Program Notes
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Guest speakers: Patreon Saloners
The painting, Saint Albert by Alex Grey, was completed as part of Dr. Albert Hofmann’s 100th birthday celebration held in Basel, Switzerland on January 11th, 2006.
Can you imagine knowing someone for over 20 years, even tripping with them from time-to-time, and not knowing that this person had done LSD with Albert Hofmann on multiple occasions? Now that’s humility. Had it been me, that would have most likely been one of the first things that I ever told you.
That story has now been told by one of my friends (hint, it wasn’t Alex Grey) in this recording of the live salon that we held on the 17th of March to celebrate the beginning of our 18th year of podcasting.
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Transcript
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Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
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Elf of Hell.
00:00:16 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:22 ►
And today I’m going to play a recording from our March 17th live salon, Psychedelic Salon few years before podcasting was invented. And to be honest, I wasn’t all that excited about this
00:00:45 ►
salon going into it because, well, I already knew the story and it’s the stories and comments of the
00:00:51 ►
rest of the people who drop by that make these conversations so interesting for me. But since
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three of the four of us who began these salons are no longer with us, I thought that, well, it might
00:01:02 ►
be a good idea to tell you the story now. Imagine my surprise
00:01:06 ►
then, when after I told my story and our conversation began to flow in a few different directions,
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that we were treated with quite a surprise. Now, since the beginning of the pandemic, two of our
00:01:18 ►
regulars in the live salons, Rio and Ildiko, were stranded in Morocco when the borders were closed,
00:01:24 ►
and it was over a year and a half before, were stranded in Morocco when the borders were closed, and it was over a
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year and a half before they were able to return to the States. Now, if you’ve been with us in some
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of the live salons, then you know about their adventures during that time, which included a
00:01:35 ►
heart attack, broken feet, coming down with COVID more than once, and well, those are only the first
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things that come to mind. So I didn’t think that Rio had any more surprises for me.
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After all, I’ve known him for over 20 years,
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and we’ve had a few adventures together ourselves,
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although none of them were as adventuresome as most of Rio’s other escapades.
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And while I never assumed that I knew about all of his adventures,
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I at least thought that, well, I knew of the major headlines.
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However, it wasn’t until this live salon that I learned, for the very first time,
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that, and on more than one occasion, Rio did acid with Dr. Hoffman,
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the man who actually invented the LSD molecule.
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Here’s a recording of that March 17th salon.
00:02:21 ►
I thought I would give this little tale today,
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and the reason is, today is, of course,
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March 17th. And in 2005, on this date, I gave the first podcast. So this is the first day of our
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18th year of podcasting. But the salon actually began five years earlier, not quite four and a
00:02:40 ►
half years earlier. And it began with three of us who met in Palenque. And for the salon
00:02:47 ►
when it actually started, there were four of us. But there’s two reasons I want to do this today,
00:02:52 ►
besides it being the anniversary day. It’s of the three people, of the four of us who were
00:02:58 ►
original salonners, three of them are dead. And so I thought, well, I’m going to get this story
00:03:03 ►
out before the fourth one goes.
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And it’s also happens to be a while Bill’s birthday. Yeah. Bill died in November of 2020,
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one of the first of the pandemics in New York. I’ve been wanting to do a, you know, a memorial for Bill, but I haven’t been able to do it quite frankly, you know, in the last couple of years,
00:03:22 ►
I don’t know. I stopped counting after a dozen, but I’ve had over a dozen friends and relatives die in the last two years.
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And Bill was the one that hit me the hardest because, you know, he’s younger or was younger
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than me. And, you know, I could always, you know, hardly a few weeks ago by, I wouldn’t pick up the
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phone and Bill would say, hey, Lorenzo, what’s going on? And, you know, he was such a part of my regular routine that it’s been a big hole and I can’t quite address it yet.
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So eventually I’ll get around to doing a memorial about him.
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But so this is sort of to remember Bill on his birthday because he was one of the original four people, a part of the salon.
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And as I said a few minutes ago, the story isn’t really that exciting, but it’s the
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reason I think it’s important is because, well, the four people, two of them are me and Nick Sand,
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who people know about, but the other two aren’t really widely known. And really that’s, in my
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opinion, the heart of the psychedelic community is the thousands of us out there, you know, just
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doing everyday things,
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not getting up on a platform and all like that. So it’s really more a story about behind the
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scenes people who really make up the psychedelic community. Now, three of us met in Palenque at the
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Entheobotany Conference. And at the time, there was this big rebellion going down in the
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Chiapas. And my friend of mine at work traveled down there with me. And, you know, we were a
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couple of guys in our 50s. And we thought we were going into a battle area in the Chiapas and all.
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And we get down to the resort in Palenque. And, you know, it’s like heaven. It’s just everybody
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has a little cabin. It’s around a pool. And it’s really amazing thing. And, you know, we kept looking at each other that
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first afternoon and evening, like, wow, we were crazy and being afraid to come down here. This
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is amazing. Look at these people. And so we got to get to know a few of the people that first
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afternoon and evening. And, you know, everybody had their meals in a family style.
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We took over this whole resort. There were 100 people, right? I had 100 people. And I think
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almost 20 of them were presenters. But everybody ate together, all the presenters. So we ate with
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Sasha and Terrence and all those people. You know, Paul Stamets was there and many of the others. So it
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was a real community feeling. And we started, you know, kind of getting into the whole thing. And
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of course, we want to know about the people who were there. And rumors started spreading. You
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know, first thing you do, you start looking to see who the narc is, because half of us were afraid
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that there were narcs there. But after that first
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morning lecture, the lectures were up in the top of a hill. It was kind of a climb to get up there.
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And then after the lecture, everybody comes down to, you know, we had an hour or so before lunch
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and most people were hanging around the pool. So I go down to the, down the hill and kind of looking over the scene and I see a whole bunch of people down by the pool on the far side so I walked down there.
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And right sitting on the edge of the pool with their feet in the water was this older gentleman who I learned later had been the director of the Harvard libraries, and he left there to become the director of the New York City Public
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Library and had just retired. And he was having his very first MDMA experience. And I thought,
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wow, you know, just sitting out here in this great atmosphere and all. And there was this woman who
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was helping him. And she didn’t take any. She was just, you know, a sitter. And he was nervous.
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He’d never done it before. And so she was helping along. I thought, my goodness, you know, woman spends all this time and money to
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come down to the seminar and then takes take the afternoon off to help somebody on their first
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MDMA trip. I thought, you know, I need to get to know her. And we’ve been married 22 years now. So
00:07:18 ►
that was an interesting first meeting, although I didn’t meet her that day. But there was only one chair left down by
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the pool, and it happened to be next to Bill. And, you know, I was kind of leery because, you know,
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we knew, I’d heard the night before that, well, the word was he was a New York City cop,
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but it turns out he was a parole officer. And he looked kind of rough, hadn’t shaved in a day or so, had a bleach blonde crew cut.
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And I thought, oh, boy, I don’t know.
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But that was the only chair next to him.
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So he said, hey, have a seat.
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And I sat down.
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And before I could kind of get my wits about me, he turned and he handed me a pipe and a lighter and said, you want some hash?
00:08:00 ►
And I knew right there that as they said in the movies, this is going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
00:08:09 ►
Well, over the years, I’ve done eight podcasts that Bill was part of, notably during the Occupy movement.
00:08:18 ►
Even though he had to walk with a cane and had retired from the police force, he marched with the people on Brooklyn Bridge and he was very active in that.
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But if you want to know something about Bill
00:08:28 ►
before I finally get around to doing the memorial,
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a podcast from Salon 2 podcast number 19,
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Lex Pelger did a really good interview with Bill.
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And so you can catch up more about him there.
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As I said, he was a New York City parole officer
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and he actually had turned
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on to LSD when he was with the Army in Berlin. And one of the things he got in trouble with his
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superiors in the police force about is in all his time as a parole officer, he never once busted a
00:08:59 ►
parolee for a pot violation. And he also, when I met him at Flanke, he introduced me to what he called,
00:09:07 ►
holy shit. Now, how many people do you know back into the 90s that were into edibles? Well,
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Bill created this edible as a peanut butter edible. And now that we know about, you know,
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we’ve had in the salons talking about how to prepare cannabis and cook at low temperature
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and all. Well, Bill was doing that. And he learned how to do it just by trial and error and he made the most
00:09:30 ►
powerful peanut butter uh holy shit you know he handed it out to everybody down there and that’s
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he taught me how to make it but the other person I met down there I’ve never talked about him here
00:09:41 ►
in the salon and uh now that he is no longer with us, I feel I at least need to make sure people know about the importance of this man.
