Program Notes
Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
Dr. Bruce Damer at Burning Man 2017
Year this lecture was recorded: 2017
Some big announcements this week followed by a conversation with Dr. Bruce Damer who shares from his wealth of stories, science and psychedelic history.
You can learn much more about his many endeavors at his website: Damer.com
Dr. Damer’s podcast is The Levity Zone
TEDx talk by Dr. Damer explaining his work
Open-access paper about Damer’s findings including the graphic he scribbled down after working on the ‘origin of life’ problem in one of his ‘endo-trips’.
Life on Earth Came from a Hot Volcanic Pool, Not the Sea, New Evidence Suggests
Scientific American August 2017
Thanks to Daniel Loew for contributing to our new Salon 2.0 intro music. Listen his tracks here.
Also on this episode, Lex added a shoutout to the Lakey sisters - Alexa & Kat - and to Jaron West for helping with the Psychedelic History Project. The sisters produced this wonderful remix of Charlie Chaplin’s speech in The Great Dictator.
They also have an Instagram of moving psychedelic art.
To support the Lex Pelger in the Salon 2.0, join him on Patreon.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon
00:00:23 ►
2.0.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
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As you’ll hear in just a minute, Lex Pelger is making a few changes in his life and some of which we’ll see here in the salon.
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Now, I should remind you that while Lex has been the anchor that has kept these podcasts coming to you from the salon when I’ve been able to slow down a bit,
00:00:45 ►
well, there still will be opportunities for you and other salonners to also produce programs for the Salon 2.0.
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And eventually we’ll figure out a way to make it easy for people to submit their programs.
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But as of right now, the only other offers of programs for us
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have come from some of the musicians in the audience
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who are using Terrence McKenna soundbites in their work.
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And while I’ve really enjoyed the submissions that I’ve received,
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this, unfortunately for them, isn’t a music program.
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But if you’ve got other ideas that you think would fit and would like to submit,
00:01:16 ►
then let me know via the comments section on our website,
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which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com.
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One other little thing that I should clear up is how we go about funding these programs.
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As I’ve done for over 12 years now, I accept donations for the salon in general,
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and all of that money goes directly into expenses associated with the salon.
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In case you’re wondering, that comes to a little over $3,000 a year,
00:01:53 ►
In case you’re wondering, that comes to a little over $3,000 a year, and for the past eight years, those expenses have been covered by a small number of our fellow salonners who, from time to time, send a little donation in.
00:02:08 ►
The other thing that you’ve been hearing about is Patreon, which is a web-based service that allows people to donate anything from $1 a month and on up to support individual artists, like myself when I’m in writing mode.
00:02:12 ►
Well, currently on my personal Patreon account,
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there are 27 patrons who collectively send me a total of $222 a month.
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And that money I’ve been using for personal expenses.
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And while that amount may not seem huge,
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well, to me it’s become a really important part of keeping me from tapping what is left of my small savings.
00:02:36 ►
And while a few of my patrons have had to reduce their monthly amount or stop altogether,
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their names will still be featured in the new book that I’m writing,
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and, thanks to all of my patrons, it will be released directly into the public domain,
00:02:52 ►
which means that anyone who wants a copy can get it free in electronic format and for cost-plus shipping in paperback.
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Now, in just a minute, you’ll also hear Lex Pelger talk about his personal patron account.
00:03:01 ►
And that is working the same way for him.
00:03:05 ►
We each have our own patrons who are supporting us for diverse reasons.
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And I’m sure that I speak for Lex here as well when I say that a donation as small as $1 a month
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still is very important to us
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in that it lets us know that there are people
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who are willing to support our creative work
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month in and month out.
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To me, it feels like a small family on Patreon
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and on top of the financial support,
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I’ve been giving my patrons advanced copies of my work, and their comments are already
00:03:31 ►
influencing the way this new book is coming together. Now, getting past all of this financial
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stuff, let me say that I realize how hard it is for most of our fellow salonners to even make a small donation.
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I know because I’ve been there myself more than once.
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But the most important thing that anyone can do to support both the Salon 1 and Salon 2 is to tell your friends about these podcasts.
00:03:57 ►
Posting comments on your social media feed is the same as paying for advertising, in my opinion,
00:04:03 ►
so don’t think that you need to contribute money to these endeavors to be a part of our clan.
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Spreading the word is even more important, in my opinion.
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Now, at long last, I’m finally done talking,
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and so we can get to today’s Salon 2 program,
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in which Lex Pelger interviews one of my closest friends, Dr. Bruce Dahmer.
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Bruce has been responsible for a significant amount of the material
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that you and I have listened to here in the salon,
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and he’s been my co-host here on over 30 occasions.
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This is a non-Nonsense production.
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If you like what you hear and want to help us make the Salon 2.0 bigger and better,
00:04:52 ►
sign up to support this work monthly on patreon.com.
00:04:56 ►
As a two-person production, any help goes a long way.
00:05:01 ►
Join us at patreon.com slash non-nonsense.
00:05:27 ►
Join us at patreon.com slash nononsense. Underhistorian and beloved lecturer of the psychedelic circuit. We’ve got some big changes to announce here on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:05:33 ►
You’re already hearing our new intro with music by my friend Daniel Lowe,
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whose work I’ll be linking to in the episode notes.
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And with everything mixed by Matt Payne,
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the audio magician behind this whole show,
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who also crafted the new transition sounds we’ll be using.
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And to keep it all in the family, my girlfriend Claire is the source of our new intro and outro pitch for Patreon.
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And you better believe that once our daughter is here and gets big enough to help, she’ll be in the studio cleaning microphones.
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Because of these big life changes, moving to Boulder, Colorado, getting a real job so I can afford this little baby girl, and other shifts of life, it means that it’s time for me to
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step down as the host of Symposia’s live stage. My hat goes off to Brian and Mike and the rest of
00:06:20 ►
the team. They’ll keep pulling together great events and running the Symposia magazine.
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Symposia.com
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will remain a place where people can
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write their story,
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while Matt and I focus on this podcast,
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a place where people can
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say their story.
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So now,
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we’ll be running the Psychedelic Salon
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2.0 under the banner of
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No Nonsense Productions. Besides under the banner of No Nonsense Productions.
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Besides this salon,
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the No Nonsense Projects include
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the Psychedelic History Project,
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where we’re digitizing Al Timothy Leary’s archives,
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as well as publishing my graphic novel series
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about the endocannabinoid system
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based on Moby Dick.
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Hence our name,
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because, as Melville says in the affidavit,
00:07:08 ►
I tell ye, the sperm well will stand no nonsense if you want to help support Matt and I continuing this work
00:07:13 ►
even a small amount of monthly support on Patreon adds up
00:07:16 ►
if you send in two dollars a month or five dollars a month
00:07:20 ►
I’ll send you digital copies of my books
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and for higher levels of support
00:07:24 ►
you’ll get books in the mail, signed and stamped,
00:07:27 ►
plus shout-outs on the podcast, other gifts,
00:07:30 ►
and free sperm whale tattoos, if desired.
00:07:34 ►
We also have the No Nonsense newsletter,
00:07:37 ►
if you’d like to sign up for our occasional updates with the big news.
00:07:41 ►
With signing up for that,
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you’ll get a digital copy of my queer chapter
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on Reagan, AIDS, and the birth of medical marijuana
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most of all
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we’re happy to be part of this community
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and we appreciate all the kind words and offers of help we get
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via email or on the road
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right now it’s Matt handling the audio
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and me handling the interviews
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but if anyone out there likes helping with social media or in other ways,
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you can email me at pelger at gmail dot com.
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That’s P-E-L-G-E-R at gmail dot com.
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And as always, I’m happy to hear your comments on the show,
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leads on who to interview, and the people with stories that need to be shared.
00:08:22 ►
I promise that every email gets read,
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and almost everyone gets responded to.
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Just not the crazy ones, and I have seen some doozies.
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If you’re convinced that we are a CIA operation,
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you should see our budget.
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Finally, we have lots of ideas for taking this show to the next level.
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So if you know any companies who would want to sponsor this podcast,
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or private donors who share our vision of ideas for taking the show to the next level. So if you know any companies who would want to sponsor this podcast,
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or private donors who share our vision and would like to help take the Psychedelic Salon 2.0
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forward, as well as
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helping out with Lorenzo’s retirement fund,
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please let us know.
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So that’s all the announcements for this week,
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except for one.
