Program Notes
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Lorenzo
https://entheomedicine.org/allan-badiner-lorenzo-hagerty-january-19th-2019/Date this lecture was recorded: January 19, 2019
Today’s podcast is part of a presentation that I made at a recent Entheo Medicine event in Santa Barbara, California. The title of my little talk was “Psychedelic Renaissance – Creating Your Own Community”, and the said that I would talk about how I came out of the “psychedelic closet” and began podcasting episodes of the Psychedelic Salon.
Download a free copy of Lorenzo’s latest book
The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
Previous Episode
Next Episode
055 - Matt Pallamary Live in the Psychedelic Salon
Similar Episodes
- 064 - Confessions of a Dope Dealer - score: 0.83771
- 019 - Wild Bill Radacinski - score: 0.83627
- 307 - Palenque Entheobotany Seminars Remembered - score: 0.82087
- 599 - The Psychedelic Hospice Movement - score: 0.81288
- 084 - Lone Pine Stories (Part 2) - score: 0.81138
- 462 - Psychedelic Advocacy - score: 0.80880
- 443 - The Legendary Venice Salon - score: 0.80732
- 640 - +ThankYouPlantMedicine - score: 0.80324
- 302 - The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide - score: 0.80164
- 092 - Lone Pine Stories (Part 3) - score: 0.80075
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:24 ►
And this is going to be my shortest podcast to date, I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 and this is going to be my shortest
00:00:26 ►
podcast to date I’m pretty sure. You see normally I work on these programs over the weekend but this
00:00:33 ►
past weekend I traveled to Santa Barbara California where I participated in one of the regular events
00:00:40 ►
produced by the Entheo Medicine community in that area. And their next community event,
00:00:46 ►
by the way, which will take place on the 23rd of March, well, at that event, the featured speakers
00:00:51 ►
are going to be Rachel Harris and Rak Razam, both of whom you’ve heard here in the salon as well.
00:00:58 ►
So in March, if you can’t make it to the Imagine Convergence and are in the Santa Barbara area on
00:01:04 ►
the 23rd,
00:01:09 ►
well, this would be a wonderful place to find the others, just like I did this past weekend.
00:01:16 ►
It’s a really interesting community of people who are all also interested in what we can learn from psychedelic medicines,
00:01:19 ►
and I’m sure that you would fit right in.
00:01:23 ►
Well, since I didn’t return until late yesterday,
00:01:27 ►
and since I still have tonight’s psychedelic salon coming up in a few hours,
00:01:31 ►
and I don’t have the stamina I used to have,
00:01:34 ►
well, I thought I’d post the first part of this recent talk I gave in the event that you still haven’t heard enough of me yet.
00:01:38 ►
But next Monday I’ll get back on track with a longer program,
00:01:41 ►
but for right now, here is an abbreviated version of the
00:01:45 ►
salon.
00:01:47 ►
I noticed that I was going to tell you how I came out of the psychedelic closet, but
00:01:52 ►
I think the first thing to do is tell you how I first got into the psychedelic closet,
00:01:56 ►
you know, because that’s something that some of you here have probably been involved in.
00:02:02 ►
Some of you here have probably been involved in.
00:02:10 ►
Well, what happened is it’s 1984, pretty interesting year, I guess, if you read novels.
00:02:11 ►
And I’m in Dallas, Texas. I’m the president of a computer company.
00:02:14 ►
I’m a 42-year-old Irish Catholic Republican lawyer, and I had never even smoked pot.
00:02:22 ►
I’d never done anything.
00:02:23 ►
So long story short, I had my first experience with MDMA, ecstasy, it was called at the time.
00:02:30 ►
And it changed my life, that just one experience.
00:02:33 ►
And so I spent the next several months looking through every bookstore and library in the Dallas area,
00:02:40 ►
trying to find out more about psychedelics.
00:02:42 ►
And back in 1984, there was no World Wide Web,
00:02:45 ►
and in Dallas, there was no bookstore that carried books about psychedelics.
00:02:50 ►
Don Juan, those novels about Don Juan were the only thing that cast native novels.
00:02:56 ►
But a friend of mine came up with a mimeograph copy of a speech.
00:03:00 ►
Remember mimeograph?
00:03:01 ►
You know, with the smelly stuff?
00:03:03 ►
And it was a speech given by Sasha
00:03:05 ►
Shulgin. And I suspect a lot of people here know who Sasha was. He probably invented more
00:03:11 ►
psychoactive chemicals than the rest of all the chemists combined have done so far. It was just
00:03:17 ►
amazing what he’s done. Then he published it all in the public domain. Well, they gave me this talk
00:03:22 ►
that he had written, or he gave, and it was titled,
00:03:26 ►
Why I Do What I Do. And it was a really moving talk about psychedelics. And actually, at this
00:03:32 ►
point in time, I’d only had MDMA, which isn’t really even a psychedelic. But that talk just
00:03:37 ►
so moved me, it changed my life. Now, that talk was given in 1983 just a year earlier and the word psychedelic was really kind of toxic
00:03:48 ►
especially in Texas but this was a conference on psychedelics
00:03:52 ►
it was in the title and it was at UC Santa Barbara
00:03:55 ►
and from that moment on Santa Barbara has become my
00:04:00 ►
ground zero for the psychedelic community if there’s a psychedelic renaissance it started here
00:04:04 ►
think about ground zero for the psychedelic community. If there’s a psychedelic renaissance, it started here.
00:04:13 ►
Think about it. 1983, you know, it was pretty conservative years. And at that conference,
00:04:18 ►
not only Sasha, Albert Hoffman was there, Richard Evans Schultes, a whole bunch of other just really big-name people. And the woman who is now my wife, I didn’t meet her until 99, but she was there in 1983.
