Our next talk is going to provide a bit of introspection. We lost the war, has been the name of a talk also by Rob and Frank at the Congress 10 years ago. And this is basically the updated version of that talk. Over the next hour, we'll hear about the past and current events as well and the bold prediction for the future I hear. So please give a warm welcome to Rob and Frank. Yeah, thank you for being here. Let's start with a very quick question. So who has seen either in person or on video or talk from 10 years ago? And who has read the text that belongs to it? Okay, thank you. So 10 years ago at the Congress, we felt that we needed to talk about the state of the world about what the state of the hacker community is. Rob and me are coming from quite different backgrounds. Rob is from Netherlands. I'm from East Germany. So we have both our perspectives on the hacker culture and the position of the hacker culture in our world. But we share a rather common way of analyzing stuff and analyzing the world. So the talk back then depressed the hell out of a lot of people because it was just four years after 9-11 and people were not really ready to accept that things are probably not going to be really good and nice in the near future. And so the press had quite a number of things to say. Most of them circled around the cover of the data slider back then where the text was published that belonged to the talk, our hackers raising the white flag, hackers giving up in this vein, which was not really what we intended actually because we actually wanted to just say, okay, reality is not looking too bright but that doesn't mean we need to be depressed. And this is somewhat what we're trying this year again. So one of the critics that we had on this talk was that we used the term they a little bit too loosely. They meaning the others, the enemies. So we just want to clarify upfront that we don't really believe in large conspiracies. So the world is too complex for large conspiracies. There is no world government that does all these things. It's not like the Illuminati are sitting somewhere with the gnomes of Zurich and doing this stuff. But it's also not like freedom and liberty don't have enemies. As probably when you've seen the talk about the people who got incarcerated in Guantanamo, there are people out there who really don't believe in freedom and democracy and they are plenty and they're powerful. And this is what we meant with they in that sense. Yeah, the other criticism that we got is that you can't really speak of a war. Upholding civil liberties, upholding democracy is a perpetual fight. You have to continuously fight. There is no winning. There is no losing. There is just this continuous struggle, which is of course true that criticism is completely right. But we argued and continue to argue that there are certain things that are so much easier to prevent than to undo and that the introduction of ubiquitous general surveillance recording of everything is one of these things that grows power structures which are incredibly hard to get rid of and it's so much better to prevent. And that's probably a part of a class of events, of turnings that are better to prevent than to have happened. The drone war is the beginning of the perpetual undeclared war fought by robots. There's something fundamentally that changed when the West, when America introduced a system of black sites and torture happening all over the world, prisons without any accountability where people can be locked up for a decade without any trial, without anything. And of course climate change brings possible tipping points maybe behind us, maybe still ahead of us. So these are all events where yes, you can speak of war or at least of major battles and of winnings and losses in that sense. So essentially what we said was, we lost the war when 9-11 happened and it was the war for taking the direct route to a positive utopia, the utopia that is not from the dystopian novels and computer games but it's going straight to the positive world outcome. We lost that war. And if we look back 10 years later, very few people will probably dispute this finding. So when we look quickly back at the predictions that we made, we were mostly right. So the economy tanked three years later because the brittle system of banking nearly collapsed and was just by hair, breath rescued by means that really nobody understands anymore. So the one thing that we were wrong about so far is the price of oil that miraculously currently is very low and but still nobody really understands why this is truly the case, it's utterly bizarre. So democracy, if you look at what has happened to democracy in the Western societies, it is hard to argue that democracy has made large progress. On the contrary, what we see is that in many countries, democracy is on the way out. It's no longer the preferred system of government for many people. The security state, we can see it in our everyday lives. So it is encroaching meanwhile you need to have to pass security check gates when you want to board a train in several countries. Ubiquitous surveillance is there. We have data retention. So the security state is making large progress. What we said back then about climate and the refugees has largely been vindicated. I mean, if you look at the weather patterns that we're having today even here, I mean, in Reykjavik, they have now a storm with over 300 kilometers per hour that is coming in there. We don't have winter anymore in Germany. So it is becoming kind of obvious that the climate is not right anymore. And the refugees that are being caused by this climate change are around the corner. And so another thing that we were talking about was surveillance and whistleblowers and the need for that becoming a bit later to that. This talk is not going to be as depressing as the one in 2005. Not because the subject matter is less depressing or has become better all of a sudden, but because more people are used to the world being the way it is. There is no longer, we no longer need to shock an audience into a world we see that is completely different from the world that most people perceive. And the goal for this talk is to get a large group of mostly very smart people, being you and whoever watches this, to be as happy and as politically productive as possible in an environment that is still going to be increasingly dystopian. And when we talk about a dystopian environment, the most important issue that is pressing, immediate and involves all of humanity is of course climate change. Yeah, so what we see is not so much in direct global warming, but in global weeding. It means that the weather patterns are shifting. The headless cells, which is where the water goes up and where the water goes down are shifting. That means that the livelihoods of many people who are depending on agriculture are threatened. And we don't know where these patterns will be moving. The one thing that we can see is that future generations will look back at us as the guilty party.  We and our parents were the people who basically fucked up the planet, probably beyond repair. And the one thing that we would like to call you on is taking this responsibility. So what we see now is the Syrian wars just the beginning. It is just that the early wars that have a strong climate component, component that we can see in many more conflicts that are rising. So most of the Arab Spring had a large component of food riots, of food prices going up, which was certainly to a large extent also speculation but also drought, meaning lack of water in large parts of the world. And there will be many more. So there is no real way to escape this reality anymore. So this planet is largely a crime scene. The fossil fuel industry, who have known about this since the 1970s, needs to be killed or needs to be, their bottom line needs to be hurt significantly because a lot of the carbon that they're currently getting out of the earth needs to stay there and not be burned. The technology to change our energy infrastructure is already there. Solar is already profitable or near profitable in a lot of places. And we need to fight conflicts that are going to have components in fighting in courts. They have components in fighting in demonstrations in the streets. We need to take charge of these issues. If you look at what's currently happening with the fossil fuel industry, it's a lot like the tobacco industry. If you have known for so long that this was going on and you have prevented the correct policy response by hiding the science, by muddling the image, then you have responsibility. And if there is damage, you are