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Because this week’s interview
00:09:01 ►
was recorded in Bruce Dahmer’s barn,
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amidst the boxes of Leary clippings from the Psychedelic History Project.
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And that makes it the perfect time to give a thank you shout out to the Lakey sisters,
00:09:12 ►
Alexa and Kat, as well as Alexa’s husband, Jaron West.
00:09:17 ►
They’re new friends who reached out because of this podcast
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and helped out with their time and a nice scanner
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for capturing much of the 1,500 items we managed to scan in.
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They were the creators responsible for that masterful remix
00:09:31 ►
of Charlie Chaplin’s speech from The Great Dictator,
00:09:34 ►
which goes viral every few years.
00:09:37 ►
We’ll link to that in the notes,
00:09:38 ►
as well as their new moving psychedelic art on Instagram.
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Now, with the announcements complete
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and the shout-out shouted,
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I’m pleased to introduce that lovely soul,
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Dr. Bruce Dahmer.
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Some of you might have seen him on the lecture circuit
00:09:55 ►
where his mix of science and mysticism
00:09:57 ►
is a perfect fit to soften the shulganistas
00:10:00 ►
and to ground the mechanites.
00:10:02 ►
Or you might have heard him on his Levity Zone podcast.
00:10:06 ►
But you might not know that he works with NASA on projects like asteroid capture technology
00:10:10 ►
and deciding where to land rovers on other planets.
00:10:14 ►
And in other accomplishments, while I was there in Santa Cruz staying on his bus no further,
00:10:20 ►
Dr. Dahmer’s Scientific American cover story came out with his theory on the origin of life.
00:10:26 ►
Using Darwin’s original insight of life forming in hot pools,
00:10:30 ►
he visualized the entire prebiotic world until he could run a simulation in his head
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that showed him how life could have clumped together from that original swirl of minerals.
00:10:40 ►
It’s taken that scientific field by storm, and we’ll link to the article in the episode notes.
00:10:44 ►
It’s taken that scientific field by storm, and we’ll link to the article in the episode notes. As a friend of Terence McKenna, a hero to the vintage computer movement, and an old-fashioned gentleman,
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I’m pleased to give you a talk with Dr. Bruce Dahmer.
00:11:02 ►
Growing up in Canada where you did, what did you hear about drugs when you were young?
00:11:08 ►
What was the opinion like around you?
00:11:11 ►
Well, you know, we didn’t have any.
00:11:15 ►
You know, I was, so in 1970 I was eight.
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And it wasn’t really part of our world.
00:11:22 ►
I remember across from our school there was like a real actual hippie colony.
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And we were sort of, oh, don’t go over there.
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I kind of wish I had because it was itinerant young people.
00:11:37 ►
Because Canada kind of picked up the end of the hippie revolution and carried it into the 70s.
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Because Canada didn’t have a war it was fighting,
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didn’t have an anti-Vietnam War,
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it didn’t have the same race issues.
00:11:51 ►
It was a civil society, so it didn’t have that kind of…
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I mean, Canadians weren’t protesting their government.
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Their government wasn’t doing stupid things, for the most part.
00:12:01 ►
We had the crisis in Quebec, the constitutional crisis,
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the Front pour la Libération de Quebec, which was trying to, it turned into an armed insurrection,
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actually. So in 1970, there was kidnappings, and there was a sort of police standoff.
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And that was kind of, that was the October crisis.
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It was a reasonably serious thing for Canada to go through, the FLQ.
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And that led to a political party getting into power in 1976 that held referendums, and the PQ in Canada didn’t break apart
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because people voted against it twice.
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So that’s how sort of Canada’s social emergence was happening.
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In those years, you know, we were switching to the metric system.
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We were switching to bilingualism, multiculturalism.
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And Canada sort of had 20-year plans.
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You know, Pierre Trudeau was prime minister for 18 years.
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At one point in school, I mean, this is so non-hippie, you know, and things were.
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I mean, because it was a civil society, people, their beliefs was, you know, equal treatment of everybody, the raising of the standard for all, investment in public, the public.
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And the country was potentially going to break up.
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And I remember Pierre Trudeau being on TV saying,
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well, you have to decide what you want.
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Do you want 10 countries?
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Do you want five countries?
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Do you want one country?
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Just, you know, just decide.
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You know, and no American leader
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would have ever said such a thing.
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And in our in our
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elementary school there were like charts on the wall showing the different possible future
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configurations of canada broken up the maritimes would be one country quebec would be another one
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alberta would join the u.s because it was so full of cattlemen and oilmen and it in sort of the most American part of Canada.
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And British Columbia would link up with the Yukon.
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You know, who knows?
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It didn’t happen.
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So Canada’s issues were different.
00:14:16 ►
So we had a, I mean, there was sort of a hippie revolution a little bit,
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say most on the West Coast.
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But the hippies were sort of proper and well-behaved and probably took regular baths.
00:14:31 ►
And so the drug use, I mean, certainly there was pot.
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I mean, I remember in high school,
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high school students were growing pot in between spruce trees
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to hide it out in the forests around Kamloops.
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There was pot plantations.
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We sort of just heard about them.
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We didn’t really know much.
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And I wasn’t out the back of the school trying to score pot.
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It was the last thing on my mind, you know.
00:14:57 ►
I was a really serious student.
00:14:59 ►
I was the front of the classroom kind of getting straight A’s type student
00:15:04 ►
trying to do everything
00:15:05 ►
right by the system and advance and advance myself and drawing cartoons and writing essays
00:15:11 ►
for universities. And, you know, so there wasn’t, there was, and I know I’m going on and on here,
00:15:18 ►
but in grade six or seven, there was a film shown about, you know, it was a film shown about tobacco.
00:15:32 ►
And it was a scare tactics film. And it showed people’s like dissected lungs that died of
00:15:41 ►
tobacco, lung cancer. That was the scariest thing that I ever saw.
00:15:47 ►
I think it was trying to get us not to take up cigarettes.
00:15:52 ►
But there wasn’t really, I mean, I think that there was one film show to us
00:15:59 ►
that showed like really whacked out people taking super colorful pills
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and something like that
00:16:07 ►
around 1974 or 75 but it didn’t leave much of an impression but this this lung cancer thing sure did
00:16:13 ►
my god it was like it was terrifying it was traumatizing it was really kind of kind of stupid
00:16:19 ►
but it actually you know you know probably dissuaded people from smoking cigarettes.
00:16:29 ►
Yeah, and since it’s the biggest killer as far as drugs go, it’s a good question.
00:16:34 ►
How far do you go with this anti-drug stuff when sometimes all drugs have some form of harm to them and need messages like that?
00:16:43 ►
have some form of harm to them and need messages like that.
00:16:44 ►
Yeah.
00:16:50 ►
I remember, you know, everything sort of happened in the U.S.
00:16:55 ►
And the U.S. is sort of this great big nutty basket case of a country to the south.
00:17:04 ►
And the whole idea was crazy things happened there and crazy experiments on the population. And they had weird beliefs, like
00:17:07 ►
Americans had this term called liberty. And for us, for me, maybe for other Canadians, it was like,
00:17:15 ►
this makes no sense whatsoever, this term liberty. It seemed like a slogan. It seemed like
00:17:22 ►
the kind of propaganda you heard in the Soviet Union, really pretty much the same. Give me liberty or give me death. I mean, what kind of comparison is that? Does that mean that you’re going to kill other people to get this thing called liberty? And what does liberty get you? What does it mean? What are the controls on liberty?
00:17:46 ►
I mean, you just can’t have liberty.
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Society can’t work.
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And it turns out that was a radical Whig term.
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So the radical Whigs, radical Whigism,
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took over, created the American Revolution.
00:18:02 ►
Recently, articles and books have been written
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that question whether the American Revolution was a mistake or not
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because where America’s ended up is really a failure
00:18:12 ►
compared to Canada.
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We’ve got racism.
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We’ve got terrible economic disparities.
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We’ve got terrible leadership, non-representative government,
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wasteful wars, high murder rates. You know, we’ve got high achievement in many sectors,
00:18:32 ►
but it’s not a successful society for the average person. And the average person is working way too
00:18:40 ►
many jobs, can never get ahead. You know, there’s been economic enslavement again. And this has
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happened several times in the history of America. America’s never really been a very successful
00:18:52 ►
country for individuals that are living here. Because then you get people with concentrating
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power and you get periods where you have civil infrastructure gets built, and then you have periods where it gets taken apart.
