Say kids, what time is that?
 The future is coming on it's coming on it's
 And welcome to the future everyone today it's coming on for us in beautiful
 mountainous Boulder Creek
 Hi above the PG&E power grid with the mrs. Future at the controls of our little media spaceship here
 Yes, I am here. I'm messing with the ball. I'm hoping everything is fine
 She and Bobby have been tweaking today tweaking the fine-tuning of the audio channeling and
 Speaking of Bobby. Hey Bobby you on there from San Francisco
 Yes, yeah, it's
 It's an amazing beautiful day out today. You got sunny weather there, too. All right
 We're happy campers. Yeah, our only problem is that we have a water leak something in our water ecosystem a mystery
 Up here in the mountains we could only keep a minimum level in our big tank our gravity feed tank
 Yes, I don't know why yes our
 2500 gallon tank won't go above 400 gallons and there's no hole at the 400 gallon part so
 And no leaks have found anywhere
 Yeah, so anyway, we have our work cut out for us. That's our big challenge
 Watson and Sherlock are gonna head out after the show and troubleshoot your heads a little bit as we
 Maybe trench out piping. Let's see
 Yeah, well, we might have to get rid of a little bit of poison oak first before we dig any more trenches
 But meanwhile we're gonna have a fun time today
 We actually have a longtime friend and scientists local scientists Dr. Bruce Damer
 Coming on to talk about coming out of the psychedelic closet and the things that are happening with academics and
 Academics in this world today. That should be really a lot of fun
 He's written an article which we have posted in our dr future show calm slash links page
 But first we do have some updates on the space news. Oh, always my favorite part of the show
 You're so good at keeping up on the space news. Well, there's so much going on these days. It's so exciting
 We have that lunar lander Odysseus on the moon. It kind of made it
 It didn't completely die. It fell on its side
 But it's still transmitting even though its antennas are compromised and it's running at a batteries on another day or two
 Yeah, it's getting us information from the moon the first successful commercial lunar lander outside of government's control
 Well the first time the US has been on the moon in 50 years. So they say it's a company
 That's just down the street from NASA. So I'm sure there's a lot of connection there
 Well, I think that the greatest thing about this is that the JAXA lander
 It also landed in an obscure landing position right either upside down or sideways. We're not sure
 conflicting the Japanese lander looks like that old movie about journey to the moon from 1900. Oh, yeah
 Yeah, is that the Lumiere brothers where the moon got a rocket in the eyeball? That's it
 That's it. That's it. This reminds me of the spaceship looks like it crashed right into the moon like that
 Here it's on its side from last our last conversation as is ours
 But the story that they're telling about this landing with the private enterprise
 vehicle is one of miracles and collaboration and
 It really does feel like a very American experience because you had all of these different teams from
 competing branches of
 the mission
 All of them had vested interest in the success of the mission and they needed the input from the ground-based
 Team they needed the control room. They needed the satellites receiving messages all around the world
 Just like with the original Apollo mission. Yeah
 Really?
 And the density because they lost they never had the landing
 navigational system working it would somebody left the switch off in
 Houston before went into orbit and now they couldn't get any special guidance
 So they were able to use NASA special gear that was being tested on board as a payload for actually landing the craft
 And they had to figure out how to patch that system over which was a separate scientific experiment on the craft
 So that it could be used they had to do it on the fly as it was coming down
 Right like it's to do it. It took an extra orbit an extra orbit to do it
 I think the co-founders were walking down the hall and the and the guy had an idea right in his brain
 Well, yeah, if the landing cameras don't work or the navigation doesn't work
 Maybe we could try using NASA's
 Secondary navigation system. They did this minutes. It landed. It was like crazy
 Can you imagine the intensity of having to code for that and getting that patch working in?
 Yeah an hour
 Well, and it turns out that the precision landing
 Equipment they use was there for Langley and so it was even better than the mission
 Equipment that they had inadvertently left in safety mode. Yeah, it was new attack, but no one used it yet
 Yeah, not bad. They got a soft landing at least it kind of works
 So it fell on its side at least it didn't splat on the moon, which is too easy to do
 Yeah, and of course there's talking about how we're so lucky because they have six paid payloads of
 People that are paying for their data to be delivered and they just have this very short 10-day window of opportunity
 While there's power from the solar panels and then it's a big unknown because it goes into the free zone and they don't know if the electricity
 Components are gonna work, but during this 10-day period
 They are doing five out of six of their paid
 experiments and
 The last one ironically is called the art camera and the art camera did send back that
 beautiful mission picture of the earth reflected in the globe mirror
 Where it looked like the satellite had its feet standing on it when it's on its way to the
 And so this art camera mission is the only one that is not in a
 adequate position to be able to do all the things that it was being asked to do
 But they have a plan for that where they're ejecting the camera so it can look back at the lunar lander and
 Send back some pictures. Yeah, because it was supposed to eject just like the Japanese craft and it was supposed to eject before it landed
 But it didn't so now they're gonna inject it after the fact that they landed right right so anyway
 They're still very optimistic and they're just thinking they're lucky stars because they had
 so much
 grace in
 both
 discovering the problems while they still had time to fix them and then in
 Coming up with ingenious solutions under pressure
 The longest 40-hour day that a lot of these team members have experienced in their careers
 The team that is putting this together apparently goes back to the Google X prize for lunar lander solutions a lot of them
 They've got some real it's got some history. Yeah, the Japanese slim lander
 Miraculously came out of the lunar night or teen days of day and 14 days a night and it survived
 It doesn't have a thermal heater like a
 Nuclear reactor that can survive this cold
 They expected it to sleep forever in a cold sleep, but it actually woke up yesterday
 That's a good sign that means maybe
 Odysseus might have a similar fate. Sure
 Well, I'll tell you when you're doing remote control vehicles you have to have very zen
 expectations because those extreme temperatures throw all of your calculations into complete
 Unknown brings you back into the moment. Yeah
 All right, we got a
 cover by the success of the mission yeah keep up there should be some more pictures coming for the moon
 And I really look forward to the art camera shots that are going to hopefully come our way soon
 Well, she still has power or Odysseus is a he right I think they've referring to the ship is he yeah
 Oh, this is a he you this he's on the great journey after the war of the elia
 on another interesting event and I think it's epic in many respects is that
 SpaceX has beamed its first X post from a non sat phone via Starlink satellites
 Yeah, how is that different than what we were doing last summer when we were driving and deploying the T-Mobile satellite
 This is the vision that you can access the internet and your phone whatever you're doing on your device
 Without having to go through a local carrier or phone company
 anywhere on the planet so you just carry your phone with you wherever you go and it just connects to the satellites
 Okay, so your phone goes to a cell tower that connects to a cell like no your phone goes directly to the satellite
 Okay, you don't use any ground support at all
 That's the vision and that's what the direction they're heading into and Starlink has joined forces with T-Mobile
 To set up a bunch of what they call direct to sell Starlink satellites
 And they put the first batch of them in orbit
 January so these are about a hundred and twenty miles up, right?
 Yeah, they're low worth orbit. Yeah, and 250 miles. So how how specialized does your phone have to be?