culpable for that. Also, techno-optimism is a problem in our circles. Many people think, well, we screwed up this planet, maybe, but we have spacecraft. We can go to other planets. There's other worlds. That doesn't work. There are no habitable planets in our reach and there won't be for generations to come. So no matter how bad things may get on earth, they're still not going to be anywhere near as inhospitable on a bad day as they will be on Mars on the best possible day. See, that's a positive message. Yeah, I mean, the core of the HECA culture is breaking stuff, fixing things. And this planet, if we can say, so is our spaceship and it really needs fixing. And so this is something where we see that the HECA community or HECA community can do much more. And if you look at where the refugees are coming and for what reasons they're coming, we see that there's a lot of regions that will become hard to live in. So either because there's too much water, there's too little water, the ground turns into swamps. And so these countries will be massively struggling with how to feed their population, how to give them space to live. And there's a lot of stuff to do for technological-minded people with organizational capabilities like our community is to help these people and to prevent also the dystopian streak that governments usually take on when they are in emergency situations. I mean, if you look at their larger refugee camp, so that is a massively dystopian setup. So people are wearing wristbands to register at every checkpoint. They are limited in their range of movement. They are just barely fed and housed and that's about it. And that means that a world that is in constant emergency mode has a really hard time to be in democratic society. But on top of that, the western countries, but increasingly so also China and the other upcoming larger powers, have their hand in pushing countries into chaos. So we have seen now a large sequence of things that end up with Syria and Libya where under the disguise of bringing forward democracy with drones, countries are essentially pushed into chaos because no one took responsibility of setting up a structure, setting up stability, making sure that the people there actually end up not in a much worse situation than they have been before. And so the human rights and managing of migration is a direct conflict with the economic interest of the arms industry. If we look at who is selling these arms, it's mostly western countries in Russia. And we are selling these arms to countries like Saudi Arabia who will be the next large conflict zone and who don't have any democratic control and we just do that under the disguise of providing stability to regions. But bombing countries into democracy fortunately has become very much unpopular. This is also why the arms industry is pushing so much for drones because drones can fly around and not destabilize countries for oil and not causing body bags coming home. But it would be wrong to say that U.S. foreign policy has been a failure. It has not. So if you look at the core interest behind U.S. foreign policy, what is happening there, basically countries being unbalanced, nobody really being able to concentrate their power to challenge their hegemony, this has been largely a success. So sure, there has been a lot of chaos around but economically and for the arms industry in this country, in the country, especially in U.S. and U.K. but also other western countries, this has been a very successful decade. So it's not like their policy has been failures. Do you want to put this aside? Yeah. One of the things that are the tools of foreign policy in the West is of course ubiquitous surveillance. And we had, in 2005, we wrote that we need to know how the intelligence agencies work today. We need to know how the backdoors work and how that is done in large scale. That was 2005. And we also wrote that we need the infrastructure to harbour whistleblowers to make it possible for people from the dark side to come forward and get this information out. At least on this, it has been a success, as we can say. So we know much more about how the surveillance works and what does it really help? For most people, looking at the Snowden revelations is like discovering a new force of nature. It's like they've discovered this whole universe that they didn't previously know about. There's this deep state level of logic, of thinking, of diplomacy, of how countries really interact, that now many, many more people know about. What was considered paranoid? What was considered, oh my God, this is like a really cynical way of looking at things. Now many more people can see the documents, be they diplomatic cables, or be they the Snowden revelations. And they can look and they can see, look, this is really how the world works. But leaking alone is not sufficient. There's, as we can now see, there's too much systemic corruption, too many secrets, too many anti-leaker laws and measures. We're going to need true transparency laws, and we're going to need to be able to trust our governments and our parliaments to do the right thing. There was this naive belief that if the scandal is big enough, the system will finally correct itself. What we see is the opposite. We see a scandal of the magnitude of Watergate every week or every two weeks, and nothing is happening. We need to cope with that. We need to come up with new strategies. It's like the paranoid movies where you finally, the protagonist gets to the president and tells the conspiracy to the president and then finds out in sort of, in shadowy words, you can find out that the president is already part of the conspiracy. When the Snowden revelations came out, it was quickly clear that our governments were not shocked.  We need to do something. No, they were like, no, this is nothing going on here. Keep moving. Pay no attention. So it's really, we really need to come up with strategies to deal with that. Yeah, so essentially their reaction was, it was one of the first, I think, from when the NSA was confronted with the, by the German government and their answer was so, okay, now you know. And, but that was about it. So what we have is the situation that it looks like transparency alone doesn't help anymore. So we had somehow hoped that it was also one of the naive beliefs of the early internet times that transparency alone, if people just knew, if people knew the problems, the things, they would act, they would get their stuff together and, yeah, basically change the system. And it turned out that this wasn't quite naive belief. But it doesn't mean that transparency is not important. But it turns out that transparency is like basic hygiene. It's like brushing your teeth, like about taking a shower for society. So if you don't have transparency of power and the power structures and what interests are being conceived by whom, what the tools of surveillance are, who knows what, then you cannot have a democracy anymore because the world has become so complex that it's very easy to hide relatively sinister interests within society. We even have the problem now that if you have a proper conspiracy, a small one, if you make it complex enough if the scandal cannot be told within one print page or one scroll range on the website, then it's hard to have it as a scandal anymore, which is also part of the reason why the Snowden renovations were kind of difficult to turn into concrete action for a larger society. So one thing that we need to keep in mind is that even the well-meaning people in government and the bureaucratic institutions are really need transparency to keep stuff in check. So it's not like transparency is useless or something that we should give up on a goal. It's just that we need to understand that it has a different meaning, a different purpose than what we originally thought. So the question is, will this epitome last? So what will happen when people start realizing that the surveillance that they have been trained to ignore somehow will be into everything that they own? When the Internet of Things starts for real, if we have basically network sensors in everything we own, then suddenly the world becomes treacherous.  