
00:54:32 ►
and a teacher of the psychedelic experience,
00:54:36 ►
the value of psychedelics and other topics as well.
00:54:39 ►
You know, ancient mythologies,
00:54:41 ►
the value of understanding the belief systems of indigenous
00:54:45 ►
people. You know, Ralph was a, just a tremendous support. And I think he saw that what we were
00:54:55 ►
doing, our generation was doing, was validating the vision that he and his colleagues had. But
00:55:01 ►
because of the cultural conditions of the time,
00:55:05 ►
it was never allowed to manifest.
00:55:07 ►
And here he saw perhaps the beginning,
00:55:10 ►
the initial steps now
00:55:11 ►
for what might eventually become a realization
00:55:14 ►
of a shared vision that many of us have had.
00:55:17 ►
Now, it may take the next generation,
00:55:19 ►
the younger generation,
00:55:21 ►
who’s just moving up now
00:55:22 ►
to really move things forward
00:55:25 ►
in a vigorous, proactive way.
00:55:28 ►
But I’m very hopeful
00:55:30 ►
about the future. I don’t know if this is true,
00:55:32 ►
but in my mind, my fantasy
00:55:33 ►
world is that the younger generation
00:55:36 ►
is also moving into positions of authority
00:55:38 ►
in the FDA and the DEA.
00:55:40 ►
They’re getting more reasonable about these things.
00:55:41 ►
I think so. I think so.
00:55:43 ►
And again, with the regulatory
00:55:44 ►
agencies,
00:55:46 ►
I was very apprehensive when I first approached them.
00:55:49 ►
In the early 90s, I had heard some scary stories from others.
00:55:53 ►
But my experience has been nothing but positive throughout.
00:55:56 ►
They didn’t always let me do what I said I wanted to do,
00:55:59 ►
but they’re willing to dialogue with me and go back and forth.
00:56:03 ►
For instance, with the my psilocybin study,
00:56:06 ►
I was asking for a rather high dose.
00:56:11 ►
I felt that would be more likely to…
00:56:14 ►
You know me, beware the dreaded underdose.
00:56:17 ►
Well, but be careful about overdoses, about giving too high…
00:56:20 ►
In any event, we went back and forth.
00:56:22 ►
They said, look, no one has worked with this compound in decades.
00:56:26 ►
And these were people with advanced stage cancer, with anxiety.
00:56:31 ►
These are very vulnerable people.
00:56:33 ►
Let’s tone down the dose.
00:56:35 ►
Probably very sensible.
00:56:36 ►
So we toned it down to more of a moderate dose,
00:56:38 ►
and we established really strong safety parameters.
00:56:42 ►
And our subjects did very, very well.
00:56:45 ►
And we’ve published our findings in one of the leading journals in psychiatry,
00:56:51 ►
the Archives of General Psychiatry, since renamed JAMA Psychiatry.
00:56:56 ►
And I think that also reflects the degree to which the leaders in the field
00:57:01 ►
were ready to once again open up the dialogue and look objectively at the issue of psychedelics,
00:57:09 ►
including their potential application in treatment settings,
00:57:13 ►
particularly with patient populations who do not respond that well to conventional treatments.
00:57:19 ►
And the evidence of the groundbreaking work that you and many others have done
00:57:24 ►
is what’s going on today.
00:57:26 ►
There’s a lot of psychedelic research compared to what there was 20 years ago.
00:57:29 ►
So what are some of your colleagues doing?
00:57:31 ►
Well, let me mention, since 1993, I’ve been on the board.
00:57:39 ►
Actually, I’m a founding board member of the Hefter Research Institute. This was a vision of Dave Nichols, a very, very prominent
00:57:46 ►
chemist and pharmacologist at Purdue for many years, now at University of North Carolina
00:57:53 ►
in Chapel Hill. He had a vision of organizing an institute that would facilitate the development
00:57:59 ►
of both basic science and clinical research with psychedelics moving forward.