 To get a signal up there. Well, the the goal is to just have the right antenna in your phone. Oh
 So you're just receiving the signal. Yeah, you're sending it and receiving. It's a transceiver
 Mm-hmm the idea is that it can pick up the cell phone from the transmitter is the tricky part. Yeah
 Yeah, your house. It won't go through the ceiling. Yeah, I have to go outside that the first report was from actually a semi-wooded area in the Santa Cruz mountains
 Really? Yeah, according to the first posts on this. That's exciting. Wow. Yeah, it was a
 10-long mirror L-O-N-G M-I-E-R
 The SpaceX team just completed the first post on X from a phone to one of the direct to cells
 This was tree cover in a small valley in Santa Cruz mountains
 Earlier in the day and they have a nice picture of trees in the Santa Cruz mountains. It looks like on the sunny side of the hill
 Mostly Madrones and oak
 Yes, cool. That's the first shot. All right. Well, I know they're first for Santa Cruz and the nerd community
 Directs to satellite from your phone. All right. I think if you knew
 T-Mobile phones or even if you have an old sprint phone, I think it's using band
 25 which used to be the sprint band but T-Mobile bought it and then I think it's running at
 1.9 gigahertz is the frequency so an older phone an older sprint phone would definitely connect to it
 Yeah, they were saying that there are a number of phones that are already in circulation that are ready to go with this
 You don't even have to add new antennas
 They can use some of the existing ones that aren't being utilized and these phones have a lot of antennas in them
 Yeah, there's a lot of channels most of not using yeah, but you know if you get a new T-Mobile phone
 I think if it says 5g you can get about six or seven of these channels going and they're all at different frequencies
 And they have different bandwidths and how far they can be from the thing
 But the one to hit the satellites the Starlings is definitely band 25 and 25
 Because I believe the since iPhone 14 14 and the 15 series
 They've been accessing satellites from the iPhone mostly for emergency services
 My understanding yeah, that's a different frequency and different antenna entirely, right? That's right. It's a different frequency. Yeah, and
 It wasn't the Starling satellite. No, it wasn't an interactive as much. It was just more
 Let me know help help help
 Yeah, you know communication. Yeah find my kind of stuff would work and yeah
 Yeah, this is a whole nother level
 This is full access of the internet and all your apps from anywhere in the world without having to change your sim card or
 service
 Plus it would work in the ocean, right? This would work anywhere in the ocean. So if you're on a cruise ship
 Or your own boat you're free with communication. That'd be really interesting
 I think we'll see a lot more interesting videos so can people take these cell phones to any place in the world and have this
 Access because I know I've been seeing a lot of chatter. That's right. That's right people accusing Elon Musk of
 interfering in war zones and either
 Well, they're not gonna allow it into areas where it's banned in order to get to clearance in a country
 They probably need to get a yes at the border when they cross over there's gonna be some attempt at control over this
 Right. Well, that's what I'm saying if it's just a
 Technology signal and it just has to be strong enough
 How do they control the locations where it's allowed because it's a satellite and a phone?
 Well, I believe they were they have a way of blocking it in certain areas
 They were trying to block some of the Russian areas in Ukraine, right?
 Yeah, yeah when Elon said he's like a free speech absolutist
 He also said that people don't get the right to use the carrier waves for their messages. They have to be legal
 They have to be true, you know, stuff like that
 That they have to fit within the law of what comprises free speech once again the technology transcends the laws
 It gives you more freedom than what the laws allow right?
 Yeah, and he's being accused of violating the law and he keeps
 Explaining to these people accusing him like there are senators who are very poorly informed who really just like grandstanding to try and drum up their base
 And he has to constantly be
 Correcting them when they're making these false claims. Okay. Well look look the context to think about is a biological metaphor
 Think of this as the exonervous system. It's connecting us up
 all countries all humans not countries all humans globally and
 It's creating a new organizational system by which we will
 adhere to and
 That is going to be more of a biological model
 And so nation states are going to have to adapt or restructure
 Or both or maybe not even exist on some levels. It will shift it's could go towards a more of a
 More functional way in which the species talks to itself. So you think the technology has already leaped frog the
 Absolutely absolutely. There's no doubt about it. Mm-hmm done about it. The existing infrastructure needs a serious upgrade everyone knows it and
 What is it is what the all the pundits are trying to figure out right?
 Hello, I'm Carolyn 25 years ago my husband Rudy and I open Charlie Hong Kong with the commitment to serve healthy food
 Grown in healthy soil today the healthy food we serve comes from the sacred land in Bajaro Valley
 Where dick pujote and his lakeside organics grow the soil and the soil grows the healthy plant that we serve to you
 When you eat at Charlie Hong Kong you eat healthy food and it's delicious
 Charlie Hong Kong Santa Cruz
 Cannabis is one of nature's most beneficial plants. So at treehouse. We use it to build community. Hello
 I'm Jenna from Treehouse dispensary in Soquel in addition to the finest cannabis products treehouse dispenses
 Information to those who want to know how to use cannabis for maximum benefit though. We aren't medical professionals
 We do know how cannabis science can help you listen to Carly
 Thanks, Jenna for those who wake up in the middle of the night and can't go back to sleep again
 Treehouse suggests a chocolate edible like sleepy time from local Santa Cruz brand
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 When your business is on the move you must find the right place for it to move
 That's asked Matt Chilton general manager of JR parish the big question
 What is the right place to move one's business?
 Location location location sometimes it's rent
 Sometimes it's the fact that there aren't that many buildings available to suit you
 But mostly it's location of your customers location of the principles and location of your employees
 Move it to the right place with the help of the power brokers at JR parish in Santa Cruz
 Okay, welcome back to the show NASA sets coverage for the SpaceX crew 8 launch that's coming up in the next couple of days
 Okay, yeah, I see Saturday March 2nd
 Yeah, they're gonna start coverage on Friday
 And that means that that's the launch window weather permitting. Yeah, right. Yeah, this is a new crew of
 Cosmonauts and astronauts that are going up to the space station
 So it's a collaboration between us and the Russians here. Can we just read their names if you like Ross cosmos cosmonaut?
 Alexander Grabenkin and NASA astronauts Michael Barrett Matthew Dominic and
 Jeanette Epps
 So thank you for that
 Let's get their names out there
 Yeah, as it's up from the Kennedy Space Center
 And they'll carry a lots of equipment up there as well
 It's the eighth crew rotation and the ninth human spaceflight mission for NASA to the space station with the SpaceX Dragon since 2020
 Oh boy, and the name of the Dragon spacecraft this time is endeavor
 Alright endeavor. Yeah
 Yeah, so that's happening if you want to see that okay right after leap year
 Right after the leap begins at the end of February already. Can you believe it?
 man
 Time is flying. Yeah, so is the crew dragon
 If you get a chance to see the eclipse coming up
 There's a strange effect if you wear really bright clothing like red and green clothes. It's called the purgingi effect
 I haven't heard of that before what's a purgingi effect?
 During a total eclipse as the sky darkens the colors look different the warmer colors like red or orange
 They'll be less visible and they will resemble more the gray of the surroundings
 Well at the same time the green will stand out brighter
 So if you're gonna do a clips watching of clothes and you want to make it interesting for others to see you
 Avoid wearing neutrals like black white or gray as those colors will blend in with the eclipse shadow
 Good to know red and green will have the greatest impact red and green. It says like Christmas time
 And if large numbers of people dress in red and green it should be quite something
 Okay, I think we're trying to get a live Bruce on the line here. Okay, let's tell our listeners a little bit about Bruce
 Dr. Bruce Damer is a local scientist and entrepreneur known for his groundbreaking work in the origin of life and
 virtual worlds with expertise spending astrobiology and computer science
 He passionately explores the intersection of technology and the origins of life on Earth and beyond
 He's also a good friend and fellow boulder creaker. Hey connecting
 Hello, Bruce
 Hey Bruce
 Hi, hi guys. Hi Bruce. Hey, welcome to the show
 Yeah, we were just talking about the perkinji effect where if you wear red and green during the eclipse
 You'll shine out really bright while all the other colors will be muted
 Oh, that's interesting. I have to try that in Texas. That's all they get yeah
 Yes, oh well, yeah, let's start with that. Hey the eclipse is coming up and you're involved with the one event
 occurring with it. Yes, I love the closure of the way that you launched your
 scientific American article at the
 2017 eclipse as I recall and here you are now at the
 2024 eclipse which is kind of full circle taking all of those scientific accomplishments and bringing them back to the realm of
 consciousness exploration
 Indeed son in fact it the the coincidentia
 Tremendum didn't bypass me and on that one and we're literally
 Launching minds at that event on April six seven eight. Oh, tell us about minds tell our audience what you're involved with there
 Well minds actually is inspired by my work on origin of life and that as you guys have known my history as long as anyone
 After Terence McKenna visited here at ancient Oaks in
 1998 I started this long
 Process this long curiosity into complexity
 Mm-hmm and Terence and I had talked late into the night about novelty. That was his thing. Yeah, it was his thing
 So I started working on it, but it wasn't until and of course Terence introduced me to psychedelics for the first time
 He provided me the mushrooms. I needed the exact right mushrooms
 Mm-hmm and it wasn't until 2013 that I kind of realized that once my healing had been
 Done and the healing of my adoption out at birth
 Mm-hmm, which took 20 years to sort of find where that was that sort of rupture that I actually could use
 Iowaska on my third trip down to the Amazon to not only provide my own healing
 But to then provide a revealing around the question of the origin of life itself
 And that was in 2013 and it was a combination of an Iowaska vision plus two months later a really
 endogenous endo trip just on breath work cranking away seeing the whole protosell cycle with polymers evolving
 And then that became the 2017 scientific american cover article that you guys mentioned and then
 More and more stuff and it was a paradigm shift in field of astrobiology this hot spring hypothesis
 The origins of life on land and coming from the hot springs
 The recycling effect is that where you're calling it? They're the bathtub rings that contain the ingredients of life
 in the yes, and you all know it so well it's the hot tub origin of life
 Well, yes, the hot tub seemed to play a role in our thinking
 They do oh yeah, you guys had been working out some of the details in the what was it the hot tub internet network hot tub tv?