00:19:06 ►
So in the 80s, the so-called Republican Revolution wiped out social safety nets
00:19:11 ►
for people with mental health problems.
00:19:14 ►
You know, it created the war on drugs.
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You know, it did all these things that were super counterproductive.
00:19:19 ►
So the American system is not very effective.
00:19:23 ►
And so these books that compare, say, how Australia is governed or Denmark
00:19:28 ►
or any of the democracies, America is not a democracy and never has been.
00:19:33 ►
It’s never represented individuals in government, very rarely.
00:19:40 ►
You know, quote, unquote, it’s a republic,
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but it has all these layers to prevent individuals from having influence.
00:19:46 ►
When I was sworn in as a U.S. citizen, and I know this is turning into a rant, this is a drug question,
00:19:53 ►
the federal judge said, you don’t have a democracy at the national level.
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It’s closed to you. You do have it at the local, so sign your voter registration card.
00:20:04 ►
This is 1,000 people being sworn in.
00:20:07 ►
And then the year 2000 election happened.
00:20:09 ►
Of course, that was true.
00:20:11 ►
It’s like, what a complete farce that was.
00:20:15 ►
You know, and it’s only two parties.
00:20:16 ►
And there’s manipulation of voting procedures.
00:20:21 ►
And there’s no oversight.
00:20:22 ►
There’s no oversight committee to nullify that election
00:20:25 ►
and to basically fire those parties and fire all those officials you know they should have never
00:20:31 ►
had their jobs you know in a in a real country there’s a electoral commission that would have
00:20:39 ►
the power to relieve all these people of their duties you And there’s an idea of responsibility,
00:20:45 ►
not just manipulation,
00:20:47 ►
to get what you want and push your man into power.
00:20:51 ►
It’s ludicrous.
00:20:52 ►
So the United States,
00:20:54 ►
the irony is it’s a failed state in a lot of ways.
00:20:58 ►
In significant ways, it’s a failed state.
00:21:02 ►
But living in a failed or constantly failing state means there’s
00:21:08 ►
flexibility, means that immigrants can come in and push their way up and create Google,
00:21:14 ►
or things like the drug revolution, the psychedelic revolution can get started here,
00:21:20 ►
get clamped down upon, and then have a resurgence. You can have people like MAPS and Hefter
00:21:26 ►
that can gradually push into the system
00:21:30 ►
and get their research done
00:21:31 ►
because they can use the same kind of manipulation and tactics
00:21:34 ►
because no one’s running the show here.
00:21:38 ►
You can eventually get your agenda put on the table.
00:21:41 ►
You can get gay marriage.
00:21:41 ►
You can get legalized weed.
00:21:44 ►
If you work the system well enough, you can get your agenda. It’s messy,
00:21:48 ►
and it may take decades. But in really conservative societies like, say, France,
00:21:54 ►
it could only be done if it was decided by the civil service to do it.
00:22:01 ►
Those are very conservative societies that don’t have a kind, there’s not that many cracks in them.
00:22:07 ►
Culturally, people just are negative or they’re not open to change.
00:22:12 ►
They’re open to habit but not change.
00:22:15 ►
And America’s got so many holes in it that these incredible experiments can happen.
00:22:20 ►
I can live like I do here on Ancient Oaks Farm,
00:22:24 ►
this very bizarre non-standard lifestyle.
00:22:28 ►
I couldn’t get away with this in Sweden. Or the only way that I could get away with this
00:22:37 ►
in one of those countries is to be a known eccentric artist and put a lot of effort into that.
00:22:44 ►
known eccentric and artists and put a lot of effort into that.
00:22:50 ►
I couldn’t do this in Singapore or Japan,
00:22:57 ►
but there’s this freedom here in basically what is a partially failed country.
00:23:01 ►
Always, it’s never quite tightly managed.
00:23:11 ►
And because it isn’t tightly managed, it goes off the rails all the time, but then it allows wackadoodle things to happen. So I call it the laboratory rat maze,
00:23:18 ►
where the rats are being driven mad in the maze, but some of them are mad geniuses,
00:23:25 ►
and some of them learn how to climb the walls of the maze. Others are manipulating. Others are driving the media here,
00:23:29 ►
or fake news media drives rats crazy for its own benefit or its own entertainment.
00:23:33 ►
But then there’s this crazy character
00:23:36 ►
that does the most bizarre things,
00:23:38 ►
like Burning Man.
00:23:41 ►
This is a bizarre invention.
00:23:43 ►
It wouldn’t have happened anywhere else.
00:23:46 ►
And especially to be hearing that here right around the Boulder Creek area,
00:23:49 ►
because you call it the psychedelic shire around here, right?
00:23:52 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:23:53 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:23:54 ►
Mainly because of its lineage.
00:23:57 ►
So up the road we have Ken Kesey’s house up on Skyline,
00:24:02 ►
15, 20 minutes that way.
00:24:04 ►
A lot started at that house in La Honda.
00:24:08 ►
Then down the road, you have the first site of the first acid test, which is commemorated by a
00:24:15 ►
bus stop in Soquel on Soquel Avenue, commemorated by the County of Santa Cruz a year and a half ago.
00:24:22 ►
And it has a picture of further on it and, you know,
00:24:26 ►
Neil Cassidy and whatever.
00:24:29 ►
And it says, the bus came along and you get on the bus.
00:24:32 ►
I mean, this is like a Santa Cruz thing.
00:24:33 ►
They’re proud that Ken Babs and Kesey and then the Grateful Dead were founded that night.
00:24:40 ►
And they were proud of this anniversary of the first asset test.
00:24:43 ►
I mean, this is not your standard American city or county.
00:24:47 ►
And then here in this valley, you have all these people that,
00:24:51 ►
we have Ralph Abraham up on the ridge here,
00:24:54 ►
who was well-known to listeners from the trilogues,
00:24:58 ►
a good friend of Terence McKenna’s and Rupert Sheldrake,
00:25:01 ►
a well-known psychedelic mathematician who helped revolutionize mathematics,
00:25:07 ►
chaos theory and strange attractors and all that. You know, anybody who created strange attractors
00:25:13 ►
must have been pretty, pretty strange himself. But then you have Nick Herbert, you know, just
00:25:20 ►
around the corner, and you have all these people. Andrew Jones used to live a half a mile from here
00:25:26 ►
at Penny and Duran’s Penny Slinger Hills place.
00:25:31 ►
For two years, there was his van driving around Boulder Creek.
00:25:35 ►
I’d see him in the new leaf and the van with his artwork on the side.
00:25:41 ►
And this is normal.
00:25:42 ►
I mean, nobody looks.
00:25:43 ►
And then all around here are burners and maps.
00:25:48 ►
Maps is just down the road in Santa Cruz
00:25:52 ►
and many of the maps people live up here
00:25:54 ►
because it’s the woods.
00:25:56 ►
Some of the first communes were here.
00:25:59 ►
Holiday’s Commune on Holiday Road in Ben Loman.
00:26:03 ►
It was a set of cabins, and I think the whole place was
00:26:07 ►
rented for $50 a month. And so hippies set up a commune there in 1966, which had basically,
00:26:17 ►
if you were in the Haight-Ashbury, you could take this holidays bus, a painted bus, down,
00:26:23 ►
went on a regular basis to take kids out of the Haight-Ashbury to
00:26:26 ►
holidays where they could wash their bodies naked in the river, in the San Lorenzo River,
00:26:33 ►
and they could live a life. They could come to this beautiful natural area,
00:26:38 ►
kind of like Gary Snyder had done out in the Nevada City area on the ridge there
00:26:43 ►
in North San Juan.
00:26:45 ►
He was the pioneer of going back to the land, living out there.
00:26:49 ►
But the hippies of the Haight,
00:26:51 ►
and the Haight-Ashbury was an unpleasant place for a lot of them.
00:26:54 ►
There were people with serious mental illness problems,
00:26:58 ►
physical illness problems that were lining up for the free clinic.
00:27:02 ►
It was unpleasant.
00:27:04 ►
Housing was irregular. Food was irregular. I
00:27:08 ►
mean, these kids were getting money sent from home. I mean, there was no, it wasn’t a sustainable
00:27:13 ►
model in the Haight-Ashbury. So for a few of them to get on the bus and go down to holidays,
00:27:19 ►
and there was food, there were little triangular circle things that were done. There was a blonde girl who looks like she’s straight out of a Midwestern suburb,
00:27:29 ►
and she was called the Angel from the Hate,
00:27:32 ►
and she’d bring in giant bags of acid tabs to hand out.
