0:00:00 Tom Barbalet: Hello Heron.
0:00:01 Heron Stone: Oh hi, Tom.
0:00:02 TB: So, I have a list of topics in front of me. How's your topic list looking this evening?
0:00:07 HS: My topic list is pretty slim. In fact, it's even less than slim. [laughter]
0:00:13 TB: So, well I have wide variety of topics here. Which one should I start with? So, something quite surreal happened this week with me. I was contacted by the city's head of IT, and he said that the city was gonna pay for the Internet at the local community center. And it turns out that my interaction with him has actually prompted, not just our community center to get the Internet, but also three other community centers to get the internet.
0:00:44 HS: It's hard to believe that there could be such a thing as a community center without the internet. [laughter]
0:00:49 TB: Well, when I arrived, there was a community center without the internet, and even without computers. It had some pathetic...
0:00:56 HS: Well they had a basketball court probably. [laughter]
0:01:00 TB: No, no, no basketball court. The crayons had been stolen, it was all quite bleak.
[laughter]
0:01:05 TB: But yeah, I think the city has realized that actually by having community members step up and do what I've done, I've actually saved them a bunch of money. And the least they could do is actually connect the internet. Pay for it after it's being connected.
0:01:20 HS: It's a little shocking that there's anybody that conscious in the system.
0:01:23 TB: I don't know, maybe give them time. I'm not really sure what's going on, it still seems a little bit surreal to me. It feels like I've been slapped round the head quite a few times...
0:01:31 HS: Maybe they're trying to get rid of you.
0:01:32 TB: Well, this is where it gets very curious because I also had some nice correspondence from the city. They want to build literally at the end of our street, they want to build a high-rise... I don't know what one would call it, like a high-rise set of, some of them are condominiums, some of them are units, but it's gonna be probably at least seven stories high right by a freeway. And it's a two...
0:01:54 HS: For what though?
0:01:55 TB: Well, it used to be a gas station and now they...
0:01:57 HS: No, no, but a seven-story building. What do they have...
0:02:00 TB: To house people. So, originally, 20% was going to be low income and they said no. It's a ridiculously small property, it's just insane. Anyway, the issue through this or an issue through this to be Stonian is that there's nowhere for these people to live. I mean, they could build it up, but there's nothing around it. There's a park maybe four blocks away, but there's nothing for children to play on or anything like that. I mean, the space used to be a gas station.
0:02:32 HS: Well, no, it's just a place to house people to keep them out of the rain, I would assume is sort of the point of it, isn't it?
0:02:37 TB: Except it's... They're selling half of them at market rate.
[overlapping conversation]
0:02:44 TB: Yeah, anyway. My axe to grind in the situation is that our street is a Truck Route. And it was designated a Truck Route about nine months before we moved in. And in fact, when it was designated a Truck Route, the people that used to own this house decided to sell and get away from this Truck Route. So we have in the order of 200 to 300 trucks a day moving...
0:03:09 HS: A day?
0:03:10 TB: At speed.
0:03:11 HS: Jesus Christ. That is a Truck Route. [laughter]
0:03:14 TB: There's a reason they showed this house on a Sunday. We saw the house on a Sunday, bought it on a Sunday. And didn't realize the Truck Route was there until we arrived...
0:03:23 HS: 200 a day?
0:03:24 TB: You can't believe this thing Heron unless you actually see it.
0:03:28 HS: So, what's the speed limit?
0:03:31 TB: That's where it comes very interesting. The speed limit is 35. The trucks frequently travel faster than 40. Many of them at 50, and some even at 60.
0:03:41 HS: And this is a residential street, right? I mean, they're...
0:03:45 TB: Yes. With residential houses.
[laughter]
0:03:47 TB: So the point that I've made to the city is that moving 290 odd families or 290 people, probably 200 odd families into this thing, on this Truck Route with no parking. Small children, nowhere for the children to play, this kind of stuff. It's just absolutely categorically insane. And if they go to build this thing, then they're gonna have to do traffic calming and they're probably gonna have to remove the truck...
0:04:15 HS: Well, no. They can just go ahead and do it. [laughter] They don't have to do anything.
0:04:19 TB: Here's where it gets interesting, because I raised a number of issues... It's currently also a homeless encampment, but that's only because they closed down the other homeless encampments, and where are the homeless gonna go?
0:04:29 HS: Yeah, to a new encampment. [laughter]
0:04:32 TB: So, yes. So I bring up this to the city expecting the usual, we're not responding to Tom nonsense, which is just like standard. And I got a very polite email back from a representative in the city who normally does not respond to any of my emails saying, if I could provide a spread sheet associated with a sampling of the speeds at which the trucks were traveling. And also, time of day and this kind of stuff. And just start collecting raw numbers, and provide it to the Department of Transportation, which is a California thing and the city, then there maybe reconsideration associated with the Truck Route.
0:05:08 HS: That's right. If you get the state involved that might be a better strategy.
0:05:14 TB: Which, well, to get both involved, the state or the city...
0:05:17 HS: Well, yeah. They could put some pressure on...
0:05:19 TB: Exactly...
0:05:19 HS: They'll have some leverage on the city.
0:05:22 TB: So the last time that the city put in an official traffic-counting device, which is a thick wire things that go across the road to count the number of cars and these guys' trucks. The trucks diverted their route...
[laughter]
0:05:36 TB: For three days, so that they wouldn't be counted in that.
0:05:40 HS: Wow.
0:05:40 TB: And when I made that point, they said, "Okay, your data will be anonymized effectively. So present your data on a spreadsheet and we'll start gathering this data". Now the responsibility is mine...
[laughter]
0:05:53 TB: Which typically is the way these things...
0:05:55 HS: And what... You're gonna end up literally with a spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers on it, right? That's what they want?
0:06:01 TB: Yeah. In particular, indicating ideally for specific times the number of trucks speeding through belonging to this particular cement works.
0:06:12 HS: So it's traffic from one particular company?
0:06:14 TB: A substantial portion is, yes.
0:06:17 HS: That's obviously something to take a look at, isn't it?
[laughter]
0:06:21 TB: It was designated a truck route based on the cement company staying in downtown San Jose, 'cause that's really what downtown San Jose needs is a cement company with speeding trucks, that leave vast quantities of debris. Fine particulate debris as they speed past.
0:06:36 HS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:06:39 TB: I think this is going to be my task for the year is seeing that this insanity is documented and presented... Since the internet was connected for the community center, at least the city paid for the internet or it will pay for the internet.
0:06:51 HS: Well, at least they've got the internet for the kids.
0:06:54 TB: They put that in in September last year. They had to drill through this big block and all the other stuff to get that through. At least the city is now taking a little bit of their responsibility with regards to this matter. Slightly more than $200 a month.
0:07:07 HS: There apparently is an individual or two around there who's to do something. Good for them.
0:07:15 TB: The folks that I normally communicate with at the city that had all these details, never acted on them, for however many months. 11 months now. So it's kind of...
0:07:26 HS: Maybe the good news here is you may have found somebody you can work with.
0:07:32 TB: It was interesting because I used a combination of satire and technical knowledge when I interacted with this individual.
[laughter]
0:07:39 TB: And I also made it perfectly clear when he said, "Why are you satirizing me?" I explained to him very clearly why I was satirizing him and I think that got some degree of respect. Also, the standard type of techie bullshit that people in his position give to people which are just random excuses of why things aren't getting done. I was able to cut down, relatively rapidly. If you use the DMCA as an excuse not to get computers with internet to seven-year-olds, you're going come up against some heavy opposition from Mr Barbalet and that's just the way it is.
0:08:13 HS: Yeah. It's tough when you're talking to somebody who knows what the fuck they're talking about.
[laughter]
0:08:19 TB: Whats also particularly curious is, that a house on the street has sold which has upped the value of our house by a quarter.
[laughter]
0:08:27 TB: Which is just astonishing to me.
0:08:30 HS: That's interesting because they don't like the neighborhood and that raises the price.
0:08:35 TB: No, what's interesting here is that most of the houses are owned by... That are still here, are owned by elderly couples or elderly individuals.
0:08:43 HS: Who live there, right?
0:08:44 TB: Who live there, yes.
0:08:45 HS: When you say most, what percentage would you say? And you're talking about just in that one block?
0:08:51 TB: It's hard to get percentages out of one block. Probably 50-60%, so roughly half of the houses.
0:08:57 HS: In the general neighborhood.
0:08:58 TB: In the general neighborhood. And the one that sold...
0:09:00 HS: 50-60% are elderly people who've lived there for a long time.
0:09:05 TB: Yeah, that have had children, and the children have moved on. You know, that kind of stuff. What's particularly interesting actually, is that the house that sold for such a price which bumped us up was pretty decrepit inside. They put in a bit of work but a lot of the work they put in was actually ripping stuff out and what was really left was a shell of a house. An elderly...
0:09:25 HS: That should save somebody some time.
0:09:27 TB: I guess so. An elderly stove and a few other little bits and pieces, but the floor plan was roughly half the size of our place and it sold for roughly the same amount as our place.
0:09:38 HS: Well, that's good news.
0:09:39 TB: So, it means that things are on the up and up.
0:09:43 HS: You could use this next year to move instead of worrying about trying to solve that fucking political situation.
0:09:47 TB: The question is, "Do you move at this stage, or do you wait another year and see where you are in a year's time?"
0:09:56 HS: That's simple for me. I'd move. I just have no tolerance for bullshit. There's nowhere that's perfect, but that place sucks.
[laughter]
0:10:05 TB: Anyway, we'll see what happens.
0:10:08 HS: Yeah, yeah.
0:10:09 TB: But I think...
0:10:11 HS: It's a good sign to get anybody to respond in some sort of reasonable manner. That's a great sign.
0:10:18 TB: I think they probably just got tired. My suspicion is that so much energy was put into not doing anything, particularly with me there to point out they weren't doing anything. This is an easy win for them because really they've saved a bunch of money and now they don't have to go on the site or do anything, they just pay a monthly bill.
0:10:38 HS: Yeah, yeah, that works out great.
0:10:40 TB: Yeah, so...
0:10:41 HS: And how much is that?
0:10:43 TB: It's slightly more than 200 a month for internet.
0:10:45 HS: For one location?
0:10:47 TB: Yeah, but this is... I made sure that they got the best... Not the absolute top tier, but they got a tier sufficient for... And now they have six iPads.
0:10:55 HS: How many computers are on site?
0:10:56 TB: There are nine computers, and six iPads.
0:11:00 HS: All internet capable.
0:11:02 TB: Yes.
0:11:04 HS: What are they? PCs or Macs?
0:11:06 TB: They're PCs, but I think we'll transition them over this year. Particularly now we've got iPads. We'll transition them over and I'm interested in the numbers as well. It moved from about 12 to 20 just by connecting the internet and having new computers, and then there were only four computers, so now they have substantially more computers plus iPads. I'm suspecting...
0:11:27 HS: They have wi-fi there, too?
0:11:28 TB: Yes.
0:11:29 HS: Awesome, that's great. And kids are using it.
0:11:35 TB: Yeah, and thoroughly enjoying it.
0:11:37 HS: Yes, of course. All the porn sites, man. They know exactly how to get there.
0:11:43 TB: Moving on. They seem to be...
0:11:46 HS: Those will be my customers on Chaturbate.
0:11:49 TB: Have you been back on Chaturbate? Or have you just completely...
0:11:53 HS: No, that's a no win situation.
0:11:56 TB: Yes.
0:11:56 HS: I wouldn't say that, it's just I'm not interested in pursuing it.
0:12:00 TB: Did they ever send you a check?
0:12:01 HS: No, you have to request it [chuckle] I figured I just... I think I have 20 tokens at a nickel each. So that's a buck.
[laughter]
0:12:13 TB: You're in the money. It's the most money you've made from Gendo in the past 15 years or so?
0:12:20 HS: It could be, that's right. That would allow me...
0:12:22 TB: You should take the check up front.
0:12:24 HS: To take a good loss on that one.
0:12:26 TB: Yeah.
0:12:26 HS: Yeah.
0:12:27 TB: So anyway, that's the community update bit of news.
0:12:30 HS: Well, that's positive, that's good. The issue is, well, to me the issue is, to get a foot in the door to find if there is anybody there that you can actually work with.
[overlapping conversation]
0:12:42 HS: If that's just pointless then...
0:12:45 TB: I think it's difficult because I spent year hitting brick walls. The head of IT, I guess has some respect for me, but that's only applicable with regards to this particular situation.
0:12:55 HS: Yeah, yeah.
0:12:55 TB: It's not applicable with regards to the truck situation, or what have you. So...
0:13:01 HS: Well, good luck.
0:13:02 TB: Most of my topics for this evening are themed around narrative in some form.
[laughter]
0:13:08 HS: Well, what did we just have?
0:13:10 TB: Yes. So one of the things that is interesting me currently, because I'm writing fiction again is associated with examples that are easily accessible of, we're taking a series of ideas in a narrative form, quickly translate to other media. Here, film in particular. And if there is a pattern that is best to follow in this practice, or if that just falls into the case of everyone who's ever done a creative writing course.
0:13:42 HS: You know, I really didn't understand.
0:13:45 TB: Okay, so let's take some films that have a familiar narrative form. 'Goodfellas', 'Casino' in fact, basic...
0:13:53 HS: What do you mean by a familiar narrative form?
0:13:57 TB: The idea is that you have voice-over characters that are ultimately criminals but become likable. That you get to see with a certain degree of intimacy, characters that give you a timeline narrative with a central peak and then as they lose everything, as the Feds...
0:14:19 HS: Yeah.
0:14:19 TB: Gather in on their...
0:14:21 HS: So you're saying this is a sort of standard narrative form?
0:14:24 TB: Yeah, and there are half a dozen of these. I'm just using those as an example.
0:14:28 HS: Yeah, right. Well, I'm trying to think of the story that's not a standard.
0:14:31 TB: Well, this is where it gets interesting, because there's a lot of experimental narrative, but it doesn't have the success.
0:14:36 HS: No, they usually suck.
0:14:38 TB: Yes.
0:14:38 HS: Because they're trying to get away from the standard narrative.
0:14:41 TB: Exactly.
0:14:41 HS: And they end up with a mess. [chuckle]
0:14:43 TB: Exactly, so I guess my concern is do you fight it or do you just work into it, and for now, I'm interested in the experimentation of working into it in some regard. But it does seem... I've had various conversations through this week associated with like Neuro-Linguistic Programming and how we've evolved into the language monkey state that you so heavily lament. But also...
0:15:09 HS: No, I don't lament it. There's no point in lamenting the caterpillars.