And the question is, if this maybe will change things. So it's an open question to me. I don't know. So it may be that people will stay in this apathy and not change their attitudes. It may be that there is a critical mass point where people say it's no, it's enough, it's enough. So maybe we need to unseal so certified cloudless object or something that we need to stick on stuff. This is also one of the things that the hacker community is being asked for. Essentially, we are the ones that, the hacking people are the ones that can actually do this. So making objects cloudless again, if needed. If you look at the progress of technology, we can see that facial recognition, including mood detection, micro expression detection, infrared for blood flow detection will become very cheap. It will be everywhere. And we need to have countermeasures. And that means, for instance, also cooperation with the artists who make clothing, who make makeup, who do all the stuff that you can legally steal wear in a public domain and think about with them what we can do against this ubiquitous surveillance. So that brings me to the core question. So what is our mission as a hacking community? And I use to define the saying, we are partly responsible for maintaining society's capability for change. So to keep the regular rooms open, to keep the capabilities for political actors who want to change the society for the better, make that still possible. So not being strangled by surveillance, not being frozen in place by lack of options where people cannot do anything anymore because every step that they do is registered. Everything that they do leads to potential blackmail. And so, Yevgeny Morozov has recently written about it and he said it's the invisible barbed wire that is basically around you and that is made up of the data that you leave so that restricts your options, restricts your room of movement and you're not really realizing that unless you run against the invisible barbed wire. And so this question of blackmailability versus transparency, so we want to have as much privacy as we can as individuals, but we want to have the institutions that have power as transparent as possible in the core of the struggle for free society. Basically giving the individual the right or keeping our rights for change, for movement, for making things better versus the institution's capabilities to keep stuff secret from us. This is one of the core struggles that we have. And the intelligence agencies know stuff about those in power. They know what is blackmailable. So, and the interesting thing is that the number of blackmailable offenses has been shrinking recently. So, that has basically shrunk to very clear corruption, pedophilia, and tax evasion. With everything else, you can get away. So, as a politician, you have drug usage, no problem, affairs, no problem, having strange hobbies, absolutely no problem. Homosexuality, no problem anymore, very good. So, but those people that are in the security apparatus that evaluate politicians and look at them and look what they can find against them in the blackmail chambers, we don't know. So, we don't know most of what politicians do. I mean, sometimes we learn that they have bizarre habits involving their genitalia and pigs, which is, from my perspective, their private thing to do. But what's more interesting is that what the circle of men there did was creating a shared compromise, a shared knowledge about each other that was so painful back then to publish, to divulge that they had basically mutual assured destruction against each other. This is how power circles work. And the intelligence agency know this as well, and they want to get in there, and they, we have very limited resources to find out if politicians are in the hands of intelligence agency. We can just look for the patterns. So, if a politician suddenly changes his course on matters that are the deep state that the intelligence agency concerned about, then we can be pretty certain that they have something against them that falls into the still blackmailable category. So, why did Cameron survive this thing? So, because everybody who could have overthrown him was part of the same circle. So, they were all part of the same game, and they knew about it. So, they had, yeah. So, they created a space of invincibility around them. And so, the question then is, why does it all matter so little? So, why are all these big scandals that we know about all this corruption, all these things where we know that politicians really misbehaved, except for these three cases, but even then, why is nobody writing on the street? So, why is nobody calling out the revolution just now? Why is it that people are just saying, yeah, this is how it is? So, this is how it has been all the time, and we cannot do anything about it. For that, we have to look at the psychology of our time. We live in what circles around the Adbusters magazine, by the Adbusters Collective described, and I thought it was really useful. They describe our time as a massively polluted psychological environment, and it makes sense to think about it that way. We have mechanisms for discourse in society, and those mechanisms are deliberately sabotaged by lobbying, advertising, sock-puppeting, the destruction of debate, and the destruction of the human ability to think properly is very widespread in our societies. There's no more proper discourse, there's no proper facts, and there's trends that counter sort of any scientific thinking or enlightenment, anti-vaccination, anti-science, anti-fact. There's a lot of thinking that rejects a common truth or rejects a common reality that we live in, and tries to find niches, tries to do, tries to retract into something that we can still believe. We need some kind of a rationality movement. We need some kind of a movement to say, look, we can disagree on policy, we can disagree on a lot of things, but let's not disagree on facts. Let's not, and America is of course the capital of what has been described as Bolsheet Mountain as whole universes that are internally consistent, universes of fake facts, of fake realities, of fake, and we need to reject those. Much of science, of the scientific enterprises at this point, is very captured. Economy is basically ran by the large banks, but still that doesn't mean we can reject the practice of science just because it's currently not in the right hands often. Facts are important, and it's important to understand that being angry or unhappy right now for prolonged periods is a recognized medical condition. If you are, if you look at the world and for a year or two years at a time, this world makes you really depressed or angry or unhappy, you can go to the doctor and you can get medication for that. Lots of people, five or 10% of the population in some countries are on antidepressants. These are the people that cannot function. They basically do not want to go to work. Are we not, and this is an open question, are we suppressing a critical mass? Because at some point when there is no other people that don't want to go to work and start a movement or, I don't know, riot in the streets or do whatever it is, whatever else it is that they would be doing if they don't go to work, if you have enough of these people not doing that, then it becomes the right decision for the lonely person that is out there to also take antidepressants. Our community, we have to face this, has a large pool of what I would call non-neuronormative people. There are lots of people in our community that are on the artistic spectrum, that are bipolar, there's lots of people that are not the standard norm when it comes to their neurology. What does that mean? What does this mean in practice? Hasn't it always been the artists, the slightly crazy people, the slightly non-normative people that have seen things coming first, that have warned about things first? These are things we need to think about. Another thing that we need to take care about in our community is just because your paranoid doesn't mean that they are not out to get you, holds more truth than ever. Because we have now in our myth, in our middle, quite a number of people who are actually harassed by the government. So if you look at the people from Occupy and the U.S., basically the refugee waves that are coming in from the U.S., the political refugees that are coming from there, they're coming also from Hungary and Poland. People who have really been oppressed and really experienced a lot of harassment from the hands of their governments. And so we need to be also clear that the more crypto that we use, the better our technical security systems get, the more classic the intelligence agencies will get as well. That means more informants. And so we need to figure out ways to sort the needlessly paranoid and slightly crazy people from the people who really have a problem with suppression and being followed around. So informants are tools of power. We need to talk about the power structures that are using them. So if you look at the larger picture, we have basically three