00:27:37 ►
And there’s a film actually on, I put it online on the Internet Archive,
00:27:41 ►
seven chapters that illustrate.
00:27:44 ►
It was shot by Pierre Sogel in 1966 and 67.
00:27:50 ►
I just posted it on social media,
00:27:52 ►
the one that shows the bus going to holidays.
00:27:54 ►
And you can see the bus literally driving down Skyline,
00:27:58 ►
and then there’s shots of it turning left at Ben Lomond
00:28:02 ►
at Highlands Park and getting there,
00:28:04 ►
and there’s life in the commune.
00:28:08 ►
So Santa Cruz is ground zero, away in the psychedelic world
00:28:13 ►
because you had these people that turned on to psychedelics,
00:28:19 ►
that created Pacific High School, which was a very revolutionary high school.
00:28:23 ►
They created a home birthing movement
00:28:25 ►
here. They created organic farming started here at Camp Joy in Boulder Creek. Snyder’s,
00:28:32 ►
it’s at Alan Chadwick’s farm that started the North American. He studied with the German fellow,
00:28:40 ►
the Swiss fellow, Steiner, right? And so he started organic farming, which is now a huge industry, started here.
00:28:49 ►
And like I said, homeschooling and the community, the psychedelicists,
00:28:56 ►
Ralph Abraham writes beautifully in his book, Hip Santa Cruz.
00:29:00 ►
So if you want a wonderful view of how central Santa Cruz is in not only the psychedelic revolution, but also social revolutions collect stories, sometimes sitting in my bus, which is called No Further at the top in honor of Kesey’s bus.
00:29:32 ►
And that hip Santa Cruz talks about how people that, very locked down, kind of very uninteresting place.
00:29:50 ►
The University of California came in.
00:29:53 ►
Ralph Abraham came here and rented that Victorian house and created this alternate, weird, polyamorous, drug-taking community.
00:30:02 ►
But he was a professor at the university and he created this
00:30:05 ►
whole scene. I think they rented the house for a dollar a year and he created a whole scene.
00:30:11 ►
And then there was Paul Lee here and they created sort of a revolution on campus for
00:30:18 ►
how to learn. And they created like alternate learning outside of campus, even though they were campus people.
00:30:26 ►
And then the community got up, got organized, and it created this wonderful bookstore, created the Catalyst.
00:30:34 ►
It created the Hip Pocket bookstore that was Peter Demme.
00:30:38 ►
Then on the coast, they were going to build all these condos and shopping malls right by the lighthouse.
00:30:45 ►
going to build all these condos and shopping malls right by the lighthouse. And these hipsters got together and fought it to the ground and turned it into this fantastic open meadows with
00:30:52 ►
Monterey, Cyprus and everything. It’s like the old, it’s preserved. And now you can see the
00:30:59 ►
monarch butterflies come. Otherwise it would have been just another stupid shopping mall.
00:31:05 ►
So Santa Cruz is where psychedelic heads pushed back and said,
00:31:10 ►
no, we don’t believe in building another shopping mall
00:31:13 ►
or a bunch of condos for some developer
00:31:15 ►
to take away our heritage and all this beauty.
00:31:19 ►
And they fought back, and they preserved something for all time.
00:31:23 ►
And it was them, and only them, that did that,
00:31:28 ►
that realized we can re-engineer this thing and rework this thing. And so you’ve got this whole
00:31:35 ►
ethos that goes back to the mid-60s here, this layer of people who are still around,
00:31:42 ►
who invented all this stuff that got exported all over the United
00:31:45 ►
States. And this little Bear Creek Valley is, you know, kind of in a way that I call it a psychedelic
00:31:52 ►
shire, but because you find these fuzzy-footed, bearded people like Fred McPherson here,
00:32:00 ►
you know, that are like hobbits. I mean, they live in hobbit houses. Maybe not, a lot of them don’t do psychedelics anymore,
00:32:07 ►
but they have that whole patina, that whole radiant aura around them
00:32:14 ►
that wouldn’t be there if they hadn’t.
00:32:17 ►
And whether it was communes or acid or experimental this or that
00:32:22 ►
or experimental music groups or experiments in food and in caring
00:32:28 ►
for children they just pushed all the limits and and they reinvented the way it was to live in
00:32:33 ►
america and we talked about how crazy america is it didn’t come and clamp down on that it just
00:32:39 ►
absorbed that and it became the norm and so that’s what we owe these original shire middle earth hobbits for
00:32:49 ►
uh crazy the hobbits um now did your psychedelic journey start around here
00:32:57 ►
well yeah yes and no in that um i was not that I avoided psychedelics.
00:33:06 ►
And I still, you know, I can’t say I have a huge amount of experience of them.
00:33:11 ►
But Terrence showed up one day here at the farm in 1998 with Ralph Abraham and Finn, his son Finn McKenna.
00:33:21 ►
And I’d been sort of emailing him with him and corresponding with him for a couple of years.
00:33:26 ►
He actually mentioned me on the Art Bell show at one point.
00:33:29 ►
You know, it was like he mentioned my name
00:33:32 ►
and somebody sent me a tape of that later that Art Bell had…
00:33:37 ►
Anyway, but whatever.
00:33:38 ►
So there he was, and I was sort of interested
00:33:42 ►
in having him come and present at one of our events.
00:33:47 ►
Didn’t materialize, but he wanted to come and be with me
00:33:51 ►
because I was the maven, the expert on avatars and virtual world cyberspace,
00:33:56 ►
which for Terrence was fascinating because this was landscapes, visible landscapes.
00:34:04 ►
These are multi-user worlds like you’d see in World of Warcraft
00:34:07 ►
or Second Life or something.
00:34:09 ►
It was the early phase of them.
00:34:11 ►
I organized a community that was building all that,
00:34:14 ►
and I created the first conferences.
00:34:15 ►
I wrote their first book to kickstart it.
00:34:19 ►
And, you know, I like Snow Crash like everybody else,
00:34:22 ►
the Neil Stevenson novel.
00:34:24 ►
So there he was sitting.
00:34:26 ►
They came in, and I met Terrence,
00:34:30 ►
and he sat at the glass table that’s still there in the house,
00:34:34 ►
and I put him in front of a big, big monitor
00:34:38 ►
and put him into Traveler,
00:34:41 ►
which is a world with big talking heads with other people’s voice,
00:34:45 ►
and it would lip sync them to Terrence.
00:34:48 ►
And then we went into these massive landscapes and hours and hours of this.
00:34:54 ►
And he was pretty blown away.
00:34:57 ►
And he turned to Finn and was like, wow, we have to get the PC,
00:35:02 ►
because he just had some dumb Mac, which wasn’t multitasking. Macs
00:35:06 ►
were pretty bad in those days. So Finn was going to buy a PC and they were going to take it in
00:35:12 ►
their luggage back to Hawaii. And Terrence said, at the time we made a date. So there were two,
00:35:21 ►
three dates were made. One was, I wasn’t going to go to Palenque, Mexico. I
00:35:26 ►
don’t know why I didn’t. Nobody knew how sick Terrence actually was at the time.
00:35:31 ►
So I wasn’t going to Palenque, but after Palenque, he was going to
00:35:36 ►
meet me and host me in Hawaii for a couple of weeks at his house. So, um, and at the time, well, well, I thought now’s the time. So Terrence arranged,
00:35:50 ►
because I realized Terrence’s brain is not scrambled. And I had avoided anything of that
00:35:57 ►
nature because I used something called endo, uh, which I call now endo, but I could go into these states, what Terrence called on the natch,
00:36:08 ►
naturally, as every little nine-year-old kid can do, I mean, in imaginal worlds. And I’d used
00:36:16 ►
that ability to create these immensely rich internal worlds that ran themselves,
00:36:22 ►
and many in parallel. I used that to build my career, whether it’s writing 100,000 lines of code,
00:36:29 ►
visualizing that as a machine, drawing spacecraft, doing virtual worlds.
00:36:35 ►
It was always using that internal reality.