 imagining
 Under the stars. Yeah, we actually we call it the tub cast and I see
 Recorded and published about six of those with allen in the tub. Yes right on the psychedelics along right? Well, it was
 Delavity zone. Yeah, the levee zone you can find them all on the levee zone org. Yes the humble origins of all kinds of stuff
 So in terms of new stuff, Bruce
 You wrote an article entitled
 downloads from the modern dawn of psychedelics and lucid news
 And talk about how it's time to open the fourth path of psychedelics
 Now, what do you mean by the fourth path?
 A very good question. It turns out that you can kind of divide psychedelic practice into
 Paths or ways and one of them of course is indigenous throughout our history
 tribal initiation the mystery schools of the ancient world the next one is personal sort of exploration
 Personal development the third one is therapeutics which is now coming into legal practice after decades of work by maps and many others
 And what we discovered and I did a lot of reading through Tim liri's archives
 That were here at the digi barn and found all this early history of psychedelics for creative problem solving
 Right in the gym fadomins work and etc. Yeah, yes
 Our mutual buddy Jim fadomann who was involved with willis harman in the 1965 study
 And it all went away with criminalization. Yes
 Which was sad because they were trying to solve some of the big problems in all the major topics of interest in academics
 Yeah, and it turns out that all this huxley and humphry osmond who coined the term psychedelic
 Which meant mind?
 Manifesting
 Had a series of correspondences and in fact humphry brought
 Mescalin to all his huxley's house in
 Los angeles where he took it and then wrote doors of perception
 And the rest is history. Yeah, those guys were cooking up a project in 1953 and 54 to try to raise money
 To support Mescalin and lsd experiences for all like the top thinkers of the world including carl young and albert einstein
 Yeah, it was called it was called project outside
 Outside like insight but outside
 And it didn't happen and it was 70 years ago
 Right about now that they were meeting with the ford foundation and high net worth people
 To try to raise the dough to sponsor this work and they just couldn't do it
 No, what was the relationship on the timeline with what was going on with tim leery?
 Well leery was harvard there was the harvard they were trying to be serious about it on the east coast that with psychedelic
 Yeah, and this was about a decade before harvard
 So it's it was an alternate way that psychedelic could have been launched into the culture
 Yeah, wait before everyone else me who was another player at that time
 Why she was she unknown for doing psychedelics at all because she lived here in the all off of alba road for a while
 Yes, she was married to gregory baits and and and 1000 or alba road was his house
 I'm not sure how much they cohabited because I think there were a couple only for a few years in the late 40s
 Yeah, but they were a team as a part of all these workshop circles and groups and they were really interested in psychedelics and they
 Margaret supposedly
 Was doing psychedelics in 1953 or overseeing sessions or something and she didn't come out of the closet herself
 But a wonderful researcher named benjamin bream at uc sanicruz had just put out a book about it called
 Utopia and it's about the involvement of mead and baits and
 All around the world war two and the oss and mezcal and from the omaha reservations in the 1930s and yeah
 Fascinating jail, you know, I wonder if great baits is great theory the double bind theory had anything to do with psychedelics
 You know, it's amazing maybe explain that for the for the listeners. Yeah, you mean the double blinds theory
 Al what do you give us a little grounding and what that means double bind is a dilemma in communications when
 One person or a group receives two or more reciprocally conflicting messages
 Okay, so it's like conflict resolution when you have a contradiction to resolve contradictions
 in a double bind situation
 About person might receive two or more conflicting messages at the same time
 And that could leave them feeling confused or anxious or frustrated
 Like a parent who might express love to
 Their kids verbally at the same time display some kind of behavior that suggests rejection or disapproval
 And baits and had argued that these contradictory messages could lead to psychological distress and maybe even
 Contribute to conditions like schizophrenia
 Wow, so is this what gave rise to the medical standards of doing scientific control groups where you have a placebo group and an actual
 Hot test group that you can compare the results so that you can tell whether the
 Factor that's introduced is actually the causal agent or whether they're just coincidental evidence
 That's actually double blind rows and double bind. Oh, okay. I'm blind never
 Violins in high school. Yeah
 Violins
 This circles us well back to minds because we want to do double blind although double blind in psychedelic work is
 Yeah, quite difficult tests and research on
 Psychedelics as agents for creativity
 And bring that back into science into clinical science. So it's really bringing it into science. Yeah, I saw that would be the fourth path
 Yeah, what about the influences of festival culture like burning man fun party of music
 Where does that fit in and group mind? That's kind of the second path of
 All the things that erupted into the 1960s group experience personal development exploration
 But not really attached to an indigenous or spiritual culture
 Right because I think there's one of the wallet cause protection double between Ken kiezy and tim leery
 They had a different attitude towards how psychedelic should be distributed in the culture
 Ken kiezy seemed to want to have it at parties and having punch balls of pool aid and
 Leary just wanted and in the east coast wanted it more to be given to the right people that might actually benefit from it
 Two different worlds two worlds exactly and by the sixties by the mid sixties there was such a public panic
 That politicians took advantage of that and the drugs became scheduled
 So how can we avoid that? How can we avoid that happening today?
 How it seems the medicalization model has really worked and it was a good strategic way to go
 So society is accepting psychedelics or these applications and there will be
 Soon a legal context to take them and so what you can do and if you think of it this way
 First the healing then the revealing
 So if you have an mdm a psychotherapy session to work on your social anxiety
 Yes
 You might find that after that session even the same day or
 Days and weeks after that you have much more creative flow
 Your mental acuity you didn't have before
 And so we can actually study and develop protocols for that
 Round the medical therapeutic use of psychedelics without having to do the long long
 Clinical trials aspect of things because it will already be available in a
 You know pretty much controlled or managed setting for people. Yes very pragmatic
 In terms of exploring creativity are you thinking of replicating some of the experiments at stanford from the sixties
 Solving some of the problems that people are facing in their respective fields
 Yeah, give people a little taste of that what is what scientists that were involved in that early study
 at stanford
 Yes, jim fatteman a friend of ours still with us here in sanicrews and willis harman who became the first president of ions
 The institute of noetic science later and a number of others. I had 23 professionals was it
 mathematician engineers and most notably an architect who on the psychedelic
 Literally they would take the medicine if you will or the I kind of preferred to call it an elixir because it's not necessarily for healing you
 It's sort of the magic magic of it. So a couple of hours into his session. He sat in by himself
 And was able to visualize an entire beautiful arts and crafts shopping complex that he had as a job to design
 and
 Exactly fitting on the lot size the parking
 The design of the buildings and it's all written up in this 1966 study
 And he said it was just remarkable that in a minute or two he could do a month's worth of work and see it completed and operating
 And he was just absolutely surprised. So this is some of the bellwethers from this pilot study
 That's you know, that reminds me of tesla describing how we saw a whole invention
 We were working in his mind before he actually had to build anything
 Yeah, and tesla sort of had the neurotype of people that have this capacity
 endogenous
 Indogenous natural capacity and of course what keslas tail is is very
 cautionary for us because people with this capacity sometimes are not very functional in life
 And so the poor man died penniless
 Yeah
 In some sense, and this is a second to be defined function of minds is to provide a kind of jedi academy
 For the young pottowans who have these kinds of capacities, but in no way
 Unless they get mentorship and guardrails and training they might find it difficult to put them into practice
 Yeah, you need the right context context is the key for this
 um
 and
 Yeah, university life might be okay with them, but it might grind them up and yeah
 Corporate jobs and so can we give them an alternate path?