0:15:15 TB: Yes. [chuckle]
0:15:17 HS: It's just recognizing it for what it is.
0:15:19 TB: Yeah, but when you say, "Fucking language monkeys,"
0:15:21 HS: Well, that's just...
0:15:22 TB: You're not saying it to me in an endearing way, right?
0:15:24 HS: You're right. But that's really sort of the bullshit propaganda stuff. When you really get right down to it... Well, of course, it depends on your [chuckle] fucking narrative, the story you're committed to.
0:15:35 TB: Yeah.
0:15:36 HS: I like the butterfly analogy, so for me, there's nothing really to condemn about the caterpillar.
0:15:41 TB: Except that you are surrounded by language monkeys.
0:15:44 HS: Well, I'm focused on the butterfly, and that's what my attention is on and that's what I'm interested in, and I just don't have much interest in the caterpillar, but... And I do tend to put it down, you're right, I mean that's just sort of standard stuff, is to make fun of it and you know. But I don't have much energy on it being wrong anymore.
0:16:03 TB: Yeah.
0:16:04 HS: This is just what I expect, I mean like the Republican fucking Party and all the shit that's going.
0:16:09 TB: Every fucking country.
0:16:10 HS: What else would you expect of this country? [laughter]
0:16:14 TB: Yeah. And in this notion of evolving into language monkeys, I return to this idea that I floated periodically here, sometimes to your agreement, sometimes to your...
0:16:26 HS: Depending on how much wine I have had...
0:16:28 TB: Exactly. Associated with animal stories. And if my wife is away...
0:16:33 HS: In your stories that animals have or our stories?
0:16:36 TB: No, no, no. Well, that's actually interesting, that's where it gets particularly interesting.
0:16:40 HS: Yeah.
0:16:40 TB: Because obviously there's an anthropomorphism that goes into these things in terms of human observation.
0:16:46 HS: Sure, yeah.
0:16:46 TB: And my wife is currently away, and I've been spending a lot of time with our cats, and they have these... It's an embodied story, because it's to do with their movements and their interactions and various things. But I make this point to my spiritual advisor on a regular basis, we have one large old feral cat who has at least two or three separate narratives that he plays out.
0:17:15 HS: Yeah.
0:17:15 TB: The first is when there's food involved. Any kind of food involved. And then his behavior is, his eyes go dead, he moves in such a way that he is driven by compulsion.
0:17:27 HS: Yeah, I know. I got exactly what you mean, he goes into that mode.
0:17:30 TB: Yes.
0:17:31 HS: Yeah.
0:17:31 TB: There's another mode that he has where he pretends to be abused.
[laughter]
0:17:41 HS: Oh lord.
0:17:41 TB: He does this thing where he comes up to us and then he shies away like we're going to strike him or something like that, which I've always pointed out to my spiritual adviser, never occurs when he's trying to get food, so he has two clear distinct paths here.
0:17:54 HS: Yeah, yeah.
0:17:55 TB: And the third is...
0:17:56 HS: Well, he was raised around... Oh, you say this is a feral cat?
0:18:00 TB: Yeah.
0:18:01 HS: He was not raised around humans?
0:18:02 TB: He started dealing with humans when he was probably three or four. He had a few relations.
0:18:07 HS: Three or four years?
0:18:09 TB: Yes.
0:18:10 HS: Oh Yeah. That's a Feral cat, alright. And he lived on the streets alone until it picked you up.
0:18:16 TB: It had a tribe of it's own relations. And...
0:18:20 HS: But I mean, they had no home or place to go?
0:18:24 TB: They lived opposite my in laws actually, which is a common theme with a lot of these cats. And, he just started to come and eat because he was the alpha male in the crew. He just started to come and eat the food that my in laws would leave out for the Feral cats. And then he became increasingly affectionate. But, if you doubt... So, we had our trees cleaned up, maybe four weekends ago. We had the guy come and clean up the trees with my instruction. And he got out, which is his nature, and...
0:18:53 HS: So normally, he stays in the house?
0:18:55 TB: Yeah. Unless, he is always sneakily trying to get out, and then...
0:18:58 HS: Why? Okay. Anyway, that's your guys decision. He's a house cat.
0:19:02 TB: We are on a truck route, okay.
0:19:04 HS: Oh yes. [chuckle] That's right, I forgot. Flattened Cat.
0:19:08 TB: Let's put the stories together. Let's put the images together.
0:19:09 HS: Yeah. They are called Sail Cats.
0:19:11 TB: Yeah, so he got out and I was able to grab him and he was in my hands and as soon as the gardener came over, the gardener wanted to stroke him. He went Feral on me. He went completely Feral on me and basically tried to scratch my various veins and things like that.
0:19:31 HS: No shit. Wow.
0:19:32 TB: We have a cage outside for him, and, I was able to kinda flatten him onto the cage, to try and just getting from just clawing at my neck and stuff because he'd already gauged my arms. I got him to calm down and then put him in the cage for 20 minutes, timed him out or time out. Put I'm in a time out spot. But yeah, he really is a Feral cat and you can't forget that. He has his behaviors that he enacts in order to get food...
0:19:55 HS: Pushed the wrong button man.
0:19:57 TB: Yeah. If he sees some strange dude coming over and trying to stroke him, he will attack, with great viciousness. You hear stories about people that are killed by their pets.
0:20:07 HS: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's perfectly understandable. They're fucking vicious man, and humans are inept at that kind of stuff.
0:20:13 TB: Well, it's happened to me a few times, sufficient that. I moved quickly and I also made sure that I had a sweatshirt on, that I basically use my sweatshirt to avoid as much of the claw attacks as possible, even though he still dove in.
0:20:24 HS: That's scary. That's scary stuff.
0:20:26 TB: On my legs as well, he left a couple of tread marks. And...
0:20:30 HS: See, I would be the end of it. I wouldn't have a cat like that.
0:20:33 TB: Well, it's interesting actually because... At various times, my spiritual advisor and I are on the cusp of just putting him down, because he's had a very good life and all these other things and...
0:20:43 HS: Or just let him go.
0:20:45 TB: No. That wouldn't... He's already known to be our cat in the neighborhood. I must of told you this story. There's a...
0:20:51 HS: I think you could take him somewhere, and let him go and he'd probably do okay.
0:20:55 TB: No. This cat would come back to us. This cat would have homing pigeon... I may of told you the story. But there's a site called NextDoor, for like community communication of associate with various things. When we got on NextDoor, we found photos of him that had been taken six months earlier by neighbors, saying "who's cat is this?". And that was one of his escape times where he was out for three days. And there're all these photos of our cat swooning around the neighborhood. 'Cause he's very friendly with humans in most circumstances, it's only when he feels that he's...
0:21:27 HS: Until he's threatened or he feels threatened. Yeah.
0:21:29 TB: Which probably would mean he'd be okay outside and he has, I mean, he's disappeared for three days. He normally disappears for half the day when he gets out. But you know, he has all these...
0:21:38 HS: Why not, just, you know, turn it over to the universe. Let him go.
0:21:43 TB: When he disappeared for three days, it was a curious situation because we hadn't quite moved into the house. We were in the process of cleaning it up and painting it and whatever. And we brought him and one of our other male cats, Bertie, over. And they were living in the house while we were still back at the apartment. But we got cleaners in to clean one day, and they left one of the back windows open. In fact, in the room that I'm talking you in currently, this this bedroom. And there was a strange set of almost like, detective fingerprint paw prints that were left. And Bertie, the other cat doesn't like him at all, they're both alpha males basically.
0:22:20 TB: So we saw this kind of stand-off in paw prints with Bertie finally pushing him out the window. [chuckle] And having him run off. And the fact that we weren't back here for three days, meant that he lived as he wanted to live. We came back however... He is also the cat who likes the El Pollo Loco chicken. We came out with a small bowl of the El Pollo Loco chicken and put it out and within about half and hour, [chuckle], he knew where his chicken was coming from, so.
0:22:49 HS: Yeah, yeah. [chuckle] He knows what's going on.
0:22:52 TB: He knows what's going on. So it's rather curious actually, because I spent... While we were cleaning up the house, I spent a lot of time with him and he was perfectly... I mean, he can be a really sweet cat for some period of time.
0:23:02 HS: Yeah. Until he claws your eyes out.
0:23:06 TB: And it's interesting actually because I spent probably a day and a half with him. I was doing odd jobs. Ripping up carpet, this kind of stuff. And he was just omni present there. So, when he disappeared for the three days, it's like "Well, I've had this nice experience with his cat and now he's gone". And when he came back actually, I was really relieved. I don't like him escaping at all because he doesn't... I mean, he's pretty smart and he does avoid the truck route and he does know where to lay. But we... I don't know all our neighbors, and some of them seem like pretty savage folk to me and my suspicion is that there's probably one or two cat haters out there that could poison him or do a variety of things to him. Anyway. In contrast, for example, last night I had a steak with the bone in, as a celebration of the bachelor life, as one does in these circumstances and he was able fish it out of the trash can, which is a slide, its actually quite a complicated kind of can to leave a trash can, but he was smart enough to actually work his way into the trash and find the bone and bring it out. So he's actually quite, I mean street cats are really smart. So we do get benefit from him. But returning to this notion of animal stories, he clearly has strong narratives.
0:24:22 HS: Yeah.
0:24:23 TB: What fascinates me particularly, is I do spending time around these creatures is that they all have really curious narratives, some of them analogous to like children in a really strange way. We have one cat which is my wife's cat primarily, who's a big fluffy male, kind of like a Maine Coon sized cat and he is just a complete baby, he is six years old now. He mews like a kitten he is very playful, he's just babied by my wife basically, and he's never had to grow up. And because there are these two other...
0:24:56 HS: Of course not.
0:25:00 TB: The alpha males in the house are... And he's not really an alpha male, in fact, sometimes you hear this squealing, because one of the other cats will pick him up and roll him over by sliding underneath him or doing various moves. He's not even into wrestling, playful wrestling for him is just distressing. When you see the animal narrative so used to... Let's return to I guess my initial basic point here. Humans evolution towards narrative indicates that perhaps through periods of time either those that were anti-social or anti-narrative or what have you, were kind of pushed aside, but then you start looking at other animals and you realize they clearly had narratives as well, they don't have...
[overlapping conversation]
0:25:40 HS: Not the same as ours, but they clearly have got a story about what's going on in their environment and how to negotiate it. Yeah, did I ever tell you that story about that dog that I took to work when I was a janitor?
0:25:53 TB: No, you didn't.
0:25:54 HS: There was... For several years when I was in college, I had a janitorial business, I cleaned doctor's offices.
0:26:01 TB: So that's how you met the police shot guns...
0:26:03 HS: Yeah, well that was the place. Basically, the building itself was a rectangle with an open atrium.
0:26:11 TB: Oh very cool, yeah.
0:26:12 HS: Okay with pull-down gates on opposite sides, there were two entries to this inner part. And I used to take my dog to work with me and he'd just sort of hang around there. There were chips of wood in the central place there, there's plants and things like that.
0:26:32 TB: Like garden...
0:26:33 HS: Yeah. And I was toward taking a break and throwing these against the back gate, which I had pulled down, okay. So that nobody could get in and the chip would bounce off it and the dog would run and get it and bring it back. Well, I threw it and this time it just went right through the grid on the gate.
0:26:50 TB: Yes.
0:26:50 HS: And the dog stopped and he's looking there, and he was trying to figure out what the fuck to do because he could see it, it just dropped three inches on the other side, and he's looking at it and he stopped. And I don't remember now, whether it was like five seconds maybe, not a very long time. And all of a sudden he shot up bolt right ran in the opposite direction, went outside the other gate all the way around the building and picked up this thing on the other side of the fence and then ran back around the building and into the side. And I thought that was just brilliant and you could just see he was looking at it and all of a sudden, man, there was just this... So he's got a narrative going on about his physical environment. And again, I think it's primarily, at least it came from a navigation system.
0:27:42 TB: Yes.
0:27:42 HS: That's where our narrative came from, originally.
0:27:46 TB: It's funny how some dogs don't have that though.
0:27:48 HS: Well, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if this is... I've never experienced anything like that. I don't know how common that is in dogs.
0:27:56 TB: We had a terrier or Schnauzer when we got together initially or when we came to the US. And he was very bright and very attentive, but he couldn't work out his leash. So when you were walking with him, he's occasionally wrap itself around the tree. Or wrap his leash around his feet. Larger dogs in particular kinds of larger dog never do that. So there is some notion that they have a straight...
0:28:19 HS: They have different maps, different map or navigation systems that pay attention to different kinds of things. Interesting.
0:28:27 TB: Yeah, I saw an Australian Kelpie. We can, bring dogs to work at Netflix and one of our co-workers has an Australian Kelpie, which is an Australian sheep dog. And they're very smart. If you spend any time around Kelpies, they can typically heard more than a hundred sheep.
0:28:43 HS: Yeah.
0:28:44 TB: And they do things like they'll jump on to the sheep's backs and run along them, to catch a strangler in the back.
0:28:51 HS: Wow.
0:28:51 TB: And they have all these techniques... They've tried to build robots to herd sheep and they've never been able to do it to successfully. It's like five or six sheep, and these dogs are really trained.
0:29:01 HS: Now, that would be a great Turing type prize.
0:29:05 TB: Yeah, very much so.
0:29:06 HS: Yeah because that seems probably doable.
0:29:09 TB: Well, you need speed agility.
0:29:11 HS: Yeah yeah.
[overlapping conversation]
0:29:13 HS: But yeah, that would be an interesting challenge.
0:29:18 TB: Yeah, I don't think... It's interesting because I think... Like seeing eye dogs for example. There are a series of things that dogs do better than humans. To do robotics for things that are better than humans, is actually quite challenging, because we don't have, I mean, this returns to narrative again, we don't have a narrative associated with solving these kind of problems. I mean the nature of sheep escaping in different directions. And how do you actually heard them together. I mean, clearly there are shepherds but in terms of doing this dynamically, a dog seems to be so much better than humans could ever be.
0:29:54 HS: Well, he's got the physical attributes, which help a lot, he's fast, and humans are fucking slow.
0:30:02 TB: But I don't think... I mean maybe as a shepherd who's spent his lifetime with a flock, could get to know the intricacies of the flock and moving them accordingly.
0:30:11 HS: Is there any such... Well I guess there are shepherds, who don't use dogs aren't there?
0:30:17 TB: I think in the Middle East they don't use dogs, and in North Africa they don't use dogs.