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I first saw him a couple of days after I met Bill.
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And as I’ve told the story before, Christiane Roche was giving a lecture down by the pool.
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I’d taken some acid and I hadn’t found acid in like two or three years
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and some I found some down there. So I decided, heck with the lecture, I’m going to trip. And
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Sasha came up there and saw me tripping and we got to talking. And while the lecture is going on for
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about an hour or so, Sasha and I just talked about our experiences in the Navy. We had both been
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young seamen on aboard destroyers in the Pacific, or I was in the Pacific, he was in the Atlantic,
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but it was during wartime. And we exchanged stories about life on the ship in the Navy during
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the war. So, you know, I really felt like I got to know him, although we’d been corresponding for
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several years before that. In fact, we’d been corresponding since 86. So, you know, it was the first time I’d had a personal interchange with him.
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And as a result, while I was sitting there, when the conference ended, the whole bunch of people came up and I got my I got to see how designer drugs were actually conceived.
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drugs were actually conceived because when Dr. Tom got up there, as soon as Sasha saw him,
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he called him right over and he says, hey, I was talking to so-and-so. And this was a guy who was,
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he was an MD and he was doing some kind of research. And they were talking about snorting,
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snorting drugs. And Sasha wanted to know, Sasha and Dr. Tom talked about how can you make it less caustic for your nose?
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And they’re talking about how to move, you know, molecules or atoms around.
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And, yeah, I didn’t understand a word they’re saying.
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But they got really talking like mechanics, plugging things in and all.
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And I should point out, though, that Dr. Tom, like I said, he had a history similar to Sasha’s.
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He was a generation and a half or so younger than Sasha.
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And he worked for a major chemical company and came up with a chemical that they patented and made a ton of money on.
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And he didn’t get a big bonus.
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I think he got 10 grand or something and they made millions.
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But they rewarded him with a private lab. Same thing had happened to Sasha.
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I can’t remember who he was working for, but he did the same thing, got a private lab.
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And now I’m thinking about it. Basically, they give him a private lab.
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It’s like a it’s like putting a alcoholic in charge of a liquor store.
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You know, all Tom wanted to do was make new chemicals. And so he kept working there for years after he should have left. But he made stuff
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for us in his private lab. He never sold anything. As far as I know, Tom never made a profit selling
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anything. But he shared his information with a whole range of underground chemists.
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And so when we came back to Palenque the next year,
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he had created a new form of 2C-B that was snortable without completely destroying your nose.
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A couple of nights after we first got there that year,
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two or three dozen of us got together down in Tom’s room and he had a whole
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assembly line where we got in line and he
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would you know put out a couple lines to snort but first you had to snort a little cocaine to deaden
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your nose a little bit but then you can snort 2C-B directly and that’s the only time I’ve ever done
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it but I’ll tell you something that if you can imagine MDMA or 2CBE coming on in 30 seconds, full blown, it’s a really interesting experience.
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And if some of those people were, if all those people were dead by now, I’d tell you the stories of that night because they were really wild.
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But right now I have to live a little longer.
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Okay, so that’s the picture of Palenque.
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We come back from Palenque.
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We come back from Palenque.
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And at the time, I was working with Bruce Dahmer on a project called Top Space.
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Now, this is before Vonage and Skype. And we had this project that was, you know, over the Internet.
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It was just audio.
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It was just like audio phone. But it was like Zoom, like right now without a picture.
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But we had a delay from the time I would say something till you would respond.
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It was like a 10th to a 20th of a second delay, which was just a pain.
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You know, we just couldn’t deal with that.
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So we kept trying to fix it.
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And while we were trying to fix it, Vonage and Skype both got ahead of us.
00:14:26 ►
So it never matured or materialized for us. However, we were in a testing mode at the time.
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And so I decided to test it with Bill and Tom simply because it was encrypted with a really high degree of encryption.
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I don’t know if there’s any secure communications with
00:14:45 ►
that encryption today yet. And so it was a little slow, but it was very secure. So we could talk
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about drugs. And so Bill and Tom and I started on regular Wednesdays, you know, just having these
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little conversations and we could talk about anything we wanted to because we knew nobody’s listening in. And after a little while in the
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summer of 2001, I got the URL psychedelicsalon.com. So there we are, it’s the summer of 2001.
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We’re having these conversations online. And Bill had just gotten back. He was somewhere
00:15:19 ►
where he and Nick were together and they were obviously partying. And Bill came back and he says, hey, Nick tells me about this stuff called Lamed.
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Do you know how to make it?
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And Tom says, well, I know a little bit about it, but I’d have to talk to Nick to find out.
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And so we invited Nick to the salon and to the three of us.
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And that was really when the salon was born is when Nick joined us.
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And we learned or Tom learned how to formulate
00:15:46 ►
LAMID and he made a bunch for us and we conducted a bunch of LAMID tests and they were pretty
00:15:52 ►
spectacular just a headline is that after 15 days in a row taking 50 micrograms at 10 a.m.
00:16:01 ►
every day for 15 days in a row on the 15th, that 50 mics was just as whopping a big acid trip as you can imagine.
00:16:10 ►
And it ended in four hours.
00:16:12 ►
So that’s the story on LAMBD.
00:16:14 ►
Now, we kept getting together for a while.
00:16:17 ►
But shortly after that, 9-11 occurred and podcasting appeared. And so the salon, you know, changed from a in-person salon to the talks,
00:16:29 ►
you know, podcasting, all the talks. But now, thanks to the pandemic, we’ve come,
00:16:36 ►
seem to come full circle and we’re back to having these conversations online. So that in a nutshell is how we came to be together today. Now,
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the point of the story is, these four guys were just sitting, getting together,
00:16:51 ►
bullshitting about drugs. Okay. As a result of that, 18, 17 years later, over 30 million people
00:17:00 ►
have listened to at least one of these podcasts from just four guys just bullshitting about drugs.
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So don’t underestimate the power of what you can do if you just keep pushing the story out there.
00:17:11 ►
And that’s all I have to say.
00:17:14 ►
Happy anniversary and happy birthday to Wild Bill.
00:17:17 ►
It’s our anniversary, not just mine.
00:17:21 ►
Without you, it wouldn’t be here.
00:17:22 ►
I wouldn’t be celebrating.
00:17:24 ►
I’d be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day instead.
00:17:26 ►
But fortunately, I’ve outgrown that.
00:17:29 ►
That’s a great story.
00:17:31 ►
Anyhow, so that’s the story of how you came to be here today.
00:17:38 ►
The creation story.
00:17:41 ►
By the way, that point about LSD being for the elite, that came from Albert.
00:17:49 ►
That was his original take and why he had such a falling out with Tim Leary.
00:17:57 ►
Toward the end of his life, did he come around and see that Tim did play a very key role?
00:18:08 ►
come around and see that Tim did play a very key role. Yeah, actually, you know, they had a pretty cantankerous relationship, if they even had one, but at the, I know in the last couple years of
00:18:16 ►
Albert’s life, he did say how he sees where Leary actually did some positive things as well, and
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you know, saw it in hindsight in the bigger picture.
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But, you know, there was a big, you know, the big research in LSD was actually being done by the CIA at that time.
00:18:35 ►
You know, so with MKUltra, you know, it was a time every bit as strange as we’re in right now, I think.
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ever been as strange as we’re in right now, I think.
00:18:53 ►
Well, and Oscar Yanager was responsible for a significant amount of research and dissemination.
00:19:00 ►
Oscar, you know, turned on a good deal of the, of major stars in Hollywood and all of that and did his famous experiments with the Kachina doll
00:19:07 ►
where he had artists
00:19:11 ►
draw or paint the Kachina doll
00:19:14 ►
before taking LSD and then
00:19:17 ►
while on LSD. There’s a whole
00:19:20 ►
collection there which I think is in the
00:19:23 ►
possession of his sons right now.
00:19:27 ►
Yeah, all of those paintings are still there.
00:19:30 ►
I know somebody has just recently seen some of that stuff.
00:19:34 ►
And so for those that don’t know, I think you can see some of it online.
00:19:39 ►
I’ve seen pictures of it.