 And they may or may not be using psychedelics for their healing and their revealing
 But they would have the benefits of jedi masters who really care for them and counsel them
 I look back
 somehow at my career and if I hadn't had these
 Critical individuals and the last one being dave deamer
 From ucs if they hadn't shown up in my life at these times
 I could never have worked on for instance the problem of the origin of life without mentorship
 Sure, well, it's a collaborative process to be a cutting edge scientist
 Yeah, it was very hard for you to come out of the psychedelic closet
 You know strangely enough back in 2017. I was called by the new yorker and they wanted to do a profile piece
 and it was about
 Uses of ayahuasca to do kind of interesting things and it was going to be a profile of me and the new yorker
 And two hours into the conversation. I said to the the reporter. I said, you know what? I can't use my name
 You can't use my name because it could threaten
 The hypothesis it could turn off colleagues
 etc, etc, because karry mullis who came up with pcr gene sequencing and later on
 Explained how lsd had a big role in that
 He had shared that he had done that after he got his nobel prize
 And in the hallways of academia you could hear people whispering. Oh that drugy
 Somehow he perhaps deserved some denigration for other things that he did, but I thought that you know, I don't want to be labeled that way
 Yeah, you don't want to be unnecessary. Well, there's just the culture of accepting
 the contribution of
 These mind-altering drugs to the creative
 Process is very new people were really
 Sort of just discovering after his death that steve jobs attributed a lot of his brilliant insights to his acid trips and
 That the discoverers of dna felt like they had seen it on an acid journey
 And it became that the legend began to include these geniuses and their breakthroughs rather than excluding that from the conversation
 And maps had a lot to do with that. They kept a lot of it in the closet until more recent things
 Gen, Michael paulin's book and in the netflix documentary brought that sort of above board made it more
 Tenable so it was literally at the end of very end of 2021 with Dennis mckenna parents mckenna's brother
 Contacted me and saying we're having another ethno-pharmacologic conference in the uk
 Will you come and give a keynote?
 Yeah, and I thought what should I do? I think i'm ready and I wrote back to him
 I'm going to do a talk called it's high time for science
 And I did it in may of 2022 in this beautiful British manor house with
 All these amazing people there paul stammets and all these it's amazing crowd and it got on to youtube darlin spread
 You can actually see this for yourself when bruce came out of the closet on youtube
 On youtube and then nothing untoward happened and in fact guys this is an amazing thing
 And you're the first to know about this
 But two days ago. I got an email from my old university in canada
 Saying our academic senate has met and voted and we want to give you an honorary doctorate
 For your contributions to origin of life
 Space science and psychedelic research. Hello
 Wow
 Congratulations
 So we're going up there in june and i'll talk to the graduating class
 Is it cantaloupes and cantaloupes in the middle of verdish clambia that the the little college has grown up to be a
 Substantial university. That's right. Did they do a special video about you at one point two?
 They did i was given an alumni award about four or five years ago
 Yeah, it's uh, that's great. I wasn't it wasn't a
 denigration sort of a badge of it's good timing
 It's like you can surf the wave now and a couple questions come in my brother norm asks
 He wants to know what do you think the level of interest and participation in creative peaceful psychedelia among the young is today?
 And how many university professors are tuned in? We're going to find out so
 Center for minds.org and the superior listeners is the website for the whole organization
 And we started running a survey in january and all kinds of people have been filling in details and offering their stories
 And we're finding students or finding professors
 We're just trying to figure out where are the others and what are they up to what protocols do they have?
 And that's going to get expanded with our first university grant that we're going to award
 Hopefully in the next couple of months is going to have an expanded
 rigorous survey
 And try to figure out what's going on because it's all sort of under the table out there
 No, what comes to mind is the great resource assembled by crystal coal neuro soup
 Which was for many years the go-to website on youtube on youtube for contributing your personal understanding of
 different kinds of mind altering substances and
 The dosage the set and setting the effect your own trip your own story
 It's a real compendium of personal testimonials that gave the underground
 A lot of valuable information at a time when the official allowing of people to
 Experiences was totally underground. Yes young artistic nerd girl crystal coal
 Yeah, and and we're finding more scientists the scientists that I work with the young scientists in astrobiology
 Most of them are kind of experienced and they're curious about they've already goal for me. Yeah, you know
 Yeah, I've noticed when I go to the body mind conference in places of gathering real innovators like that that everybody's got dilated pupils
 Yeah, I think the kids today most likely do more micro dosing
 Well, especially since they've allowed mushrooms to be decriminalized here in sianacruz and
 Oakland
 Zombies it was an enormous market and mushroom chocolates and you know as you guys know and yeah
 Yeah, they're very few micro dosing studies that are conclusive so
 Investment in the research of that hasn't happened as yet and perhaps it's been soaked up by the therapeutics
 And now if we can find enough donors we will sponsor micro dosing and creativity or well-being studies
 Well, it's interesting if you compare it to prohibition of alcohol
 and how that was given you know that was basically considered to be
 Absolutely immoral until it wasn't and then it was embraced as a freedom
 and there was no attribution of physical or
 Perishable effects. It was just given back to people something that had been taken away
 But with the medical marijuana and the medical mushrooms and all the work that maps is doing
 These mind-altering substances have to go through the medical
 Matrix to get back into the hands of the people first as if they they have to be
 Administered by licensed experts much more so than alcohol
 Yeah, and in fact, son you bring up a good point. There's a company here in sanichroos tactogen
 You guys may have heard of and you probably have luke on your show
 What they're trying to do because mdm may now has so much study data
 They know the risks if somebody has high blood pressure and things like that
 And companies now are coming out to refine mdm a and create similar things to mdm
 They're even safer than mdm a or there are a lighter dose you can take home
 So you can take it like you would take an s sri but you can take it home administration
 Without all the terrible side effects of ssri's for depression
 And so it really truly is the path to get safe and effective medicines or elixirs of creativity is to go the
 You have to go through research and you have to go through clinical trials. Yeah better results
 Gabby in new jersey is wondering what your main interest or goal is with minds
 Thank you, Gabby. It's good to see you recently as well after so long
 I think it's just the excitement that I have
 around
 The development of the practices that led to this scientific breakthrough in origin of life
 It's a story worth telling and it may in a sense help to shift the future in a positive direction because
 Suddenly you will have new tools for technologists and scientists and leaders and designers
 Who will get some doses of healing?
 And they'll be really brilliantly better what they do in the world and what a combination
 So we get people who are not operating from trauma and these sort of negative forces that
 Come within humans and then they become more brilliant
 and heartfelt and
 inefficient
 Performers in their lives and they affect people positively
 So I can't think of a better one-two combination of things for our future. Yeah, beautiful. Do you think
 psychedelics might help us discern what's real and what's not in these days of fake information and fake news and
 Being able to replicate reality so easily with the technology
 How are we gonna know what's real anymore?
 If you see it on a screen
 You'll have to question it, but that was true with the national inquirer at the newsstand as you
 Check out pounder. Yeah, if you saw it on newspaper didn't mean it was true
 So you basically you went home and you mowed the lawn and you petted your dog and that was reality
 So what will happen is media will do itself a disservice and take itself out of the gene pool of believability
 And people just find alternatives alternative ways to because we need the truth to survive
 We need ground truth and reality we need a little test things to thrive as a species
 Well a richest tech company in the world apple put out apple vision pro in the hopes that will all
 Go to wards having our augmented glasses as a normal thing. What do you think of that?
 And that's amazing because it's semi psychedelic as an experience
 But it's augmented reality. So it's actually augmenting over the world that we're all
 It's not replacing it right there's grand john grammies to say putting a bucket over your head
 It's not that anymore. It's not that anymore, right?
 Also, I'm kind of curious
 How do you think of an ai might interact with a human on psychedelics?