00:04:27 ►
And her boyfriend at the time is a friend of mine now, too.
00:04:30 ►
The two of them both told me they didn’t remember Sasha’s talk.
00:04:34 ►
They didn’t remember Hoffman.
00:04:36 ►
They didn’t remember Schultes.
00:04:37 ►
They only remembered that one of the main speakers had canceled out.
00:04:41 ►
And the emcee got up and said, well, there’s going to be this new guy.
00:04:44 ►
And everybody’s, oh, so-and-so didn’t show up. And he said, well, there’s going to be this new guy.
00:04:47 ►
And everybody’s, oh, so-and-so didn’t show up.
00:04:48 ►
And he said, well, you’re going to like this guy. He’s different.
00:04:52 ►
It was the first major public appearance of Terrence McKenna.
00:04:56 ►
So that is Santa Barbara. That is ground zero.
00:05:02 ►
And those two talks, Sasha Sheldon’s talk and Terrence McKenna’s talk from the 1983 conference,
00:05:07 ►
are in my podcast number 100, and you can download it or stream it, whatever you’d like.
00:05:12 ►
But you can hear those two talks from back then and really get your psychedelic roots from here.
00:05:15 ►
So when Matt Tallamary got a hold of me to come tonight,
00:05:19 ►
you had a speaker that had an emergency, couldn’t come.
00:05:23 ►
Well, he knew that for the last five or six years, and if you’ve listened to my podcast,
00:05:25 ►
you know I’ve been a hermit.
00:05:30 ►
And in the last almost six years now, I only left San Diego County one other time.
00:05:33 ►
And that was September, actually.
00:05:39 ►
So he didn’t think I would come here, but he didn’t know my connection, mystical connection to Santa Barbara.
00:05:41 ►
And he didn’t know something else.
00:05:45 ►
Now, Matt and I have had a lot of experiences, a lot of adventures.
00:05:47 ►
You’re going to see more of him soon, I know.
00:05:52 ►
But one of the things that we’ve had some experiences in Palenque, Mexico,
00:05:56 ►
and the first time I went there was the result of I’d gone to a conference,
00:05:59 ►
met Terrence McKenna for the first time, and he said,
00:06:00 ►
oh, you’ve got to go to Palenque.
00:06:01 ►
He didn’t say it.
00:06:03 ►
He just said, well, you ought to go to Palenque. He didn’t say it. He just said, well, you ought to go to Palenque. But I went down to the conference in Palenque, and
00:06:07 ►
it ran Friday through Friday. And on Sunday,
00:06:11 ►
Christian Reich took the whole group, and there were about 80 or
00:06:16 ►
90 of us, out to the ruins in Palenque. But I decided not
00:06:20 ►
to go. Instead, that morning, I got up early, and I walked up that little
00:06:24 ►
dirt road on the way up to
00:06:25 ►
the ruins, and you walk long enough, and some little kids will come out of the jungle and offer
00:06:30 ►
you mushrooms. And so they wanted 20, because in
00:06:36 ►
Dallas, it was a $100 bag, you know. So I went back, and I stayed in our little cabin while
00:06:42 ►
everybody else went up to the ruins, And I ate this bag of mushrooms.
00:06:47 ►
The whole bag.
00:06:48 ►
Now, the way I did it, in case you ever get hung up and you’re in the desert or something,
00:06:53 ►
Paul Sammis told me as long as you get it up to 160 degrees, it’ll kill everything.
00:06:58 ►
And so I got some boiling water, and I just dipped them real quickly.
00:07:02 ►
And I got some tacos and rolled them up.
00:07:04 ►
And it took me over an hour to eat them.
00:07:06 ►
I mean, it was horrible.
00:07:08 ►
But when my roommate came back, he said, well, how was it?
00:07:14 ►
And that was like six hours later, and I said,
00:07:16 ►
I’ve made a hard left turn.
00:07:20 ►
And I had my dream job.
00:07:23 ►
At the time, I was the Internet evangelist for Verizon,
00:07:26 ►
and they flew me all over the country and the world
00:07:28 ►
to say the Internet’s the next best thing.
00:07:31 ►
And it was a great job, but within six months of that conference,
00:07:33 ►
I had quit my job and moved to the coast.
00:07:36 ►
It was a hard left turn, and I also found out when I returned home
00:07:39 ►
that that was the day that my granddaughter was born,
00:07:42 ►
my first granddaughter.
00:07:43 ►
So I had become a grandfather and made a hard left turn.
00:07:47 ►
Now, some of you probably remember the Beatles,
00:07:51 ►
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band.
00:07:53 ►
The way it starts out, if you remember, it was 20 years ago today.
00:07:57 ►
Well, my hard left turn was 20 years ago today.
00:08:02 ►
And so how could I not come?
00:08:06 ►
I had to be here.
00:08:08 ►
Now, when you plan these things
00:08:12 ►
and they say, what are you going to talk about?
00:08:13 ►
I said, well, I’ll talk about finding the others.
00:08:16 ►
And fortunately, Jacqueline was able to come up with something a little better
00:08:19 ►
because it’s pretty obvious that you have found the others.
00:08:22 ►
I mean, we’re here.
00:08:24 ►
So, what does it mean today to start building a psychedelic community?
00:08:29 ►
See, it was Timothy Leary who first said, find the others,
00:08:32 ►
but that was back in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s before the Internet,
00:08:37 ►
well, before the World Wide Web.
00:08:39 ►
And that has really changed a lot about finding the others.