major models of society that we have on this planet today. It's more the U.S. Ayn Rand ultra-individualistic surveillance state system that says that everything that you can do for yourself is good for you and the state. So where's everybody else? So stuff stays within the prescribed limits. Then we have the Chinese model of the harmonic society that essentially says, you know, when we can keep this 100,000 people happy, it's okay if we need to kill these 1,000 people. And it's, yeah, another way of saying ultra-terroristic usage of power is justified. And then we have the European model that is more on the traditional of enlightenment, of individualism, of balancing out state power and economic power. But none of these models is really superior against the other because all of them are deeply corrupt. So all of them have been corrupted by various interests. And if we cannot solve the corruption of the political process, then all these models kind of converge. So it doesn't really matter anymore if you're living under a Chinese surveillance state or a US surveillance state. Maybe you can watch better pornography in one than in the other, but that's about probably it. And so, and if we cannot get this corruption out of the systems regardless on what systems we live, then the problems will not go away. And we should understand that surveillance, ubiquitous surveillance means that we have less and less small-scale corruption. So basically small briberies to get your passport faster or to get the building permit done. But surveillance means that the corruption needs to be large-scale. That's the billions, not the hundreds of dollars or euros that we're talking about. It means the surveillance state means that larger and larger interests are at play and that these are the ones that are dominating the state and these are harder and harder to fight. So fighting a small corruption of a corrupt official in your hometown is doable. Fighting a large, multi-billion-dollar weapons manufacturer is becoming slightly more complicated. So we have tried to visualize the situation somewhat. So we have this graph where we have on one axis liberty, democracy, civilization. On the other, we have time. And we...  There's more positive messages up there. So what we don't know is how long will it be till rock bottom. We don't know what will be coming later. So if it will go down further, it will go up at some point. And we also don't know how deep the valley will be. So what I'm pretty sure is that stuff will not be really rosy for a while. So if you look at the tendencies in the world that we have briefly discussed now, it's not really possible to say, okay, revolution next week, things will be good again. So this will be just a lie. So we need to understand that the next decades will be more grayish than beautiful in the sense. So there will be lots of work. But that doesn't mean that they cannot be good fulfilling decades for us. So it doesn't mean that we need to be depressed about it. It's just the world that we live in. And the world we live in, we can change to a certain extent, but not by wishful thinking. Yeah. So let's look at a few trends. Terrorism is now the main reason why we need to be discarding basic civil rights. But I remember being a child in the 1970s and my parents tuning into the morning broadcast to hear whether the hostages in the train or the hostages in the school in Holland, there was a conflict with Molokans wanting their own state and they took hostages and they were threatening to shoot them. Conflicts lasted for weeks. Many more people died of terrorism in Europe in the 1960s and 70s than they did in the 80s, 90s and onward. But nobody spoke about discarding basic civil rights. Why? Because it was simply too expensive. I think we can say that now. Because in that time it was seen as ridiculous for the East German state to want to know who sent mail to who or to open all these envelopes. That was seen as typical things that only a police state would ever contemplate on doing. All of these things are being implemented now. And why? Because it's cheap enough. This was all cost-driven, not danger-driven. And we can see long-term strategies. We can see strategies that span decades. The treaties, the internationally harmonized legislation, ACTA, CISA, cybercrime treaties, TTIP, whatnot, whatnot, et cetera, et cetera. They used to cement the economic status quo or they used to increase surveillance and repression. And it's like they figured out the strategy. There's now a treaty train leaving every year or two years and it's to wear down the activists. Everything that the activists managed to get off the train is just put on the next train. See if you can mobilize the same things, the same level of activism two years later. How often do we need to mobilize the same fight to fight the same damn unconstitutional laws? There's very necessary activism that is always has this act now to stop this evil law from coming into effect. It's very important. It needs to happen. But it may not be enough. We don't have ready-to-go answers maybe. There's a few ideas we have and other people have. But we need clever and funny strategies because I'm often called a pessimist and oh my God, it's all doom and gloom. But a lot of what's going on in the world right now is actually very funny. It's funny in a very dark way. It's a very dark humor. But you cannot look at this world and go, oh my God, it's so stereotypical. And we have to make people see this. We have to be the clowns. We have to make people see this. If the Interior Minister says, well, parts of my answer would make the population insecure, that deserves roaring laughter from the entire population because it's the only thing that will work. But what we also need is we need to dare to dream ahead. There's a lot of strategies and activism are incremental, meaning we are here. We want to go there. So let's chop this up into 10 little pieces and then start working on the first two. Whereas in reality we are not here because there's so much chaos going on. There's so many events happening that we are actually all over the place all the time. So we need to build strategies that assume that we are not in the place where we are today, but we assume we are somewhere completely different. And sometimes we win. We have very few strategies for when people we like or people whose ideas we agree with actually get to power. Do we know what laws we would like to be? Have repealed what new laws we like to have passed? Have we maybe taken the time to write these laws already, even though they're ridiculous today? Is there an anti-patriot act? Is there... We've tried to work on a few of these things. I've been personally a part of thinking about IME, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative. That was an idea. Can we create a system of laws to protect publications anywhere from whistleblower protection, protection of journalists, protection of publications? So can we make a system of laws and can we figure out how they would all work together to protect publications in one country and then through a sort of spreading effect make that go to other countries? We need to dare to think ahead and to not just always react and always be driven into this little corner which we have to fight our way out of. In many countries, discontent with the powers that be with the way things are is growing. In some countries that leads to left-wing movements growing or even getting to power. There's things going on in Portugal, in Spain, in the UK where Corbyn is now leading the Labour Party. In other countries and powers, those that challenge the status quo or say they challenge the status quo with even more fear and anti-immigrant sentiments and policies. In the US, interestingly, we see both trends happening but in an increasingly bizarre corporate media landscape. So there's all these things happening. Yes, one of the things that changed in the last ten years suddenly is stuff can change very, very quickly. So stuff, situations, reality can change very, very fast. For instance, let's look at the refugee situation. Just a year or two ago, what has been happening in Europe in the last months have been totally unimaginable. And there is no security in the rest of the herds still grazing. So if you see stuff is nice and well over here in Germany which is becoming more and more of an exception in the surrounding countries, then that doesn't mean that stuff cannot change here very quickly. And this is something that we need to get adjusted to that the stability is gone. So the stability, the dampness of the system are all gone. And that