00:19:40 ►
I don’t know where they’ve come from.
00:19:42 ►
But it’s really amazing.
00:19:46 ►
The, the drawings, you know, some of them before they had LSD were like, you know,
00:19:51 ►
camera ready art almost, you know, you know, real reproductions, but their art was so much
00:19:56 ►
better after LSD, you know, it became more contemporary. So it’s a fascinating thing.
00:20:01 ►
And I hope that eventually that series of paintings could get published.
00:20:08 ►
It’s a valuable collection, actually.
00:20:10 ►
Some of those people became famous artists.
00:20:13 ►
I have a question for Rio and Lorenzo and Eugenia.
00:20:17 ►
You guys are acquainted with people like Oscar, people like Myron, people like, God, why am I blanking on
00:20:30 ►
Bicycle Day Guy Hoffman? You were acquainted with them and you were acquainted with them in the
00:20:36 ►
period of time where this was a very disreputable field to be interested in. And so what were, what was their attitude when you were working,
00:20:48 ►
when you were talking to them, both about younger folks like you coming to them for,
00:20:53 ►
for their insights, but also what kept them in the community and
00:20:58 ►
maintaining an interest in what had become a very taboo subject?
00:21:02 ►
in what had become a very taboo subject.
00:21:09 ►
Well, speaking both to Albert and to Oscar,
00:21:15 ►
I mean, well, Albert believed that it truly was,
00:21:20 ►
as he put it, the medicine par excellence for the occidental mind.
00:21:23 ►
And it was, of course, a major part of his life’s work and i think
00:21:29 ►
it wasn’t some albert was part mystic and that really came to uh you know blossom under the
00:21:39 ►
effects of lsd and i think he also understood historically the importance of it.
00:21:46 ►
And so I never saw in Albert there was any question of continuing it.
00:21:53 ►
This was a life work for him.
00:21:56 ►
And he understood that it was a major breakthrough for humanity.
00:22:03 ►
I think in a way, Oscar was the same. I mean, he pursued his work
00:22:09 ►
as a psychiatrist all through his life up until the very end. And, you know, he celebrated the
00:22:17 ►
fact that what had maybe taken him 20 years of therapy was someone he could do with one pill in a few hour session
00:22:27 ►
um so i don’t think that i mean both of them had a passion for it and albert’s the one who
00:22:34 ►
introduced me to oz and he said you know this man has the most amazing library
00:22:40 ►
in the world and it’s when albert came to la for that one conference somewhere i have
00:22:48 ►
the t-shirt from here and so i don’t know if that addresses your your point charles
00:22:57 ►
it addresses the question and were they were they forthcoming i mean how did they vet
00:23:02 ►
that you know you weren’t just some nut?
00:23:06 ►
And, you know, it’s like, because you had to be, they had to have been very careful
00:23:10 ►
because there were a bunch of seekers, many of whom were unbalanced.
00:23:14 ►
There are a bunch of narcs.
00:23:16 ►
There was a lot of heat.
00:23:17 ►
So, you know, to what extent did they, were they forthcoming?
00:23:21 ►
And to what extent did they, you did they have to be cautious and how
00:23:25 ►
long did it take to kind of get them
00:23:28 ►
to open up and be in that
00:23:30 ►
state with you where you could
00:23:31 ►
be communing with that
00:23:34 ►
knowledge and with that respect for the
00:23:36 ►
practices? I don’t know.
00:23:38 ►
With both of them, it was kind of
00:23:40 ►
immediate. A little bit
00:23:42 ►
like Lorenzo described,
00:23:44 ►
you know, the beginnings of a great
00:23:47 ►
friendship. I think there was kind of an immediate recognition that I was serious. I wasn’t,
00:23:55 ►
you know, CIA in disguise or something. I suppose it helped that I did have a background in chemistry so I could talk from a certain place
00:24:07 ►
about the substances that in both cases, yeah, I’d have to go back in detail, but I believe
00:24:19 ►
it was before or not very long after my Amazon expedition.
00:24:25 ►
I knew Schultes.
00:24:26 ►
So I kind of knew a lot of people in the community.
00:24:31 ►
So they saw that.
00:24:33 ►
I think they recognized that.
00:24:35 ►
It was like somehow a real connection.
00:24:38 ►
I mean, I wasn’t there for any alternative purpose or ulterior motive.
00:24:48 ►
I wasn’t trying to write a story about them or something that had a very strong personal interest.
00:24:56 ►
And in both cases, they allowed me to do video recordings, which are somewhere in my archive.
00:25:06 ►
recordings, which are somewhere in my archive, and I hope to get out and hope they’re still viewable, because we had long, long discussions. And in certain cases, we did that intentionally
00:25:17 ►
on video. That’s wonderful. You know, it may have depended in some instances on how we met these people.
00:25:29 ►
You know, Myron’s one introduced me to Oscar.
00:25:33 ►
And so I was already kind of in the tribe, you know.
00:25:38 ►
It’s not like they knew I was not going to think they were crazy or anything like that or breaking the law.
00:25:44 ►
That Myron actually went to his death believing, and I agree with him, that the psychedelic medicines are the most important advance in human history.
00:25:54 ►
That, you know, a future depends on it.
00:25:57 ►
And he never wavered on that for an instant.
00:26:00 ►
He always felt he was doing the most important work possible that he could have done uh but i
00:26:06 ►
got to know myron at in a really safe environment for him it was a invitation only conference that
00:26:14 ►
was a bunch of psychiatrists and healers and uh the uh it was i’ve talked about it before it’s up
00:26:22 ►
in canada an island up there and it it’s very secure, private little place.
00:26:26 ►
And I wound up, my room was,
00:26:30 ►
had on one side was Myron and Gene Stolaroff.
00:26:33 ►
And on the other side was Duncan and Jane Blewett.
00:26:35 ►
And so I got to know Duncan Blewett and Myron Stolaroff,
00:26:39 ►
you know, sitting around the evenings
00:26:40 ►
in their room smoking dope.
00:26:42 ►
You know, Myron didn’t, but Duncan and Jane did.
00:26:44 ►
And, you know, so I got but Duncan and Jane did and you know so I
00:26:46 ►
got to know them on a very casual you know place a safe a safe environment where everybody there
00:26:52 ►
was psychedelic you know and so they just accepted me as not an outsider I guess I never really
00:26:59 ►
thought about it it’s but I’ve never never since in in Myron or Oscar or Gary or any of those people, any sense of regret
00:27:09 ►
or sense that they did anything other than the most pristine thing they could have done. So
00:27:15 ►
they were really purists in what they did, I think.
00:27:17 ►
Wow.
00:27:18 ►
And I would say, just second all of that, In the case of Albert and Oscar,
00:27:26 ►
they both felt
00:27:27 ►
that the way things
00:27:29 ►
had gone in making
00:27:31 ►
LSD research illegal
00:27:33 ►
was, you know,
00:27:36 ►
on the other side of the aisle
00:27:38 ►
could be, from their point of view,
00:27:40 ►
could be considered a crime
00:27:41 ►
toward the evolution of humanity
00:27:44 ►
and scientific research, that it was really tragedy.
00:27:51 ►
Yeah, people don’t realize this, but before LSD became illegal in the United States,
00:27:56 ►
there were over 3,000 papers published about the effectiveness and research papers and all.
00:28:01 ►
It was very widely studied outside of MKUltra for a long time.
00:28:07 ►
Yeah, for sure.
00:28:08 ►
The 50s rhyme with the present moment with regard to the research dynamics and the quest
00:28:15 ►
for panacea.
00:28:16 ►
Hey, Eugenio, what book are you holding up?
00:28:18 ►
What’s the name of that?
00:28:20 ►
LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process.
00:28:24 ►
Thank you.
00:28:24 ►
That has a bunch of the images from the Kachina project in it.
00:28:28 ►
That looked fantastic.
00:28:29 ►
LSD spirituality and the creative process.
00:28:33 ►
Let’s see which of us nabs it on a books first,
00:28:36 ►
me or rich.
00:28:41 ►
Sorry to derail you guys.
00:28:43 ►
Those stories are fascinating.
00:28:47 ►
What was Hoffman like Rio?
00:28:51 ►
Give me one second here.
00:28:52 ►
I’m just notating it.
00:28:55 ►
Oh wait,
00:28:55 ►
are we all looking for that fucking book right now?
00:28:58 ►
What’s happening?