00:08:42 ►
I suspect many of us wouldn’t be here tonight
00:08:44 ►
if it wasn’t for connections we made finding the others. I suspect many of us wouldn’t be here tonight if it wasn’t for connections we’d made through the internet. So finding the others has really moved into
00:08:49 ►
building community. But it was Tim Leary who started the whole thing. Terrence McKenna gets
00:08:54 ►
credit for saying it, but I’ve seen the video where they had a conversation. I think it was
00:09:00 ►
the only time they met, and Terrence did say, okay, well, yeah, I didn’t get it from you. I got it from you, and Timothy Leary didn’t think he’d said it, but
00:09:09 ►
the whole quote is kind of long, but it begins, admit it. You aren’t like everyone else.
00:09:15 ►
Trust your instinct. Do the unexpected and find the others. Well, that was kind of dicey back
00:09:23 ►
in the 80s, you know,
00:09:28 ►
because you couldn’t really talk about these things.
00:09:31 ►
The man I traveled to Palenque with, I worked with,
00:09:36 ►
and he and I had lunch every work weekday for almost a year before we admitted to one another that we smoked pot.
00:09:38 ►
That’s how tense things were, you know, in the work world,
00:09:42 ►
and I don’t have to explain it to those of you who are still stuck in it.
00:09:48 ►
So it was a little dicey to talk about these things. You had to go about sneaky ways to find the others, and that
00:09:52 ►
was sort of the mentality I’ve been in for a long time. But it’s really
00:09:56 ►
no longer about that. It’s about building our community. We have found that
00:10:00 ►
there are a lot of the others. When the last conference that Terrence
00:10:04 ►
gave was in Hawaii,
00:10:05 ►
and my wife and I went,
00:10:06 ►
and we met this man who was a professor emeritus of criminal law at Long Beach State,
00:10:11 ►
and he’s the one that founded that college where they send all the L.A. troopers through it,
00:10:17 ►
and, you know, it’s a really heavy-duty criminal law.
00:10:19 ►
Gates went through there and everything.
00:10:21 ►
Well, he and his wife were there,
00:10:23 ►
and at the time I thought, oh,
00:10:25 ►
they’re cute little people. They’re in their early 80s, you know. Well, I’m only three years away
00:10:29 ►
from there now, so I don’t think of them as cute little old people anymore. But he had written
00:10:38 ►
this little essay that I published on my website. He and his wife were still doing acid in their 80s,
00:10:41 ►
that I published on my website,
00:10:44 ►
he and his wife were still doing acid in their 80s.
00:10:47 ►
And he was this really pillar of the community guy.
00:10:49 ►
And he wrote this essay about if everyone who used an illegal substance
00:10:53 ►
in the last six months,
00:10:54 ►
if their ears turned green,
00:10:56 ►
well, you would see green ears on.
00:10:58 ►
And he listed at least 50 occupations,
00:11:01 ►
almost everybody you could imagine, you know.
00:11:04 ►
And that really got me thinking.
00:11:05 ►
And yet I still didn’t want to stretch out too much.
00:11:09 ►
You know, it was kind of difficult and dangerous.
00:11:12 ►
But my, I wouldn’t call him my mentor.
00:11:16 ►
He was a close friend.
00:11:17 ►
But the guy who really got me into coming out of the closet was Myron Stolaroff.
00:11:24 ►
And some of you, in fact, Mike and I were just talking about Myron.
00:11:28 ►
He was a mutual friend, and Michael knew him a lot longer than I did.
00:11:31 ►
But Myron would, Gene, his wife told me,
00:11:35 ►
they would catch planes, leave from his daughter’s house in Burbank
00:11:39 ►
and take a shuttle to the airport.
00:11:41 ►
She said every time he got in the shuttle, he would sit down,
00:11:44 ►
and before he even got settled, he’d turn to the guy next to him and time he got in the shuttle, he would sit down, and before
00:11:45 ►
he even got settled, he’d turn to the guy next to him and say, what do you think about LSD?
00:11:50 ►
And, you know, a little old harmless man, and smiling, you know, and he said he never
00:11:56 ►
failed to start a conversation. He said everybody wanted to talk about it. Everybody had an opinion,
00:12:01 ►
you know, and we’re not talking about people who have done it.
00:12:05 ►
We’re talking about people who are interested in some of the thinking that comes from it.
00:12:09 ►
So for just a second, let me talk a little bit about what I see as the word psychedelic.
00:12:18 ►
Now, Timothy Leary said, if you’re psychedelic, you think for yourself and you question authority.
00:12:24 ►
said, if you’re psychedelic, you think for yourself and you question authority.
00:12:30 ►
And I don’t think there has been a better time in our history to do that.
00:12:34 ►
The thing is that for many years, you know, I was kind of a rebel, and so for many years I thought the only authority to question was the government
00:12:38 ►
because they weren’t letting me smoke my dope.
00:12:40 ►
Well, the authority really is much more widespread.
00:12:44 ►
It’s your friends, your relatives, your neighbors, your family, your coworkers, your religion, your community.
00:12:51 ►
Those are the ones who are really controlling our thinking.
00:12:55 ►
Because, like it or not, we’re different people in different situations.
00:12:59 ►
At work, we have one personality.
00:13:01 ►
And with our family, we have another one.
00:13:03 ►
And with our parents or our children or with our friends or at church or wherever,
00:13:08 ►
we have these little different quirks to our personality where we fit in.
00:13:13 ►
Well, that’s because we’re putting filters on saying,
00:13:15 ►
well, in this conversation I’d better not mention marijuana.
00:13:19 ►
I can’t talk to this person about that because it just sets her off.
00:13:23 ►
So you don’t, And that’s fine.
00:13:25 ►
I mean, that’s what society is about.
00:13:27 ►
And we should be considerate about other people.
00:13:29 ►
But when you start becoming psychedelic, all the medicines, I think, all they do for me, I should say,
00:13:37 ►
is they start dissolving these filters that I put in that say, oh, I can’t talk about this.