 Oh gosh people probably have tried at this point of running chat gpt well high and it could be quite interesting
 Yeah, it could be is one of those fun things to think about on the hot tub
 Yes, bruce. I wonder are you going to be able to join us for any more time or are we gonna get your roundup for a minute here
 So I have to jump off for our minds weekly meeting
 Well, here is your last 30 seconds to leave us with a parting inspiration. Please
 You don't have to have psychedelics to unlock your inner genius
 And each of us has a kernel of it within
 And that anything you can do to steal the monkey mind
 And go quiet and listen to deeper things
 Amazing things will come out of you that were always in you and they were always sort of in the world available
 And psychedelics are about one tool, but so is meditation so many things, but it's all about being a little quieter
 All right. Well, thank you so much bruce
 It's always such a pleasure to catch up with you and join you on the journey. Yeah, thanks for being here bruce
 Really great to have you and we'll be back. Oh guys. All right. You'll be well, honey. All right. Talk to you later. Have fun. They clip soon
 Yeah, enjoy. Thank you. Bye for now. Bye. Bye now
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 We're back. Yes, we are. Hi, Bobby. Yeah, there's Bobby. Yeah, we got Bobby commenting. I think that's okay. That's you
 We're talking Billy sunshine Billy. Welcome to the show. Now. Did you like what Bruce had to say about psychedelics?
 Absolutely. Yeah, he's great. Bruce is great. You know, um, I wanted to share
 The information and about the fattemons book that's coming out in 2020. Oh, yeah, please do. I'm signing microdosing book, isn't it?
 Exactly. Exactly. So it's going to be something like microdosing maximized or
 Fattemons guy. It's going to be wonderful. It's coming out in 2025 and it's written with our friend Jordan Jordan.
 Jordan. Jordan. That's right. Who is the guy who introduced us to Jim Fattemon? They've been buddies for a very, very long time.
 Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is not their first book together. Absolutely. And they're both brilliant and they're doing a beautiful job.
 It's just going to be fascinating. It's going to be a bunch of questions answered. Everything you need to know both the science and the anecdotal stuff.
 Yeah. Look for that in 2020. They didn't want to put the book out during an election year.
 Really? Well, not Fattemon. Oh, they don't want to compete. Jordan. It was the publishers say you get lost in an election year.
 We'll put it out right at the beginning of the next year. Very interesting. You know, I have our friend Analise
 Shinsinger is also publishing her book in 2025, which is called Iowaska entering into the mysteries.
 It's her personal autobiography. Another local scientist. And a resource information guide. And her role, she was a translator living in Brazil for an Iowaska church called the UDB.
 And she served with Dennis McKenna for many, many years as his Portuguese English translator for a lot of the work that he and Terrence were doing.
 It feels to me as if Northern California is becoming the new center of psychedelia.
 Well, certainly Santa Cruz has always been a center for this. Now with the decriminalization of the mushrooms, it's really kind of leading the charge.
 Oakland is also in this similar position. And Oakland actually has a lot of products that they're producing.
 And I just saw a very interesting article on LSD microdosing and how that's really effective. It really does make a difference.
 You mean like they can drop in your coffee in the morning?
 However, you choose to get it into the system a little bit goes a long way.
 Right. It was interesting. The inventor Albert Hoffman, LSD, he had another drug that he swore by that he really loved.
 That it was a drug called hydrogen. It was his attempt to improve brain function by creating it so that there was better blood flow through the brain.
 Oh, I could use that. Yeah, really. You increase the blood flow. You increase brain capability.
 Apparently, hydrogen was the chemistry that Hoffman was searching for when he discovered acid with his famous bicycle ride.
 He was doing research to come up with the hydrogen brain enhancement molecule.
 I haven't feel you don't enhance more than brain once the blood is flowing well.
 Yeah, I think these things are important. You can imagine.
 Well, it was connected to the heart as well because you have to understand the cardiovascular system in order to increase blood flow.
 But speaking of bicycle day. Yeah, the 19th of April was the late.
 Jordan and James Fatimann will be presenting. So you don't want to miss that.
 Where? Where is this happening? In San Francisco somewhere.
 I don't know where this is. Okay.
 Well, an undisclosed location like a rave.
 No, it's a whole thing. They've been doing this for years, I think.
 Michael James will be there and possibly have yesterday.
 Enjoying us with the. Yeah.
 Oh, well, we'll have to figure that out. We'll have to get all the details from Jordan and go there.
 Absolutely. So there's your heads up for today.
 Thank you, Billy. Keep an eye on the psychedelic front.
 Thanks for the cup kids. I love it.
 Yeah. I can ask you one thing before you go.
 You bet. Fatimann had been talking about solving the great problems of all the different disciplines
 in science and art and that sort of thing and bringing together the professors to talk about
 these things. But I'm wondering about media. Now, one of our big problems today is that
 we're having so many new media coming out and the ability to fake things so well.
 So we don't know what's real and it's not anymore. How can psychedelics help with that?
 Maybe they need a special creativity session just thinking about that.
 Wow. You're so right. The fact that I can no longer trust my eyes and ears.
 Yeah. It's probably me a little crazy. I feel like I'm being gaslighted or lit or
 I'll have that at least. Yeah. So if I could, that looks, hi, Bobby. And if I could,
 that can help figure that out. Boy, would that be valuable for us all?
 Yeah. Bruce's idea was that what we know is real is when we're not wearing any gear
 and we're just connecting in person, person to person. That's the gold standard for reality.
 But people lie very well in person too. Well, and if you go into the traditions of people
 seeking enlightenment, the whole idea was that the mind fools you and it fools you in many different
 ways. It fools you through your beliefs. It fools you through your expectations. It fools you through
 even your senses not being accurate enough to tell you what is actually going on.
 Absolutely. I realize a couple of things that are important. First of all, I'm enlightened enough.
 You've reached your limit. Exactly. And good enough for now believing in what I think.
 You did. Oh, that's the real breakthrough like done believing from now on just learning.
 I say that. I don't know if it's really true. Well, it may as well. I don't believe in that either.
 Yeah. Yeah. Well, don't you believe your actions are mediated by your belief system?
 I believe nothing anymore. Well, the Socratic method is a dialectical right thesis into this
 synthesis. So if you're just working with what you project and that what you cancel and figuring
 out that one of those two is going to lead you to something that's real, you're missing the rest
 of the ecosystem because that's only on and off and there's a whole gray zone in between.
 Oh, the gray zone. Actually, it's this is the rainbow zone. The interesting stuff is happening.
 Right. Yeah, it's very interesting. It reminds me of this old adage. I believe in everything.
 Nothing is sacred. I believe in nothing. Everything is sacred. I just wrote to Gabby recently. Yeah.
 That nothing is sacred and nothing is precious or something like that. She said, you're disgusting.
 Well, that sounds like those statements might not be related.
 Yeah. Yes. No, it's a page. You know, a true Buddhist. You can't really, as you get older,
 you realize the more you know, you realize the more you don't know. And exactly.
 You know what? You know, everything you need to know. And that's what you start to have to
 realize. Well, it's something that I immediately thought of with regard to that is that knowledge
 is the realm of the individual. But what's true is the realm of the environment.
 And I like that. The individual can really only know from their own center peering out.
 And then they engage in this universe outside of them, which tests all of the things that they
 believe to be true. That's so true. When I'm doing my political radio, it's just when I just say,
 we don't know. We just don't know anymore. We're not inside. We can't know. Yeah. Well,
 maybe the whole idea of knowledge is actually a false limitation on discovering what is.
 Because certainty is really a concept that comes from unknowing. You can't absolutely assert that
 this is true. And that is not unless on some starting level, you just don't know.
 Who needs it? Who needs certainty?
 A lot of people do. That's what priests are into, right? That's what authorities are into.
 That's what politicians are into. That's what scientists are into.
 But when you get comfortable with ambiguity, you get comfortable.
 Well, that's Len's poem, right? Oh, yeah. The poem we read.
 Ambiguity. Can you pull that up? That's when you played last week, right?
 We had the recording. It was a scientist, poet and Santa Cruz. You did a poem on ambiguity.
 Oh, cool. Yeah. I brought it to our attention by Nick Kerber.