00:28:58 ►
I’m in my library.
00:29:01 ►
Goddammit.
00:29:02 ►
You’re going to make me go on,
00:29:03 ►
on the search during the salon.
00:29:04 ►
That’s not fair
00:29:05 ►
well uh
00:29:09 ►
albert was a very serious person um he uh was a relatively quiet but very impassioned person he was very quiet and soft-spoken but with a real
00:29:29 ►
emotional force and he understood situation of politically i remember taking a walk out back
00:29:40 ►
from his house through the forest and then pointing out that he was right on the border of Switzerland and France.
00:29:49 ►
And so if they ever came after him,
00:29:52 ►
he could just walk across the border.
00:29:56 ►
But he, yeah, I’d say while not,
00:30:01 ►
he was not a like person who would get out and have like a party
00:30:07 ►
type of
00:30:08 ►
atmosphere about him though he enjoyed
00:30:11 ►
hanging out and being at parties
00:30:13 ►
especially with the conferences
00:30:15 ►
some of the
00:30:16 ►
private and some not so private
00:30:19 ►
conferences especially
00:30:21 ►
in Europe as I can remember
00:30:23 ►
with Christian Roche
00:30:24 ►
I don’t know if many of you
00:30:27 ►
know him but he was one of Albert’s major students and written in many other places
00:30:39 ►
I can just remember one time with he and Albert at a conference in Europe and everyone tripping together.
00:30:49 ►
But Albert still always had this very serious demeanor, but serious in the sense that this was a sacred substance, that it was something that you really had to approach in a very serious way
00:31:06 ►
uh that’s why he and leary split because he felt that uh it was for the elite at least
00:31:15 ►
i would say the elite of in a mindset uh you know that it wasn’t just to be taken frivolously or a recreational drug or something, but it was a very serious substance that was changing the world, had the potential to change the world, change humanity.
00:31:38 ►
And certainly a complete new breakthrough in the world of psychology and psychiatry and healing of mental disorders.
00:31:48 ►
So if I could ask you to back up a second, you just said, you know, at the private conferences,
00:31:52 ►
everybody was tripping together, if I heard you correctly. Does this mean that you tripped
00:31:57 ►
with Albert Hoffman? Oh, yeah. Wow. Now, what was that like? Well, it was the one that’s coming to mind right now was at an after party.
00:32:10 ►
And I don’t know, maybe 20 people were there.
00:32:13 ►
Not everybody at the conference, but, you know, select people.
00:32:18 ►
And it was a very relaxed scene.
00:32:23 ►
People just sort of, you know,
00:32:25 ►
I can remember laid out on the floor,
00:32:28 ►
talking, relaxing together,
00:32:30 ►
just having a very personal interactions
00:32:34 ►
and exploring together
00:32:39 ►
the discussions about substances,
00:32:42 ►
their effects, so on and so forth.
00:32:44 ►
discussions about substances, their effects, so on and so forth.
00:32:55 ►
And also his sort of another aspect of his character was almost a childlike curiosity in the world.
00:33:02 ►
I remember him describing in some detail, and I think it’s in some of his books, you know, discovering the world anew. And in the back was this forest. And he thoroughly enjoyed.
00:33:25 ►
And I think it was one of the first things that he really connected with was the connection with nature.
00:33:32 ►
When he came home and had his experience, he was also very physically fit.
00:33:40 ►
He had a swimming pool in his house so he could swim all year round.
00:33:47 ►
Being Switzerland, of course, in the winter would be very, very cold.
00:33:53 ►
And of course, Albert was a European gentleman at the same time. So he had that whole tradition. I really saw him in the tradition of Paracelsus and the alchemists.
00:34:08 ►
And he recognized that also in himself.
00:34:12 ►
And he had sort of the outlook and the grasp on life of a mystic.
00:34:19 ►
I mean, he was one of the finest chemists that had ever lived.
00:34:23 ►
And he had that whole other side to him
00:34:25 ►
i mean he must have understood himself to be as revolutionary in his way as jung was in his
00:34:32 ►
oh absolutely and to be one of the rare people to be like a real peer of jung down to geographically
00:34:51 ►
to geographically yes yes and taking things way beyond any other uh you know researcher young or whoever you would choose without having intended to do that i mean i i think albert stands as one
00:35:00 ►
of the most interesting people in history because you you know, he went back and synthesized
00:35:07 ►
LSD-25, which had been put on the shelf because it lacked any biological activity in animals.
00:35:16 ►
And, you know, so he broke a taboo or maybe even a laboratory rule at Sandoz anyway by doing that
00:35:26 ►
and then by accident
00:35:28 ►
got a little bit on his hands
00:35:30 ►
which again for Albert
00:35:32 ►
being the level of chemist
00:35:34 ►
that he was
00:35:35 ►
is itself extraordinary
00:35:37 ►
and that’s why I say
00:35:40 ►
there was this mystic side of him
00:35:42 ►
to one go back
00:35:44 ►
and take it off the shelf and
00:35:47 ►
synthesize it again and then two to get some on him it just goes way beyond any logic
00:35:54 ►
he was being led somehow if you will or following his intuition whatever you however you want to describe it but you know clearly a
00:36:06 ►
manifestation of that uh mystic side of him and of course that transformed humanity and i i would
00:36:14 ►
agree i think it’s one of the most important discoveries in the history of humanity so two
00:36:19 ►
two two questions two questions about him one was there a humility in his character?
00:36:27 ►
Absolutely. Albert was a very humble man.
00:36:32 ►
And the second, when you had, and I loved how you said, well, let me see which time I want to talk about, suggesting that there’s multiple Albert Hoffman trips there, which is, you know, I mean, a single
00:36:45 ►
one is, you know, a holy grail experience for a particular kind of psychonaut. But when you were
00:36:50 ►
in these environments, and, you know, Albert is in the medicine along with others, was there a
00:36:58 ►
sense that people were peers? Or was there a sense of we are in the presence of the founder?
00:37:09 ►
were peers or was there a sense of we are in the presence of the founder no from it was a sense of peers from him now i can’t describe you know what was going on in other people obviously a lot of
00:37:17 ►
people there probably did feel you know hey i’m in the presence of this God from some people’s point of view
00:37:25 ►
but from Albert
00:37:28 ►
no he was very humble
00:37:29 ►
everyone he met
00:37:32 ►
he treated as an equal
00:37:33 ►
you know
00:37:36 ►
unless they became
00:37:37 ►
you know he would kind of distance
00:37:39 ►
himself if they
00:37:41 ►
didn’t have that real quality
00:37:44 ►
of sincerity and humble interest in uh that yeah he
00:37:51 ►
treated people on an equal level this raises a new dimension of his um distaste for leary hearing
00:38:02 ►
you describe him in that way because Leary was so outwardly on a
00:38:05 ►
guru trip. Now, I don’t know what Leary was like in private when you trip with him. And I’ve read
00:38:09 ►
a number of accounts from a number of different people. But, you know, there was always this sense,
00:38:14 ►
at least when you read about Leary of this, you know, I got here first, or this kind of hierarchy
00:38:19 ►
trip. And again, I don’t know that that’s what he’s what he was like. But hearing you describe
00:38:23 ►
Hoffman’s character is so different from Leary’s character that it makes a great deal of sense why there would have been that disdain.
00:38:32 ►
Well, I think the disdain on Albert’s part came in large part from the fact that Leary turned on the general public and created – I think Albert, to a certain extent, blamed Leary turned on the general public and created,
00:38:45 ►
I think Albert to a certain extent blamed Leary for the crackdown on LSD
00:38:55 ►
and other psychoactive substance research because he took it out of these small,
00:39:09 ►
he took it out of these small, serious circles of research. And, you know, therefore, a backlash occurred within general society, especially in the US. And as we know, especially in those days,
00:39:17 ►
whatever the US did in terms of drug policy, everybody else followed. Every other country went along. So I think that was part of it. I will say some of my experiences with Tim, and one in particular comes to mind because I did a portrait of him one night. It was about 2 a.m. We were sitting, having what I consider to be a very philosophical
00:39:46 ►
discussion, sitting before a Keith Haring table in his kitchen. And I did a completely different
00:39:54 ►
portrait of Tim than you will see anywhere philosopher. And so in those private moments,
00:40:10 ►
it was only he and I there at the house. I was staying with him as I usually did after,
00:40:17 ►
you know, or when I couldn’t stay at Oz’s and having these late night discussions,
00:40:23 ►
and having these late night discussions as opposed to his more public persona
00:40:27 ►
where, you know, he was the Pied Piper of LSD.