00:36:41 ►
And here’s a man, though, that took medicinal things medicinal things or elixirs I like to call them
00:36:48 ►
he took elixirs and explored worlds of his own of that that came through the elixirs
00:36:53 ►
so I was very interested in that and I decided now’s the time because we’re going to be comparing
00:37:01 ►
notes you know we’re going to do something notes. You know, we’re going to do something together. So he, through channels, provided me access to my first experience,
00:37:09 ►
which was very intense and made his hair more curly than it was when I told him what happened.
00:37:17 ►
That’s, you know, for another day.
00:37:19 ►
But then, so I had that experience on my own in the wilderness.
00:37:27 ►
And it was kind of a rebirth.
00:37:30 ►
It was kind of what I expected, but it was very…
00:37:35 ►
When I came out of it, I felt I don’t need to strive anymore.
00:37:39 ►
I’m done. I’m complete as a human being.
00:37:43 ►
Of course, I went on to strive, worry, and fuss,
00:37:47 ►
and make money to pay off the farm, and do all that.
00:37:51 ►
But for a brief time, I was like, I’m now complete as a human being
00:37:55 ►
from what I witnessed and experienced and became.
00:38:01 ►
I don’t think Terrence ever went to the place I went to.
00:38:04 ►
And I mean that not facetiously at all.
00:38:08 ►
I don’t think he went to that place
00:38:10 ►
because I never heard it in any subsequent stories,
00:38:14 ►
this type of place.
00:38:17 ►
But then Jim Essex and I arrived in Hawaii,
00:38:22 ►
in Kailua, Kona, rented a car,
00:38:26 ►
drove up the terrible road to,
00:38:29 ►
I think Terrence came and picked us up initially
00:38:31 ►
and we went to his house.
00:38:34 ►
I actually, I think I slept outside.
00:38:37 ►
But we did this experiment from his house
00:38:39 ►
where we were going to run the virtual worlds
00:38:41 ►
on his newly acquired Windows machine,
00:38:46 ►
much more advanced than his Mac, surprisingly,
00:38:50 ►
and off this dish on the roof.
00:38:53 ►
It was a military-produced technology to bring wireless Internet, 40 megabit,
00:39:00 ►
from the ISP in Kailua to the top of Terrence’s house so that he could be on
00:39:06 ►
the mountain and be online and he always he laughed he said you know military technology
00:39:15 ►
is connecting me to you know imagine you know so all you conspiracy theorists out there yes
00:39:23 ►
the Pentagon equipped Terrence with this dish so that he could muddle your minds and destroy another generation of potential troublemakers.
00:39:34 ►
Anyway, but the dish would actually pop in the morning.
00:39:38 ►
So you had to wait until the sun hit it to warm it up, to give it the right shape.
00:39:44 ►
So you couldn’t use the Internet until it had acquired the right shape.
00:39:48 ►
And you had to run the generator to get enough juice to run it.
00:39:53 ►
So it was a non-trivial thing.
00:39:56 ►
You had to go out where there were bales of hay
00:39:58 ►
to try to block the noise and turn on the generator to juice the house up
00:40:02 ►
in order to run the PCs and the
00:40:07 ►
net connection. And you couldn’t do voiceover because there was a lot of delay. So we literally,
00:40:14 ►
for several days, we sat, you know, I had an odd smoke with him, but he complained bitterly
00:40:22 ►
about the pot, the terribleaiian pot and had asked
00:40:26 ►
did i bring trinity gold did i bring you know his my kingdom oh my kingdom for some trinity gold
00:40:34 ►
because the pot was so bad in hawaii and he was just a you know a chronic regular user i mean
00:40:40 ►
so um and then came the great day where finn built this hyperboreal gate, which was a teleport to this wonderful world built by a fellow named Factor.
00:40:55 ►
And it was a tryptamine, DMT-inspired, low-resolution, but very convincing avatar space in Active Worlds, the platform. And Terrence took
00:41:07 ►
groups of people through the Hyperboreal Gate. There’s a video of this online. You can see clips
00:41:13 ►
of this. It’s called Terrence McKenna on the Natch. But he took people through this gate
00:41:19 ►
that Finn had built, and Finn guided him, and he used the avatar named Zone Ghost.
00:41:26 ►
Zone Ghost. And I read in a letter, I acquired a collection of letters from Terrence, over 15 years
00:41:32 ►
of letters, some of the only documents left from Terrence McKenna’s life, because the rest were
00:41:38 ►
destroyed in the fire of 2007. And in the letter, this is earlier than, this is like five years before, he said,
00:41:48 ►
I would like to be a zone ghost in cyberspace and meet my tiny audiences online so I don’t
00:41:57 ►
have to travel. Because he had told Jim and I that I’m just so tired. I’m so tired.
00:42:04 ►
I don’t know what’s going on, I’m just so exhausted.
00:42:07 ►
And he looked bad, he looked pale, and we didn’t know he was ill.
00:42:14 ►
He actually told us, I’m having dreams I can’t explain,
00:42:17 ►
they’re so strange, they’re so strange.
00:42:19 ►
He was very troubled, and that was the oncoming seizure
00:42:23 ►
that was about to erupt because my sister
00:42:26 ►
had a similar brain cancer and when they erupt the seizure just it’s unbelievable when they
00:42:33 ►
announced their arrival these big brain tumors and that happened six weeks later I think and
00:42:38 ►
Christy had to drag him into the pickup truck and get him off the mountain. It was a horrific experience.
00:42:45 ►
It really was. But this was just before that eruption. So we did this hyperboreal gait and
00:42:54 ►
Terrence on the PC and talking to people and doing hunt and peck typing. If you’ll notice,
00:43:00 ►
in the video, he just uses two-finger typing. So this man of words, this man of Joyce-ian
00:43:08 ►
skill, he was a hunt-and-peck typist. And when he typed, you know, this is turning into a Terrence
00:43:16 ►
Fest, but whatever, this is what your audience wants. So when he types, his tongue moves.
00:43:23 ►
So when he types, his tongue moves.
00:43:28 ►
So he would talk about, later I found,
00:43:32 ►
he would talk about the genius of a certain, was it St. Augustine?
00:43:38 ►
Who could actually memorize, he could read books without mouthing the words as he was reading them.
00:43:42 ►
This was an amazing achievement for the 12th century.
00:43:46 ►
And a person could memorize a book and do it back, but he could actually read without
00:43:51 ►
mouthing out the words, because that’s how people read.
00:43:55 ►
But Terence, when Terence Huttonpeck typed, he was always moving his lips and his tongue.
00:44:01 ►
He was doing this, you know, he was embodying the words really in a way.
00:44:08 ►
But I don’t know how on earth he was able to write four books in one year, which actually
00:44:13 ►
did occur, I think, in 1991 or two. I think he had three books that came out one year. They must
00:44:19 ►
have all been in preparation. But there he is doing his thing. He’s making faces into the camera because his
00:44:27 ►
avatar is projected every second or two onto a screen in the world as people’s avatars are
00:44:33 ►
milling about. But he’s this gray alien zone ghost. And he had a fantastic time. I mean,
00:44:40 ►
it was his dream come true. It was visible landscapes made by language in cyberspace.
00:44:47 ►
He felt he was there.
00:44:48 ►
He was taking groups into this trippy world and then taking them back out,
00:44:54 ►
and then they would report on what it was like.
00:44:57 ►
So the goal that we had was to compare his tryptamine-induced worlds
00:45:03 ►
with these low-res first avatar worlds
00:45:06 ►
and compare them.
00:45:09 ►
And I had entered his world.
00:45:12 ►
I didn’t really comment much about it.
00:45:16 ►
I told him what happened, and he was sort of curled back.
00:45:21 ►
It was very intense.
00:45:24 ►
But we mainly focused on this. And Terrence,
00:45:31 ►
so that morning, I think after we had done it, I said, so what, how does it compare?
00:45:39 ►
What was your experience? And he turned to me and he said, it’s not unlike DMT.
00:45:48 ►
It’s not unlike DMT.
00:45:51 ►
And that was an interesting endorsement
00:45:55 ►
in a sense of the power,
00:45:57 ►
the transformative power of these worlds.
00:45:59 ►
And now we have super advanced VR
00:46:02 ►
that if Terrence could try that,
00:46:06 ►
he would just be floored.
00:46:08 ►
I mean, it’s so beautiful, VR today.
00:46:09 ►
This is stunning.
00:46:15 ►
I mean, it’s, you know, Tilt Brush and all these worlds and things like that.