00:13:43 ►
And I shouldn’t really be thinking about that. And I, oh, I don’t want to go to that play, I don’t want to read that book. All of these
00:13:49 ►
little things that we pick up, that, you know, that voice in the back of your head, it calms that voice
00:13:55 ►
and erases those filters. Now, not permanently, just while you’re in that state, and then you
00:14:02 ►
come back. And if you do that and don’t do anything afterwards,
00:14:07 ►
well, you’re a psychedelic tourist.
00:14:09 ►
But if you really want to be a psychonaut, you come back,
00:14:11 ►
and then you spend some time thinking about it.
00:14:14 ►
I don’t know anybody that’s ever done ayahuasca as a psychedelic tourist, quite frankly.
00:14:18 ►
I think it would be pretty tough to do.
00:14:19 ►
But when you come back after these experiences,
00:14:23 ►
if you can just kind of pull back and say,
00:14:25 ►
you know what I was thinking about?
00:14:27 ►
And sometimes it’s months later that something will happen.
00:14:31 ►
Somebody will say something or you’ll hear a sound or a smell
00:14:33 ►
and you’ll trigger back to something that you thought of
00:14:38 ►
during the mushroom trip or the ayahuasca trip.
00:14:40 ►
And that’s what doing psychedelics is really about.
00:14:42 ►
It’s not the, for me, it’s, I don’t, it’s not the same for everybody.
00:14:46 ►
I realize that.
00:14:47 ►
But for me, I found that doing the medicine itself is only the tip of the iceberg.
00:14:54 ►
That’s where it starts.
00:14:55 ►
And even, you know, I remember one time I heard Ralph Metzner say how he finally had
00:15:01 ►
had an experience, I think it was mushrooms, and nothing had happened.
00:15:04 ►
And he said, well, that was it.
00:15:05 ►
And then like six months later, something reminded him
00:15:08 ►
of something that happened during that experience,
00:15:10 ►
and it was one of the most profound moments of his life.
00:15:12 ►
So we have these experiences, and then we try to work on them.
00:15:17 ►
We try to remember what it was like, and it’s not easy,
00:15:20 ►
because you come back down, and then you go back to work,
00:15:22 ►
and you’re among people who aren’t in the same mindset.
00:15:25 ►
So that’s another reason I think it’s important to have community.
00:15:29 ►
And today, besides the local community,
00:15:32 ►
we can have worldwide community, global community.
00:15:35 ►
You know, some of you are my age or close to it,
00:15:39 ►
and we had pen pals, remember that?
00:15:42 ►
And I would maintain maybe three or four exchanges of letters
00:15:45 ►
before I couldn’t. I lost interest.
00:15:48 ►
It was really difficult to keep up
00:15:49 ►
because with email and instant messaging,
00:15:51 ►
you don’t really have that lag time and everything.
00:15:53 ►
So I think we’re in better communication,
00:15:56 ►
better touch with people.
00:15:57 ►
And I would also like to add one thing
00:15:59 ►
to Timothy Leary’s think for yourself and question authority
00:16:03 ►
because there’s one other thing I’ve
00:16:06 ►
learned in doing psychedelics that it has done for me, and that is to help me overcome my fears.
00:16:14 ►
And I found that psychedelic people in general have a lot better control over their fears,
00:16:21 ►
and they don’t let people stampede them and worry them. And I think the reason for that is, at least in my case and I know a lot of my friends,
00:16:30 ►
is because the more of these experiences you have, the more fearful you are going into them.
00:16:37 ►
I’ve only done ayahuasca, you know, maybe three or four dozen times, but each time gets harder and harder. That’s over a period of like 13 years now.
00:16:47 ►
But I quit doing ayahuasca about three years ago
00:16:50 ►
because I was getting afraid.
00:16:53 ►
It was just too difficult.
00:16:55 ►
It takes a lot of work.
00:16:57 ►
And I’ve done, I don’t know how many mushroom trips,
00:17:00 ►
but what I do with mushrooms, I used to do anyhow,
00:17:03 ►
is I’d take a cassette recorder in with me that was voice activated,
00:17:06 ►
and then I’d make my mushroom tapes.
00:17:08 ►
And I’ve got like 20 hours of mushroom tapes that, you know,
00:17:13 ►
oh, the green squiggly inside, the blue cube is awesome.
00:17:18 ►
There’s not much that I can salvage out of them.
00:17:21 ►
So I really haven’t even listened to them in years.
00:17:23 ►
But they’re on my desk, and when I
00:17:25 ►
really get old, I’m going to listen to my old mushroom tapes. The other thing I’ve seen about
00:17:30 ►
psychedelics on many occasions is that at least while you’re in that state and in the afterglow
00:17:37 ►
for the hours afterwards, one of the things that seems to disappear is evidence of class, class structures.
00:17:46 ►
You know, that I have done psychedelics with nobility and with celebrities and stuff like that.
00:17:54 ►
And, you know, going in there, oh, that was so-and-so, and I was nervous,
00:17:58 ►
and I didn’t want to talk to him and let him see how stupid I could be.
00:18:01 ►
And so I was like that.
00:18:04 ►
And yet after the experience, you know, we’re hugging each other and we’re old buddies stupid I could be. So I was like that. And yet, after the experience,
00:18:06 ►
we’re hugging each other,
00:18:07 ►
and we’re old buddies and stuff like that.
00:18:09 ►
I think that the psychedelics aren’t for everybody.
00:18:13 ►
I would be shocked if more than 10% to 15% of the population
00:18:19 ►
would ever really participate in psychedelics.