00:40:32 ►
It seems like there was some recording on,
00:40:35 ►
or some recording where Timothy said
00:40:37 ►
that he was what the public kind of made him.
00:40:43 ►
And so the whole public thing and going public and being kind of
00:40:46 ►
like really loud and outrageous about it i think is the difference between how i feel about my dad
00:40:53 ►
it was part of more of the beat and extending was of the dead heads or let’s say the the movements
00:40:58 ►
um as and and like we should have the freedom to do lsd kind of really a little more pronounced than i
00:41:07 ►
it seems to me like hoffman was more um subdued about it maybe not to not i don’t i mean it seems
00:41:15 ►
like just from recordings that i’ve heard that he’s not closed about he’s not being private about
00:41:21 ►
um experiencing the lsd but he he doesn’t go about it uh he goes more gentleman
00:41:26 ►
gentleman like about it than um the whole movement and the and the revolution and
00:41:33 ►
you know um the hippie movement is what i want to say and i hate categorizing like that or deadheads
00:41:38 ►
and um there is there was a difference there was a little break in that little tiny era in between that I experienced most of my dad’s friends that were extremely like more like Hoffman or Huxley.
00:41:53 ►
Yeah, I would lifestyle was around.
00:42:16 ►
That was the structure.
00:42:17 ►
And of course, of his experience, I think in some ways, I agree with you that Leary became, took on the role that society kind of, in a way, drove him to.
00:42:31 ►
I mean, I think being thrown out of Harvard, having been already before the discovery of LSD, one of the most important modern psychiatrists, psychologists.
00:42:44 ►
I’m not sure he was a psychiatrist ever, but a psychologist.
00:42:47 ►
I mean, he revolutionized psychology.
00:42:51 ►
And shortly before his death,
00:42:53 ►
he was recognized for that by the Los Angeles Psychology Society.
00:43:00 ►
I don’t know the formal name of it,
00:43:02 ►
but they did have a formal recognition evening for him.
00:43:07 ►
So I think there were two factors there, that he recognized the possibilities and truly
00:43:17 ►
life-changing and the ability to change other people’s lives that LSD offered and the other substances, psilocybin and the
00:43:29 ►
others.
00:43:30 ►
And then he did take on this role.
00:43:34 ►
And of course, you know, it all flowed from there.
00:43:38 ►
But and it was a different time.
00:43:40 ►
It’s also if you want to make the comparison, what we’re kind of doing here,
00:43:45 ►
the difference between an American in American society at the time when it was a revolutionary
00:43:55 ►
event happening, world’s historical, which maybe we’ll never see again, moment in history and albert who was in the context of sophisticated very serious uh
00:44:10 ►
european culture that’s a good observation and there’s also the generational observation of you
00:44:17 ►
know albert was born in 1906 and so he his psychology really would have been defined by world war one and you know tim was born
00:44:26 ►
i think uh what like 17 18 something like that so his psychology would have been defined by the
00:44:33 ►
second world war and you know and america versus europe etc but you know it’s really interesting
00:44:39 ►
how you know they they come out of their respective zeitgeist at the time where they were kind of each needed within their cultural zeitgeist and responded to yeah what was going
00:44:52 ►
on in different ways of course yeah you know another little picture i have of albert hoffman
00:45:01 ►
as a real human being, neat guy is,
00:45:05 ►
before I met Mary C, she was at a conference over in Amsterdam.
00:45:10 ►
And at the Saturday night of the conference,
00:45:12 ►
they had a rave after later that night and Albert Hoffman showed up at the
00:45:17 ►
rave and one of the women got him out on the dance floor.
00:45:21 ►
And so Mary C and about six other women got to dance all at the same
00:45:25 ►
time with Albert Hoffman, but he danced, she said for quite a long time for, you know, I don’t know
00:45:29 ►
how old he was then, but he was probably older than I am right now. So, you know, he could be a
00:45:35 ►
man of the people as well. And Rio, you mentioned Christian Rush. Christian once told me that,
00:45:42 ►
that he considered Albert Hoffman, his, his mentor, and he actually thought of Albert as his father almost.
00:45:49 ►
So what I find ironic about that is how staid and gentlemanly Albert was.
00:45:57 ►
And Christian partied.
00:46:01 ►
He made the Grateful Dead look like school, semi-school teachers. Christiane could party
00:46:07 ►
heartier than any human being I’ve ever met.
00:46:11 ►
The two poles of that relationship are kind of fascinating.
00:46:16 ►
Well, that pursuit of Dionysian ecstasy is something
00:46:20 ►
that they don’t really talk about in the annals of serious
00:46:23 ►
psychedelia. So it’s good that you have those stories.
00:46:26 ►
And I’m not saying he took MDMA.
00:46:29 ►
I’m just saying they had a rave and he danced at it.
00:46:32 ►
Well, he did something.
00:46:35 ►
If you make the Grateful Dead look like schoolboys, that’s a bold statement.
00:46:38 ►
And you know what that statement means.
00:46:40 ►
And so do we.
00:46:41 ►
and so do we it’s interesting about Christian
00:46:45 ►
because I basically
00:46:48 ►
consider Albert
00:46:49 ►
to be like my spiritual
00:46:52 ►
father
00:46:52 ►
and you know
00:46:56 ►
that came out of the
00:46:57 ►
relationship as it developed
00:47:00 ►
and went
00:47:02 ►
on for years
00:47:03 ►
and Christian he’s just a wonderful guy.
00:47:10 ►
I mean, beyond wonderful.
00:47:11 ►
Amazing person.
00:47:13 ►
We really got to know each other during,
00:47:16 ►
when I was in Tucson during the Biosphere 2 project,
00:47:20 ►
because he was supporting himself.
00:47:23 ►
His business was coming to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show
00:47:28 ►
and buying fossils for museums in Europe.
00:47:33 ►
And he was quite an expert in it.
00:47:35 ►
We’re talking, you know, I can’t buy a dinosaur the size of a house.
00:47:40 ►
And then, you know, it would be shipped back to Europe or something.
00:47:44 ►
So it was a very serious enterprise he was involved in.
00:47:47 ►
And then at some point,
00:47:49 ►
I don’t know if he had a direct run in with the law
00:47:54 ►
or he just became concerned.
00:47:57 ►
I don’t remember exactly,
00:47:59 ►
but he didn’t want to come back into the United States.
00:48:03 ►
So that cut him out of a lot that was going on and more focused toward Europe.
00:48:09 ►
And then in 2000, I think, we had a shaman conference in a Dulakil in Nepal, which he organized.
00:48:24 ►
Christiane did? I’m’m sorry christian organized this conference
00:48:29 ►
yes okay thank you yeah and again i have hours of video he agreed uh and you know i pretty much
00:48:40 ►
videoed the entire conference again those are tapes in the library that maybe somebody would get
00:48:47 ►
interested in helping me with because these are all big projects um have to be done in real time
00:48:54 ►
but christian and as you say uh lorenzo he could really party
00:49:01 ►
there was no way I could even see.
00:49:05 ►
He was so far ahead of me,
00:49:06 ►
I couldn’t even see where he was going.
00:49:08 ►
Yeah.
00:49:08 ►
And of course,
00:49:10 ►
that happened at the Palenque conferences.
00:49:14 ►
Exactly.
00:49:17 ►
I mean,
00:49:17 ►
I recall being totally overdosed.
00:49:22 ►
And I think it was Grisham who gave it to me on 2CI there
00:49:26 ►
in Palenque.
00:49:29 ►
You know, if we were
00:49:30 ►
all researchers
00:49:30 ►
and scientists, we’d be
00:49:34 ►
talking about molecules right now instead
00:49:36 ►
of we’re talking about experiences. I think that’s
00:49:38 ►
the difference here.
00:49:40 ►
We could talk about
00:49:42 ►
molecules as well.
00:49:51 ►
But it well we could talk about molecules as well but but it seems like our number one topic is what the molecules do to us yes um it sounds like their number one topic was
00:49:57 ►
knowing what the molecule was doing and being able to personify the molecule in its experience
00:50:03 ►
and being able to personify the molecule in its experience.
00:50:12 ►
And use it in a serious way as a tool.
00:50:16 ►
They both saw it that way.