00:58:06 ►
So with the Hefter Research Institute,
00:58:09 ►
they supported my psilocybin studies.
00:58:13 ►
They supported subsequent psilocybin end-of-life work
00:58:16 ►
at NYU and Johns Hopkins.
00:58:18 ►
By supported, you’re talking about they put cash in line.
00:58:21 ►
Well, yeah.
00:58:21 ►
They invested in it.
00:58:22 ►
We raised the funding.
00:58:24 ►
And, you know, back in the 90s, it was difficult to raise funding.
00:58:29 ►
So our study was done on a shoestring.
00:58:31 ►
Those that followed, I think, have had more generous funding.
00:58:34 ►
And they’ve had more, you know, they’ve been able to study more subjects.
00:58:39 ►
But Hefter has played a significant role helping to move this process along.
00:58:44 ►
HEFTA has played a significant role helping to move this process along. HEFTA also provided some funding for Dennis McKenna and I to go to the Brazilian Amazon in the early 90s
00:58:51 ►
with our friend and colleague, Jace Calloway, to conduct what was really the first ayahuasca research study in human subject,
00:59:00 ►
working with members of the União de Vegetal, the UDV, Ayahuasca Syncretic Church.
00:59:07 ►
And that was a remarkable experience for me personally. And I think we published some
00:59:14 ►
really important data, which over the years, other investigators have followed up on. I will say
00:59:20 ►
other investigators generally from outside of the U.S. So investigators in Brazil,
00:59:26 ►
Jordi Riva, a very accomplished researcher in Barcelona, Spain.
00:59:30 ►
It’s not been possible to conduct prospective ayahuasca studies,
00:59:37 ►
administer ayahuasca in the U.S. for a variety of reasons.
00:59:41 ►
Hopefully there will be such studies in the future,
00:59:44 ►
but Hefter has been very much
00:59:46 ►
involved with that area.
00:59:48 ►
Didn’t Hefter support Franz
00:59:50 ►
Wollenweider? Oh, the Hefter
00:59:52 ►
Center in Zurich,
00:59:53 ►
the University of Zurich with Franz Wollenweider,
00:59:56 ►
the most
00:59:57 ►
experienced and productive neuroimaging
01:00:00 ►
researcher of psychedelics
01:00:01 ►
over the last 25 years.
01:00:04 ►
Hefter has also sponsored the work of Michael Bogenschutz,
01:00:09 ►
first at University of New Mexico, now at NYU,
01:00:12 ►
who is a substance abuse expert
01:00:14 ►
and has developed some excellent protocols,
01:00:17 ►
really replicating the old work with alcoholics,
01:00:20 ►
a psychedelic treatment model.
01:00:22 ►
The Canadian work?
01:00:23 ►
The Humphrey Osmond’s work
01:00:25 ►
and later Stanislaw Grof’s work
01:00:27 ►
and others
01:00:28 ►
so Michael has been doing some excellent work
01:00:31 ►
and then a young researcher
01:00:32 ►
at the University of Alabama
01:00:33 ►
Peter Hendricks
01:00:34 ►
has a psilocybin treatment model
01:00:38 ►
research study
01:00:40 ►
with cocaine addicts
01:00:42 ►
and crack addicts
01:00:43 ►
including subjects from
01:00:45 ►
the very bottom of the socioeconomic
01:00:48 ►
ladder. I think in many respects
01:00:49 ►
this is an important study. Not only
01:00:52 ►
because Peter’s getting good treatment outcomes,
01:00:54 ►
but because he’s working with
01:00:56 ►
very, very poor people
01:00:58 ►
very desperately. Tell me
01:01:00 ►
again, what university that is? University of Alabama.
01:01:02 ►
That’s what I thought. I’ve spent
01:01:04 ►
a lot of time in the Deep South
01:01:05 ►
and for them to be that enlightened is encouraging.