00:46:18 ►
It’s just, it is truly a psychedelic experience. Without the body involvement that psychedelics has, visual sort of sort of thing and you got to see a lot of the
00:46:29 ►
with the the digibarn here and the history of computing that you’ve assembled uh here in
00:46:34 ►
boulder creek you’ve seen a lot of the psychedelics and how they’re related to this computer revolution
00:46:40 ►
through your work yeah i mean uh so in a sense because i collected these leary papers
00:46:48 ►
that were surrounded by were sitting in the middle of i i don’t know why when i when i i was always
00:46:56 ►
fascinated with that time so like i absorbed books like joan didion’s books about this period and electric Kool-Aid acid tests.
00:47:08 ►
For some reason, and I read that years and years ago, but I was fascinated by this group of
00:47:14 ►
individuals who really went on a magical mystery tour. They recovered something. They went
00:47:21 ►
fearlessly into this incredible space. It wasn’t outer space.
00:47:26 ►
They weren’t going to the moon. They were going to another space that was in some ways more
00:47:32 ►
impactful for humanity, which was the full ungluing of habit and cultural conditioning,
00:47:40 ►
and even your own sense of balance, for God’s sakes, and the fact you can see anything.
00:47:46 ►
And they were willing to smush their neurons
00:47:50 ►
so that they could crack open and let what may come.
00:47:55 ►
And do it in a community and do it with their art
00:47:59 ►
and do it with things that had really no history in human use
00:48:04 ►
and just experiment.
00:48:07 ►
And it was like one of the greatest,
00:48:09 ►
and the cultural products they made were beautiful,
00:48:12 ►
not only like the home birth movement
00:48:14 ►
or preserved parks or community centers or organic farming,
00:48:20 ►
but the arts and the music was so powerful from that period,
00:48:27 ►
you know, 1965 to early 70s. There was such juice and power in that that has never been reproduced. I mean,
00:48:35 ►
it’s funny because at the Grammys, when you get somebody like Justin Timberlake, all these
00:48:40 ►
incredibly weak, thin soup people that have really, there’s nothing going on, right, with them, nothing.
00:48:48 ►
Some of them are pimped-up prostitutes, basically.
00:48:52 ►
Galen’s nephew writes half the songs for these kids, right?
00:48:57 ►
He’s like the song crafter, and it’s all garbage.
00:49:01 ►
But when you have the Grammys, and you have one of them up there and you have
00:49:05 ►
somebody like you know a big-breasted beautiful black powerful woman singer from i forget which
00:49:13 ►
one she was up one year and they’re all fawning over her saying we’re not there’s the real one
00:49:21 ►
you know and she’s in her 70s, and it wasn’t Lena Horne.
00:49:25 ►
It was like Tina Turner or somebody like that who had the full power.
00:49:31 ►
And the current generation, because they’re so co-opted by money
00:49:35 ►
and stupidity and mundanity, they know where the real power is,
00:49:42 ►
and it’s these groups from the 60s and into the 70s.
00:49:47 ►
They connected to the electricity, and a big part of that was acid and the drugs that opened them up.
00:49:56 ►
Without that, you would have had sort of late 1950s kind of, you know, you’d have nice tunes, but you wouldn’t have had tremendous,
00:50:02 ►
you’d have nice tunes but you wouldn’t have had tremendous
00:50:04 ►
you wouldn’t have lizard power
00:50:05 ►
coming through like Jim Morrison
00:50:08 ►
none of that
00:50:10 ►
so you can feel it
00:50:13 ►
and you can see it
00:50:15 ►
in these articles
00:50:16 ►
the complete bewilderment
00:50:19 ►
of America
00:50:20 ►
and all these newspaper reporters
00:50:22 ►
what is going on
00:50:24 ►
and it exploded in about 18 months, between about 66 and 68.
00:50:29 ►
The thing just is a nuclear blast.
00:50:32 ►
It was like a cultural, psycho-spiritual nuclear explosion.
00:50:39 ►
And nothing like that has happened since. I mean, one of the, Paul McCartney was quoted as saying that the 1960s, particularly the second half of the 60s, were so avant-garde.
00:50:54 ►
People like Penny Slinger were doing her thing, swinging London and whatnot, and movies like Clockwork Orange, you know, they were so avant-garde that it was like a decade
00:51:07 ►
plucked from the mid to late 21st century
00:51:10 ►
and stuck into the 20th
00:51:12 ►
because it was so out of place.
00:51:14 ►
It was so out of place.
00:51:16 ►
So much change, so much was achieved,
00:51:19 ►
so many barriers broken down in just months, you know,
00:51:24 ►
and it took the powers that be or
00:51:28 ►
conservatives or whatever, or just exhausted politicians and sheriffs, it took them 30
00:51:34 ►
years to really put it back in the bottle.
00:51:36 ►
And they never quite could.
00:51:38 ►
I mean, women were never going to be treated the way they were again.
00:51:42 ►
Gays were going to get their rights and people were going to talk about the environment
00:51:46 ►
and it was, you know,
00:51:48 ►
they were never going to quite put it back in.
00:51:51 ►
But it ran out of steam.
00:51:53 ►
It exhausted itself.
00:51:55 ►
It was so intense, it had to.
00:51:57 ►
You know, R. Crumb has this wonderful drawing
00:51:59 ►
that he produced, I think, in the 70s
00:52:02 ►
which showed the crashing of the wave.
00:52:05 ►
And it showed this wave of people, including hippies smoking and all that sort of stuff.
00:52:10 ►
It’s like a cresting tsunami heading toward this wall.
00:52:14 ►
And this is a wall of blocks.
00:52:16 ►
And on the wall is inscribed a triangle.
00:52:19 ►
And under it, it says E Pluribus Unum, which is what’s on the dollar bill.
00:52:28 ►
e pluribus unum, which is what’s on the dollar bill. And that this, this rebel, rabble rousing revolutionary thing is about to smash itself to pieces on this wall. That was our crumb.
00:52:35 ►
And it did, it did, but it, it left residues. And when I was growing up in Canada in the 70s,
00:52:43 ►
it was all around us. You know, the, the senior scouts were smoking hash at the lake.
00:52:49 ►
And, you know, there was stuff that sort of went out, jean jackets and things, which lasted way too long in Canada.
00:52:58 ►
But, you know, it’s immense. And so that meeting Terrence in 97, 98, and then in some ways,
00:53:10 ►
and I still feel it, um, I was there to see him out. Uh, many of us did, but I often meet people
00:53:20 ►
who are on their way out and I don’t know about it and I end up doing their legacy
00:53:25 ►
Jeff Raskin was one um Wes Clark was another one you know it’s just a pattern and that’s why I’m
00:53:35 ►
sitting with in a sense with Timothy Leary’s collection here um and at one point I don’t
00:53:42 ►
know it was before Terrence was gone or after, because I had some conversations with him afterwards, he said, carry it on, keep telling the story.
00:53:53 ►
But tell your own story, is what he said.
00:53:57 ►
We were going to go on the road. He wrote to Nancy Lunney at Esalen to set up for February or March, spring of 2000,
00:54:08 ►
we were going to do our first workshop together at Esalen, and then that would help me launch.
00:54:13 ►
But we were going to kind of go on the road where I would handle tech and futures and space
00:54:19 ►
and all the things that he was learning from me, and then he would do hermeticism, you know, recipes,
00:54:27 ►
because I knew nothing about, I still really know nothing about psychedelics, you know.
00:54:33 ►
But he knew a lot. He just was steeped in it. Yeah. He could talk about the Voynich manuscript
00:54:42 ►
and all these juicy, wonderful things and all these bizarre
00:54:46 ►
theories about stoned apes and you know um the rosicrucian this of that or you know um
00:54:55 ►
was it the fellow d and prague john d john d giordano br. And I lived there. I mean, I lived in Prague.
00:55:06 ►
I never once spoke to Terrence about living in Prague.
00:55:10 ►
It would have been interesting because we’re both bohemophiles.
00:55:12 ►
I was living there from 90 to 94, and he visited there for the interpersonal psychology, whatever it was, the ITP meeting.
00:55:23 ►
It was either 94 or 96, and Ram Dass was there.
00:55:26 ►
And there’s a nice video of them in a cafe connected to Obechnie Doom,
00:55:32 ►
which was the Civic Opera House, and talking, Ram Dass and Terrence talking.
00:55:38 ►
And I miss that, but I was there before them.
00:55:41 ►
And if I’d only mentioned to Terrence that I’d lived in Prague,
00:55:44 ►
that would have been a wonderful conversation.