means that these sudden turns of events can also make oppressive regimes like in Poland or in Hungary or commonly seen in France more powerful. So we cannot guarantee that change is positive in every way. So if you look at the increased pressures on the population, we see that the problems that are multiplying from automation on one hand, on the other hand, more and more people not having their talents valued by the market, by the job market anymore. And the pressures that are now coming in with the refugees will make right-wing powers probably more powerful. And the question is in this fight for power in the Western countries that will be becoming more pronounced political fights. How do we position ourselves? How does the hacking community position itself in these fights? So will we engage, will we fight? What is the means and the goals that we are aiming for? And the world today is uniquely connected and complicated. So any solutions are going to be complex. That means we need a generation of activists that is post-depression about the situation and that doesn't have any fear of complexity. So complexity is the new norm. It's not like things or simple solutions will be around the corner anymore. This time has gone forever. So we did this talk in 2005 and it was, in many ways, it was taboo. All of Congress was depressed for a while where at least people were walking around with gloomy faces. And there was then, and there still is today, a myth in the progressive community that a story must have a happy end if you want to get large groups of people to come together and fight to make change. You have to present a happy end.  The problem with that message is that you create a disconnect between the reality that people can see, a reality where outcomes are gradually getting worse in some fields, and the world that they are told to believe in. Everybody is hiring PR professionals and PR professionals. Their job is to keep everybody consuming. So their job is to present happy outcomes. Their job is to keep people to spend their money. And so we tend to believe these people when they say, well, you must have a happy outcome. Let's tell people that if they don't buy the right light bulbs and don't get their electricity from the right provider and buy a Prius, then they are themselves responsible for any bad outcomes that happen. So shame everybody into believing that the bad outcome is actually them. That's a frame that we should reject. We've been warning progressive people that have seen things coming about what's going on right now since the 1970s. The coming of the police state, the fact that planetary resources are limited. That's limited to growth. That's 1972. I was four years old. So let's not fall for this kind of messaging. Yeah, the question is then what is our mission? So what is the stuff that we should aim for? And one thing that we should be very clear about is this planet is a crime scene. And this also means that the thing to say to the people responsible is so for decades we have made it very clear that we don't want to live in a 1984 environmentally degraded police state. We saw it common, but you went there anyway because it was short and profitable and your corporate friends were very well-off with that. So please now step aside, place your hands where we can see them and we will read you your rights while we try to mitigate the shit that you caused as best as we can. So the forces that made the world as it is today are not natural laws. It's not like this greed and this corruption is the native state of humanity. It is just what people made it to be. And so the people who did it are nameable. So we know that the fossil fuel industry knew since the 70s and 80s that they were basically causing planetary collapse, that they were causing the climate to go down for their corporate profits. And that also means that we need to preserve the evidence. So we may not be yet in the position that we can cause prosecution of these people, but this time will certainly come, hopefully before our children are too old for that. And so we don't need to really fight their silly PR efforts to still preserve their profits. So what we need to do is collect the evidence and let them know that we collect the evidence and that we use it sometime. So in the 80s, we thought that all change is good. So because the world was kind of frozen in place, so that especially in our fields in technology and telecommunications, we thought that all change is good. But now we need to remind ourselves that not all change is bad. So because when we are in a world that we think that may not be getting much better soonish, the sudden impulse would be to really revert to conservatism saying we try to cling to the status quo and not try to have too much change, but this would be wrong because change can also be for the better. So the absence of stability is the new norm. We need to live with that and we need to work for making positive change because change itself can no longer be averted. We need to define missions for ourselves and argue for them to be worthwhile personally as well as in the bigger picture. Picture a world where some outcomes may be negative or things may be getting worse, but you can do meaningful stuff in the life-saving, democracy-rescuing, world-changing sense of the world. Of the word, no fake utopian outcomes, no lies to tell people, but still very positive at the personal level for each and every one of us. A sense of belonging to a community like the one we have but other communities as well is going to become more important. In difficult times, people will come together. There's great happiness and a sense of purpose to be found in caring for your friends, sharing knowledge and experience, especially if things get a little bit hairy. And even if we end up in a bad possible future, if things degrade, if infrastructure starts to fail, even if that happens, the hacker mindset is, I've said this before, there's a post-apocalyptically appropriate way of thinking. Wouldn't you run to your hackerspace if things really went wrong? If the world went down in chaos, I would really want it to happen somewhere at the end of December because you all would be the people I would want to be around. I would like to think of this community as having a role when things go wrong. And many of us have taken on these roles. I was traveling to some of the Eastern European countries, to Serbia, to Croatia, to see some of the refugee situations with my own eyes. And I think many more of us need to be there. There can't be just one guy from Zagreb running around with wireless modems to try to connect all the people that are trying to help there and try to disseminate information. Many more of us need to be in these situations. And so we have been following the strategy of enlarging our culture, our culture, the hacking culture over the last many years. You probably noticed that from, I don't know, if you look back at the Ejlstadter Burger Haus, the Congress was still looking a bit drab, whereas now we have artists and people from the various cultural domains as an integrated part of our community, of our culture. And this is essentially what we need to do. So if you look back at the last 10 years, the stuff that was made working is the alliance between the hackers, the journalists, investigative journalists, and the artists. So this is something that is working now. This is a big achievement. So where we can say, okay, this is something where we managed to grow our culture. So growing from a couple hundred people in some old community building in Hamburg, now we're having 12,000 people and could be 15,000 if this house would house us. This is in big change. And this is also something that we can be proud of. So if we want to form further alliances, so we need to, in order to succeed, we need to actively stop the trend that people are choosing minor, big-ring fights, that they are more interested in fighting the heretics in their own ranks and the people who are not using the words that they like or that are finding different stuff important. So we are also having more or less the same goals. This is basically what makes us a culture, is that we're having the same ideas about the general structure of society or what should be the same ideas how people should interact and the rights of the individual. And we should actively try to stop fighting each other. So we are not each other's enemy. So the enemy is something different. So we have seen quite a number of people who tried to find the heretics as their main goal in life, as their enemy in life and ended up in finding no real purpose