01:01:07 ►
Well, it’s interesting because we’re talking about Humphrey Osmond
01:01:10 ►
who, he was British and then as a young man
01:01:13 ►
migrated to Saskatchewan and Northern Canada
01:01:17 ►
and then after retirement he ended up at the University of Alabama
01:01:22 ►
in an emeritus position.
01:01:23 ►
I didn’t know that.
01:01:24 ►
So there was a foundation.
01:01:26 ►
But Peter Hendricks is doing some great work with his cocaine and crack addiction treatment.
01:01:31 ►
He also did a very interesting study looking at recidivism rates for individuals who had been incarcerated.
01:01:41 ►
And he made the astonishing finding that individuals who’ve been in prison,
01:01:46 ►
who had a prior experience with a psychedelic,
01:01:49 ►
they were far less likely to return to prison
01:01:53 ►
after being released.
01:01:55 ►
And I think the implications there are,
01:01:57 ►
I think, very interesting.
01:01:59 ►
Right, they are.
01:02:00 ►
To some degree, it touches upon an old study
01:02:03 ►
of the Harvard group in the early 60s,
01:02:06 ►
working in a state prison.
01:02:08 ►
Although some of the methodologies, Rick Doblin is pointing out,
01:02:11 ►
some of the methodologies were problematic.
01:02:13 ►
Some of that was questionable.
01:02:14 ►
Oh, but I’ll tell you a great story.
01:02:15 ►
See, Ralph.
01:02:16 ►
We’re almost out of time, so I’m going to have to kind of cut you off there, Charlie.
01:02:19 ►
I had a good story.
01:02:20 ►
Okay, well.
01:02:21 ►
Go ahead.
01:02:22 ►
It’s about Ralph.
01:02:23 ►
Okay, good.
01:02:24 ►
Thinking about a great deal.
01:02:25 ►
He meant a great deal to me.
01:02:28 ►
So you know about Ralph’s first psychedelic experience?
01:02:31 ►
No.
01:02:31 ►
He was a graduate student in the early 60s working under Tim Leary.
01:02:35 ►
And Ralph was put in charge of the state prison project.
01:02:39 ►
And his first personal…
01:02:40 ►
And then the model was you not only administer the psilocybin to the
01:02:46 ►
prisoner, you take it yourself.
01:02:47 ►
It was in a hospital prison ward with a
01:02:50 ►
bunch of hardcore criminals. So Ralph
01:02:51 ►
took psilocybin for the first time
01:02:53 ►
as a convicted murderer.
01:02:56 ►
He said for the first part of the session
01:02:58 ►
it was sheer
01:03:00 ►
terror, paranoia.
01:03:02 ►
And then he realized, he had this
01:03:03 ►
realization, we’re all the same under our skin
01:03:07 ►
and this guy’s as afraid of me as i is as i am of him and he bonded with the guy they had a very
01:03:14 ►
rich rewarding valuable therapeutic discussion and uh and that really launched ralph’s career
01:03:20 ►
i’ve never heard that before yeah well you know we’re essentially out of time, but you talked about
01:03:25 ►
launching Ralph’s career
01:03:26 ►
and you talked about
01:03:26 ►
this young researcher.
01:03:28 ►
Do you have any advice
01:03:29 ►
to a young person today
01:03:30 ►
who wants to get into it?
01:03:32 ►
Get a credential, I guess,
01:03:33 ►
is what you say.
01:03:34 ►
Well, the advice my father gave me,
01:03:36 ►
I think still holds up today.
01:03:37 ►
Get credentials.
01:03:38 ►
He says,
01:03:39 ►
no one will listen to you
01:03:40 ►
unless you get credentials.
01:03:42 ►
And I think that’s important.
01:03:43 ►
And the other is,
01:03:45 ►
you know,
01:03:47 ►
just be persistent.
01:03:48 ►
You know,
01:03:50 ►
you’re bound to hit obstacles.
01:03:51 ►
And even though we’re going through what’s known as a psychedelic renaissance,
01:03:53 ►
there still is a lot of resistance
01:03:55 ►
in our culture.