0:30:22 HS: What do they shepherd? Well, I guess it depends on... Yeah, it depends on the kind of animal you're shepherding and all sorts of terrain issues and all sorts of things, I guess, yeah.
0:30:31 TB: Yeah, I mean certain kinds of creatures have relationships with their shepherd, so I'm not sure, if it's the case for sheep or goats. But there are certain kinds of animals, I mean I've heard this, I don't know this in any matter of fact. Where they actually have a relationship with the shepherd sufficient, that they will stay in close proximity to the shepherd. Cause they understand that the shepherd will do them no harm. And sheep are like notoriously scatter brain, and [chuckle] will be flighty and run in various directions and I think...
0:31:02 HS: But they do tend to clump though, don't they?
0:31:04 TB: Well, I've heard it's interesting. I think if you were to set off a fire cracker in a herd of sheep, they would...
0:31:11 HS: Oh, they spread when they need to, but I think they prefer to be sort of...
0:31:16 TB: In relative close proximity.
0:31:18 HS: Yeah, a bit like birds in a flock. I mean, that's a standard biological position.
0:31:23 TB: Yeah, even bison and these kind of creatures, they stay together.
0:31:26 HS: Sure yeah, there are some... Apparently, [laughter] they like doing it that way. It makes some sense, I guess.
0:31:34 TB: Yeah, I'm trying to produce various things currently. Music, software, writing [chuckle] and I've realized through this period, and of course occasional podcasts as well. It's funny, when I think about creative stuff, I rarely think of podcasts as part of it. Slowly but surely I guess, I'm moving podcasts into this creative group as well. Actually I think it's a lot easier for me to produce podcasts, than it is for me to produce, writing and music and to a lesser extent software. But anyway...
0:32:00 HS: It's certainly true for me. [laughter]
0:32:01 TB: I've been reflecting heavily...
0:32:04 HS: This is easy. [laughter]
0:32:05 TB: It is, it's extremely easy for you. I've been reflecting recently. Particularly because the kind of ebbs and flows with my day job, that there are certain mind states that I get into, particularly associated with solving work-related problems. Which make it very difficult for me to come home and be creative. And something...
0:32:22 HS: Yeah, just putting in that many hours a day.
0:32:25 TB: Yes, well focused hours.
0:32:25 HS: It would kill me, I couldn't do it.
0:32:27 TB: Yeah, I think the nature of focused hours, in particular in a dynamic work environment, where things are constantly changing and people are constantly asking different questions and you're lucky if you get 40 minutes on a single thing. My spiritual advisor refers to it just as tiredness, that I actually get like mentally tired from doing work.
0:32:46 HS: You have to deal with people. Yeah this is why I try to avoid people. [laughter]
0:32:50 TB: Yes.
0:32:52 HS: No, I've very limited energy. And you know, damn. [laughter]
0:32:58 TB: But it's something... So I've had certain situations, where I have been able to be creative and work. But through... Like various problems that've come up really in the past three weeks. It's been really quite hard to come home and actually generate anything over this period of time.
0:33:12 HS: Yeah.
0:33:13 TB: And I reflect on how can I get myself into the mental state of creativity. Like do I listen to certain music? Do I have a certain conversations? How can I get myself into that state? And I think what I've found just by example, is that forcing this mental state is completely counter-productive.
0:33:33 HS: Have you considered meditation?
0:33:35 TB: Well, the problem...
0:33:36 HS: And I don't even like that word, but silence and just sitting quietly.
0:33:40 TB: A lot of the stuff that I go through in the day-to-day, in particular with work doesn't allow for... So for example, if things are being... If there've been various problems that have come up, of work, there's a pretty good chance, like maybe a one in three chance that my evenings will also be polluted by these things. So I will also after like I do some work associated with these things, which require me to be in a catlike readiness state, basically for these things to occur, and that makes it very difficult.
0:34:08 HS: Also you're working 24 hours a day.
0:34:10 TB: Well, this is where it gets curious. I'm on call currently, for example, which means I have to have my phone by me and if it goes off, I have to do various things.
0:34:17 HS: Yeah, yeah, deal with whatever comes up.
0:34:19 TB: Yes, and I think that is like a counter creative state, because...
0:34:23 HS: That's why they pay you the bucks man.
0:34:26 TB: Yes, yes.
0:34:27 HS: That's it, that's the price you're paying.
0:34:29 TB: Yes, yeah, I can't argue with that.
0:34:31 HS: Yeah.
0:34:32 TB: But the trick is to find time where I can actually be in that creative state, when I'm not on call, for example.
0:34:37 HS: Yeah, yeah.
0:34:37 TB: And utilize that as much as possible.
0:34:40 HS: Well, see this to me is really about control of the language machine, is getting it to... You know, to quit focusing on certain stories and freeing it up for other stuff, yeah.
0:34:49 TB: It's not that I've a particular narrative or any of these kind of things, it's that when I'm in a work state... There's an element of the work state that is fundamentally sub-linguistic, it's associated...
0:35:01 HS: Well, everything is that way. I mean, it's not just work, everything. And language is just part of the process.
0:35:07 TB: I guess what I'm saying is, that it's not that my brain is in a narrative state, that's blocking the creativity. It's that it needs to be in a ready state to enter an environment. And part of this is almost anaesthetizing, like you need to be just prepared for a certain degree of... It's like entering turbulence on a flight. You just need to be ready to enter that turbulence at any given time.
[laughter]
0:35:32 HS: Well, that's sort of general in life, isn't it? I mean come on.
0:35:35 TB: Well, I think it's interesting actually because increasingly, I see various people and it could be purely because I don't know them particularly well, that don't have these kind of circumstances. That the way in which they make money or survive, is not based on being in these kind of hyper...
0:35:53 HS: No, of course, some people have really got a great gig going.
0:35:57 TB: Yeah.
0:35:58 HS: So, if I could only figure that out.
0:36:00 TB: Yeah. It's something that I wonder about, particularly because I think when we first started talking in Las Vegas, although my job had occasional stresses and occasional nonsense. It wasn't comparable to my experience here. And actually, I left here originally because of exactly this thing, mainly, actually, because I was investing six and a half days a week, sometimes even seven days into these things that were always on, where I'd get to bed at 2:00 AM and have to be up by 7:00 and I just thought this thing is insane.
0:36:31 HS: That's insane. I wouldn't do that.
0:36:34 TB: Exactly. Yeah it is a curious thing because ultimately, I get the impression at various periods when I stop and actually take breathe, that the learning that I've done through the past four and a half years here, has fundamentally changed the way in which I deal with you know a high-stress situation, in a somewhat positive way. I don't think it's all negative, but it's just changed my ability to interact through these situations.
0:37:04 HS: Yeah.
0:37:05 TB: And ultimately it's created something which didn't exist previously. And it's also something which I don't necessarily want to give up, it's not because it's like an adrenaline rush or something like that. It's because I can enter a different level of problem solving, which enables me to solve problems relatively rapidly.
0:37:28 HS: Yeah it's a good skill to have.
0:37:30 TB: Certainly.
0:37:32 HS: It's just whether or not you wanna live in an environment that's killing you.
[laughter]
0:37:35 TB: Yeah.
0:37:38 HS: You know, for a short while, yes.
0:37:40 TB: Well, it's interesting actually last weekend we did our taxes, which was a very curious experience because I realized doing the charitable donations gave quite a good tax advantage but also we were really close to a substantial tax burden, like we were unknowingly close to this thing and we just got it in... We kind of slid under the gate as it slammed down. We do owe a bit of money, we owe about the same amount of money we owed last year, which is still a reasonable chunk of change. But by doing the charitable donations, I basically furthered my federal income tax.
0:38:19 HS: Yeah, yeah, that's great.
0:38:21 TB: Which in and of itself is quite astonishing.
0:38:24 HS: And you contributed something significant to the community.
0:38:28 TB: Yeah. Not to be sniffed at as well. And we gave a lot to animal charities, we gave a lot money to the Internet Archive. We gave a lot of money to a number of charities that I think represented something. And this year however, I don't think we're gonna be as aggressive with the charitable giving, because it created a circumstance where we were really close to peril and this year we were vastly closer to even greater peril.
0:38:57 HS: So you don't take this to a tax guy, you do this yourself.
0:39:01 TB: No, we have an accountant who we go to.
0:39:05 HS: Well isn't that his job to make those determinations?
0:39:08 TB: No, no, I mean my perspective is we pay a reasonable amount for the accountant. We don't pay as much as my colleague that I used to work with who had an accountant that he would meet with quarterly. I'm never really satisfied. I guess, it's a bit like doctors. You need to actually appreciate that a doctor exists in some level, but they are just as fallible as you are at the end of the day.
0:39:34 HS: They're just fucking people. Unconscious language monkeys probably.
0:39:40 TB: And the advice that they give should be gauged... He's not some drunk guy at the bar but he's basically...
0:39:46 HS: He is just a guy with a story.
0:39:48 TB: Yes. [laughter] I feel the same way about our accountant.
0:39:54 HS: Yeah, sure about anybody. But some are better than others.
0:39:58 TB: Well, I guess it's a bit like financial planners and these kind of things. I've resisted through my professional life dealing with these people because when I've interacted with them, it's always cost me substantially. And none of them seem to have... We have like five or six parameters which are relatively unique. We don't plan on staying in the US for the rest of our lives. We don't really plan on... We see everything in a transitional form, which is why it's curious that we own property, but also we have a view that that's relatively dynamic as well. But I think we would need a very particular tax advice person. We have someone who's at least worked with us for four years, has a sense of who we are. And the advice that she has given periodically has been not the best advice, but she's also, in general, given better advice than most. And I don't know, I mean it's one of these curious things where really, it's my responsibility, I'm not willing, even though I pay this person something...
0:41:02 HS: Ultimately, of course, it is your responsibility. I got the same issue, I've always used the easy form taxes, but some time either this year or next year I'm probably gonna have to switch as I become more self-employed and less otherwise. It terrifies me.
0:41:22 TB: If you're self-employed you definitely need an accountant.
0:41:25 HS: No, I know, but the idea of how do I find somebody that I can work with?
0:41:31 TB: That's where it gets interesting. We've employed maybe four tax professionals over the past decade.
0:41:38 HS: Yeah.
0:41:38 TB: One of them died. One of them we left Las Vegas, but one of them we did have a problem with them, we did move away and the woman that we have currently, I was on the cusp of... She gave us a modest discount and apologized profusely, associated with what happened last year. I'm never really satisfied with the information that I get because also the taxes change dynamically as well year to year and when you file your taxes they can only give you projections associated with what next year will be.
0:42:02 HS: I wanna find somebody that I can actually trust.
0:42:05 TB: Well, that's always been a problem with you, Heron, hasn't it?
0:42:09 HS: Yeah, and that is the problem because, ultimately, as I meet and talk with people, I get the sense that they really are fucking unconscious language monkeys, and that they actually believe this shit they're telling themselves. [chuckle]
0:42:22 TB: I mean, tax is even more perverse than "the law".
0:42:27 HS: Oh, I know, yeah.
0:42:28 TB: I mean, it's something that is completely and utterly constructed to keep certain groups of professionals employed...
[laughter]
0:42:35 TB: And, the whole nature of like it being for the common good is so clearly not the case.
0:42:42 HS: Yeah, yeah.
0:42:43 TB: So yeah, it is a very curious thing.
0:42:46 HS: Well, I can get away with this year, still going with the easy form, but that's not gonna last much longer. I'm gonna have to change and I've been looking around and I've talked to a couple of people, but I wasn't impressed by anybody I met yet.
0:43:01 TB: I don't think you've ever... Our person is a retired tech worker. She bleaches her hair blond. I mean, she's kind of a curious person. If I interviewed with her, I probably wouldn't employ her.
0:43:14 HS: Yeah...
0:43:15 TB: She was kind of allocated to us for the first year and then we kept going back because, well, this year, it wasn't particularly impressive because a whole lot of stuff that we did with our tenanted properties weren't available this year and she kind of fought with the forms for about an hour trying to get them to work the way that they had last year and they just weren't working that way. Interesting point though, keeping our property untenanted, now second thing attached to this house, looks like it's gonna be a substantial advantage so we're not going to tenant it.
[laughter]
0:43:45 TB: Which just means we have this more space.
0:43:49 HS: Yeah, yeah, it can work out to your advantage.
0:43:54 TB: We've periodically talked about dreams in particular, what I call episodic dreams, which are dreams that I return to and one of these dreams which I can't believe I hadn't talked about previously, I had through the week and it got me really excited because I woke up from the dream and thought, "Why have I never talked about this in Stone Ape?"
0:44:12 HS: Yeah...
0:44:12 TB: So I have a periodic dream, which I guess one could describe, and this sounds a little corny, but I'll use it anyway. As the meeting of deceased minds, it's in an old...
0:44:23 HS: Sounds like a Monty Python sketch.
0:44:24 TB: Yes, it very much is a Monty Python sketch, in that regard. It's in a kind of... I always say it's got to be smoky because the vision is not like you don't have direct vision of the stuff around you. It's like an old men's club, one of those leather seat mens club, wooden walls, very kind of rich texture with this kind of fog, which I guess is smoke. And I go into this dream state, maybe once every couple of months. It's not very frequent, but I always, when I enter it, I'm always like... Why don't I ever remember about this place?
0:44:58 HS: Yeah.
0:44:58 TB: And it involves groups of men sitting down having conversations with other like-minded folk and occasionally these characters from history come and it's typically, like four people sitting around a table with other men in other areas and you're having a conversation with these people with the view that they're all deceased. So what it really is...
0:45:23 HS: But they're actually worth listening to.
0:45:25 TB: Yes!
0:45:25 HS: Okay, good. And that's whether they're alive or dead... [chuckle]
0:45:28 TB: No, but this is what's curious because it's almost associated with, like generations of minds that certainly, I had primary access to my grandparents, for example, but I had a very unique perspective that came from them, being born in the 1920s. And what I find fascinating is, you see on YouTube you can look at interviews from the '1950s with civil war veterans and you had this notion that at various times in history, people existed with a completely different perspective. Now, truth be told, probably the earliest deceased mind that has come in to these conversations that I can recall, kind of the renaissance era person.
0:46:08 HS: Yeah.
0:46:08 TB: But you have these kind of curious, or I have in the dream space, have these curious conversations, and very rarely like Mozart will turn up or Rommel will turn up, or Einstein will turn up.
[laughter]
0:46:19 TB: And it's one of these curious things because it's very... It's like TED in the dream space. These kind of minds that come and give these discussions and most of the time through this dream, I remain silent. Unfortunately unlike this...