00:18:22 ►
And our role, I don’t think, as psychedelic community, isn’t to
00:18:26 ►
talk people into using them or
00:18:28 ►
experiencing it. It’s to
00:18:30 ►
let them know what it’s done for us.
00:18:33 ►
And today, it’s
00:18:34 ►
more important than ever,
00:18:36 ►
not necessarily with psychedelics so much,
00:18:38 ►
as with MDMA.
00:18:40 ►
The work that MAPS has done with MDMA
00:18:42 ►
and PTSD is awesome.
00:18:44 ►
I’m a Vietnam vet.
00:18:45 ►
I’ve got a lot of friends with PTSD,
00:18:47 ►
and I’ve had a little touch of it myself,
00:18:49 ►
and I’ve worked with MDMA, and it’s amazing what it does.
00:18:52 ►
I know the opioid epidemic is huge, of course.
00:18:57 ►
You know that last year more people died from opioid overdoses
00:19:01 ►
than they did from car accidents.
00:19:03 ►
That’s pretty amazing.
00:19:02 ►
opioid overdoses than they did from car accidents.
00:19:04 ►
That’s pretty amazing.
00:19:11 ►
Now, Ibogaine is a really, almost a surefire cure for heroin, for opioids.
00:19:17 ►
And the last study that Dr. Grobe did here in L.A., at UCLA,
00:19:22 ►
it was using MDMA with high-functioning autistic people.
00:19:28 ►
And these are people who don’t want to, quote, get cured of autism.
00:19:34 ►
They really appreciate the gifts that they have that are extraordinary, but they want to be able to interact with us people who don’t quite work on that plane.
00:19:39 ►
And this has been a really effective study.
00:19:41 ►
Now, the study for PTSD is so important, not just for military
00:19:46 ►
vets. How about everybody in Paradise, California? They’re all suffering from PTSD. How about Santa
00:19:53 ►
Barbara and Santa Monica? There have been fires around these places, you know, and look at all of
00:19:59 ►
the shootings in the inner city. We have a nation filled with people who are really going to have some serious issues. And these
00:20:08 ►
medicines can help. I won’t lie to you. I started
00:20:12 ►
into all this because I was having a good time. It was a lot of fun.
00:20:16 ►
And that’s the way a lot of people start. And most of them kind of drop by the
00:20:20 ►
wayside afterwards. I was one of those who, I just liked it. I
00:20:24 ►
wanted to know more about it. I wanted to know more about it.
00:20:25 ►
I wanted to try more things.
00:20:26 ►
And so at one point in time, I was involved in a study group,
00:20:31 ►
and we were working our way through the index of Sasha Shulgin’s book.
00:20:35 ►
And every other week, we’d get another white powder in the mail.
00:20:39 ►
And then came 9-1-1.
00:20:42 ►
And sending white powders through the mail was not a good idea.
00:20:47 ►
After a dozen or so of those experiments, that ended, a couple dozen.
00:20:53 ►
Another thing that psychedelics are, if you want to talk about a renaissance, because
00:20:58 ►
you couldn’t use the word psychedelic 20 years ago, now you’re seeing mainstream media talking
00:21:04 ►
about microdosing with LSD.
00:21:08 ►
And by the way, on my website, go to psychedelicsalon.com. You can get my books and
00:21:12 ►
all the podcasts and everything. And if you go down to podcast 100, you’ll hear Sasha and Terrence
00:21:18 ►
here in Santa Barbara. But if you go to my website, the book, The Spirit of the Internet,
00:21:23 ►
you can get that one downloaded for free in PDF format.
00:21:25 ►
And I wrote that while I was microdosing.
00:21:29 ►
These medicines are good for a lot of things.
00:21:32 ►
But what I’d like to mention a little bit tonight
00:21:35 ►
is to talk about the ways that psychedelic community can help our friends.
00:21:42 ►
And I used to think of the psychedelic community
00:21:44 ►
as like the mycelium on
00:21:46 ►
the forest floor that was underneath that provided all the nutrients and held everything together.
00:21:51 ►
And that metaphor worked while I was still trying to find the others. But now that there are so many
00:21:57 ►
others that are popping up and not afraid to talk about these things and think about them,
00:22:03 ►
that I’ve come up with a new metaphor.
00:22:06 ►
You probably won’t like it.
00:22:07 ►
It’s probably not politically correct,
00:22:08 ►
but if you think of us sapiens, not humans,
00:22:13 ►
I think of the species sapien,
00:22:15 ►
just because there may be other humans coming around here.
00:22:18 ►
But if you think of all of us, we’re up on a big plane,
00:22:22 ►
and it’s like a huge troop of great apes, and we’re just kind of
00:22:26 ►
milling around. And you ever see those old cowboy films, the westerns, and you have a herd of cattle,
00:22:31 ►
you know, and in the middle of night, all of a sudden, there’ll be a noise, and it’ll spook them,
00:22:34 ►
and the whole thing will stampede. Well, we’re all up on this great plane, and there’s a cliff over
00:22:40 ►
here of environmental destruction, and a cliff over here of nuclear war, and a cliff over here of racism, and all these cliffs, and people are trying to get the whole herd to go over a cliff.
00:22:51 ►
Our role is to keep them calm, keep them calm. A good example in my case, a friend of mine,
00:23:00 ►
a couple months ago, you know, President Bonesonespur decided that we were being invaded by a bunch of people escaping terror.
00:23:07 ►
And so he sent the army down here to the border.
00:23:11 ►
Well, I have a friend up in the Northeast who is not psychedelic.
00:23:15 ►
He’s a big Fox News fan.
00:23:17 ►
And he called and offered for my family and I to come up and live with him until the war on the border was over.
00:23:23 ►
come up and live with him until the war on the border was over.