01:03:56 ►
There are a lot of places where
01:03:57 ►
this would not necessarily be appreciated.
01:04:00 ►
Just establish dialogue,
01:04:02 ►
friendly rapport,
01:04:03 ►
don’t get defensive,
01:04:04 ►
don’t get angry, and just be patient and persistent. And my personal perspective is optimize safety first and foremost. understand what is necessary to establish the strongest of safety parameters because when people
01:04:26 ►
go off the rails i mean it’s it’s just it’s bad for your project it’s bad for them it’s uh and it
01:04:34 ►
can attract a lot of negative sensationalized publicity just like the 60s that’s why
01:04:41 ►
investigators today need to do their due diligence properly screening people,
01:04:47 ►
preparing people, facilitating under optimal conditions, and then helping with integration
01:04:51 ►
afterwards. Also establishing very strong ethical parameters for the therapist. These are boundary
01:04:58 ►
dissolving compounds. There are stories from the past of unscrupulous therapists taking advantage of a subject or a patient with lowered defensive. That has to end. And what I’d also put a plug in for is diversity in the field, but assuming positions of leadership. We need people of color. We need to work with not only upper middle class, middle class
01:05:31 ►
subjects and patients. We need to work with people from the bottom rungs of society and see how it
01:05:37 ►
might be of value with that population as well. So there’s a great deal of work to do. I think
01:05:43 ►
the pioneer generation, Ralph’s generation,
01:05:46 ►
and his colleagues, the people we wrote about in our book, Higher Wisdom, and my generation,
01:05:52 ►
of the Hefters and other colleagues, we’re establishing a foundation, but it’s going to
01:06:00 ►
be up to the younger generations moving up who are going to take it forward.
01:06:05 ►
But to do so, you’ve got to do it right, and you’ve got to be careful,
01:06:10 ►
and you’ve got to, above and beyond everything else, optimize patient safety.
01:06:15 ►
Well, Charlie, I can just put that whole summation in a nutshell and say they should just follow your example.
01:06:21 ►
Thank you so much for your time.
01:06:23 ►
Thanks for having me.
01:06:23 ►
I look forward to your talk tomorrow.
01:06:29 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:06:31 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:06:36 ►
Since I was able to insert my own questions and comments during these interviews,
01:06:42 ►
there isn’t really very much that I can add right now.
01:06:44 ►
However, well, there is one much that I can add right now.
01:06:51 ►
However, well, there is one thing that I simply have to comment on, and my guess is that the more experienced psychonauts among us are thinking the same thing. You know, it may be difficult to
01:06:57 ►
think back to your first psychedelic experience, but if you do, I’m pretty sure that you’re going
01:07:02 ►
to recall experiencing a significant amount of trepidation and fear as the medicine was coming on for your first time.
01:07:10 ►
Now, imagine yourself ingesting your first psychedelic substance in a prison hospital room, surrounded by serious criminals.
01:07:20 ►
And then try to imagine the terror that Ralph Messner must have felt that day.
01:07:24 ►
and then try to imagine the terror that Ralph Messner must have felt that day,
01:07:30 ►
and think about what awesome courage it must have taken for him to go ahead with that experience.
01:07:36 ►
The resurgence in psychedelic research is truly resting on a foundation laid by giants.
01:07:42 ►
And speaking of that, tonight in the live salon, my guests will be Greg and Tanya Manning, who have been Anne and Sasha Shulgin’s
01:07:45 ►
right and left hands for more than a decade. Now, while I’ve podcast over 20 programs featuring Anne
01:07:51 ►
and Sasha, tonight we’re going to hear a little more about Sasha as the fascinating conversationalist
01:07:57 ►
he was, which is something that sometimes gets overlooked due to the amazing amount of serious
01:08:03 ►
chemistry that he accomplished. And if all goes well, I’ll podcast the amazing amount of serious chemistry that he accomplished.
01:08:05 ►
And if all goes well, I’ll podcast the audio recording of tonight’s salon in the weeks ahead.
01:08:11 ►
But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.