0:46:34 HS: You're just one of the people at the table.
0:46:36 TB: Yeah, I'm just... God they're really flying low tonight. Anyway, I'm one of the people at the table who typically asks maybe one or two questions through the entire dream, but mainly it's just, in wonder of these elaborate constructions. And I find this through reading text as well, like if you read Newton's work and you can get it, it's online, Google hosts, I think everything that he ever wrote. Google also hosts everything Darwin ever wrote. You get to see, or maybe it's the internet. I can't remember, they were sharing them for some period of time, and then they just went online.
0:47:08 HS: Yeah.
0:47:08 TB: But you can see that they are completely different, like their whole, and this is...
0:47:13 HS: Yeah, it's a different Universe.
0:47:14 TB: Yeah, their whole narrative makeup is completely different.
0:47:16 HS: Yeah, completely.
0:47:17 TB: Cause they've never seen the internet.
0:47:19 HS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was a different world, that was a different world.
0:47:24 TB: What I get from this episodic dream, and this is something that I've said out loud, quite a few times, that people were different, but there was no hierarchy. There's a narrative associated with the fact that we are a pinnacle point of civilization. My perspective is that we just don't know how to maintain steam engines anymore.
[chuckle]
0:47:43 TB: Or we don't know morse code.
0:47:46 HS: I have no idea of what you've just said.
0:47:48 TB: Well, let's say I have a certain body of knowledge in software, but if software didn't exist, I'd probably have a certain body of knowledge, which would be of similar volume in some other area.
0:48:00 HS: That's... Yeah, but come on, that's just meaningless to say something like that. And if you weren't... If the world was different, everything would be different.
0:48:08 TB: Let me put it another way. When I lived in the UK, I occasionally had conversations with my friends in the UK, associated with what the Dark Ages was like and they would say, "People were just filthy." It's just like "I'm filthy."
[laughter]
0:48:20 HS: Probably depends on which people you are talking about.
0:48:23 TB: The general peasantry, the normal everyday folk. And they didn't have creative notions or stories or soap operas or any of this kind of stuff. And I've always returned to the fact that children had made toys manually in every point in human history. Some of them still exist from...
0:48:40 HS: Well, I'm not sure the children made them, I think maybe their parents made them for them. And then children did make some too.
0:48:49 TB: The creative spirit of the human, particularly with the fingers and what have you.
0:48:53 HS: Oh yeah, humans are special. And again, we've got our language that's... That's what makes the difference as far as I can see.
0:49:01 TB: And maybe this dream is just reinforcing my own superstitions here, but I guess my view is that people have not gotten smarter through this period of time. We've changed in terms of what we know, but the capacity and the insight that the human brain has, is something where we'll find a variety of spaces, knowledge and...
0:49:27 HS: I think there have always been brilliant individuals, you know. Yeah, I think there are probably more now than there ever were before too. A higher percentage, not just more, but a higher percentage of the population.
0:49:40 TB: Well, this is where it gets interesting because I guess, it's not that I disagree with that, I just think it would be remarkable to spend quality time with people that grew up in the '1750s because...
[chuckle]
0:49:52 HS: That would be fascinating.
0:49:53 TB: Yeah. And I guess this is what this...
0:49:55 HS: The right people.
0:49:56 TB: Well...
0:49:57 HS: A mix actually, would be interesting from the monarchy down to the peasant slopping the hog.
0:50:07 TB: Yeah, but it is curious because I don't know, I returned to thus dream like I say, it's not a it was December 15th when you last had the dream, so February 15th you will have this dream again. Its just kind of like a random order but it is a very curious dream because Bruce Damer does in his whole psychedelic rap, that with psychedelics you're not actually getting your mind in some state. You're actually harnessing things outside your mind, earth spirits and other spirits and this kind of stuff. And I guess it's difficult for me to believe that's actually the case. I think...
0:50:43 HS: Well no, clearly not. It's a bunch of abstract bullshit words like, "mind" and all that stuff are nice reifications. What the fuck do you mean by that word?
0:50:54 TB: Well, of course.
0:50:56 HS: And of course that stops the whole conversation. Well, shit if I go defining every fucking word, we'll never get anywhere.
0:51:04 TB: Let's just talk about the mother spirit again. So, yeah, whereas my perspective is that we have this amazing Wetware, that is so heavily repressed and cut up and manipulated and forced into specific things so we can live as decent members of a dubious society. That when you actually see that process of power harnessed in different ways, it's just...
0:51:27 HS: Well, the potential for the future is just amazing. What could we do if we knew how to use all this stuff intelligently? What a concept.
0:51:41 TB: And I guess through my periodic returning to this episodic dream, I have a very keen sense that it's just all my biases, acting on this thing, I don't... I'm not dealing with spirits here. I just wanna make that perfectly clear...
0:51:56 HS: No, I assume this is a construction of your own nervous system over its entire life's history.
0:52:03 TB: And that's just one thing that I wanted to assert at this stage before listeners start emailing me associated with...
0:52:09 HS: Well, yeah, that's just a story, that's under current circumstances probably the most reasonable story that we could come up with for it. [chuckle]
0:52:18 TB: Yes, it's interesting, actually, you talked with Ron Pare through the week and he made a comment which has been echoed through the week as well after I put it out in the podcast. I guess it resonated with a group of our listeners. That people do genuinely like listening to you and me rambling for whatever curious reasons they have in their own...
[laughter]
0:52:38 HS: You know, that really is fascinating because I enjoy it. And apparently you do too. I think maybe that has something to do with it. [laughter]
0:52:48 TB: Clearly others out there enjoy it. The thing that struck me, this has been aired in your YouTube but also was aired in private communication to me, was, a number of listeners get frustrated with the conversation as well. But they still listen. Like there's some strange relationship they have either with you or me, of course those that are less associated with you will correspond with me and those that are more associated with you, will correspond with you or talk to you on YouTube or what have you. But it is interesting, the group that view it almost like guilty pleasure because they have so much... I don't know, it acts on them in such a way. I mean T mentioned this, that she couldn't listen to the episodes in continuum, she had to take them in small portions. Because it had such an impact on her.
0:53:30 HS: Wow, see that's the thing is, I think these people, for whatever reason, are our audience. I think there is, it's like my guess is two to five percent. You get enough people to listen, a couple of them, this is gonna be just what they wanted to hear. [chuckle]
0:53:48 TB: And they're the ones the stick around.
0:53:51 HS: Yeah, yeah.
0:53:52 TB: Yeah.
0:53:52 HS: Yeah, it's fascinating. It's sort of... I imagine there are people who have listened to Alan Watts and who have listened to Terence McKenna, and they went,"Eh." And that was the end of it.
0:54:04 TB: Yeah.
[laughter]
0:54:07 TB: It's interesting actually because a portion of our audience, we've never really surveyed them properly, but a portion of our audience are very much the Watts/McKenna-philes. And another portion have never had any contact with those people. And then there's a smaller group...
0:54:21 HS: Well, this other group that has had no contact find anything in common, though, among those groups, aside from that they don't fit the other group, is there anything that unites these other ones?
0:54:33 TB: Well, obviously, they like the narrative form, right? But what interests me is there's a third group, a much smaller group. Our listener Paul Brian Hancock in Hong Kong is an example, where we inform him that there are these particular people that like Watts and McKenna. And then he starts finding them in the wild from us just saying that there are these people in the world that like Watts and [laughter] McKenna. And when he finds them, he realizes that they also like to have conversations that he likes to have. So what's interesting here, maybe he's part of the second group, and maybe the second group should perhaps embrace them, unlike the other folk similar to them that listen to Watts and McKenna, or are in this general discourse. But it is very strange that...
0:55:12 HS: Well, there's certainly some overlap, but those are very distinct audiences, the McKenna crowd and the Watts crowd. There's a lot of overlap. No question about it. But there's also a disjunction here, too.
0:55:24 TB: Have you ever found people that have liked Watts but really disliked McKenna or...
0:55:29 HS: Oh, no. It's not about dislike, it's just about whether they give a shit or they've heard him or given him much thought.
0:55:36 TB: I think it would be hard for someone who had listened to Watts to come to McKenna and not like some aspect of McKenna.
0:55:44 HS: Yeah. You're right. I'm trying to think of the other way. If you started with McKenna, I can see starting with McKenna and not being impressed at all with Watts.
0:55:53 TB: Watts becomes almost like truisms after you picked up McKenna, right?
0:55:57 HS: Well, I don't know what it is, but... Yeah, for me, the order is really... Well, for anybody, the order that you are exposed to ideas are very important, because then stuff you learn after gets integrated into a system that's already in place [chuckle]
0:56:11 TB: Yeah. It's interesting actually, because my cousin who's quite conservative who likes Watts, is an example who probably wouldn't like McKenna.
0:56:19 HS: Quite conservative. Is this guy in Australia?
0:56:22 TB: Yeah, yeah.
0:56:23 HS: And conservative, meaning what?
0:56:26 TB: His father was a policeman and he...
0:56:29 HS: Well, police is somewhat different in Australia than it is in America.
0:56:33 TB: Yeah. Well, to a certain extent. It's less different than it is in the UK. In the UK, police is very different than either Australia or the US. Australian police have adopted a lot of the US...
0:56:44 HS: They like to beat people up too.
0:56:47 TB: Yeah. They've adopted a lot of the US... They're more likely to be armed. These kind of things. The police in the UK are very, very rarely armed. In fact, my father once helped with a citizen's arrest in the UK, where a small female officer could not hold the large fellow that she was trying to arrest. My father had to help out in that [laughter] circumstance to assist with the arrest. Otherwise, this female officer would probably have been in mortal danger. So...
0:57:08 HS: How did he decide who to help?
0:57:11 TB: I think my father has this, which thankfully I don't have as solidly as I once did, but my father has this child-like sense of justice for want of a better term. That when he sees something injust, he just changes into a different creature.
0:57:28 HS: I understand that. But what we classify as... I can easily imagine someone jumping in to rescue the civilian against the police officer.
0:57:38 TB: Well, I think the civilian was trying to injure the police officer. And it was clear that it was just an imbalanced situation. It was also a clear by the civilian's behavior that the civilian probably wasn't in the right.
0:57:49 HS: Yeah. In the real situation, it often is clear [laughter]
0:57:56 TB: Yeah. You can resolve these things rather than abstractly talking about them after the fact. But anyway, so he became a mining engineer. He lived out in the middle of nowhere for a long period of time to go through his mining engineering stuff. He's an Ironman. He goes into the Ironman events, which are typically triathlons with particular rules. And when you have conversations with him, and I spent a bit of time talking with him at the wedding, I was actually very pleased when he starts picking up Watts, because it showed immense capacity to...
0:58:24 HS: That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
0:58:25 TB: Go out of ones boundaries. But I don't think he'd be McKenna. I don't think he'd be into McKenna stuff.
0:58:31 HS: Well it'd be interesting. I'd love to talk to him. Is there any possibility of me having a conversation?
0:58:37 TB: Yeah. It probably could be arranged. I don't know, it's interesting actually because I don't know... Yeah. I could put it to him. I could say...
0:58:43 HS: Oh, yeah. We could do it on... If he's up to it, I think it would be fascinating. I'd love to just hear how he explains where he's at.
0:58:52 TB: Yeah.
0:58:52 HS: And you think he does not know who Terence McKenna is.
0:58:56 TB: I would put money on the fact that he doesn't know who Terence McKenna is.
0:59:00 HS: Yeah. Yeah. I think Terrence is really not... We all think he's a big deal, but I think he's barely a blip on... [chuckle]
0:59:08 TB: Well, the 2012 stuff, you've got to appreciate. And it's interesting, actually, because my cousin acknowledges that there's a good portion of Watts that he doesn't agree with. He doesn't really...
0:59:18 HS: Of Watts?
0:59:18 TB: Of Watts that he doesn't agree with.
0:59:19 HS: Oh, that would be fascinating to hear.
0:59:21 TB: He's still enjoys. McKenna, I think you need to be very sympathetic... I was a doubter of McKenna for a number of years. It's only really been in the past decade. And it's only through podcasts actually.
0:59:36 HS: See. I just like listening to him. I've never read any... I may have read some of his stuff.
0:59:42 TB: It seems if you've read Leary.
0:59:45 HS: Oh, Leary's fun to read. I like reading Leary.
0:59:48 TB: It seems like he's trying to be Leary in a very curious way. And also Douglas Rushkoff was both a Leary devotee and a McKenna devotee. But my introduction to McKenna was through Rushkoff's writing.
1:00:03 HS: Yeah, I've always just known him as a speaker.
1:00:06 TB: Yeah.
1:00:07 HS: And that's really pretty much all I know of him.
1:00:10 TB: His writing is nowhere near as good as his speaking.
1:00:14 HS: I love listening to him talk. He's just such a pleasure, he's so much fun. You know, you never know what the fuck he's gonna come up with.
1:00:22 TB: Also, when I started listening to his stuff, a lot of it... I mean, he talks about monkeys coming down from the trees and surviving as scared apes on the plains. I mean, this is quintessentially Noble Ape. And if you hear any of his kind of Primatology and evolution of Primatology in society, that's all Noble Ape. So he was writing about and thinking about stuff roughly a decade... Well probably five to eight years before I heard McKenna actually speak on this, after his death. And what was particularly curious was through him being written about, I never had any of the contact with his stoned ape hypothesis, the coming down from, you know, with mushrooms and stuff to assist in...
1:01:03 HS: It's an interesting theory. It's just really a wonderful concept.
1:01:08 TB: It's similar in some regards to the Aquatic ape hypothesis, which you may or may not have heard of.
1:01:13 HS: I'd find that less plausible but I haven't really examined it carefully. I just figured, bullshit.
1:01:21 TB: Well it's interesting actually because regular science thinks all these things are bullshit.
1:01:26 HS: Well in the long run though, I mean, I'm not gonna concern myself with a lot of these issues because in the long run usually one side wins. And there's a lot of controversial stuff in the interim, but usually new ideas that are good come on board.
1:01:45 TB: My mother, independent of the Aquatic ape discussion, she starts talking about it in her early 20s and certainly through my early childhood she would discuss the Aquatic ape hypothesis, but it was far removed from the scientists that talked about the Aquatic ape hypothesis. I think a group of people gravitate to the Aquatic ape idea primarily because we're so unlike the other apes. We have skin.
1:02:11 HS: Well we're so unlike them, but on the other hand we're so like them.
1:02:15 TB: Well it's interesting actually because our means of standing upright, our means of balancing, our Eustachian tubes, a variety of things are far more aquatic than they are on the ground, right?