00:50:20 ►
Look who just showed up.
00:50:22 ►
I’m sorry?
00:50:24 ►
The Ian is here so ian and seba don’t realize that we’re on daylight savings time now wait what happened
00:50:32 ►
you’re late like an hour late huh yeah like an hour late yeah you you miss you miss hearing about Rio tripping with Albert Hoffman and Tim Leary.
00:50:48 ►
And you miss Lorenzo’s story of the beginning of the psychedelic salon.
00:50:56 ►
You’re going to post this, though, right?
00:50:58 ►
I’m thinking about it, but not as a podcast.
00:51:01 ►
I’ll put it up in Patreon and find a way to get you to it.
00:51:05 ►
Okay, good. Yes, please. I’m not going to ask what I missed.
00:51:11 ►
You missed one of the greatest trip stories I’ve ever heard about Rio and Albert Hoffman.
00:51:15 ►
How many people do you know that tripped with Albert Hoffman?
00:51:21 ►
I don’t.
00:51:24 ►
No, you do.
00:51:27 ►
Nice.
00:51:29 ►
I thought it was a big deal because I smoked dope with Joe Rogan and did
00:51:33 ►
ayahuasca with Sting, but you know,
00:51:35 ►
Hoffman acid trip trumps them all.
00:51:39 ►
Yeah. That’s a, that’s quite a claim to fame, my friends.
00:51:43 ►
And also it speaks so well of your character, Rio, that you’ve been coming for what, a year and a half, two years to these salons?
00:51:52 ►
And not once did this come up.
00:51:55 ►
It had to kind of come out, you know, in conversation.
00:51:58 ►
You know, you’re not dropping your calling card on the table to see your psychedelic bona fides.
00:52:03 ►
It speaks very, very well of you.
00:52:06 ►
Charles, I’ve known Rio for over 20 years,
00:52:08 ►
and this is the first time I’ve heard that story.
00:52:12 ►
I’d be telling it to everybody I’ve met.
00:52:15 ►
Yeah, that Dos Equis guy’s got nothing on you.
00:52:21 ►
Well, I think, you know, Rio shared a lot of these amazing experiences
00:52:24 ►
with the forebears and you shared your amazing experience of how the Psychedelic Salon came to be.
00:52:32 ►
But I also know that, you know, part of your whole journey within the Psychedelic Salon was being, you know, I can’t tell whether you were a scholar or a fanboy or both in spending a lot of time with folks, you know, like Myron and Gene and Sasha.
00:52:49 ►
So, you know, as Rio was talking about his experiences with these folks, you know, what were some of the things that really made an impression on you as you were somebody that was just kind of building connections within this community about some of these figures and their traits?
00:53:06 ►
Well, all of this started before I was podcasting. And so, you know, I was just getting to know
00:53:12 ►
people. You know, it’s more of a friendly get to know you. I had no intention or idea that I’d ever
00:53:19 ►
be talking to anybody else about it. I just thought, well, that’s my own personal interest.
00:53:23 ►
And Myron’s a really cool guy. And I love going up there and staying with him. And it never, even when I was
00:53:29 ►
doing those recordings of him, I was doing it. I’m not really sure why I was doing it. I didn’t
00:53:35 ►
realize that. I just assumed there were hundreds of hours of recordings of Myron Stoller. I, you
00:53:41 ►
know, I didn’t know any better. And so had I known better, I might’ve done a better job, but I wasn’t really thinking this far ahead. I wasn’t even thinking other than just the
00:53:51 ►
weekend being with him and hearing more stories and learning stuff. And I was just collecting it
00:53:56 ►
for my own benefit, I guess. I, there’s no plan. And what was it, what was it in your character
00:54:02 ►
in like Myron, for instance, he’s somebody that you got to know.
00:54:07 ►
Like, at what point did it become a core, did it move from being a cordial, here’s a younger person who’s interested in my work to, yeah, come out to Lone Pine and have some research chemicals with me?
00:54:20 ►
It started up at that conference up in Canada where we were essentially living next door to each other.
00:54:26 ►
And I don’t know, I said a couple of things that Myra just got fascinated at how reckless I was with my drug use, I think.
00:54:35 ►
And he couldn’t believe some of the stupid things I did.
00:54:37 ►
And he was just fascinated that I was as crazy as I was, I guess.
00:54:42 ►
And I didn’t think I was, but I didn’t have any mentors, didn’t have any guides. And so maybe he just wanted to take care of me. I’m not
00:54:49 ►
sure, but we just became friends somehow. And I guess you would have been in your forties or early
00:54:55 ►
fifties at that point? I was a mid fifties and he must’ve been late seventies about the age I am
00:55:02 ►
now. Well, it must’ve been extraordinary for a guy like that
00:55:05 ►
with his history to hear a guy in his mid-50s talking about drug habits that belong to somebody
00:55:10 ►
in college yeah he he had uh you know he had his own milieu that they were you know people his age
00:55:18 ►
ones that worked on p-col and t-col and I don’t think he hung around younger people. I don’t consider myself a younger person,
00:55:25 ►
but relative to him, I was. And I didn’t come in through the 60s. I was in my 40s when I first
00:55:32 ►
had my experience. And so I was a curiosity to him too, I think. I think Lorenzo hit on a point is that, you know, it’s one thing to look back on these experiences that we had.
00:55:51 ►
So you have a different point of view.
00:55:54 ►
But at the time, somehow it was very natural within that milieu and what was going on.
00:56:02 ►
And it was all very new.
00:56:05 ►
within that milieu and what was going on and it was all very new.
00:56:09 ►
And there were some people who were, of course, taking it
00:56:15 ►
in the, let’s say, more hippie, you know, rave direction.
00:56:22 ►
And there were other people who were doing, you know, curious and serious
00:56:26 ►
research or just, you know, trying to find their way in this new world um and as well as the people who were directly involved say like albert like myra who were
00:56:35 ►
oscar you know it was all new for them too so it was a different kind of milieu to be doing that in whereas now we look back
00:56:50 ►
from this point of view of the renaissance of psychedelics and the whole history of it up till
00:56:58 ►
this point going through the stage now to the semi-legal, at least open to research stage again.
00:57:08 ►
So I think that the point Lorenz was making
00:57:11 ►
is very well taken,
00:57:13 ►
and you need to kind of put it in that context.
00:57:17 ►
I think William Burroughs said,
00:57:19 ►
you really can’t understand anything
00:57:22 ►
without looking at the context.
00:57:25 ►
I think Melissa has also made this point within the Beatnik period.
00:57:31 ►
Right. You know,
00:57:32 ►
something I hadn’t thought about until just right now is that at the time I
00:57:38 ►
met Myron, this is after the, the analog drug law came in and,
00:57:43 ►
and Myron threw up his hands and quit when that happened.
00:57:45 ►
And at that conference, I was one of the few people who was new.
00:57:49 ►
Everybody there knew each other from research and past conferences and stuff like that.
00:57:53 ►
I was one of the few new guys.
00:57:55 ►
And Myron may have been fascinated that somebody that wasn’t involved in the 60s, you know, an older guy was still interested in psychedelics.
00:58:04 ►
that, you know, an older guy was still interested in psychedelics.
00:58:08 ►
I think I was one of the first people he talked to in several years that hadn’t been involved in a long time or for a long time that was still interested and kind of perked him up
00:58:13 ►
a little bit, I guess.
00:58:14 ►
I’ve never thought about it, but I’ll give some thought to that now.
00:58:17 ►
But I think that might have been part of it.
00:58:19 ►
You had a unique status, evidently, and coming in kind of new and a more
00:58:27 ►
mature age wasn’t something. So you were kind of a subject, it sounds
00:58:32 ►
like, almost. Lorenzo, we didn’t hear anything you just said.
00:58:36 ►
Probably just as well. I said,
00:58:40 ►
yeah, in Vietnam, we call him the FNG, the fucking new guy.
00:58:53 ►
Well, and listen to me, the yeah in vietnam we call them the fng the fucking new guy well and melissa made the point about keeping it going or maybe you did lorenza i think that was always a vector for these people you know what’s coming to mind is Kathleen Salon’s, where even though it was illegal, we kept it alive through these.
00:59:09 ►
And then new people would come in.
00:59:11 ►
So there was a passing on within generations, too.
00:59:16 ►
And by the way, Kathleen Salon was originally formed as the Albert Hoffman Foundation monthly meeting.