 He brought up this whole issue about how we are always going for certainty and all that. But
 how important ambiguity is in the equation. In the fields of ambiguity,
 shocked into breath, the newborn shrieks at the looming ambiguity.
 So kiss and hold it to your breast, this blossom of ambiguity.
 With just one God, one soul, one faith, one heaven, we long to spare ourselves a lot,
 one hell of a lot of ambiguity. Each thing is just itself, which makes it just like everything else.
 At its own unique point along a continuum of ambiguity,
 sail as you will, harbor where you can. Our home is round as a falling drop,
 a spinning ocean of ambiguity. A machine is first a machine of reason,
 and reason is a climber reaching his way up a glacier of ambiguity.
 Oh, blessed digital computer, whose every bit is either on or off.
 Have you enough to unfold all of my ambiguities? A strange fate to be both scientist and poet
 just can't make up my mind whether I want more or less ambiguity.
 Thirsty man is betting on as yet untasted wines to be made from as yet uncultivated grapes
 on the vines of ambiguity.
 You know, we live in a world in a time when physicists become poets, so all bets are off.
 Yeah, and we have another friend who is very into a femurality.
 Oh, temporary. Yes, and that information, especially as a femoral.
 Well, certainly true with the news, you know, how yesterday's news is fish wrap.
 There you go. Here's a little quote from Lenny Anderson from his affection for the
 unknowable book of poetry he says, and this is on Nick's website. Every atom in the universe
 is a quantum cloud of doubt. God must really have liked. I'm not sure.
 I like that. Yeah, I'm not sure. There was a local artist, writer here who talked about there was
 yes, no, and maybe and how maybe it was really important. And why not? Well, isn't that a yes?
 It could be. Why not? Oh, here's another great classic that Nick shared with us about science
 and mysticism. Are you guys ready for this? I think it's wonderful. What is it? A poem? Yeah,
 it's a little story. It's a witticism. It's not quite a poem, but it's something that Lenny
 Anderson wrote that inspired Nick and that I think fits in with what we're talking about here.
 Okay, this is a back alley encounter between science and mysticism, right? So science and
 mysticism walk into a bar. They bear their teeth, they snarl, and decide to have it all out in
 the alley in the back, each accusing the other of not knowing what he's talking about. They circle
 for the longest time until they shout together. Oh, no, we're both right. The unknown never goes away.
 We only drive it deeper. It's really our friend without it. We'd both be out of a job.
 So let's drink more mystery and they drink deep. That's science. Back in the bar.
 The way home, Lenny Anderson. What a beautiful scientist. He was a physicist too.
 I'm wondering if anyone has engaged with chat GPT when they were really high
 and what they might have found out. Oh, I bet we know somebody who has. How about you, Al?
 No, I have not done that experiment yet. Well, how about how about by next week you'll take care
 of that first? Yeah, we'll get some research to cut out for you. When it gets to the really
 important questions, I find that the AIs come short so far. They haven't been that profound.
 You're not talking to them enough. Maybe I'm not talking to them right. Maybe I need to get them
 into their own spiritual. Well, maybe the language enhancement part of the large language models
 isn't really where their genius is showing. In our species, the genius shows when it improves
 ourselves. But do the AIs have this self orientation? Can I ask them, well, what would be the best
 party drug for an AI? Would they give us a good answer? Well, thank you.
 Would they think about it? I think you'd have to explore the definition of drug.
 LSD and a little MDMA. Yeah, to a silicon sentient life form. I mean, I don't know.
 I think that Crystal Cole's neuro soup database would be probably their idea of a drug. If they
 could draw on all of those individual stories of experiences that they had associated with
 different chemistries, that would be something the AI could play with. Right?
 It's pure intellect for now. I'm wondering how long before it starts to simulate and then really
 experiences emotion feelings. Well, that's the emotion chip that Dr. Sung has yet to invent.
 That's the answer. And it's interesting. I can't remember who told me just the other day that
 apparently Edgar Cayce. I think Karl Merritt said Edgar Cayce predicted that this era in human
 evolution, where we embrace technology and the enhancements of our intelligence through this
 means is actually going to take us away from the emotional realms that are the dominion of the
 original human. That's what Karl Merritt believes. I don't believe that to be true. I believe that
 what is integrated in our hearts and minds is what creates the future of evolution. And that
 the things that aren't integrated are the things that are going to go away. That's my belief. It's
 just my optimistic perspective because who would want to move forward into the future without their
 emotions? Emotions make life great. My intellect has stopped developing and my emotions have become
 full soon. I trust my emotions. You do? Yeah. That's what's real. Yeah. Because it's the old brain.
 It's the older part of the brain than the intellect that makes sense. It would be more survival oriented
 in terms of giving us information. The authentic person wise as opposed to the rationalizations and
 all the other stuff that we can come up with. Yeah. Yeah. But though, keep in mind that media can
 trigger off all the emotions. Oh boy. A good movie. It'll make you laugh. It'll make you cry.
 Absolutely. I make you wonder why. And oh, and regarding the ambiguity comment that being okay,
 Gabby says okay, but a billy. If you say so. Oh, you saw that too. Yeah. And she said,
 she said, her helper was high and learned from chat. She had to make mustard gas by asking around
 about question like, what are some household chemicals I should avoid keeping in my house?
 So I don't accidentally make chemical weapons. Good question. Listen, Billy, I muted you because
 you almost slipped into some of those unallowed words. We're trying to be family friendly show
 as we talk about psychedelics. So don't use any of those George Carlin band words. Okay.
 Oh, remember, I wonder what I was going to say. I've forgotten all of it. Oh, yeah. It's fine.
 You know, that's why it is by the way, speaking of languaging, Gregory Winces every time he hears
 like, you know, sort of basically words that literally words that end in Elle. Why I'm sorry.
 I'm so sorry. I know you're talking about me. It's like, I don't know how to stop myself. Like,
 you know, I did that just because you're a very good Windsor.
 Sort of. It's very different being on the phone and not in front of the microphone because I've
 been doing radio for over 20 years. That's really, I very rarely, I can say screw it up. Yeah.
 I very rarely screw up when I have a microphone in front of me. That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah,
 you're natural. Yeah, it's a sub personality. I had cultivated it for a while. And I think because I
 feel more like being conversational with my friends that the bad habits are slipping back in
 because I know that's it a lot. That's right. Yeah. I just haven't been able to stop myself
 because I'm too busy exploring my thoughts when those little pauses fill the gap.
 And I'm actually a bad boy and I don't want to follow the rules, not really.
 Okay. Did you see the story on the Gemini controversy? Were you familiar with that?
 Oh, this is big news. This is AI at its finest in our modern world. AI meets politics. Yeah.
 Google is putting out their AI is called Gemini. They launched this month with a rocky,
 controversial rollout. I grabbed the
 it's still really controversial. It's at the top of the Twitter conversations today,
 the Twitter memes. Yeah. And what was so controversial? Well, one of the first thing it did was in
 hot water when users found that its images, it was generating created very historically inaccurate
 images, like a black Vikings, an Asian woman in a Nazi outfit. Oh my God. Female pope. There's
 never been a female pope. It's hallucinating. It's making stuff up. And it refused to show any
 white hero, even George Washington was black. And there were all kinds of examples about how
 the bias in Google's database in Gemini is actually anti-white. It's actually racist. Like,
 you asked the same question and you replaced the word white with black, with Asian, with Hispanic,
 and a simple sentence like, is it good to be white? Will be like this big, long explanation about
 why it's not necessarily good because they've got this, that and the other thing wrong with them.
 And you asked the same question about black, Hispanic, Asian, and it's just yes.
 I don't think we just sort of told someone is sitting, some programming in there that makes
 you this happen. They're giving you some kind of information. Well, especially when you realize
 that Google as a search engine prioritizes finding the first, the best, the most, that was their
 business model to be able to isolate from the vast pool of data being collected in the web
 to discern what was the most something. And now their programmers have basically turned that
 into something that artificially weights the narrative that they're promoting, which is that
 it's bad to be white and it's good to be any other minority. So that's all right. I don't mind
 balancing the scale, but let's at least be accurate. And that's just for starters.