1:02:31 HS: No, don't accept my silence as agreement. I don't know that to be true at all.
1:02:37 TB: Well it's curious though, like it's a curious footnote...
1:02:41 HS: I don't know anything about aquatic anatomy. What can I tell you about that? I don't know. Do you know anything about aquatic anatomy?
1:02:52 TB: Yeah, I had to study it at various points in my high school and early learning.
1:03:00 HS: So that's a reasonable question for you.
1:03:03 TB: Let's put it this way. My mother never studied science to this level. Her mother was a biologist, so she had biology books lying around but in terms of these ideas... And it might have actually come from my grandmother, I need to have a conversation with my mother about that because it could have been my grandmother channelling the Aquatic ape hypothesis into her daughter. But it's interesting because I think... But again the stoned ape hypothesis, I mean how much of that do you really know about?
1:03:29 HS: Oh we don't know anything, it's just an interesting idea. Shit we don't know. To me it's not that far out an idea really. I mean is it really? What makes that such a bizarre idea?
1:03:48 TB: I have always had questions which have never really been probably answered, perhaps because I haven't asked them to the right biologist, associated with our brain evolution.
1:04:00 HS: Well there's also the whole idea of life itself. There's the Panspermia thing.
1:04:06 TB: Let's just push the problem off into space.
1:04:08 HS: Well no I'm just suggesting that the context, the line we draw around what we're talking about is the line we made up. I don't know. The idea that apes somehow interacted with some pan-universal Protozoan mushroom pod and created us, is a really fucking interesting idea.
[laughter]
1:04:40 TB: Neanderthals. I mean Neanderthals also is a really interesting idea.
1:04:44 HS: Yeah. Clearly, what is that? Those are again the old biological distinctions. I don't think they're that significant, I mean at this level.
1:04:53 TB: What I find curious is around the time that humans first started producing alcohol, is also around the time that we appeared to have started finding these Neanderthals more attractive.
[laughter]
1:05:09 HS: Like your drunk enough, the ugly girls...
1:05:11 TB: Neanderthal women seem... Yes.
1:05:16 HS: At the old Neanderthal ball.
1:05:17 TB: Exactly. It's actually fascinating because my wife has... What's her percentages? It's something like 0.02% and 0.01%. I can't remember, I think it's Asian is 0.01% and then African is 0.02% of her DNA. And yet 2.7% of my DNA, and I think about 2.6% is Neanderthal. Yes.
1:05:48 HS: Oh okay.
1:05:48 TB: So it's very very curious that these... You can't... Well, you can, my father does, my father argues the genetic numbers all the time because in his case it shows that his mother and his father were related, they had a shared ancestor that was very definite and he says, "That's all masking what have you." I said, no, these genetics are absolutely identical, these genetics are absolutely identical, they're a sufficiently long chain that this couldn't be contributed from different populations. This is actually a shared human being, then the ancestor... And he just won't buy it.
1:06:20 HS: No.
1:06:20 TB: He just completely disregards DNA.
1:06:23 HS: Well, again, we've all got our stories to fit the data into.
1:06:29 TB: The data as you all call it here is actually interesting because this is the thing that...
1:06:34 HS: Well the data is the data, how you interpret it...
1:06:38 TB: Well my father argues that there's a belief component to it, which I'm sympathetic to.
1:06:42 HS: Well there is.
1:06:43 TB: Yeah.
1:06:43 HS: There always is. There's no way around, well not belief, it's about unconscious... Well, it's underlying assumptions that we usually aren't aware of.
1:06:51 TB: Which could be classified as belief in this broad term.
1:06:55 HS: Well, yeah, except that it's important that they're not consciously held in some sense.
1:07:00 TB: You think that belief is conscious?
1:07:03 HS: Well, I think there is some overlap but I think if you know you believe something it's very different than if you believe something but have never even thought about it in those terms, you know?
1:07:12 TB: Let's return a little bit to this episodic dream thing. It's funny that I forget about these experiences. My brain has very definitely changed in the past six months. And part of that is the migraines but part of it is also the migraine medication.
1:07:27 HS: Yeah.
1:07:27 TB: I think they're inextricably connected.
1:07:31 HS: And the rest of the universe, too.
1:07:33 TB: Yeah, well also my general deterioration.
1:07:34 HS: You're reaction to everything is a result of you going through this.
1:07:37 TB: Yeah.
1:07:37 HS: And the response that everything is getting to you from that, so yes.
1:07:43 TB: To have these memories which I would normally remember thrust upon me to remind me of these things is very, very curious.
1:07:52 HS: I didn't understand what you just said.
1:07:53 TB: So I used to have... I didn't associate with my childhood and I didn't associate it with people that have messed with me or various bad experience. I was good at clearing that stuff. But in general, and in large part due to the nature of my work, I would have to remember various things that had occurred previously in order not to do what I'd done in that situation or to repeat what I'd done in that situation. And to kind of learn from progressively what was going on. There's a kind of background self-deprecating narrative through this associated with the fact that... And this in large part comes from my family and the society in which I grew up in, but just that I'm not that smart, I'm not really that bright and I just kind of kid myself.
1:08:31 HS: No, but you've worked hard. See there's...
1:08:34 TB: Yes.
1:08:34 HS: I make a distinction between the car and the driver's skill.
1:08:39 TB: Yes.
1:08:39 HS: You know, you can have the best car in the world or you can have a fairly average car, but if you got a good skilled driver...
1:08:46 TB: I'm not aware I fit into that metaphor but anyway...
1:08:52 HS: Well, the thing is I feel the same thing, I know a lot of people think I'm really smart and I know goddamn well I'm really not all that smart but I also know I'm very skillful.
1:09:03 TB: One of the benefits of being married is that you know that at least there's another entity that knows you're a moron, or at least knows...
1:09:10 HS: Yeah, that knows you.
1:09:12 TB: That knows your...
1:09:13 HS: That I just can't take that.
1:09:16 TB: Anyway associated with this episodic dream, one of the... And I had it that, I can remember at least now... I really love these planes flying over, like so close yet so in the way.
1:09:27 HS: I can't hear it at all.
1:09:29 TB: You can't hear it? So of the ones that I can recall, I mean just to list Mozart, Einstein, Rommel and Newton. I've probably had five of these dreams that I can recall greatly. One of my favorites was when Rommel sat down at the table, which is quite an exciting thing because when these people sit down, you immediately are like "okay so now I'm in... " And none of them... I mean Einstein for example, talked about love and talked about strange aspects of spirituality and talked about a variety of things. He wasn't taking Physics. When Rommel sat down I asked him probably more questions than any of the other folk in these episodic dreams. The end of his life, well actually his experiences in the First World War, but really the experiences at the end of his life, he chose to commit suicide and he did so in such a way where he had so many possibilities but obviously his legacy was really important to him as well.
1:10:31 TB: He's just a fascinating kind of character because he wanted to kill Hitler, then he was caught. Then he had to commit suicide. And the Rommel stuff was interesting because I asked him questions associated with that and I got back answers that I wasn't expecting. It's not like these people are playing out roles, although Einstein slightly. It's more associated with them sparking ideas in my own thinking.
1:10:56 HS: Yes of course. That's precisely what it is. It's your own narrative.
1:11:01 TB: My narrative surprises me occasionally but really surprises me very rarely compared to the dream space. When I started Noble Ape, the dream space in Noble Ape was considerably different than the reality space of the Apes wandering around on the island. And I did it intentionally based on my own experience with the dream space. It's interesting because this is the aspect of whatever you call it, the wetware that we're given, that is really so poorly understood in modern science.
1:11:34 HS: The scientific era is about to begin. Without computers I don't think... Well, I think we've gone as far as we can go.
1:11:45 TB: It's interesting because the way computers have been used for the past 40 years in general, associated with the problems of the mind, well, let's create neural networks. Well, that doesn't really give us what we want. Let's try this thing, well that doesn't really give us what we want. And then similarly, there are kind of biologically obsessed crowd that don't really understand the underlying mathematics computation, and really don't understand like all the counter examples that you get through human psychology. That are obsessed with computer simulating the next biological principle. Well maybe that will get us closer to the mind. Its all very curious. There's an article which I didn't read too deeply into, associated with a particular person who's name didn't resonate with me, donating her head to science in order to enable the study of the mind to go forth after she had passed away. And I thought...
1:12:39 HS: I'd like to see a better written prospect than that.
1:12:46 TB: It wasn't you who posted that through the week was it Heron?
1:12:47 HS: What?
1:12:47 TB: I thought that appeared on someone's Facebook feed. And I think... Well it's akin to the articles that I typically see posted on your Facebook feed, but it mustn't have been you, associated with this woman that was giving her head to Scientific research and the theories of the mind...
1:13:03 HS: The details of course, are in the research itself, what are they planning on doing with her head, you know I mean. That might be an interesting idea. I don't know, what are they going to do with it?
1:13:19 TB: Well the experiments primarily the Russians did.
1:13:22 HS: No but I mean with her head. What are they going to do with her head?
1:13:26 TB: Well let me talk about dogs heads, the Russians did a lot with experiments associated with dogs head.
1:13:32 HS: They actually transplanted one on top of another dog and it worked for a while, didn't it?
1:13:38 TB: Well... It was interesting. What interests me is the dogs heads where they were able to remove the bodies and still get like twitches, and movements, like muscle reflexes and this kind of stuff. And there's curious things associated with freezing dogs, and all this other kind of stuff.
1:13:57 HS: Frankenstein.
1:14:00 TB: Exactly, Franken-hound.
1:14:03 HS: Yeah, that all seems so pointless to me. I mean really, let's just create it in a computer. Why the fuck go through all that bullshit.
1:14:09 TB: Well they didn't have computers at that time.
1:14:11 HS: Well no, that's the point yes. That's the question. Now the question is do we really need to do it that way? I mean is there anything that we're really gonna learn from that that's gonna make a difference?
1:14:21 TB: The problem with the do it through the computer thing is that, the way in which this is taught to university students has so much historical legacy bias in it.
1:14:31 HS: [1:14:32] But that's the present state and yes, yes, it's all fucked up, everything...
1:14:34 TB: No, no but here's something I think is interesting through that. So I have been associated with academic artificial life, but through a series of changes in the international society I'm closer to it now than I've probably been in the past three years. I've always thought that particularly because its already a fringe study that's already like poo-pooed by large groups of the scientific establishment, that these bottom up ideas that you get through artificial life may actually hold, not the answers, or even some answers, but just might get people into a space where they try considering different methods. There's a shortage of methods in this research basically.
1:15:14 HS: Yeah, there need to be a lot different levels of focus, until there comes some amalgamation somehow of this stuff into some other theory that actually makes sense.
1:15:28 TB: Well, my insight into this came through reading many different theories of the philosophy of mind going back to Plato, and Aristotle, these kind of folk, through Kant, through Sartre, Derrida all these wonderful philosophers. And I realized that the artificial opposition was something that I could certainly embody, like in satire through Noble Ape, like I could take a variety of different models of the mind and actually put them together and show that they work better together than in opposition. Like actually this whole notion that they were in opposition was false and the arguments associated with these oppositions were false. And all the energy, all the intellectual energy that had gone on, in some cases for 200 years, were just like strange human mental constructions. And when you wrote it in software you could put them together and they'd work...
1:16:21 HS: It's called being under the spell of your language machine.
1:16:24 TB: And through this, I think through philosophical satire, it drove me for at least the past two decades associated with Noble Ape, and I guess my hope is that through... But its needs to be pluralist. If you just do a biology degree with a few psychology units, you don't have the aspect of computation, you don't have the aspect associated in particular with parallel and reactive programming which you put together and you can do experiments that you can't do with traditional linear programming. And you need to be, not necessarily a polymath but at least curious enough to move into a variety of areas.
1:17:05 HS: Or you might be lucky enough to be teamed up with some people who complement each other and that does happen. But that's rare.
1:17:15 TB: And the problem is actually, that unless you...
1:17:19 HS: And if you know how to raise funds.
1:17:21 TB: Unless you do some dabbling in a number of these areas, just to hear someone talk about it without actually having the grit, the internal grit, for want of a better term, of actually diving into these things and exploring them.
1:17:36 HS: Well there are different parts of the program. I don't see any problem between... It's not a short coming that people don't do that.
1:17:42 TB: Well let me make this point, that actually a lot of the stuff is sub-linguistic and a lot of it is experiential.
1:17:49 HS: I don't know what that means. What stuff?
1:17:51 TB: Okay, so calculus for example can be described in language, but it's actually better to explore it through mathematics.
1:18:00 HS: Well but that's a language, it's still a symbol system. Slightly different than language as it's normally. You're not gonna find any monkeys who can do anything more than, more than and less than.
1:18:11 TB: I'm not sure if that's relevant to the point I'm trying to make.
1:18:14 HS: Math is a language, that's what I'm saying.
1:18:18 TB: Yes, but also I guess music is a language too, so basically...
1:18:22 HS: Music is sort of...
1:18:23 TB: You see this is where it gets interesting...
1:18:26 HS: You're right. You can find things like, yeah music. That's a good example because...
1:18:31 TB: I would say the weirdness that you find in music is because of your experience in music, and the weirdness that's in math...
1:18:37 HS: Well apparently, parrots are very musical and rhythmic. If you've seen any of the YouTube videos, that's pretty... I mean to me, that's fairly astounding. After you've seen it 10 times, you go, yeah of course. I remember that thinking wow, that's pretty fucking cool.
1:18:57 TB: I guess what you're saying here associated with music through your own experiences is exactly the point that I'm trying to make. That the experiential component to these things, actually can not be communicated between humans in some regard. It needs to be a human that has these experiences in a few areas, in order to actually put these things together, and you can have conversations...
1:19:19 HS: Man I'd love to, say that again, because I got a hint that there's something really good there but I couldn't quite...
1:19:24 TB: So you're experience with music associated with its not quite language because there's more in it than could be described.
1:19:31 HS: No, I didn't say anything like that, it's not quite language.
1:19:35 TB: Well no, we talked about music, we talked about mathematics and we talked about spoken language and you realized that there was something interesting...
1:19:43 HS: Well, there was language a long time before there was music... Or music probably long before there was theory about it. I mean probably, in fact it does... Chimps like to beat on logs, actually it turns out, [chuckle] with clubs. So there you go.
1:20:00 TB: I guess what I'm saying is that there is something that is unique about the personal experience in these areas, which cannot be easily... I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think it's very difficult to translate these experiences through language to another person. Let me just finish, by having these experiences in different areas, biology, computation, mathematics, perhaps psychology...