00:59:26 ►
originally formed as the Albert Hoffman Foundation Monthly Meeting. And Sasha and Ann came down to kick off that original meeting, and it evolved into Kathleen Chalon eventually. But it was
00:59:31 ►
originally the Albert Hoffman Foundation Monthly Meeting. Wow. And it was invitation only when it
00:59:37 ►
first began. Yeah, I guess part of the interest, too, that you must have elicited is that this was disreputable and dangerous knowledge to be around.
00:59:50 ►
You know, so for somebody that isn’t a kid or, you know, a complete fuck up to be coming into that environment, for somebody with somebody to lose, in other words, to be coming into that environment what must have been quite uh quite
01:00:05 ►
not unique but certainly special well it’s like when i meet somebody today who tells me like that
01:00:12 ►
they converted to christianity like in midlife it’s like oh like you’re still joining teams
01:00:19 ►
interesting and so to encounter an adult who like hadn’t been turned off just by the saturated with
01:00:27 ►
paranoia informational environment um is like oh you made it interesting i i didn’t even know we
01:00:33 ►
were advertising i guess the difference is that you don’t get high off of a communion wafer
01:00:38 ►
true true there’s well i mean you’re making it sets you up for that. Like the whole ceremony, like it sort of makes you think that there’s going to be like a moment is going to be something that you like.
01:00:52 ►
Baptism is like this. Communion’s like this. And and so like I learned how to like expect lift off, you know, from communion.
01:01:02 ►
And then when I took a mushroom, like that actually went somewhere,
01:01:05 ►
but like the communion had taught me how to like center myself, focus on what I’m about to do,
01:01:11 ►
take it seriously. And, and nothing ever happened. But when I found something that did make something
01:01:15 ►
happen, I was like, Oh, I’ve been practicing that thing, you know, just with the inert,
01:01:21 ►
you know, placebo for so long. Right. The placebo for me was effective no matter what, as far as communion goes.
01:01:30 ►
I would, to this day, would get a euphoria natural high off of it for sure.
01:01:37 ►
And, you know, in today’s world, it seems like a lot of people are acting like they don’t have a lot to lose.
01:01:44 ►
And I think they might be rudely surprised. I think it also, they might be rudely surprised, number one.
01:01:52 ►
Number two, I think that there is an element of risk, no matter how safe the legal environment
01:01:58 ►
is when you’re working with psychedelics, and that needs to be treated with great care and respect. I mean, you only get so many freebies where you can consume without intention before you get slapped. And, you know, three, the element of community that came about from the sense of being underground and dangerous is very different from the quality of community that we’re encountering
01:02:27 ►
right now.
01:02:28 ►
I mean, just this morning, I sent my friend Chris an ad that came to me on Instagram that
01:02:35 ►
was advertising last chance to buy a pre-IPO investment in some company doing psychedelics.
01:02:47 ►
you know investment in some company doing uh psychedelics and i think it was uh like their medicine was called like silly p-s-i-l-l-y or something stupid like that you know and i sent
01:02:52 ►
it to him with the vomit emoji and um but i mean that’s the sense of community where it’s all out
01:02:58 ►
in the open is that it’s um it’s just a very different dynamic and i guess maybe it’s the
01:03:04 ►
difference between um you know not to be too highfalut And I guess maybe it’s the difference between, you know, not to be too highfalutin about it, but it’s the difference between, you know, early Gnostic Christianity and the establishment of transmission and, you know, person to person
01:03:27 ►
exchange of knowledge where, you know, we get to be, you know, in the room with Rio, who was in the
01:03:33 ►
room, in the medicine with Albert, to we get to be sitting in a seminar with 45 spiritual entrepreneurs
01:03:43 ►
telling us about how we can
01:03:45 ►
microdose to lose weight. It’s just a very different, you know, dynamic.
01:03:50 ►
Yeah. The underground part was a big appeal to me, actually.
01:03:54 ►
I don’t know why, but I’ve always been anti-authoritarianism.
01:03:57 ►
And so the underground aspect was, was important. I think.
01:04:01 ►
You had that rebel in you.
01:04:03 ►
You just had that turning of getting away from the corporate clown ship
01:04:08 ►
and turn into the experience more
01:04:12 ►
and open that mind up again
01:04:15 ►
to make the wonderful you, Lorenzo.
01:04:19 ►
I spent so much time living inside the little circle
01:04:23 ►
that I had to step out once in a while.
01:04:25 ►
And let’s not forget that rebellion was the cultural currency of the progressive mind in the late 20th century.
01:04:32 ►
You know, all of the really great people that were looked up to were in some way deviating from or transgressing from or rebelling from the establishment.
01:04:44 ►
And, you know, we currently
01:04:46 ►
live in an era that’s actually a lot more about consensus building, and a lot more about, you
01:04:51 ►
know, finding a status quo that, you know, one can identify with, it’s very, very, very different.
01:04:57 ►
It’ll swing again, I mean, there’s a lot that’s rhyming right now with the, you know, first 20
01:05:01 ►
years of the, of the 20th century. You know. The temperance movements, the censorship movements,
01:05:08 ►
the geopolitical unrest, the fragmentation of society.
01:05:13 ►
I mean, what’s different, of course,
01:05:14 ►
is the telecommunications and scale,
01:05:16 ►
but the underlying kind of turbulence of society
01:05:22 ►
is about can we develop an establishment?
01:05:29 ►
Young people are more interested in um in in in in being um the establishment than their parents you know that’ll shift again but i think
01:05:36 ►
where lorenzo was coming from that’s where that’s where the action was you know i mean that’s where
01:05:42 ►
the action is you know and you know ian is a product of the late 20th century you know his books you know is a product of um you know of that of that late 20th
01:05:50 ►
century um you know culture of the the visionary man that goes out to the edge of experience you
01:05:59 ►
know that’s not a story that is really being told right now now it’s the visionary person
01:06:03 ►
is bringing the experience to the IPO.
01:06:06 ►
It’s just a very different dynamic.
01:06:09 ►
There was a certain validation
01:06:12 ►
if it was illegal and forbidden that,
01:06:18 ►
you know, because we had a total distrust
01:06:20 ►
and not that we shouldn’t now of the establishment.
01:06:26 ►
And, you know, I not that we shouldn’t now, of the establishment. And, you know,
01:06:28 ►
I think that crossed borders, just thinking about also Ildiko’s
01:06:31 ►
experience, you know, in communist
01:06:34 ►
Czechoslovakia. And
01:06:39 ►
I think it’s too easy to assume that none
01:06:43 ►
of this can happen again.
01:06:45 ►
Oh, it’s going to happen again.
01:06:47 ►
You know, not to fall off into politics, but I think what we see happening today just shows that, you know, one person can take us back in history, you know, years and years.
01:07:07 ►
know years and years robert reich wrote an editorial over the last couple of days describing that um maybe america needs a cold war and i don’t want to go into into politics but i mean
01:07:14 ►
the idea that um the pendulum will swing is absolute i think the difference is that
01:07:20 ►
the anti-authoritarian energy in the late in the mid to late 20th century was about the state
01:07:27 ►
and the way the state put restrictions upon liberty, whether it was the restrictions that
01:07:35 ►
Ildiko experienced directly in growing up in the Soviet environment or the restrictions that Lorenzo and you and Larry and your peer
01:07:47 ►
group experienced growing up in the Nixon-Reagan kind of axis of emerging neoliberalism.
01:07:55 ►
The difference now is that the establishment seems to be about neoliberalism itself,
01:08:01 ►
about the market itself, and rebellion has become a flavor within neoliberalism itself, about the market itself. And rebellion has become a flavor
01:08:05 ►
within neoliberalism. And that’s where you see a lot of younger folks talking about,
01:08:12 ►
we need to overthrow capitalism and burn it all down, which is like, that’s a nice idea that
01:08:16 ►
ain’t going to happen. But there are elements of, we need to find a way to liberate ourselves from the programming of this superstructure and find a
01:08:26 ►
way to engage with the world in a more mindful and deliberate way i think that can happen and i think
01:08:32 ►
psychedelics will be a part of that but i’m not investing in any of these companies anytime soon
01:08:37 ►
yeah and there was never that side of it you know the whole capitalist side just did not exist
01:08:46 ►
yeah i mean neil goldsmith is now a taboo person because i guess he had some me too stuff but one
01:08:53 ►
of the things i remember him saying at a horizons conference is my generation took acid and quit our
01:09:02 ►
jobs and this generation microdoses to get ahead in their jobs
01:09:05 ►
that’ll shift too i mean that’s that’s probably overly reductive i mean this was about six years
01:09:11 ►
ago when microdosing was first you know coming into the into the into the parlance but um
01:09:17 ►
you know definitely there’s there’s going to need to be a shift
01:09:19 ►
i welcome the return of the counterculture i’m sorry sorry, Larry, go ahead. No, no, no. I, I’m not even,
01:09:26 ►
we may have missed this moment in the last 30 seconds, but, um,
01:09:30 ►
it reminds me of the theory who I always forget who originated it.