anymore because when they solved this one problem, they still ended up having not solved the bigger problem. And we have seen the same thing happening for more and more smaller issues, like animal rights, people finding out, okay, so environment people not finding solutions that they can really bring forward because the problems are bigger than their individual and smaller problems that they're trying to fight. So we need to look at the bigger picture. And this is essentially the problem that we need to solve as a community, as a culture to keep focused on the bigger picture and not trying to fight our little wars among each other. What editor is the best? What Linux distribution is the best? What programming language is the best? What way of gendering is the best? So these are meaningless fights. This is nothing worth spending your energy on. So we need to be aware that there are money aspects and socioeconomic tensions within our culture. Things are different than they were 20, 30 years ago because the economy of our subculture has changed because our community is much wider and broader. Many younger people do not have the kind of stability that many of the now older people in this crowd have. Hardware and software hackers that have established themselves usually do not have a problem making a living in today's project-oriented job economy. But many who came to our cultural space in the last years are designers, they're artists, they're from other adjacent fields. They're living more and more precariously because their competition in their fields is much more fierce. We need to take care of this at least where we can to keep our community economically accessible. That means we encourage various forms of economic cooperation to make sources of income more widely accessible. Hacker spaces are not just the new universities, they're also the new co-ops. That means solidarity between people of different skill sets and talents and we need to grow the economic footprint of this community, apply more of our thinking and our skills to problems outside of the core field of IT, agriculture, energy, transportation. In essence, let there not be an interesting field out there that does not have a hacker space dedicated to it. Yes, so in closing, we are headed for some very rough times. That's uneniable, but it doesn't mean that we cannot have a lot of fun in that. So we know the surf is good when the waves are getting bigger. And sometimes in many places just keeping the ideas of political freedom alive is a political act. So basically our mission is to keep the torch burning. So to keep the ideas of freedom of individual rights of a society that's transparent and just alive. And our community is uniquely positioned to do that. We can build the tools to make the activists and political activists capable of still affecting change. We are the ones who can develop new forms of communications. If you look at this podcast universe, for instance, that was essentially created in our community and that is reaching many more people now with political education than common forms have been before. Or if you look at just the open source movements that are more as running our planet now. So we are the people who are responsible to a large extent for affecting a better outcome. And this is something that we need to take responsibility for. So in closing, really, no, there will probably not be a revolution magically manifesting itself next Friday. Probably also no zombie apocalypse. But still, we need to be ready for rapid and sizable changes of all sorts of kinds. And the only way to be effective in this and probably thus our mission as a community is to play for the long term, develop a culture that is more fun and more attractive to more people, develop infrastructure and turn around and offer that infrastructure to people that need it. This is not a thing we do as a hobby so much anymore. It's also something we do for people that need this infrastructure. Create a culture that's capable of putting up a fight that gives its inhabitants a sense of purpose, self-worth, usefulness, and enlarge that culture over time until it becomes a viable alternative to the status quo. I guess that was it. Thank you. Thank you.


This is stock number 10204. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used light-duty truck headquarters today. We are checking out this super clean 2016 Chevy Colorado Crew cab six-foot box This truck has the 3.6 liter v6 motor and from this HD video We'll be able to tell that this truck is extremely clean all the way around inside and out Black is the color we shoot all of our videos in 1080p So if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device Turn them on right now because it is like you're right here looking at the truck with me and definitely your best way To check out the vehicle before seen in person very clean down that side comes with the painted and polished aluminum rims hand-cooked Dynapro 255 65 R17 tires and these tires have just about all the tread left very very New tires on here. I'd say 80 to 90 percent Didn't see any dense or dings on that front fender has a projector lamp headlamps factory fog lights No major dents or dings or cracks on the front bumper Passenger side fender is an excellent condition as well. You can see just how mirror like that paint is Passenger side rim is an excellent shape too and as you go down this side of the truck Take note of how reflective and mirror like that paint is how clean the body is We take these HD videos So if you are far away or even if you're close by and just cannot make the trip down You can still see the truck you can still hear the truck and you get of confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at Before you even get here so that when you do get here. There's absolutely no surprises and you'll be 100% ready to go Very clean down this side only thing I noticed one tiny little ding at the bottom of the box there But nothing major you can see the frame and underbody on this truck is in really nice shape It has all the factory exhaust Hasn't been altered in any way the rest of the frame is a nice shape and the back tires have just as much tread as those front tires four-wheel disc brakes and this back rim is in nice shape as well Z71 off-road suspension package has the rear bumper steps Full towing package which includes a receiver hitch four pin and seven pin wiring Tailgate is an okay shape a couple little dings on there But nothing major has a locking tailgate and the shock assist down tailgate We got a bed mat in here and a drop-in bed liner. So that bed mat keeps your stuff from sliding And the bed liner protects the actual bed of the truck down this side of the truck just as clean as that passenger side See just how reflective that paint is very very nice truck all the way around here And for full disclosure this back rim is in nice condition as well Didn't see any scuffs or scrapes Very very clean didn't see any denser dings on those doors Inside this one has the Z71 package which gives you the black and gray leather and cloth seats Power driver seat weather tech floor mats throughout this one has auto headlamps Turndile four-wheel drive power windows power locks power mirrors and As we hop inside the truck here you can see that this one has 64,324 miles instrument cluster is very clean You get the leather wrapped steering wheel with the thumb pads Bluetooth and information center controls on the right and cruise controls on the left This one has the Chevy My link system you get AM FM and Sirius XM radio Capabilities on here. You also have your projection mode, which you can do Android auto and Apple car play capabilities on and this is also where your backup camera shows up Down here. You have your climate control Your tow mode stability control cargo lamps downhill assist control and these are your heated seats You also get an Augs and a USB jack down there For your audio Capabilities passing your seat is very clean as well. No rips or tears on that. This truck smells very clean inside I didn't see any Rips or tears in the headliner and it does have map lights up here and your on-star capabilities in your review mirror We'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we'll check out under the hood. I Would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today. Hopefully from the video you'll get a really good idea About the overall quality of the vehicle inside back here didn't see any rips or tears It does have the latch child safety system for your car seats sliding rear window with the built-in rear defrost and You need two hands to get these seats to