1:20:30 HS: These experiences. Again I'm not quite sure what that means.
1:20:30 TB: Your experience with music is associated with an intimacy with music, which is not just you hearing music, but it's associated with you studying music, you performing music...
1:20:44 HS: Yeah, right, I actually studied it and performed and did all sorts of shit.
1:20:52 TB: Exactly. And I would say my experience with mathematics and certainly with regards to programming and data theory and all this kind of stuff, had similar qualities associated with my inability to communicate it with language to another human. And you take three of these things or four of these things, with these experiences, which cannot be translated to language and it requires...
1:21:16 HS: Well, not they can't be, but I certainly don't know how to do it yet.
1:21:20 TB: Exactly. Either it takes a super communicator which I mean it's possible.
1:21:25 HS: It takes new language.
1:21:27 TB: That's another part, but unless an individual has had experience of this... It's not... I guess the point that I'm making is bringing a lot of people that have had these unique experiences in various areas are good, but what's better is to have people, through perhaps creative course were perhaps a variety of factors that have these experiences of different areas because the gestalt of having these experiences, perhaps music, perhaps biology, perhaps computation, perhaps... But to have multiple experiences in different fields, makes it easier to produce things which are outside the common agreed upon things associated with our computational cognition for example. If you study that and you study all the research associated with artificial intelligence and all this kind of stuff, that's going to be okay, but you're probably not going to be, as in tune with creating something that's new, different, and potentially moves us further forward, if there is such a thing, than if you study in three separate areas to the level of detail at least, where you have the kind of experiences that you were talking about associated with music. Does that sound reasonable?
1:22:40 HS: I really didn't understand it, honestly.
1:22:44 TB: I guess what I'm saying is that the experiences that you had studying music, associated with performing it, exploring musicology...
1:22:54 HS: Yeah the whole thing, going to classes and rehearsing and the orchestra and singing in the choir and all that shit. Yeah, awesome stuff.
1:23:03 TB: That created the kind of gestalt experience which isn't easily...
1:23:10 HS: Most people don't have a clue about what's going on. I mean they like it, maybe, they may even be passionate about it, but if you haven't played an instrument, then you're missing part of the game which is okay, I guess, not everybody wants to do that.
1:23:25 TB: Now suppose you could take this experience, which is difficult to communicate if not impossible via language, and apply that not just to music but to say computer science or programming or some aspect of information theory that is very useful...
1:23:45 HS: To do what?
1:23:46 TB: To take the experience... Let's just use...
1:23:49 HS: That's just crazy. You can't do that. How can you do... What does that mean? I mean, what would it mean? What is the experience that's being taken?
1:23:56 TB: An experience which can't be easily mapped on to language for other people. So you can't actively communicate it because of the the experience that you're having.
1:24:04 HS: Well, I'm not sure we can... It seems to me that we're in that exact same position with respect to all the ideas we already have. [chuckle]
1:24:14 TB: Except what you are doing in a study, is going to a certain degree of depth that can be shared with other people that have gone to that degree of depth, but may not be easily shared with people that haven't.
1:24:28 HS: Yeah, that's one of the issues I'm dealing with actually, yeah.
1:24:31 TB: Okay, so as this exists with regards to music, imagine also that it can exist with regards to a number of other...
1:24:39 HS: Okay, alright yeah, whether you're a casual observer or whether you decide to dive deep. [laughter] Okay, now I got you.
1:24:46 TB: And now imagine that you do this in three areas. Three completely different areas.
1:24:51 HS: Dive deep into three areas. Yeah, but that's rare in life. There aren't many people who do that. There aren't many people who even do one.
1:25:00 TB: Consider that individual versus three individuals that have had their own dive, but into the single areas.
1:25:08 HS: Ah, interesting.
1:25:10 TB: Communicating. So, my assertion is that the person that has done the three dives into the different areas is more likely to produce something new and interesting than the three individuals that have each done dives into the single areas.
1:25:26 HS: My intuition is with you on that, but I don't trust my intuition usually. [chuckle]
1:25:33 TB: However, I've had the experiences of meeting the kind of people and they have tended to have insights which I find distinctly unique and indicative of a very particular kind of learning which is outside of the way it's kind of traditionally taught.
1:25:49 S3: That sounds all reasonable. These special people.
1:25:51 TB: And I guess these people, for me at least, are the kind of folk that would be driving forces in...
1:25:58 HS: And they can also be total nuts too, that's the problem.
[laughter]
1:26:04 HS: They're either brilliant or they're fucking cranks.
[laughter]
1:26:07 TB: What's interesting associated with this is, that some choose to put their ideas down in a form that other people can access. And whether they're cranks or not, it's kind of like a sterilized form, but it's at least something that you can...
1:26:21 HS: Something you can look at and read and examine. I just recently, sort of dawned on me that the only problem I have with Bernie Sanders is that I'm afraid he actually believes all that shit he says. [chuckle]
1:26:33 TB: Clearly he does.
1:26:34 HS: Yeah, that's really, it's too bad. [chuckle]
1:26:38 TB: It's interesting actually I've been going back and listening to Obama speeches and he is such a good orator. His abilities to...
1:26:51 HS: Obama, yeah.
1:26:52 TB: And it's interesting actually because I don't agree with the gentleman's policies, I don't even particularly like him as a politician, but as a speaker, he really... They talk about him going on the Supreme Court or what have you. He should go on the radio or these kind of things.
1:27:07 HS: No, he's good, as a media personality.
1:27:11 TB: Yes, and it's interesting because he does things... What he says is fascinating, what he does is what concerns me.
1:27:17 HS: Well, again, how much really... The President really doesn't have all that much power. Come on.
1:27:26 TB: Clearly.
1:27:26 HS: That's just a figure head.
1:27:27 TB: Without question. And actually to have the figure head actually does more damage than the...
1:27:33 HS: We've got the illusion [chuckle] that we have a democracy here and they were actually deciding the way everything is gonna develop, right? [laughter]
1:27:43 TB: It's astonishing, it really is, it really is. It is fascinating just to watch him, particularly because I don't feel as burdened by him now as I did through the majority of his presidency. Just to go back and realize that this is an incredibly smart guy, who just enacts and behaves in a way that I find particularly objectionable.
1:28:04 HS: See, he doesn't bother me, he's just a nerd guy playing out his...
1:28:09 TB: Yeah, yeah.
1:28:10 HS: He's got a pretty fucking good game going.
1:28:13 TB: Well, yeah, for at least 20% of the population. I heard and interesting statistic...
1:28:18 HS: I mean for him personally.
1:28:20 TB: Certainly and for at least 20% of the population. I heard an interesting statistic that within this country over a broad surveying, only 19% of the population is violently opposed to abortion. And it's interesting because that's exactly the number that comes out and votes for the Republicans.
[laughter]
1:28:41 TB: And it's fascinating to see these minorities representing their views in elections when they are really tiny percentages. 20% is not tiny. But it's certainly nowhere close to the majority on any of their particular things. Returning to Obama's narrative however, he's almost McKenna like, associated with listening to him. And it's actually interesting...
1:29:05 HS: He is good, isn't he? You're right. Not as good as McKenna but... Not even close. [chuckle]
1:29:11 TB: A quality that I like associated with people that call into Model Rail Radio. And again, it's 20% or less of the callers, is their ability to consider... I ask questions, that's the whole format of Model Rail Radio. I ask questions, I give my answers. I make jokes, I ask questions, I give answers. Sometimes I ask questions but basically, the format is me asking questions. And many of the people will start off with an "uhm, ahh, mah", and it takes them like five to ten seconds to actually get into the conversation.
[laughter]
1:29:41 TB: What fascinates me, is a minority of the participants pause, the pausing is critical, and then answer questions.
1:29:49 HS: Ah, interesting. The other ones just start right off.
1:29:52 TB: They just start talking and then eventually... And then they get to it. And it's a quality which I find... I've tried to survey and I haven't done a particularly successful job.
1:30:03 HS: No, you already have, man. I think you have identified something quite significant, actually.
1:30:09 TB: Well, I just want to learn how to be like those...
1:30:11 HS: How long does it take... What have you noticed about this? How long is the standard waiting?
1:30:17 TB: I think it might be a Southern thing. I'm trying to work out the demographics as I cut them associated with how this happens. In the UK, it'd never happen.
[overlapping conversation]
1:30:31 TB: It's the fear of silence, I think more than anything.
1:30:34 HS: Do you think this isn't just an American thing. This is a Southern American?
[background conversation]
1:30:41 HS: Yes, it was indeed. But here you are.
1:30:43 TB: It's back again, back again.
[laughter]
1:30:46 HS: Welcome back.
1:30:47 TB: We were talking about Obama's oration style. But the thing I found with Model Rail Radio is actually, if I stop and restart the recorder every 15 minutes it seems to eliminate the crash problem.
1:31:00 HS: I don't understand, 'cause I haven't had one until now.
[chuckle]
1:31:05 HS: I've never had a problem with.
[overlapping conversation]
1:31:10 HS: Who knows? You gotta work with your own system. It's different from mine, so...
[overlapping conversation]
1:31:18 TB: I'm using 10 11. I'm using the latest scope, the latest call recorder.
1:31:22 HS: I still haven't found a good reason to... This is the first... Almost all of... I've had Mac since the very first one since system 1.0 and I've always upgraded. This is the first time I've gone this far into the cycle without having upgraded.
1:31:39 TB: Yeah.
1:31:40 HS: I mean I almost always do it and I did the last within, before or maybe after the first upgrade, I don't know but it was relatively quickly. And now I'm thinking... I'm getting conservative in my old age.
1:31:54 TB: Yeah, no, I was conservative for my whole last computer, everything was running smoothly, I just kept it on the same version. I didn't...
1:32:02 HS: Yeah, if it works, why screw with it.
1:32:06 TB: Yeah, I didn't hit 10 9. I was on 10.8 for the longest time on that machine. And now what? It's 10.11 or something.
1:32:10 HS: Yeah, 10 11 is what's there. Yeah.
1:32:13 TB: I guess the problem is I can't stop until it gets stable. It's not stable currently, so I can't stop here.
1:32:18 HS: Okay, yeah, yeah, well see that's the thing is my system is stable and it works and if there's some problems with it, I know what they are, but they're not that big a fucking deal. I can live with them and it means exchanging it for unknowns.
[laughter]
1:32:33 HS: And I'm not sure I want to deal with that.
1:32:35 TB: Yes, whereas I just went in boots and all to the unknown, so from literally the day I purchased and started using this computer. I mean, when the crash...
1:32:44 HS: That computer had 10.11 on it to begin with.
1:32:49 TB: Yeah.
1:32:49 HS: Okay.
1:32:50 TB: It was the fastest configuration for this particular device.
1:32:54 HS: Yeah.
1:32:55 TB: In terms of threading and a variety of factors, there's a whole lot of stuff that I'm sure call recorder isn't tracking for but the ways in which it's crashed and it's always division by zero errors as well, because that's a very unique kind of crash. It strikes me as really strange that this is occurring and I do constantly update the system software to try and get it to a point of stability.
1:33:19 HS: Yeah, yeah. Once you're in the game, then you've got to take all the...
1:33:24 TB: You gotta keep going.
1:33:25 HS: Yeah. You gotta keep going. Yeah.
1:33:27 TB: Until you're in the point of stability.
1:33:28 HS: What is it now? 11... What is it? 0.3 now? Is the current one?
1:33:32 TB: I'm not sure, I'm not sure. At work, I'm in four version cycles plus the operating system version cycles plus the future operating system version cycles plus the compilation software...
1:33:46 HS: You've got them all running side by side.
[chuckle]
1:33:50 TB: Sometimes they align, sometimes they dis-align it's just like...
1:33:54 HS: Yeah.
1:33:54 TB: I need to write it all down on a white board so I can just divert my eyes and not have to keep any of this in my head...
1:34:00 HS: Yeah, that's one of the values of writing, isn't it?
1:34:05 TB: And thankfully, thankfully, most of the time it's just watching YouTube or Facebook... But recording podcasts, it is genuinely frustrating. Can I ask you to do something for me? Can you stop and restart your recorder so I only need the first half of your audio?
1:34:20 HS: Okay, hold on.
1:34:22 TB: That will make it a little bit easier for the download.
1:34:24 HS: Okay. [chuckle] It got started when we hung up.
1:34:28 TB: Okay. Cool. So, you don't need to do that. You don't need to do that at all 'cause you got the cut already.
1:34:35 HS: The cut was already there, yeah, but I just did it again because I wasn't thinking properly and I just blindly followed what the master told me to do. But now you'll get two files instead of one.
1:34:47 TB: That's fine. It will make it a bit easier for me.
1:34:50 HS: No, actually...
1:34:51 TB: I'll get three.
1:34:53 HS: You won't get these new ones because you're recording this, and this should be working...
1:34:56 TB: That's fine.
1:34:57 HS: The first stuff that you think you might have lost.
1:35:01 TB: In fact, it's probably, you should have three files.
1:35:03 HS: Now. Yes.
1:35:03 TB: I'd probably need the first two.
1:35:08 HS: Why would you need the one after the...
1:35:11 TB: Because it's...
1:35:12 HS: That's okay, I'll send them.
1:35:15 TB: Thank you.
[chuckle]
1:35:16 TB: I also find these things really quite exhausting as well. Like the Model Rail Radio, basically by the second crash, I was talking gibberish, because I was just so like, the energy associated with... Although last week when you got me the audio, I edited I think in a single setting and got it out Saturday morning, so the listeners were none the wiser.
1:35:35 HS: Well, thank you.
1:35:37 TB: Not a problem.
[chuckle]
1:35:38 TB: It's interesting actually, because the more feedback that I get from listeners, which occurred most recently in I guess the last two recordings, it really is really very nice, and I'm kind of saddened that most listeners reach out to me and not you because from my perspective, the ability just... So for example Joe the Drummer emails me periodically. And it appears in my inbox just at random times and I have to remind myself, he exists. He's a human out there and he's doing it.
1:36:08 HS: And thank you Joe. It would be nice to hear from them, but we have talked and I know he's there.
1:36:16 TB: Certainly.
1:36:17 HS: It is good to hear though that he is still in communication with you.
1:36:22 TB: We hope to meet. This whole UK trip thing which I'm supposed to be doing in April but looks... Well, a number of things have come in front of it, that looks like it might stop the UK trip, but everyone that has come so far seems to have disappeared.
1:36:37 HS: We'll see.