00:23:32 ►
I live in San Diego, and I’m less than 30 miles from the border.
00:23:37 ►
In fact, my wife was in Tijuana today, meeting with the Mexican government officials,
00:23:43 ►
filling out procedures that she and her compatriots are opening a medical marijuana clinic down there,
00:23:46 ►
because the one that they’d been running got shut down after Prop 64.
00:23:48 ►
They changed all the rules in California.
00:23:52 ►
And after several years of doing this with hundreds of patients,
00:23:55 ►
they’ve had to shut down, and so they’re moving it all down to Mexico now.
00:23:58 ►
So that’s no crisis at the border I can see. I saw my role as a person who thinks psychedelically.
00:24:06 ►
I think for myself, I question authority,
00:24:09 ►
and I’ve overcome a lot of my fears.
00:24:11 ►
And so I was able to calm him down.
00:24:14 ►
And after that was over, I got thinking about
00:24:17 ►
Terence McKenna’s idea of the perfect sitter
00:24:19 ►
for a psychedelic experience.
00:24:22 ►
He said the perfect sitter is somebody
00:24:24 ►
where you’re having an experience in a room,
00:24:28 ►
and by the way, he uses the word sitter,
00:24:29 ►
and I agree with him, as opposed to guide.
00:24:31 ►
I am very much against people guiding a psychedelic experience.
00:24:35 ►
You need to have your own experience and not somebody else’s.
00:24:38 ►
That’s just a little side from a grumpy old man.
00:24:41 ►
So Terrence’s idea of a guide
00:24:43 ►
is the person taking the psychedelics in one room,
00:24:46 ►
the guide is two or three doors down the hallway in a different room. And a person, all of a sudden,
00:24:51 ►
if you’re having an experience and you get in difficulty and you’re having a problem,
00:24:55 ►
you pick up a little Tibetan bell and ring it, and your sitter comes down the hall and pokes her or
00:25:00 ►
his head in the doorway and says, it’s okay, you took a drug, you’ll be back to normal in a couple hours.
00:25:07 ►
Shuts the door and goes away.
00:25:10 ►
That’s what we need to do for the rest of the country, you know?
00:25:15 ►
Now, I have to admit, in my darker hours,
00:25:18 ►
I don’t think that we’re going to go back to anything new normal.
00:25:23 ►
I think that my childhood nursery rhyme,
00:25:25 ►
all the king’s horses and all the king’s men
00:25:27 ►
couldn’t put Humpty back together again,
00:25:30 ►
and we may be approaching that,
00:25:31 ►
which is even more important about establishing community.
00:25:35 ►
So I wasn’t able to establish much of a community in Tampa, Florida,
00:25:41 ►
because there was only one other guy my age
00:25:43 ►
that I knew was doing psychedelics.
00:25:45 ►
And he was my traveling companion to go to Palenque.
00:25:48 ►
So after the Palenque experience, six months later,
00:25:51 ►
I moved out to the coast and started really getting into the swing of things.
00:25:57 ►
And that’s actually where Michael and I first met at Kathleen’s Salon.
00:26:00 ►
There was a major salon in the L.A. area
00:26:03 ►
that was really quite interesting for many years.
00:26:07 ►
And so I started meeting people there and getting out a little bit. And then through that, I wound
00:26:13 ►
up with Burning Man. And it wasn’t so difficult out in the West Coast to talk about psychedelics.
00:26:18 ►
When I’d fly back to Florida and visit my children and grandchildren, I had to be really kind of circumspect
00:26:25 ►
because none of them approved what I was doing.
00:26:28 ►
And I think we all had family members who looked at us askance too.
00:26:33 ►
So I did a lecture series at Burning Man.
00:26:38 ►
I went in 2002 for the first time,
00:26:41 ►
and then in 2003 I decided we should have a full-scale lecture series.
00:26:46 ►
And, you know, everybody kind of laughed at me because, you know, it’s Burning Man. During the
00:26:51 ►
day, you’re going to have lectures. So I rounded up Allison and Alex Gray and Eric Davis and Daniel
00:26:58 ►
Pinchbeck and Bruce Dahmer and several others, and I produced a lecture series there. Well,
00:27:04 ►
Bruce Dahmer and several others, and I produced a lecture series there.
00:27:10 ►
Well, I’d recorded them all, and this is before podcasting came out.
00:27:16 ►
So I took the recordings and I put them in little 10-minute segments, put them up on the Internet, and that’s where they were. Well, then podcasting comes around, and a couple months after it started, I’m a geek, so I played with the technology.
00:27:23 ►
And podcast number one was a talk
00:27:27 ►
that I gave at MindStates in 2001. And I thought, oh, okay, I kind of know how this works. And you
00:27:34 ►
have an RSS feed, which is a channel, more or less. And so I named my channel the Psychedelic Salon,
00:27:40 ►
only because I didn’t think I was going to be doing this more than one or two times.
00:27:44 ►
only because I didn’t think I was going to be doing this more than one or two times.
00:27:47 ►
And I had been doing a psychedelic salon.
00:27:53 ►
Bruce Dahmer and I have this software, this voice software over the Internet, and it has like a tenth of a second delay, so we couldn’t commercialize it.
00:27:57 ►
But it’s more secure than the red phone on the president’s desk.
00:28:00 ►
It’s really secure.
00:28:01 ►
So I was holding this salon with some of you know who Nick Sand was,
00:28:05 ►
the guy that invented the orange sunshine.
00:28:07 ►
So Nick and I and three or four other people would get together every Wednesday night
00:28:11 ►
and in the psychedelicsalon.com, which is the URL I had at the time.
00:28:16 ►
And so I just put psychedelicsalon for the RSS feed,
00:28:19 ►
figuring every time I had to have a different one.