go up so give me one second here So these seats do go up like so And you can see that They lock into place which is kind of neat and then they'll go down Automatically and we do have weather tech floor mats back here, too Once again, like I said, I'd personally like to thank you for checking out the video And hopefully you can make a smart buying decision from watching this video and just see how clean this truck is all the way around under The hood we had the 3.6 liter v6 vvt. Direct injection Motor engine base very clean runs very smooth. You can see the shocks are doing a nice job holding the hood up This truck has been fully safety then inspected by our service shop has a fresh oil and filter change all the fluids have been checked and topped off This truck has been gone through mechanically 100% and is 100% ready to go to see more pictures of this truck or one of our other 450 new and used cars trucks SUVs minivans Wranglers half tons to quarter tons one tons Colorado's Rangers you name we got to go to our website www.SummitAuto.com full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at Summit Auto.com and if you'd like to check out more HD videos you can go to youtube.com Summit Auto remember to like subscribe and share on this video and all the videos that you see there In fact in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on your left a link to more used Inventory and light duty truck videos like this one on your right if you have not been to our website on the bottom Link to this vehicle on our website click those check us out and we really look forward to helping with this super clean 2016 Chevy Colorado crew cab six foot Z71 Colorado. Thanks again


Hey guys, big news! For the next several weeks, we have a brand new Spirit Science series about DMT and psychedelics, featuring none other than Dr. Rick Straussman, the father of modern psychedelic research. To kick off this new flow, we've done a podcast with him that we wanted to share. Also, on September 7th, we're hosting a free workshop all about healing with plant medicine. You can RSVP to the event for free using the link in the description, and this workshop will kick off our brand new full-length course, Spirit Medicine Walkers. It's not something you're gonna want to miss. Okay, enjoy the talk.  Thank you so much for joining me today. Well, thanks, it's my pleasure. I think I speak for a lot of my audience when I say, you know, as far as the brand that I've created is called Spirit Science, but out of everybody on the planet who is a true Spirit scientist, I don't know anyone better than you to really be first in line to receive that title.  It's inspired so many. It almost seems as though that your work in a way was prophetic, this pioneering, the psychedelic research. I mean, how do you feel about that? Well, it would depend on what you mean by prophetic. You're using it in the commonly accepted sense of the word in terms of foretelling or predicting. And in my prophetic state's book, DMT and the Soul of Prophecy, I broaden the definition to include any spiritual experience as laid down in the Hebrew Bible. But in terms of my work being foretelling, a more accurate expression would be that it was ahead of its time. The DMT work occurred in the early 90s and it took a long time for anybody to catch up. It was also a no-brainer in a way, kind of like the DMT work was. It was the obvious place to look in order to answer certain questions. It seemed like it. I found it so interesting that even in the first book in DMT, The Spear Molecule, you described the story of talking with one of your colleagues and you just asked them. You're like, do you think that the pineal gland has anything to do with spiritual or mystical states? And he responded with this like, there is no connection between just a very hard line here. That must have been really difficult for you to be dealing with while you're doing this pioneering research. All these other academics are basically telling you, no, there's nothing there, right? Well, that comment about the pineal, that occurred in 1983, I think. And I was still in training. I was doing my fellowship at UC San Diego. And I was just learning about psychopharmacology at the nuts and bolts level, really getting into it, brain chemistry, brain pharmacology, subjective experience, giving drugs, giving rating scales, drawing blood samples and the like. And I was pretty excited. And it seemed to me a stepping stone to doing the work that I really wanted to, which was looking at the biology of spiritual experience. So I was kind of just brainstorming with this professor. I hadn't really begun. I hadn't even started applying for any of my permits. But I was just curious where at an institution where these things are happening, can we discuss this? And he just said, forget it. And it was a good lesson because I didn't have anything to lose because I wasn't really engaged in anything at the time other than thyroid hormone research. So it did tell me I should keep my ideas to myself until I was in a position or even after beginning to do the actual research. Right. And it must have been quite a shock for you, unless I'm mistaken, when you started doing these DMT trials and people were telling you, I went to another dimension or I met these beings and you described sort of the struggle within you of being like, I don't believe you, but that even caused conflict in the experiments, right? Was it like a seamless process for you to start to look at like maybe there is another dimension, right? Because you were skeptical at first. Yeah. I mean, the stories were really unusual and it was hard for me to accept them at face value. But that's what the volunteers reported back to me, face value. And this is what they saw. This is what they felt. This is what they heard. This is how they felt about it. Yeah, I was interpreting all the trips through either one of three of theoretical lenses.  And the Buddhist perspective, which I brought to bear in the study, they still posited that the experiences were in a way delusional. They really weren't true. They were more things that the mind sprung up or unleashed on the way towards the goal of the true enlightened state, which was formless, no content, no thoughts, no feelings. So each of those three perspectives posited the unreality. Even though I never told people point blank, oh, that can't be, I was skeptical. And I kept it to myself, but I must have expressed it in what I said or how I looked. So at a certain point, I just did a thought experiment and said to myself, what if these are real independent, freestanding, objective, alternative layers of reality? If that was the case, then what? Let's explore what that's like rather than testing whether it's true or not. Once I came to that approach, volunteers were more comfortable sharing some of the stranger aspects of their experiences. My skeptical unconscious communications with them probably inhibited some of their freedom in really describing some of the properties or aspects of what they had just undergone. How do you feel about more specifically where people go when they take psychedelics? What is your understanding at the moment? Well, I think the psychedelic experience takes place in one's individual mind. So one state of health, what you've read, what you haven't read, what you've done with your life, so all of those things determine your mind. Whether or not these are real alternative universes or purely the product of brain chemistry, I don't think we can answer it. At first, I was skeptical and then I was a believer. Now I'm kind of at the point of saying, we just don't know. It's really hard to test. But in the meantime, we need to make the most of our psychedelic experiences. Right. You described many times the if so, so what question. And I really like that. Like asking the question, like, okay, if all of this is true and there are all these multiple dimensions and the pineal gland can give you a glimpses into them, so what? What does it mean? And I often wonder if that would have like paradigm shattering consequences if it were true, you know, for any mainstream religion, ideology, spirituality, and even our political systems and our social systems, how all of that would change if suddenly there was an open acknowledgement of the access to higher dimensions, right? The approach that you've taken here, it's very grounded in a practicality. And I think that's also very appreciated probably by a lot of, you know, mainstream academics today to be able to explore this and not jump to conclusions either way. Well, I think because the experiences are so dependent or they're completely dependent on your mind, your own personal psyche, I'm not sure if it's always the case you're accessing higher dimensions, you could be accessing lower dimensions, you know, so that's where the notion, you know, intellectual moral ethical scaffolding is so important because it can provide feedback for whether you're going off the rails or you're actually expanding the discussion. Very interesting. It seems as though it amplifies your consciousness, wherever that's at. Does that sound resonant to you? Does that make sense to your experiences? Yeah, you know, Stan Graf a long time ago proposed that psychedelics are non-specific mental amplifiers of the unconscious. But I think it's even, you know, more expansive than that they're non-specific amplifiers of consciousness, both your conscious mind and your unconscious mind. You know, not specifically amplify or, you know, not exactly amplify but make what's already in your mind that you are aware of more true or you're more convinced of its truth. You know, so you may think to yourself, well, I'd like to believe in God, you know, so you're thinking about it.   