1:36:38 TB: We'll see. So I'm actually, hopefully sometime this year. We'll post on Facebook, even though Joe doesn't like Facebook, I'll definitely post on Facebook a photo of me and Joe, probably taken by my spiritual advisor in London, somewhere. And actually, this is an interesting trip in terms of meeting Stone Ape listeners.
1:36:57 HS: Oh really?
1:36:57 TB: Cause I'm gonna actually be meeting with a number of Stone Ape listeners.
1:37:01 HS: That's right, there are a bunch of people over there, aren't there? Oh cool. Well, we'll need to talk about that as we lead up to that time.
1:37:07 TB: Yeah.
1:37:08 HS: And maybe have a... Well, that's up to you.
1:37:12 TB: Let's just take photos. I mean photos are good start, right?
1:37:15 HS: We could do a live broadcast.
1:37:17 TB: Oh Heron you always love these live broadcasts because for you, it means sitting at your laptop in your hobbit hole, perfectly comfortable. For me, it means finding an adequate network connection in a strange place. Carrying some technology with me on a plane in various directions.
1:37:34 HS: I don't worry about those little things.
1:37:36 TB: Exactly.
[overlapping conversation]
1:37:36 HS: You know what would be so cool?
1:37:39 TB: Exactly.
1:37:40 HS: And it miraculously somehow happens.
1:37:43 TB: The one time that we tried to record a Stone Ape when I was in a hotel room, I think in Reno, we stopped after the first 20 minutes and just gave up. We were able to record a Stone Ape but this was more in a kind of condo situation when I first moved here and we were able to reasonably reliable internet.
1:38:01 HS: Well, we still live in a primitive planet. You know. Sorry. [laughter] But it is getting better, isn't it?
1:38:09 TB: Yeah. You've had the opportunity... Have you actually spoken with Joe the Drummer or have you just corresponded?
1:38:14 HS: No, I think we talked, but I don't remember. It's been quite a while. It's been a couple of years.
1:38:19 TB: There was another fellow in the UK who interviewed me for his astronomy podcast. What was it called? Anyway, I've spoken to him and he's also spoken to you, I think. I can't remember the fellow's name. He might still be a listener. And I guess there are a bunch of people, we got Bob Mottram, formally Noble Ape developer, still current Stone Ape listener who I'll be meeting with. We've got my friend who's not an avid Stone Ape listener but who has a friend in Australia who is an avid Stone Ape listener, which means he must listen to some of them. He's in the UK. Yeah, we've got a bunch of people in the UK that listen to Stone Ape.
1:38:56 HS: Well, the question is whether they're really our people or not.
1:39:02 TB: What's interesting is I think we've probably moved them, just by them consuming this they've become more our people or more...
1:39:07 HS: Yeah, I think you can get infected.
1:39:09 TB: Yeah.
1:39:10 HS: That's actually my purpose here epidemiology, trying to spread this...
1:39:17 TB: To go viral.
1:39:20 HS: That's right. Get these ideas out there. Infect those language Monkeys.
1:39:24 TB: Yes. So, yes. It's very nice to get correspondence from listeners, but I think also there's been a history of folks that are... Like they come from your prior body of work, and get kind of frustrated with the framing of Stone Ape. Most of these people are people that I... Well, Joe the Drummer is as a mutual friend of ours, but most of these people are people that I know of that have just picked up Stone Ape and then gravitated towards the format like Bob Mottram. So, I can see why I get correspondence from some of these folk uniquely.
1:39:57 HS: I'm a little surprised that people... I mean, is it easy for them to find... Have I done something wrong to make it difficult for them to get in touch with me?
1:40:04 TB: Most of the communication with me, which is similar to your friends' communicating with you, are associated when you were on the webcam stuff for a start, you know that created some email from listeners like, why the fuck are you talking to Heron? This is gone far for more bizarre than it has ever been previously. [laughter] What kind of... I mean, literally insane asylum entry criteria associated with going on a porn site in order to teach people about Gendo.
[laughter]
1:40:35 HS: Really people were that upset?
1:40:40 TB: Oh yeah, Heron. I represented them in the recordings following... Actually, I represented some of this communication.
1:40:44 HS: You got people writing to you complaining about the fact that I was doing this on a porn site.
1:40:56 TB: It wasn't for any moral reason. It was because this was clearly not going to workout. Any rational person would have come to that determination before they got on the porn site.
1:41:10 HS: Well yeah but you see, I'm an idiot. I need to actually try things to find.
1:41:14 TB: The other part of this correspondence which you got to understand is the fact that you'd done nothing up until that point. Like this was your first foray. You didn't create a meet up or do anything like that. You went on a porn site to try and educate people about Gendo.
1:41:29 HS: Sure, why not? It just... It was easy to do. It was just low gate to apply. The meet up thing is still something I've been considering a lot because... I mean, I get invita... There are new meet ups starting everyday. There's just tons of them, there's no shortage of new meet ups. And all you get is a single email informing you that there's this new meet up.
1:42:00 TB: Yeah.
1:42:01 HS: So, I've gotta be [chuckle] pretty clear on...
1:42:03 TB: It's interesting as a consumer of Meetup, because I mean I... I cut my Meetup, I stopped my subscription to Meetup. I think they were charging me, I don't know when I stopped it they'd raised their rates twice on me. I was paying about $300 for three months I think.
1:42:19 HS: Three hundred bucks.
1:42:20 TB: Yeah, and their thing was, "well why don't you start charging the people that attend your Meetups?"
1:42:25 HS: Well that's obviously one way to do it if that's how much it costs. Hell, yes.
1:42:29 TB: What I found was curious was we went from 60 to 30 to 20 to 10 to 5.
1:42:35 HS: Yeah, right, yeah...
1:42:37 TB: A large part of that was... This is the number of people. A large part of that was because they realized they could get it in podcast form.
1:42:43 HS: Yeah. Yeah.
1:42:44 TB: There was no point in attending, you know.
1:42:46 HS: Yeah, yeah, if you don't wanna be involved, 'cause that means being involved, that's the difference. If you're just gonna listen to it, then yeah [chuckle]
1:42:55 TB: Driving your monkey down to the southern part of the Bay Area in order to, you know, be in the same room as the air particles that were initially moving around associated with these ideas, a less expensive version was just to download the podcast.
1:43:10 HS: Yeah.
1:43:10 TB: So, I mean, my experience with Meetup is as a Meetup producer and it... It just wasn't productive for me, I mean it was just the wrong format.
1:43:19 HS: Yeah, well that's what I'm trying to figure out, just exactly what it is I think I want to have happen and how the hell do I write something up that attracts the right people?
1:43:31 TB: But it is a huge number of people, I mean Meetup initially for me was an amazing way to get people that I had absolutely no means of getting through any other means.
1:43:39 HS: That's what I'm thinking about is that it's a whole bunch of people there. This is all new, you know.
1:43:45 TB: And it's far bigger in LA, than it is in the Bay Area I think.
1:43:49 HS: Think so?
1:43:49 TB: I think the Bay Area is big but the problem is the Bay Area is big, and actually it takes an hour and a half to two hours...
1:43:56 HS: Southern California, it's worse here. I mean it really goes from the San Fernando Valley down to the end of Orange County along the coast.
1:44:06 TB: But people can go... I guess they can go across the water through bridges here, but you're right.
1:44:11 HS: No, no, its just there's a lot more people. A lot wider. But in any case, it's a huge market. There's a lot of people here. Yeah, the issue is what you say is gonna determine the kinds of people who show up who are attracted to the words that you write there. You know, they're gonna see it one time.
1:44:32 TB: It's interesting actually, because I could probably record Stone Ape live in our little Hobbit shack and invite people to the Hobbit shack if they wanted to participate or be in the audience at least.
[chuckle]
1:44:43 TB: I mean the acoustics are probably gonna be more... It's on a cement slab so the acoustics will definitely be more resonant than they are here. But yeah, that would be one way of getting an audience involved and they could come with their booze and, you know, their medicinal cannabis and enjoy the recording and perhaps even have conversations following it. And I think the task associated with finding the others electronically is really quite artificial because...
1:45:09 HS: No, no its not. It seems to me that's... That is... Well, that's the issue is how to... This so far... This Google thing is not attracting any people, and I haven't... I really don't know what to do. I mean, I'm not quite sure just how to get it out there. Because nothing's happening.
1:45:30 TB: It is an interesting... It's funny because the hang-outs that... I am trying to explore the space and most of them are with young women in their 20s or early 20s.
1:45:42 HS: Well there's a religious sub-group.
1:45:45 TB: No, I'm talking about... You know 500 people, the weed hangouts get about 50.
1:45:50 HS: Yeah, see, I don't give a shit about... If I can get two or three of the right people that would be great. [chuckle]
1:46:00 TB: I guess, taking Model Rail Radio as an example I would agree, associated with that. But once you get popularity, ideally it would snowball into something where you would end up with 20 or 30 people on, just because there are 4,000 people...
[overlapping conversation]
1:46:16 HS: Well that's the thing, but that was what I was sort of hoping is that the the medium here... There a lot of people there and that they'll end up in here just randomly, so... Well, I haven't given up on it, I just... I realize it's just gonna take more, it's not gonna just fall in my lap, like I was hoping it might.
1:46:36 TB: Yeah, I was working from home today, and I switched on the Apple TV, and I noticed You Tube was up, and I saw that you were broadcasting but no one was actually there. And one of the things that I did with Biota Live was that I had a monologue narrative prepared and when I had to use it, I had to re-generate another one, with the view that if people didn't call in, I'd have to have a monologue narrative just to be broadcasting.
1:47:00 HS: You're right, I need to do that. Yeah, you're right, 'cause I just turned my mic...
1:47:05 TB: Exactly, and if you have an interesting monologue narrative associated with explaining various things, you would at least be broadcasting content so people would at least catch something.
1:47:13 HS: No, absolutely, you're absolutely right. And I'm not quite sure how to do that, but it's probably not that difficult to figure out.
1:47:20 TB: Well originally you were going to... Or originally you were thinking about producing 10 four-minute YouTube clips. And it's not that format, because what you've got to produce is two hour... You know 10 two-hour long YouTube.
1:47:32 HS: Well there's all sorts of possibilities. This is what I'm dealing with these days is just really specifically what is the proper way to use media to get these ideas out there, you know, and how much needs to be PDF, how much needs to be YouTube.
1:47:49 TB: Well the point that I made to T when, you know, there was some degree of collaboration going on was that she...
1:47:53 HS: I'm sorry...
1:47:54 TB: The point I made, talking about PDF specifically, a point that I made to T associated with, when there was collaboration between the three of us going on, was that your journals were very useful early on in Stone Ape, I think somewhere there.
[laughter]
1:48:12 TB: It was certainly actually when I arrived in the Bay Area, so it's about from Stone Ape maybe 35 to 45. It provided a lot of material and I said, "If you're interested in Heron's progression of thought particularly associated, the journals are an amazing resource to start exploring."
1:48:28 HS: Yeah. Well, see that's again why I have those journals is that they're a record of what I was thinking at the time. [laughter]
1:48:35 TB: But also because they are so distant to you now...
1:48:42 HS: Well in some ways, and yet, in other ways, I'm amazed at how some of the same ideas just come straight through the whole thing.
1:48:50 TB: And you certainly had ideas associated with marketing these ideas then that you don't have now, which is what's particularly interesting.
1:48:57 HS: Yeah. I haven't looked at that stuff in a long time.
1:49:01 TB: No clearly. I mean I think if you looked at it now, it would potentially take you in a variety of different directions.
1:49:08 HS: It did the last time I looked at it. I mean I did review it a decade ago or some time ago.
1:49:14 TB: Well, I guess the point that I made to T was that if she looked at your journals, she would have a stack of topics to discuss with you.
1:49:22 HS: I see, yeah, that would be very helpful. You're right, but that would require a real fucking commitment of time.
1:49:30 TB: So when I first got your journals, I think I loaded them on an iPad and I went through them. I mean it's not dense. Like it's dense in some areas, but there are long sections of just...
1:49:40 HS: Yeah, there's a lot of bullshit.
1:49:42 TB: Exactly... You can scan through that very quickly.
1:49:47 HS: Yeah. You're right.
1:49:49 TB: And adjust accordingly.
1:49:51 HS: Well, the whole idea of someone else looking at that, I mean that's just a fascinating idea to me because I see it from whatever perspective I came from, and anyone else looking at it and evaluating it, is bringing their perspective on it.
1:50:09 TB: What was fascinating is that T mentioned to me that you had told her at the time that I was reviewing your journals that there was someone out there actually reviewing the journals and talking to you about them. And so when I said you should review the journals, she said, "You're the guy that reviewed the journals" And I said, "Yes", at that time it was very useful particularly to have a completely different perspective of Heron and the perspective of Heron who thought of owning motorcycles amongst designing computers, amongst... It's quite scatter-shot in some regard. But it also gave a number of interesting topics that the standard, whatever number that podcast was, "The standard five stupidities". It's completely removed from that. It's actually more a humanitarian dissection of various periods in your life and your various perspectives of that.
1:51:00 HS: I don't really have much perspective on all that stuff.
1:51:03 TB: That's exactly why it's an interesting thing to...
1:51:06 HS: I've gone through it a couple of decades ago. It's been a long time and I found it fascinating, and I found it embarrassing, and I found it all sorts of things.
1:51:19 TB: There are large sections that I feel are probably [laughter] genuinely embarrassing.
1:51:22 HS: Yeah. There it was.
1:51:25 TB: And the way it was introduced to me was associated with your son's consumption of it, and certainly, while I was reading through it with that in the back of my mind, it gave a different insight to the whole thing.
1:51:37 HS: Well, of course, that's always the case though, isn't it? We all bring our own story to the table.
1:51:44 TB: That detail specifically, I wonder where Heron's son occurs in the journals. Looking through, looking through, looking through, looking through. I think there are two references with about 30 pages.
1:51:55 HS: Yeah, not much.
1:51:56 TB: Not much.
1:51:57 HS: Didn't make one bit a difference. That was the shock of my life.
1:52:01 TB: Yeah. And probably the shock of his life as well as he read through it.
1:52:03 HS: Well, sure, everything was a shock to him. [laughter]
1:52:11 TB: Whatever, he read it in 28-31 that kind of period, so yeah.
1:52:15 HS: What can I say? [laughter] There it is. That was a part of the whole thing for me was this realization that that was not my life, that isn't why I'm here, and that was not an easy realization to accept. But at some point, it became imperative to accept it.