00:55:47 ►
That’s why I was saying to you the other day that I really miss him.
00:55:50 ►
There was so much opportunity to explore with him,
00:55:53 ►
and it could have gone so far.
00:55:57 ►
But he was gone.
00:55:58 ►
He was on his way out.
00:55:59 ►
And we had a conference for him in Hawaii in September of 99.
00:56:07 ►
It’s called All Chemical Arts.
00:56:09 ►
And we built a virtual world, and I did a talk about all this.
00:56:14 ►
But his head was shaved.
00:56:16 ►
He’d already had some procedures, and it was goodbye to Terrence.
00:56:23 ►
And one story I’ll relate, and then we’ll sort of get off this subject.
00:56:29 ►
So it came to the final hour of the meeting. It was like three or four days in this hotel that
00:56:38 ►
was going to be demolished, right? So they were serving us the last food they had, which every meal seemed to be ham sandwiches.
00:56:47 ►
It’s ham sandwiches. How delightful. Again, you know, this is buffet bar of ham sandwiches.
00:56:54 ►
But these are heads and these are people, the stoners that, hey, it looks good to us, you know.
00:57:01 ►
So we had, it was a great group. It was tom robbins and the gray it was the grays
00:57:07 ►
there i think they were there and uh martina hoffman and robert venosa and uh many many people
00:57:16 ►
and lorenzo that’s where i met lorenzo hagerty our dear our dear godfather our our podfather
00:57:22 ►
and and and he was larry hagerty the time, but that’s where we met.
00:57:28 ►
I remember standing outside the hotel in the front little foyer next to some tropical foliage and talking to him.
00:57:37 ►
He’s writing this book called The Spirit of the Internet.
00:57:40 ►
This is September 1999, and he wanted to put me and Galen in the book, and he did.
00:57:47 ►
But he had been to Palenque, I think, in the 99 year or something,
00:57:53 ►
and then he had followed.
00:57:55 ►
He must have made an impression upon Terrence or Ken Symington
00:57:58 ►
or Rob Montgomery because he was invited.
00:58:01 ►
This was an invitation-only meeting.
00:58:03 ►
And it had been planned before they knew Terrence was ill,
00:58:07 ►
but it turned into the goodbye event.
00:58:10 ►
So we also had Constance Demby there,
00:58:14 ►
the great space-based, symphonic, oceanic composer of space music.
00:58:22 ►
And she had shipped over the space base by boat.
00:58:26 ►
It’s this great big piece of metal
00:58:28 ►
that you hit with something,
00:58:30 ►
and it was really quite impressive.
00:58:33 ►
But she was big in the New Age circuit.
00:58:36 ►
But she was going to close the meeting.
00:58:39 ►
And she actually played,
00:58:40 ►
when we did the Terrence 2012 program in Sierra Madre,
00:58:43 ►
she also did the last thing
00:58:45 ►
that brought her for that because she had done this very last thing for Terrence.
00:58:51 ►
And as she finished, we all realized that’s it. Everyone’s just about to disperse.
00:58:59 ►
And somebody had the idea, let’s clear out all the chairs in this big room, which is about to be just torn down.
00:59:07 ►
And there was a carpet.
00:59:10 ►
You can lie on the carpet.
00:59:11 ►
You can take a nap.
00:59:13 ►
You can send Terrence healing energy.
00:59:15 ►
We’re going to put Terrence in the middle and sit there.
00:59:18 ►
I’m sure this was a little awkward for him, but, you know, hey,
00:59:23 ►
it was also theater.
00:59:26 ►
And he’s used to sitting in groups of people sitting around him, but this is different, right? Because he wasn’t going to be
00:59:31 ►
speaking and holding forth and telling his stories. He was being the subject of a lot of pain or hopes or sadness. And so people lay down, they lay down, they could take a nap,
00:59:50 ►
they could send them healing vibes, they could do what they wanted to do. As soon as my head
00:59:56 ►
hit the carpet, I just lay down. I think I lay toward him, I’m not sure. As soon as my head hit the carpet, I went into endotrip, boom.
01:00:07 ►
And these endotrips are my primary, they’re my primary psychedelic. And I think that they’re
01:00:12 ►
endogenous flushes of DMT. That’s my belief. I’ve done some tests on that seem to verify that that’s what that is so I go boom into an endo trip
01:00:26 ►
and it’s a green plane and there’s Terrence sitting sort of folded up with his knees up
01:00:34 ►
and there’s just a green plane in an azure sky that’s it no other people and then I hear this
01:00:42 ►
sound it’s like we’re we’re we’re sound and I’m the sound. It’s like, whir, whir, whir, whir sound. And I’m the
01:00:47 ►
observer sphere. That’s how I do these things. I become this, just this observer, just pure presence,
01:00:52 ►
but nothing else. I mean, there’s no, no other thoughts, just observation. And I look up and I
01:01:00 ►
see this, this point coming down and it reaches a sort of a halfway point where I can see glistening things around it.
01:01:09 ►
And I realize, oh, they’re sort of like jewels or diamonds or something.
01:01:12 ►
They’re like paste jewels, you know, these cheap things.
01:01:18 ►
But it’s quite beautiful.
01:01:19 ►
And it’s this egg-shaped thing.
01:01:22 ►
And it comes down and it hovers.
01:01:24 ►
And it’s, you know, pretty sizable.
01:01:27 ►
It hovers there.
01:01:28 ►
There’s this curving glass screen with an unseen driver and sort of a front cockpit.
01:01:34 ►
And then there’s a back seat with a plush red couch.
01:01:39 ►
And Terrence looks up at this thing, unfolds himself, steps into it.
01:01:44 ►
It sort of bounces because it’s
01:01:46 ►
sort of a hover machine, you know, and, and he lies back. And I think I caught him, uh, lighting
01:01:55 ►
up, which would make sense. And off it goes, you know, where, where, where, where, and it goes up
01:02:02 ►
through the crystal veil and you can just see the last of it disappear, and so that was it, and we were all sort of milling about the outer, people
01:02:13 ►
are gradually leaving the hotel, and I saw Terrence there, and there was Robert Venosa,
01:02:19 ►
and I came over and said, Terrence, I’d like to share something with you that I saw.
01:02:24 ►
And I came over and said, Terrence, I’d like to share something with you that I saw.
01:02:26 ►
He said, you know, sure.
01:02:28 ►
And I shared this very story.
01:02:32 ►
And he turned to me when it was done.
01:02:36 ►
He said, ah, the getaway car, the getaway car.
01:02:44 ►
And it was, in a sense, it was sort of, I figured it was an elven-driven thing.
01:02:47 ►
And then we posed for a picture that Galen took of,
01:02:49 ►
I think it was Terrence in the middle,
01:02:52 ►
Robert on one side, and me on the other side of Terrence. And those are the last words that we ever exchanged.
01:02:59 ►
And years later, going to Burning Man, doing the Terrence 2012 program, we did a sort of release of Terrence.
01:03:14 ►
If you listen to podcast 316, that’s 3-1-6, it’s mine and Dennis McKenna’s efforts to tell some truths about Terrence that needed to come out that were quite disturbing for both of us.
01:03:28 ►
He knew them for years.
01:03:30 ►
I only had discovered them in 2011.
01:03:33 ►
We took it on ourselves to make these truths known to the community,
01:03:38 ►
and it generated quite a, I call it a love storm.
01:03:42 ►
It wasn’t a fire storm.
01:03:48 ►
But there were consequences to it.
01:04:01 ►
But I remember at Burning Man in a wonderful night, and this is all sort of endogenous again,
01:04:07 ►
I suddenly had the flash of this Fabergé egg limousine.
01:04:13 ►
And I realized it’s sort of one of his Fabergé eggs bejeweled, but it was in the shape of a limousine. And for some reason, what came to me was along the side were these elven scripts.
01:04:22 ►
were these elven scripts.
01:04:26 ►
So it was a revisioning of this crazy thing.
01:04:32 ►
And the elven scripts, I could read them in elvish.
01:04:37 ►
It said, for a good time, call, and then there was elvish numbers.
01:04:39 ►
For a good time, call.
01:04:42 ►
It’s on the side of a limousine is what you see, right?
01:04:48 ►
Limousines in Las Vegas or Manhattan or whatever,
01:04:50 ►
or good time calls.