00:28:22 ►
So the next week I was going to do another one.
00:28:24 ►
I do one of Terrence’s talk. And I realized, oh, you just have a different one. So the next week I was going to do another one. I wanted Terrence’s talk.
00:28:26 ►
And I realized, oh, you just keep the same one.
00:28:30 ►
And so I started doing this and that and the other thing.
00:28:32 ►
And over time, it just started growing.
00:28:36 ►
And then I found a RSS feed channel
00:28:39 ►
that was a little better.
00:28:41 ►
And so I started a second one.
00:28:43 ►
The same program on two channels.
00:28:45 ►
Well, now I’ve got four or five, if you count SoundCloud.
00:28:48 ►
And they’re all, you know, none of them are overlaps.
00:28:52 ►
They’re all different people.
00:28:53 ►
But on top of that, these people mirror my podcast.
00:28:58 ►
And so there’s all of these servers that mirror them.
00:29:01 ►
So I actually have no idea how many people listen to my podcast.
00:29:06 ►
I don’t keep any logs or records because a lot of my listeners are, you know, early,
00:29:12 ►
late teens, early 20s, and I don’t want any tracking. So, you know, Gilmore helped me. He’s
00:29:17 ►
the co-founder of EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and he’s been one of my speakers.
00:29:22 ►
And he helped me build it up and make sure that it’s
00:29:26 ►
not trackable. I don’t use Google Ads. I’ve never had any advertising. It’s just a platform I’m
00:29:31 ►
going to turn over to the community here in a few years. And so I just wanted it to be commercial
00:29:35 ►
free, and I didn’t do anything. I don’t track the logs, but that second feed that I started a year
00:29:40 ►
or so after the first one had some things built into it, and it tells how many files
00:29:45 ►
were downloaded, but more importantly, it tells how many unique individuals have downloaded
00:29:50 ►
something.
00:29:51 ►
And on that one feed, like I say, it’s not the, I’m sure the number is bigger, but on
00:29:58 ►
that one feed, I haven’t looked in a couple of years, but after the first 12 years, there
00:30:02 ►
have been over 30 million unique listeners.
00:30:06 ►
This community is large.
00:30:09 ►
I think that my audience maybe is twice as big as that.
00:30:13 ►
And, you know, I can’t get my head around that.
00:30:17 ►
So when I do my podcast, I’m in my little bedroom and I’m talking to one person.
00:30:22 ►
And that’s usually the last person I’ve talked to or maybe one of you that I met tonight. Probably the next podcast, it’ll be Aurora. I might be
00:30:29 ►
thinking of you. But I try to just think of one person because you can’t play to that audience.
00:30:37 ►
And so lately, I have moved it to where in addition to my regular podcast and everything,
00:30:46 ►
it to where in addition to my regular podcast and everything, I’ve started on Patreon, which you can see you can support here. For $1 a month, I’m hosting a live psychedelic salon on Monday nights.
00:30:53 ►
And it’s not really big. There’s only like 350 people and 10% of them show up. But what I’ve
00:30:58 ►
learned is I’ve started doing my interviews there because you’ve got all these other people can ask
00:31:03 ►
questions because I don’t like doing interviews. I don’t think I’m very good at it. So now I’ve got all the help. So
00:31:08 ►
my building of the community is what I’m doing is podcasting because I’m a hermit. You know, I
00:31:15 ►
have trouble coming out in public like this. I used to travel for Verizon and I was flying
00:31:21 ►
everywhere. And I’ve gotten where I just like to stay home. But this live feed every Monday night has been really
00:31:28 ►
great because some of these people, I’ve been doing it for a year now, and some of
00:31:32 ►
these people are old friends. Like Kevin, he’s a
00:31:36 ►
trucker and he’s driving. You can see the road going by in a way.
00:31:40 ►
He’s in the middle of the country driving at night. And we’ve had
00:31:44 ►
Nikita from St. Petersburg, Russia.
00:31:47 ►
Trevor comes in from New Zealand on his lunch break.
00:31:51 ►
We do it at 6.30 on Monday nights.
00:31:52 ►
It’s really tough for people in Europe.
00:31:54 ►
But we’ve had people from all over Europe.
00:31:56 ►
The one that really impressed me, a man one night joined us from Slovenia.
00:32:01 ►
And the next day I actually had to go.
00:32:03 ►
I kind of knew where Slovenia was and I had to go
00:32:05 ►
look it up. And now I’d love to go there. It looks like an incredible place. But Slovenia, it’s got
00:32:10 ►
two million people. And he had just hosted an event like this over a weekend. Think of it.
00:32:16 ►
And I had people from Croatia get a hold of me. Give me pictures of their conferences with hundreds of people at them.
00:32:26 ►
This is huge worldwide.
00:32:28 ►
And it all started here in Santa Barbara,
00:32:30 ►
as far as I’m concerned.
00:32:32 ►
So what can you do to build community?
00:32:35 ►
We’ll take questions here in just a second,
00:32:37 ►
but how can you build community stretching out from here?
00:32:42 ►
One of the things I would encourage you to do
00:32:44 ►
is maybe
00:32:47 ►
tomorrow, email a couple of your friends and say, man, they’ve got this group going here in Santa
00:32:53 ►
Barbara. It’s only been going a little over a year. You could start one where you are. I bet you they
00:32:58 ►
would tell you what they did and help you. We need to spread this kind of event where people can get together face to face. And then
00:33:06 ►
afterwards, we can stretch out to the rest of the world. And I would be willing to bet in my
00:33:13 ►
audience, which is big, I would say based on emails that I’ve received, that probably 25%
00:33:21 ►
of the people have never used a psychedelic and don’t intend to,
00:33:26 ►
because of fear, mainly, and I don’t blame them.