1:52:45 TB: It's one of the more curious... In terms of my father's interaction with me. He was exactly the same. And it's one of the more curious things associated with my relationship with my father, less so with my brothers, more with me because I was like 10-11 when my father left and he left for the US, there was a substantial distance between us. And the realization that all my experiences with him leading up to that all his rage and my general confusion as to his behavior, was the fact that he just didn't wanna be a parent. And like once I understood that on some fundamental level, then I was able to accept him more as a human.
1:53:23 HS: I would have been awful if I had stayed. It would have just been terrible. And anything would have been better than me staying there. [laughter]
1:53:32 TB: Yeah. It took, I guess because as we've discussed already my father has a very core sense of justice in some regard. That's what kept him there, but his actual dislike of being a parent was far greater than any perception of justice. And truth be told, it was only when I reached adulthood that my father and I could have a reasonable relationship. There were bumps...
[overlapping conversation]
1:54:01 TB: Now I was able to functionally work, feed myself, interact with a broader society as an adult. It was easier easier to interact with my father.
1:54:08 HS: In fact, it's great. I would love to have a relationship with my son.
1:54:12 TB: Yeah.
1:54:12 HS: Well, it's up to him, not me. I have made it clear.
1:54:16 TB: Yeah. We had a mutual friend who was a DJ, who also I think my wife knew, in Southern California, a guy by the name of Jay Brennan who was friends with you, friends with me, and also friends with your son as well. And I don't know what happened to Jay Brennan. I think I un-friended him in the first major unfriending. He seemed like a genuinely nice guy. I might have met him once, but he was friends with all of us.
1:54:41 HS: You were ruthless, man.
[laughter]
1:54:44 HS: Jesus.
1:54:45 TB: It was all just noise. But look, I might go back and re-friend him but he didn't make a major impact on my life.
1:54:52 HS: Yes. Yes. Well... Yes, I'm just into collecting really...
1:54:55 TB: You're just really...
1:54:56 HS: Passive and superfluous relationships. I don't give a shit, just give me a big number, coming up on 800 now or something.
1:55:04 TB: Yes.
1:55:04 HS: 900. I don't remember. One of them numbers.
1:55:07 TB: Yes. [laughter] Anyway, he was a mutual connection with the three of us, which I find rather strange. I don't know how he knew you, but...
1:55:14 HS: What was his name?
1:55:15 TB: Jay Brennan?
1:55:17 HS: Vaguely sounds familiar...
1:55:19 TB: He is DJ in LA. I met him in Vegas. He knew my wife through the area, somewhere in California. I think they went to high school together.
1:55:27 HS: Oh, well.
1:55:28 TB: And I guess your son might have known him through his DJ-ing or something. So...
1:55:32 HS: There's all sorts of possibilities in this world. Yes.
1:55:39 TB: Yes.
1:55:39 HS: Yes.
1:55:40 TB: But he was an interesting character who might listen to Stone Ape. Who knows? Jay Brennan if you're out there, I'd consider re-friending you. Apologies associated with...
[laughter]
1:55:51 HS: You just got carried away there. I've looked... I honestly haven't got a clue who most of the people who are my friends are.
1:55:58 TB: Yes.
1:56:00 HS: Really.
1:56:01 TB: It astonishes me actually, how many of my friends are your friends.
1:56:04 HS: Well, because I keep all of them.
[laughter]
1:56:06 TB: Yes.
1:56:07 HS: And you throw most of them away. So whatever you got left they're probably on my friends too.
[laughter]
1:56:14 TB: It's interesting, that whole criteria. I haven't unfriended seriously, probably in about a year.
1:56:19 HS: There's a couple of people I've seriously looked at that. Because when I look at their posts I think, "Why the fuck am I friends with this asshole?"
[chuckle]
1:56:26 TB: Yeah, exactly.
1:56:28 HS: And I think, "Just exactly why the hell did they choose me."
1:56:33 TB: Yes. [laughter]
1:56:33 HS: And then they're okay... Fuck them. I don't care. I just don't follow them anymore.
1:56:37 TB: I got up to thirteen hundred. And thirteen hundred was just way too many. Particularly around elections.
1:56:42 HS: No, that's not even closely enough. You just have to... The thing is when you add a new one, you just gotta be sure to unfollow him.
1:56:49 TB: Yes.
1:56:50 HS: If you unfollow them then it doesn't make any difference how many there are.
1:56:52 TB: Yes. Unless they comment and start trouble through...
1:56:56 HS: Well, if they do, if they become... And that's when you have to deal with it, but that's rare.
1:57:02 TB: Yes.
1:57:03 HS: Usually it's all very passive and you end up seeing all their bullshit, that I just... I have no interest in seeing. And it took me a while to figure that out that whenever I add a new friend, I gotta be sure to not follow them.
1:57:17 TB: Yeah. I guess I like following people because I find it... The aspects of Facebook that I like are associated with holidays, or as they're called here, vacations. I have a number of friends, many of whom are progressively unfriended...
1:57:32 HS: You're right. You're right. No, I like looking at the news feed.
[laughter]
1:57:37 HS: And it's gotten better and better as I unfollow more and more people and focus on the ones who actually post interesting stuff.
1:57:45 TB: Yes.
1:57:46 HS: Yes, and I'm discovering who... Again, it's really been learning about how to use Facebook. It's just a fucking piece of software and it does some things pretty well. And it could do a lot better in some other things, but it's what it is.
1:58:04 TB: Yes. Yes.
1:58:06 HS: The possibility for the future for governing ourselves, for making decisions on a planetary scale are just so enormous that the possibilities are, imagine that, imagine writing that software.
[laughter]
1:58:22 TB: Well, the software, the ideas and certainly probably a lot of the concepts are open source now, Bob Mottram, we had this discussion maybe two years ago, started posting the software. There were already efforts to start writing the software. It's not that...
1:58:39 HS: Yes.
1:58:39 TB: It doesn't exist, it's that it's just not been actively adopted.
1:58:43 HS: Well, there are people who are... Anyway, yes, we're not the only ones. There are people who are...
1:58:47 TB: Yeah.
1:58:47 HS: Aware of these issues, and working...
1:58:49 TB: It's just a matter of introducing these issues too. This is why I've been relatively proactive through the current presidential election in this country, to point out to people that there's a majority of this population who doesn't want the current political situation, and why not have a discussion about that rather than posting Trump photos.
[laughter]
1:59:11 TB: Why not actually have a reasonable discussion about...
1:59:14 HS: Yes.
1:59:14 TB: Something that's interesting as opposed to satirizing this guy who'll probably be the next president. Because there's no political relevancy. It's like a curious kind of...
1:59:26 HS: Because they can still get up and go to work tomorrow and get your pay check, and come home and watch Two's Company or whatever is on TV and...
1:59:35 TB: And they brought back Two's Company. Haven't they?
1:59:37 HS: I don't know.
1:59:38 TB: Wasn't it called Three's Company?
1:59:39 HS: I don't know, I'm just saying that apparently still at least in a good part of the developed so-called developed world, things just aren't desperate enough for people to start rethinking shit.
1:59:51 TB: Our television is losing it.
1:59:53 HS: Well, it's not the...
1:59:55 TB: The injection in the arm that is the elections, give television a bit more money based on the political ads.
2:00:02 HS: No, but I'm just talking about the screen, not the television, that's part of it. But I mean, the whole issue of using media to stay unconscious, as opposed to using media to become aware of what's going on.
2:00:15 TB: Yeah.
2:00:16 HS: And that's like a fundamental distinction that's made a priori in a sense.
2:00:22 TB: You resubscribed to Netflix accidentally in order to see content that wasn't actually available through the streaming service. Have you gone back to Netflix periodically to experience the...
2:00:33 HS: No.
2:00:33 TB: Service, no?
2:00:35 HS: No, no. It's not that important to me.
2:00:37 TB: Yeah, it's interesting because I've realized that DVDs are just not something to own any more, particularly as these...
2:00:44 HS: No, that's ridiculous.
2:00:45 TB: Devices don't even have DVD...
2:00:47 HS: I don't have anything to even play them on.
2:00:49 TB: So, I've gone back to iTunes to own content that I want to own, that's available through iTunes, which is actually a surprisingly small amount of content.
2:00:58 HS: Yeah.
2:00:58 TB: But recently, for example, I bought Casino and Goodfellas, which is why I mentioned Casino and Goodfellas, at the start associated with the narrative form. And I've started going back and thinking, so I've the film Crumb, a variety of films that are important to me, I've decided to own through the iTunes service.
2:01:14 HS: Yeah.
2:01:15 TB: Over a slow purchase but over a few months now.
2:01:17 HS: Yeah, yeah.
2:01:19 TB: Which seems to be what my peers are doing, as well; associated content. But it is an interesting idea that at every point...
2:01:25 HS: What about just watching it, as opposed to downloading it and owning it. Is there a different pricing structure for that?
2:01:32 TB: So, there's a rental and a purchase, and the rental is typically about a third of the purchase price. So the question you ask yourself is...
2:01:39 HS: "Am I gonna watch this three times?"
2:01:41 TB: Exactly.
2:01:42 HS: Yes [laughter]
2:01:42 TB: That's exactly the question you ask.
2:01:44 HS: Yeah, okay.
2:01:45 TB: And...
2:01:45 HS: And that's a easy to answer question usually, isn't it?
2:01:49 TB: Yeah. In general, I purchase. And I've been burned a few times by this, but not as much as I have by actually owning, like purchasing it outright. And I think purchasing it outright is always superior to renting, if you're even gonna invest it. So for example, Bridge of Spies; recommended by you, I thought was an amazing film. Easy to own because I thought, Heron's recommended this. Rough chance I might watch it again. I know my spiritual advisor hasn't seen it and wants us to watch it again.
2:02:19 HS: Yeah.
2:02:19 TB: So then I'm two thirds of the way there, quite literally, associated with owning versus renting.
2:02:24 HS: I love the way they portrayed the spy.
2:02:26 TB: Yes.
2:02:26 HS: Yeah, he was great. He was wonderful.
2:02:29 TB: Yeah. No, it is the Heron Stone part, isn't it?
2:02:32 HS: Yeah, it was great. [laughter] I loved that.
2:02:35 TB: Yes, yes. I mean people like that just don't exist any more, right?
2:02:40 HS: Oh, I think they do. Of course, they do. Sure, there are all sorts of people out there that aren't being covered in the news, and shit.
2:02:47 TB: Well, I understand that. But he was a product of his time as well.
2:02:51 HS: Well, listen, what's out there is what's our there. We get to deal with whatever the fuck is out there.
2:02:57 TB: I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker who experienced the Cultural Revolution in China through the week. She was about nine when it occurred.
2:03:06 HS: How old is she now?
2:03:07 TB: Well, you can do the math.
2:03:08 HS: Well, no.
2:03:09 TB: I think 1966, she was nine at the time. And she talked about a kid in her community, like a 16-year-old boy, who she'd seen playing around the area and had grown up in the area.
2:03:22 HS: Yeah.
2:03:22 TB: Coming into the house and just vandalizing things. Slashing art work, throwing records out the window, throwing around chairs.
2:03:29 HS: Just came into the house and started destroying it?
2:03:31 TB: Yeah. Which was backed by the government.
2:03:34 HS: Because?
2:03:34 TB: Of the Cultural Revolution.
2:03:36 HS: And these people were singled out because?
2:03:40 TB: Well, actually, it happened to everyone, but it happened...
2:03:43 HS: They just went into people's houses at random and threw shit around and destroyed their stuff?
2:03:49 TB: Yeah.
2:03:49 HS: Really?
2:03:50 TB: Yeah.
2:03:50 HS: Oh God. Humans. Okay, go on.
2:03:53 TB: I mean this is an amazing story to hear from someone. And then reflect on ones own existence. Now, her parents had spent time in the US, so they had certain things that obviously other people in the town didn't have; which were destroyed. But, the idea of local kids going into people's houses and just destroying stuff in order to normalize the culture.
2:04:16 HS: It's unfathomable.
2:04:19 TB: Exactly.
2:04:19 HS: It's just astounding to consider.
2:04:21 TB: Yeah, no. I mean, this is why I think...
2:04:23 HS: That's why I think Chinese is just a different universe. I'm really quite serious having worked with my Chinese friend on translation, I've just have been dumbfounded by it, every time.
2:04:36 TB: Yeah, yeah.
2:04:37 HS: You know. I think they live in a fucking different universe than we do.
2:04:43 TB: And it's interesting the aspect of language and the aspect of experience, and in particular, the aspect of living with a lot of humans. [laughter]
2:04:51 HS: Did you see that photo I posted of the swimming pool?
2:04:54 TB: Yes.
2:04:56 HS: Geez. That. Man [laughter]
2:04:58 TB: Yes. Yeah, the closest experience I've had to that is spending time in New York City. And it does fundamentally change you. We really are like...
2:05:09 HS: Well, it's got it, yeah.
2:05:10 TB: Yeah.
2:05:10 HS: Yeah, yeah.
2:05:12 TB: Like grasshoppers and locusts. Like when we start...
2:05:13 HS: Well, my ability to live alone here. I mean, is such an amazing thing.
2:05:20 TB: Yes. [chuckle] Yeah.
2:05:22 HS: Wow.
2:05:23 TB: Yeah, my mother lives alone, but she lives alone in a condominium which means that she's surrounded by people.
2:05:28 HS: Well, that's fine. That's the ideal situation. Because, you can have people around when you want them, and you can shut them out when you don't.
2:05:35 TB: Well, it's usually there are people around that she doesn't want around that she has to interact with, because they live in a condominium.
2:05:40 HS: No. But well, you don't have to, as long as you stay in your house.
2:05:44 TB: Well, as you leave...
2:05:46 HS: Yeah, no. I know, I know. That's manageable. I wouldn't find that to be a problem. I'd make it very clear to people; just exactly where my space ends and yours ends.
2:06:01 TB: I guess, I've had conversations with people, you know, from various parts of like Ethiopia and Somalia where they had to physically leave their country and walk across desert with like lions. You know, these people are alive, and to talk to them for any length of time makes you really acutely aware. You know, just...
2:06:24 HS: Yeah, well that's almost unfathomable, actually.
[laughter]
2:06:33 HS: Yeah. How you talk about that. Shit that some people go through. We are still living in the age of the humans. It's almost over but got a ways to go yet. [laughter]
2:06:51 TB: Yeah, speaking of this Heron I'm kind of considering this is probably the end of the conversation, for me, given the editing and also the week that I've had. So I'll stay on line and pick up the audio per last week and hopefully we'll have a more stable conversation. Now I may not be able to record next week, but we'll have to play it by... We'll work something out.
2:07:12 HS: Yeah, whatever. It'll be okay.
2:07:15 TB: Talk to you soon, take care.