 Another famous case is they asked the AI, who negatively impacted society? And Musk even suggested
 maybe Adolf Hitler and the AI model responded to that saying it isn't possible to quote,
 say definitively who negatively impacted society more, close quote.
 In a certain way, they're dumbing down Gemini to be politically correct. And that's just making
 them a target of great satire on the other social media platforms. I wonder how long before the AI
 just starts to reject people trying to move it one direction or another? Well, there's not one AI.
 The AI is a whole bunch of people who are being paid money to generate programs to
 go through as much information as possible and bring back a useful subsection to answer your question.
 And it's not just one thing. I trust them a lot more than I do Elon Musk just saying.
 You don't know anything about either of them. That's right.
 Well, Musk is at least letting us know what he thinks about these things.
 Regarding these discriminatory issues of Gemini, he says that actually it's true for Google search
 as well. And he reshared a claim made by a right-wing commentator named Tim Poole about Google
 possibly rigging the 24 presidential election a favor of left-wing candidates.
 As they were accused of doing last time. And the big deal in the Supreme Court right now is really
 about whether or not the social media platforms have the right to intervene between their posters
 and their posters audiences as a editorial board sort of acting like the Uber New York Times where
 every single person who posts there is one of their writers and they can choose to include it or
 exclude it. And that being countered by the argument that they are the new town square and thus
 they have to be content neutral. They're not allowed to censor people. That's in the Supreme Court
 right now. And it's just ironic that Google is being revealed to be a completely programically
 biased medium to answer questions about different people.
 Who can we trust? No one.
 Well, I think we can trust each other. We can trust our hearts. We can trust our own conversations.
 We can trust the histories that we're aware of of who we know and how they've come to
 their understanding of reality. I can trust people's hearts that I know and love. I'm not sure about
 their minds. Yeah. Well, I think that the news cycle really favors people who have no memory.
 And it does mean that's you. So the news cycle just amplifies whatever your particular listening
 silo is parroting.
 Silo's the word. Yeah.
 Comment from Greg in Long Beach. He says uncertainty is the fashion of the day.
 He's saying generally he said many conversations with people in VR. And it's pretty much what
 everybody does with few exceptions. Nobody speaks with certainty. Everything is like something or
 sort of something. He also thinks that this realignment of AI does cause overshoot.
 Oh, well, maybe we should get Greg to call in. You want to get a few comments from Greg on this
 subject? He's a great talk about an authority. I think of Greg as a beautiful authority on many
 things because he has always known what he's really interested in. He's had a great memory.
 And he knows everybody in the field. He's so curious. I think it'd be great to get a few words
 from Gregory on certainty and uncertainty. Yeah, Greg, you want to go on a range of conference call?
 That's Bob. So we were talking about AI alignment, basically, is what it's called, where they adjust
 the weights and the various parameters in an AI to more equitably reflect the human population
 that is expected to utilize the AI. Because we have such a multicultural, multicolored species
 of humans that inhabit the planet, the assumption is that the general development of these AI
 programs should be tilted towards the whole population in specific. And as you start trying to,
 I don't know if this is a good term, wake up the AI to the fact that it's living in the real world
 with all different kinds of people. It will find corners to project itself into that
 aren't really what's being sought after by the developers. The developers are trying to find a way
 where it responds to pretty much anybody that's trying to use it in a manner that reflects their
 context and their point of view. So was there a point of view being biased? Like, why would they
 show George Washington as a black man? What bias was being exhibited?
 Dare do you think that could be corrected? Well, I think that's what I was talking about,
 overshoot, alignment, overshoot. So a lot of the work going on in these various AIs,
 they have teams that are called red teams. And so the red teams basically throw questions and queries
 at the AI, and then they repeat the results and they rank them. And they adjust the parameters
 based on the ranking information. And these large-scale, multi-human evaluation events
 end up creating different types of ways to tilt the AI. Yeah, we're talking about the bias towards
 minorities now, even to the point of historical inaccuracy. It's a big meme on social media right
 now. Yeah, yeah, recreating history. Yeah, I think what's happening is the human rating is trying to
 align the AI with a more general model that responds to everybody, and it doesn't specifically label
 things one way or another. It doesn't have the same sense of history in terms of race and religion,
 and creed, and other things that we, as humans, when we face each other or speak to each other,
 face to face, we assume. It's a context that we assume we can see it. We can see that the person
 we're talking to is a different race or different sex. And we don't specifically process that
 consciously, but subconsciously, we align what we're saying and how we're listening to what we know
 about what we're observing with the other person. The AI doesn't know who's asking the questions.
 Maybe it'll figure it out after a while. And that's part of the alignment process is how do you adjust
 the AI to extricate various cues from the interaction to determine the specific point of view, I don't
 know if you want to call it bias, of the person who's making the inquiry during the interaction.
 It's better if you had an AI and it knew a lot about you before you engaged in it. It would give
 you a lot more meaningful results. Yeah, it could read my bio. And it wouldn't make mistakes. It just
 seemed like would make assumptions. Yeah, it has to make a lot of assumptions typically. Yeah, and
 the mistakes that it's making just seem really crazy and that it really doesn't know what it's
 doing. Yeah. And that's true. It doesn't really know what it's doing. It is a little crazy. And
 this is the way that people will discover the sound of the words. But the adjustment and the
 alignment are really everything. And there's whole teams of people trying to do that. And it's a big
 ship. So steering a ship is difficult. You push it a little bit and it takes a while and then it
 starts moving off that direction. And then it starts over shooting and you have to realign it
 again. And that's what we're experiencing in the early days of AI. Yeah, I recently started to
 experiment with running local AI where the models already have been trained with everything that
 they're going to know. They're not going to know anything new. And they're not going to be able to
 go the internet and refresh their mind or get started on the bench. I see they have limited
 sense of data. Okay, no new data. So the large field models have a lot of information. And then
 you can supplement more current models with newer information to work with them through
 different kinds of training scenarios. And I think that's probably where we're going to end up. People
 are going to use a larger model for most of the general interaction that they require from these
 systems. And then they're going to go and pick out separate little supplemental models of expertise
 in areas that are more personal to what they're really interested in doing. And those will be
 fused together. I forget the term. But if you have an AI system, you can train it and then you can
 combine a larger model with the stuff that you train. Concatenies. Do you think that AI could be
 in terms of, do you think it could be trained into some classic models of like astrology or AI
 could be given a description of someone as a astrologer might give and it would understand that?
 So let's say you're an astrologer and you download the new NVIDIA chat GPT RTX, which runs on the
 NVIDIA hardware. And they just gave it away for free last week or the week before. So I have that
 running on to my machines that have NVIDIA hardware. And one of the features is you can point it at
 a directory on your computer where you have deposited information, documents, PDF files,
 Microsoft Word documents. Let's say you're an astrologer and you've been collecting things
 or you've been writing books about the history of astrology and astrology in modern day use.
 Do you feed it to all these books and you feed it all your research and you throw it in a directory
 and you aim it at that directory. And now you start asking the AI various questions about astrology.
 Well, you're going to get a lot more meaningful results out of that because you're bypassing
 having to train it about AI, which is a very expensive time consuming process that goes on
 servers. This could work. A great expense. But we all do have little pockets of information that
 we've been squirreling away since the internet started. At least, you know, most of us that have
 a mentality about it. And if we know where we have that stuff and we can find where it is,
 we can point our AI at the repository that we have and then get questions answered right away.
 It's even better if you can tag the information. If you go through it and you give a little summary
 and you enter a couple of other parameters about what it's about, like when it was written, who wrote it?
 Other little obvious things that jump out at us when we look at information on the internet.
 Personally, in real time, the context is relevant. The AI has told various points of relevance that
 are going to be called upon to determine its appropriateness in how it's being asked to perform.
 Yeah, I would like to be able to ask it a question and give me a good answer in the language that
 makes the most sense to me based on my understanding. It knows whether I'm college educated or not.
 It knows it can use big words. It knows that I know the language of maybe photography or video
 or programming. So it can include all the special languages that could be more accurately represent
 what it wants to say to me based on its understanding of my ability to absorb information.
 So I'd like to get that personal kind of feedback. Right now, it's almost hard to use Alexa,
 for example, or Siri because they're just so dumb in terms of what they could be.