00:33:29 ►
So it’s about consciousness and talking about what you learn when you can get rid of the filters.
00:33:35 ►
Now, one other thing I would suggest you do is, before you leave tonight,
00:33:40 ►
introduce yourself to one person that you don’t know yet.
00:33:44 ►
And I’ll tell you what sometimes can come from that.
00:33:47 ►
Two or maybe three days after my hard left turn in Palenque,
00:33:52 ►
we had community breakfast.
00:33:53 ►
I’m sitting at a table with six or seven other people.
00:33:56 ►
There are two empty seats, and these two women came and sat down,
00:33:59 ►
and everybody seemed to know everybody except I didn’t know them.
00:34:02 ►
And so I said, oh, I was Larry then.
00:34:04 ►
I’m Larry
00:34:05 ►
Haggerty. I’ve changed my name to Lorenzo. It works better. But I introduced myself to
00:34:09 ►
these two women. And that one woman who is in Mexico today and I are going to have our
00:34:18 ►
20th wedding anniversary in October. So maybe you want to introduce yourself to somebody here tonight. And let me just say one
00:34:28 ►
thing. I’m going over my time, I guess, but Alan is going to be talking about psychedelics and
00:34:34 ►
Buddhism. My psychedelic mentor was Myron Stolaroff in many ways, and he wrote articles about psychedelics
00:34:42 ►
and Buddhism. And he was mentioned in Dvorak’s book, What the Dormouse Said,
00:34:48 ►
as one of the four most important people in the computer revolution
00:34:52 ►
because he ran the Menlo Park Clinic where everybody from the Homebrew Computer Club
00:34:58 ►
and Xerox PARC, lots of them were part of that 350 people
00:35:03 ►
who were trained with LSD to be more creative.
00:35:08 ►
You can tell that I’ve been off the road for a long time. And I’ll tell you one of the reasons
00:35:12 ►
I did that is that for many, many years, it was only old white men up on the stage.
00:35:19 ►
And I took that to heart. Several years ago, couple of people said, I was on a panel with three or four people.
00:35:27 ►
We were all men.
00:35:28 ►
I was maybe the oldest one.
00:35:29 ►
But some young woman stood up and said, when are we going to hear from the ladies?
00:35:35 ►
You’re all old white men.
00:35:36 ►
We don’t care what you say.
00:35:39 ►
And so, you know what?
00:35:41 ►
She had a really good point.
00:35:42 ►
And it’s been very hard to recruit women to talk about psychedelics up until recently.
00:35:49 ►
That’s changing now.
00:35:50 ►
But the reason is because women really are the responsible ones for the children.
00:35:57 ►
And if you are openly psychedelic and you have young children, you can lose them.
00:36:02 ►
And so you can’t blame women and men
00:36:05 ►
too for not talking about it. But now as these children are entering their 20s and 30s, the women
00:36:10 ►
like Kat Harrison and people like that are coming out. And one that has helped me a lot in the salon
00:36:16 ►
is Shauna Holm. Shauna is mid-50s, two teenage daughters. She’s a medicine woman. And she’s done
00:36:23 ►
like 20 or so podcasts for me. Some of them were
00:36:26 ►
speeches that she’s given herself. But she interviews women and medicine women. And she
00:36:33 ►
speaks at conferences everywhere. And I found that by finally spreading out and almost dragging
00:36:41 ►
some of these women in, and now there’s a Women’s Congress, and there’s a lot of other psychedelic events for women.
00:36:46 ►
I think that finally, and probably within less than 10 years,
00:36:49 ►
we’re going to have an even 50-50 balance.
00:36:52 ►
I think that that’s the next big thing you’re going to see
00:36:56 ►
in the psychedelic community,
00:36:57 ►
is more and more women taking the lead.
00:37:01 ►
And when that happens, I think it’s when we can really start
00:37:03 ►
talking more intelligently
00:37:05 ►
about educating children, bringing, eventually I’d like to see talking about psychedelics in
00:37:11 ►
schools, in drug education, you know, teach them how to do it, you know, because they’re going to
00:37:15 ►
do it, you know, you did it. And we’re in a strange situation. I just bought some pot from my medical marijuana supplier, and I’ve got the
00:37:27 ►
thing here. I can’t believe it says this. On the label, government warning, this product contains
00:37:35 ►
cannabis, a schedule one controlled substance. Keep out of the reach of children and animals.
00:37:41 ►
Well, in between that, a schedule one controlled substance, 30 years in prison for this,
00:37:46 ►
you know? And how are we going to raise the kids to respect a government that puts a warning like
00:37:52 ►
that on something that they’re selling you over the counter, you know? It’s all upside down.
00:37:57 ►
And I’m upside down now. I got a timeout thing, so we’re going to shift speakers. I should have
00:38:03 ►
got a better clue as to how this program was going to go, because I thought we’re going to shift speakers. I should have got a better clue as to how this
00:38:05 ►
program was going to go, because I thought we’re going to do questions right away, so I apologize
00:38:09 ►
for that confusion. And Alan, who is going to come up, I carried my book up here, Zig Zags In. I have
00:38:16 ►
a first edition hard copy that Myron Stolaroff and I looked at together. So I will get out of
00:38:22 ►
the way now and turn it over to the rest of you. Thank you for
00:38:25 ►
your attention. I appreciate it. You’re listening to the psychedelic salon, where people are
00:38:39 ►
changing their lives one thought at a time. Well, as much as I’d like to continue here with you a little longer today,
00:38:48 ►
I’ve got to get to work on the post-production of this podcast
00:38:51 ►
and get it posted and then get ready for tonight’s live salon.
00:38:55 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:38:59 ►
Be well, my friends.