01:09:38 ►
Somebody might know he’s the scientist that wrote the book that, uh,
01:09:47 ►
He’s the scientist that wrote the book that Crickton based Jurassic Park on.
01:09:54 ►
He’s the one that had the idea that if you took a fly in amber, you could, I forget what.
01:09:56 ►
Anyway, the point is he was a serious scientist.
01:09:58 ►
And I can’t remember the name of his book.
01:10:01 ►
But the point is, and I’ll figure that out but the point is that uh he had the theory that uh progress is
01:10:08 ►
really only made in times of war technological progress is only really made in the times of war
01:10:16 ►
that’s because charles picked that up with there being a new cold war and i there’s a billion
01:10:22 ►
examples i think the most important one was the the Egyptians. They lasted for like two or three thousand years. It didn’t change anything. And they didn’t invent anything. They didn’t do anything. They just did what they did. And they were pushed out by the people that had horses or iron, not horses, but iron, whatever it was.
01:10:41 ►
Not horses, but iron, whatever it was.
01:10:48 ►
And that had been replaced by corporate wars.
01:10:54 ►
But now we’re getting back to a real Cold War, which puts kind of everybody on the same side.
01:11:01 ►
I hate what I’m saying, but Charles set off that thought.
01:11:04 ►
Yeah, it was that Robert Reich editorial and
01:11:05 ►
this is going to be dorky
01:11:08 ►
and I apologize in advance, but
01:11:10 ►
I was hoping that COVID was going to be the squid
01:11:12 ►
at the end of Watchmen, but maybe Putin
01:11:14 ►
is instead.
01:11:16 ►
Yeah.
01:11:18 ►
I think we’ve all thought that.
01:11:21 ►
Yeah.
01:11:21 ►
Yeah.
01:11:23 ►
And we don’t know where this is going to go so yeah hopefully not i’m
01:11:29 ►
sorry go ahead to some ways and i know this is mindless this is just a comment but it’s not a
01:11:36 ►
sin to me to say that covid has been somewhat of a blessing i’m more than 50 percent a blessing
01:11:42 ►
and lives that i’ve seen change and paths and that thought they
01:11:48 ►
were just going to stay on one path and and it it has changed everybody’s life in a lot of a lot of
01:11:55 ►
ways but like you said like the cold war like people are going to die from this disease or
01:11:59 ►
they’re going to die from the war you know it’s good something’s going to blow right well what
01:12:04 ►
what I meant
01:12:05 ►
in the in the allusion to Watchmen is that there was this event that occurred in the end of the
01:12:10 ►
story that became this galvanizing thing that unified humanity in a direction that was moving
01:12:15 ►
away from nuclear identity, annihilationism. And, you know, my hope for COVID was that this would be a thing that pulls people together and allows a radical rethinking or at least a rethinking towards something more sustainable.
01:12:32 ►
Radical is far too much to hope for.
01:12:34 ►
But we didn’t get there.
01:12:35 ►
We became more divided.
01:12:36 ►
And it’s hard to say where this is going to go.
01:12:51 ►
But stuff like the time change thing, I think that shit’s a test vote to see is it possible to build baby steps of bipartisan consensus?
01:12:56 ►
And then let’s do something else and see if we can get a little bit further, a little bit further.
01:13:03 ►
And this was – I think Heather Cox Richardson wrote about that a little bit this week, and I think I said something to The Atlantic about it this week.
01:13:12 ►
So there’s something there well and also in bosh’s you know lsd in the mind of the universe where his vision is that uh humanity is going to go through a very dark period and you know a lot of humanity will be destroyed and the ecological situation will in the end become the overriding force.
01:13:32 ►
But he sees in the end that a new form of person, a new human will be born out of this.
01:13:41 ►
will be born out of this.
01:13:45 ►
And that kind of corresponds to stuff that, you know,
01:13:48 ►
Dahmer’s talked about a lot, both in his public talks and in his private conversations about developing this 500-year runway
01:13:53 ►
for humanity.
01:13:55 ►
And I think that’s kind of the key for me is to what extent can those of us
01:14:01 ►
alive right now be establishing the structures, the examples, the life ways that will inspire the people, that will be raising the people, that will be the leadership of the early 22nd century?
01:14:17 ►
Because we’re only, you know, what, you know, 80 years away, 78 years away from the 22nd century.
01:14:24 ►
It’s not that long.
01:14:27 ►
You know, somebody born right now is going to step foot in there, which means that everybody
01:14:32 ►
on this call has a role to play in establishing the intellectual template and framework that
01:14:38 ►
that person is going to carry forward. We’re seeing a lot of 20th century thinking trying to dig its claws into 21st century problems.
01:14:47 ►
And I think a lot of our problems are deriving from trying to carry these 20th century ideas about growth and these 20th century ideas about wealth and these 20th century ideas about work and achievement into a 21st century framework where our population is so much higher, our ease is so much greater, our automation is so much greater, you know, that those ideas that were born out of the post-World War II climate just don’t port to right now.
01:15:20 ►
And if we try to carry them further into the century, we’re going to fuck the century more than it’s already fucked.
01:15:25 ►
And so the pivot that we need to be making in this decade is how do we stop looking to reclaim this past that only existed for an elite and privileged few to how can we be looking forward to – we don’t need to look forward seven generations.
01:15:45 ►
be looking forward to, you know, we don’t need to look forward seven generations. We can just look forward two generations and make sure that their life isn’t a fucking hellscape.
01:15:51 ►
Yeah. They’re alive right now. They’re alive right now. The 22nd century was born in the last
01:15:57 ►
couple of years, you know, that, that, I mean, yes, of course there’s a hundred, there’s the
01:16:02 ►
centennial people that are outliers, but you know, the’s the centennial people that are outliers.
01:16:15 ►
But the people that you’re seeing in strollers right now, a good percentage of them are going to be elders at the beginning of the next century.
01:16:20 ►
So that means that we’re touching that century and we have an obligation to it.
01:16:28 ►
Well, does anybody have anything they would like to add uh at this late hour we’ve been here a little while so uh uh again it’s been fascinating i thought it was going to be kind of boring because
01:16:34 ►
i was going to tell my story just because it’s the anniversary date but i got that done and it
01:16:38 ►
turned into a really fascinating conversation i i appreciate that with all of my heart so uh
01:16:43 ►
happy anniversary, everybody.
01:16:45 ►
We’re starting a new year and it’s going to be better than the last.
01:16:50 ►
Till next time.
01:16:51 ►
Hey, keep the old faith.
01:16:53 ►
Stay high.
01:16:54 ►
As if I have to tell you that.
01:16:58 ►
So that’s a pretty good example of what goes on in our live salons.
01:17:03 ►
Although I seldom give a little spiel like I did in this one. And we would love to have you join us. I originally began
01:17:11 ►
hosting these salons in 2018 for my supporters on Patreon. They’re the ones who’ve been filling
01:17:17 ►
in the financial gap from living primarily on Social Security. And my supporters on Patreon
01:17:22 ►
have been my saviors these past few years.
01:17:25 ►
But when the pandemic arrived and lockdowns began, well, some of my supporters lost their
01:17:30 ►
jobs and had even more financial challenges than I did.
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So in addition to sending the links for each live salon only to my friends on Patreon,
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I now also post it on the salon’s Discord server.
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As you know, Discord is free and doesn’t even require your email address.
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And the link to our Discord server is at the top of our homepage at psychedelicsalon.com.
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However, unless I decide to podcast one of those live salons,
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I only post the recordings on Patreon.
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And right now there are over 130 of them available for download and listening
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if you want to hear some of our past hits and future conversations.
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Well, that’s it for today.
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And until next time, namaste, my friends.