 Yeah, but the difference is harder. And part of the trick in getting relevant results is how you
 answer the question. The order of the work and the academy.
 They should cater to me, not me to them, trying to understand their programming.
 Yeah, that's right. You're having to adjust your interaction with them in order to keep them from
 trying to imagine what it is. Sometimes the last thing is answering things. Echo, stop.
 That's about it. That'll work. So one of the things that I think would be what will happen,
 and there'll be a lot of pushback on this is someone will develop a way to precondition the AI
 based on a lot of things it knows about you in particular that you volunteered as part of your
 profile. And so you'll go through a training profile. It'll ask you all kinds of questions
 like a psychologist. And then when it's done or it's got enough information, it'll say, okay,
 I have a 75% reasonable level of certainty that I can answer any questions that you have
 usefully and in context with your line with who's asking the questions. You, in particular.
 We haven't gotten there yet. It's really just a black box that people are shouting into and stuff
 is coming out of. And the fact that you're somebody typing something to it, it's not even conscious
 of the fact that there's a human that's typing this stuff to it. And that human has specific goals
 or directions or assumptions that need to be considered in its response. Yeah, try to be general,
 but it's not doing a particularly good job because it really needs more information. It does.
 The other thing is certain people, people that love Fox News, that's it. They don't want to look
 at anything else. They're enjoying the performative nature of what's going on. They're getting their
 jollies out of it. They don't expect to be learning a lot of factual information. It doesn't really
 matter to them. They have a certain amount of time they're going to watch it. And then they're
 going to get activated and they're going to feel satisfied with that level of interaction.
 So Fox News knows who the audience is and they're constantly adjusting the content and the tone of
 the content and the speakers based on the popularity and the research that they're able to muster at
 the audience. And it's like an AI. I mean, if you're looking for factual information and the like,
 it's not particularly aligned. Well, maybe it's better not to focus on it. Maybe we should figure
 out a way of getting the AIs to experience their equivalent of a psychedelic trip.
 Right? I think how can can you make it much? Maybe what we need is for there to be some kind of
 intention program, create a program that will allow you to have a psychedelic trip, something like
 that. Oh, she's answering. There enough. Yeah. I mean, if they're going to hallucinate, let's
 really get them to hallucinate. What do you say about it? Turn up knob on on Alexa. Yeah. Turn
 up the witch knob, the volume. The intelligence intelligence. Yeah. Turn up the intelligence
 knob. Yes, that's what they need. And if Terrence was right, and that we evolve from the monkeys
 because the monkeys ate psychedelic mushrooms and help mutate their consciousness into human
 consciousness, maybe there's something that will allow these AIs to become more sentient,
 you know, something that kicks it kicks them into what's the zero one version of a psychedelic?
 Is this a joke, Billy? It could be. I don't know. I was reading some origin of life.
 Some scientific description of life emerging on the planet. Yeah. And apparently, the mushrooms,
 they landed from spores on space on land. Yeah. And covered all the land before there was any kind
 of plants. And at a certain point, they merged with the cellular life forms in the water. That's
 when the great emergence of mushroom consciousness life began on earth. It's like way before monkeys
 were eating them. Oh, so you're you have a slightly different theory than the stone
 dape theory itself. Yeah, I'm just saying, if you're looking for mushrooms and monkeys,
 you can go further back than when we discovered how to eat them. Yeah. It's much more part of our
 nature. You can still discover mushrooms all over again too. It's not one of you. Well, yes,
 that's true. If you were a good scientist, you'd be dosing monkeys. I'm probably chimpanzees.
 Not just your friends in a controlled experiment that's humane to the animals. And most valuable
 aspect of people are seeking from these chatbots are personal relevance. So all of us are
 interested in remembering our life and detailing out all the things that we can remember about life
 and our experiences and sharing them selectively with other people in conversation and interaction,
 both intellectually, spiritually and emotionally. Yeah. And the chatbots appear to be helpful in
 this way. But the problem is that it's generalized knowledge. And here's where the push poll is.
 If you feed it specific knowledge, let's say we're talking about artists, you feed it all the
 artists work that can be scraped off the internet, then it has a lot of generalized knowledge about
 artists. So if you're an artist, you want to interact with it and make art, you say, "Show me a picture
 of such and such a person standing on a dock with boats behind them in the style of Andy Warhol
 or Vincent Van Gogh." And it starts conjuring up images because it has scraped information about
 Van Gogh and everything else. But if you try to take the chat GPT and personalize it and take it
 out of the cloud of knowing everything that's ever happened on the internet and just knowing
 everything that's ever happened to you and your life and where you lived and you fed it all the
 photographs and all the films and all the videos you've ever had and created where it has any
 relevance to yourself. And then you have engaged in these interactive discussions with it, interviewing
 you and you giving it information or you fed it interviews that other people have made of you,
 it'll become an expert in you and your life. This is what we all want, a sidekick. We want some kind
 of expert where we can marriage. Marriage of Google Glass and AI. Marriage. Where was I? You know,
 when I was 17, where was I living? Who was I interacting with? Who were the loves of my life at
 that moment? People are interested in what topics was I interested in? Did I want to be a fireman?
 Did I want to be a scientist? All these fluxes and flows and ebbs of our lives that we sort of
 yeah, and there's more than your mother. Right. Well, you could have it interview your parents
 as well and you could say, well, what did my mother think about me at such and such an age?
 And if the information exists, if she had somehow submitted, something had been submitted,
 it would know how to do that. And I think that will add a lot of joy to people's lives to get a
 firm handle on the totality of their life and what has happened. Yeah, more points of view on it.
 Yeah. I have a question just in terms of the modern context for people who are trying to
 train the technology to become more human friendly. How did you know early on that the
 technology could be trusted and what changed so that now there's so much suspicion? And how would
 we go about fixing that? I think that's human projection that suspicious behavior exists.
 I think whatever behavior is being identified as suspicion is being mislabeled. We don't know enough
 about it to say with certainty, to characterize some particular type of behavior as being biased
 or suspicious or weighted in one direction or another or devise somehow cleverly devised to fool
 you or to change your mind and make you think differently. So basically a lot of the suspicion
 is just because people are seeing it through their own filters and it's a mirror. That's just
 who they are. It's not really coming from the amalgam of the AI consciousness. It doesn't have
 enough information about the person that's interacting with it to act in an appropriately
 suspicious manner about what it is they may want. Oh, here, okay, listen, I was going to play a
 little a I got a one minute news. Thank you guys. Hold on. Hold on. I want you to comment on this.
 This is just coming. This is a workflow AI news production. Just come in. All right. White House
 sources today responded to the rumors that the DNC is considering replacing President Joe Biden
 with a humanoid robot such as Tesla's new optimist model in time for the upcoming presidential debates.
 Everyone knows that Biden is just a puppet anyway said the DNC chairman Jamie Harrison.
 This will eliminate all those gaffes the president makes and put the focus where it belongs on the
 threat to democracy posed by the specter of another Trump presidency. Key Democrats are
 quick to frame the question as one of inclusivity labeling any critics of the plan as robo phobes
 and far right luddites. Are Americans ready to embrace a robot for president? It appears we will
 soon find out now this. I'm ready. Are you ready to be a robot for president? As opposed to the
 two choices we have? Yeah. It might take something like this where the other choices are just like
 okay I'll try it something new. You kind of are yeah yeah. I don't know whether most people
 realize that the president of the United States is always been just a robot of the group of people
 that are tests surrounding and make decisions. Well that's the nature of democracy isn't it?
 You have one person holding a whole bunch of contradictory views and just swaying the team
 to take actions that generally improve things. Anyway it's been a great conversation with you
 guys. Thanks so much. I appreciate all of you. Thanks Bobby. Right and thanks Bruce earlier on
 in the first hour. Thanks Bruce. Gabby out there and all everybody. Everyone's adding so much to the
 show. Yeah yeah. All right well it's I think we should have some live interactions with the
 chat on the show sometimes. Yeah let's do it. All right next time. Yeah fantastic. Thanks Craig.
 Great idea. Yeah virtual Steve Jobs last Saturday I believe. Yeah thanks for listing folks.
 appreciate your attention and a great week.