01:04:54 ►
And I said to myself,
01:04:57 ►
and I gathered together a bunch of people.
01:05:01 ►
We’re going out to this art sculpture,
01:05:04 ►
and I’m going back to Merman for the first time in years, and maybe something of this will happen again.
01:05:07 ►
This is the place where I’m going to dial that number
01:05:11 ►
because I kind of made a pronouncement to Terrence
01:05:17 ►
after all of the deep dive into Terrence McKenna
01:05:21 ►
and all of the pain that Dennis and I went through.
01:05:24 ►
It was excruciating.
01:05:26 ►
It was exhausting. A many-step process. I decided to tell Terrence that he owed me
01:05:34 ►
and that in a certain time in the future, in a certain state, if I called him down, he would come.
01:05:46 ►
if I called him down, he would come. So I attempted to do this. At Burning Man, we have this very, to mean like sculpture, two stories high, very beautiful. And I said, you know,
01:05:54 ►
he’s going to appear in that second story because he’s never going to want to be on the playa
01:05:58 ►
because of all the freaking people. This guy’s a hermit, right? He wants to be in an upstairs library. He wants to
01:06:06 ►
be away from all the mess and fuss and people wanting to talk to him and everything, but he
01:06:11 ►
will, he’ll hang there. So I’m going to dial the number. And I just visualized this for a good
01:06:19 ►
time. And there were the Elvish numbers and I just one time lit them up in my mind’s eye and just waited.
01:06:28 ►
And, of course, nothing came down.
01:06:31 ►
I mean, there was not.
01:06:32 ►
But what I want to say, you know, into the airwaves here is we have dialed this number,
01:06:38 ►
and we are experiencing our good times.
01:06:41 ►
We’re expecting more, and Terrence is on the hook.
01:06:46 ►
And by hook or by crook, we’re going to reintegrate him into this community
01:06:53 ►
because like what happened to me in 2005 when I sat bolt upright in bed one night,
01:07:01 ►
I said, Terrence, you left too soon.
01:07:03 ►
I’m bringing you back.
01:07:03 ►
One night, I said, Terrence, you left too soon.
01:07:04 ►
I’m bringing you back.
01:07:10 ►
That led to the digitizing project and the cassettes and why the salon has 270.
01:07:13 ►
Terrence talks is because of that moment.
01:07:16 ►
Because Terrence did leave very suddenly. I think he was pulled out suddenly because of this incongruity that was occurring in his story and his life.
01:07:27 ►
But he left very suddenly.
01:07:29 ►
So we’re gradually bringing him back.
01:07:33 ►
But it’s all for a good time.
01:07:37 ►
So that’s where I want to leave this story.
01:07:42 ►
We dialed the number.
01:07:43 ►
Our good times are rolling in.
01:07:47 ►
Yeah.
01:07:48 ►
I,
01:07:48 ►
I want to say thank you for sharing.
01:07:50 ►
It’s,
01:07:50 ►
it’s always a pleasure to talk to you.
01:07:52 ►
So welcome Lex.
01:07:53 ►
And it’s been a pleasure having you living here for off and on for the
01:07:57 ►
summer during this leery scanning.
01:07:59 ►
It’s been,
01:08:00 ►
it’s been a joy.
01:08:01 ►
Um,
01:08:01 ►
and actually the last question I should ask is if somebody wanted to hook up and start listening to Levity Zone,
01:08:08 ►
would you have any episodes to recommend as favorites?
01:08:11 ►
Yeah, I think, and this will actually be my first appearance in the salon
01:08:16 ►
since I did the Melbourne, the voiceover with the band in Melbourne.
01:08:22 ►
If people remember, Lorenzo called it something completely different.
01:08:26 ►
And he likened it to when he walked into a specific nightclub or bar in the East Village in the early 60s.
01:08:36 ►
And they were doing this.
01:08:37 ►
They were doing this poetic reading over music, over live music,
01:08:43 ►
something with a guitar, electric guitar and everything.
01:08:45 ►
And we did that in Melbourne,
01:08:46 ►
and I wanted to try to bring that format back
01:08:49 ►
because Terrence had done that with Lost at Last,
01:08:52 ►
and he’d done that with Stephen Kent.
01:08:54 ►
And he’d done this beautiful format of speaking
01:08:58 ►
and semi-rhyming over live music.
01:09:02 ►
And so that’s the last one.
01:09:04 ►
If you want to hear me on the salon, that’s something completely different.
01:09:08 ►
The Levity Zone podcast number 50, which is called Fire in the Sky,
01:09:14 ►
I think people will like that.
01:09:16 ►
We did that at, that performance was done at Lightning in a Bottle
01:09:22 ►
with Android Jones doing live brush work
01:09:24 ►
and Avelle Santana doing the score, the music. performance was done at Lightning in a Bottle with Android Jones doing live brush work,
01:09:34 ►
and Avelle Santana doing the score, the music. And it was our really updated version of this format, which I’m about to do at the Eclipse Festival in a week and a half, where a whole
01:09:40 ►
crew is going up there to do the next rendition. And then we’re going to be at Playa Alchemist,
01:09:47 ►
a 70-foot-tall pyramid on the playa,
01:09:50 ►
one of the largest enclosed spaces ever made on the playa.
01:09:54 ►
We have two shows.
01:09:56 ►
We have a Thursday and a Friday night show.
01:09:58 ►
So I am carrying on the tradition
01:10:01 ►
that the last performance I saw Terrence do was the Maritime Hall
01:10:07 ►
in December of 98 with Lost at Last doing his thing and there’s video of this online
01:10:15 ►
and so in a sense I’m really carrying it forward because we’re doing that format again
01:10:21 ►
doing my own stories science and space and spirit and whatever I do.
01:10:27 ►
And the levity zone has a lot of that. So there’s really kind of fun ones from
01:10:34 ►
symbiosis years ago, from Burning Man years ago, stuff that I really care about, like
01:10:41 ►
computer history, Bob Taylor, the interview of Bob Taylor, who created the world we live in.
01:10:48 ►
Created the ARPANET, ran Xerox PARC computer science lab, which created everything you use on a computer today.
01:10:56 ►
And talking with this man that really did it.
01:11:00 ►
That’s episode one back.
01:11:02 ►
And that’s episode one back.
01:11:06 ►
And the last one, episode 57, which I just put up last week,
01:11:10 ►
is a talk from the Science of Consciousness Conference.
01:11:15 ►
I did a plenary talk following Deepak Chopra’s talk and before Stuart Hameroff’s talk
01:11:17 ►
on how the origin of life relates to what consciousness is.
01:11:23 ►
And it’s a very wonderfully spun up reductionist
01:11:27 ►
take on consciousness that flies in the face of a lot of beliefs that, you know, atoms have to be
01:11:33 ►
conscious and things like that. But it was an insight into a whole system that creates the
01:11:38 ►
entire living world. And it was just a de novo downlink that happened over the last six months.
01:11:47 ►
And it’s new and fresh stuff.
01:11:49 ►
And I’m giving that talk again and a performance at the Science and Non-Duality Conference in San Jose in October.
01:11:56 ►
So it’s rolling.
01:11:58 ►
I mean, this whole, the new ideas are rolling.
01:12:03 ►
The science is rolling. The Scientific American cover this month on our new theory of the origin of life is out. That’s us 40 years in development. And Terrence would have loved hearing about all that.
01:12:27 ►
but it isn’t necessarily about the hermeticism or psychedelics or kind of escapism.
01:12:32 ►
I think it was more as direct engagement in the biosphere and in the human enterprise and its health and its future with powerful ideas that can shift it.
01:12:40 ►
So, yes, there are idiots in politics,
01:12:44 ►
but there’s a lot of other good things going on
01:12:47 ►
that are the true future
01:12:49 ►
and America’s part of that
01:12:52 ►
even though it’s falling apart constantly
01:12:55 ►
I think on that note of optimism
01:12:57 ►
I’ll say thank you so much
01:13:00 ►
you’re welcome Lex thanks for listening to the
01:13:10 ►
Psychedelic Salon 2.0
01:13:12 ►
to help us out
01:13:14 ►
you can leave a review or rating
01:13:16 ►
on your favorite podcast service
01:13:18 ►
or share an episode with a friend
01:13:20 ►
it really does make a difference
01:13:22 ►
and to follow along
01:13:24 ►
with everything else we’re working on
01:13:26 ►
check out patreon.com
01:13:28 ►
slash non-nonsense