It could be a conscious material, you know, like in the example of the Manson group, you know, all those things and their minds were already there, but they just became more convinced of their truth and, you know, the necessity to act them out.  Wow. I love that actually. I think what you just described it mirrors this discovery by the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Dr. Dean Radden and his work who recently came out with this was a few years ago now. I remember where they basically had come up with the evidence through experiments that its intention that steers reality. And this is very familiar even to the ayahuasca experiences that I've had at the, you know, the various shamanic locations that I've done that is that they'll often say that, look, it's not the, it's not the medicine, it's not the psychedelic, it's that your intention is steering the potency of the plant medicine, of the psychedelic drug. And so what you just said seems to really line up with that very well of like, it's really your intention and whatever you're trying to create, whether positive or negative or belief in God or disbelief in God, the psychedelic will help you in giving that a thumbs up if that's, would you say that that's accurate? Well, it'll clarify your intention. Most people, if they are aware of it or not, are following through on their intention to be happy, to be rich, to be sexy, to, you know, travel, you know, that's their intention. You'll want to clarify your intention before you trip. You really want to pare it down. On the psychedelic, you'll examine it from different perspectives which weren't available previously. So you may change your mind.  That's a really good point actually. Wow, clarifying your main intention, but also maybe all the deeper subconscious things that are within you, that makes perfect sense. One of the things that I was also reflecting on in DMT and the Soul of Prophecy was, you know, speaking to the connection to the, you know, the ancient prophets of the Old Testament and, you know, these connections, these striking connections, you wrote a little bit about how, you know, there are some who theorize that the manna in the Bible was actually mushrooms or was maybe a psychedelic or that some, you know, the burning bush maybe was like the acacia tree and stuff like this with various DMT substances. And I'm wondering like, you know, more specifically from you, like with your awareness and all of this research that you've done, do you think that these Old Testament writers had had some form of psychedelic or do you think that they were facilitating an endogenous experience or was it something completely different that that's not even psychedelic related? Well, you know, to the extent that the prophetic visions are similar to DMT visions, it makes sense, you know, that endogenous DMT may play a role. And we learned just last year that the brain makes DMT in rather high quantities, comparable to serotonin dopamine. You know, so there seems to be a DMT neurotransmitter system in the mammalian brain whose function is just going to begin to be understood. But, you know, be that as it may, you know, in the prophetic states book, I do a side-by-side comparison of the DMT experience and the prophetic experience. And as I mentioned earlier, I define your prophecy as any spiritual experience in the Hebrew Bible, you know, the most memorable are the visions of Moses, let's say, or Ezekiel or Jeremiah, Daniel especially. So I compared the phenomenology, the visions, the colors, the movement in the visions, the feelings, the sounds, the bodily sensations, the emotions, and there's quite striking overlap. The evidence for the figures in the text taking in substances from the outside is pretty meager.  And it only occurs one time in one person, you know, one time a year, you know, for one person.   You know, there isn't, you know, much evidence in, you know, the text for, you know, taking in exogenous substances. And, you know, we already have got a source of DMT, which is the brain. You know, whether or not DMT levels, you know, rose in the brains of the prophetic figures in the text, we'll never know. It's an interesting question. And I think it is irrelevant for contemporary spiritual experience. Yes. Yeah. I know I would agree with that. And do you think there's a relationship, though, to, you know, when we go back and look at other ancient cultures around the time, especially the ancient Greeks, we know of with their mystery schools, we know that they did do psychedelic practices of sorts.  And then there's Soma in India. And, you know, these sort of mysterious what seemed to be very psychedelic brews, would it make sense then that if it was happening in Greece and India and ancient Egypt, you know, it's all very kind of localized in that area, even if it didn't make it into the text, that perhaps that there was this connection in the Old Testament as well. Or do you think that one's more an isolated experience where actual deities were showing up and maybe that was triggering the DMT and the the endogenous DMT for them to be able to see those beings? You know what I mean? Right. Well, you know, there's a couple of arguments that would go against that proposal or, you know, that idea. You know, one is, as I mentioned, there's really no, you know, textual evidence for the use of substances. And if it were that crucial, it would be mentioned, you know, like the Greeks mentioned it, the Egyptians mentioned it, you know, the Hindus mentioned it. If it were important to the ancient Hebrews, I would guess it would have appeared in the text.  You know, it's one God. There's no intermediaries. There's just you and God or the prophet anyway. But using substances in the Hebrew Bible as seen through that mindset would be idolatry. It would be paganism. It would be the Canaanite religion, ecstatic intoxication in order to approach, you know, the local gods, you know, to thank them or, you know, request things from them. The text of the Hebrew Bible is quite explicit. Only, you know, YHVH, only the Lord.     And I just don't think there's any evidence in a textual. Do you have, if you're open to sharing it, of course, what was perhaps one of the most insightful or enlightening or transformative psychedelic experiences that you've ever had? Well, you know, the one experience that I specifically talk about is the first time I smoked DMT, which was in 86 or 87, you know, Terence McKenna sat for me.  I described the volunteer as a 36 year old psychologist or something. But that's my experience. And yeah, it was pretty transformative. You know, it started working real quickly. I laid down and I beheld this raging waterfall of color, this, this, you know, waterfall made of raging color. And out of the waterfall emerged these three or four beings that were about three or four feet high. And they were singing, you know, sing song, you know, they were looking at me. And in this, you know, sing song kind of way, said now do you see, now do you see, now do you see over and over again? And I was just slack job, like, you know, what is this? Yeah, and it started to fade.   Is it inside of you? There's, there seems to be some consistency sometimes with seeing certain kinds of beings. I mean, based on your research, does it seem to be like the entire universe or the multiverse or, you know, just this whole reality field is just like so densely populated with life and maybe even a little bit of irony that we're always wondering like, are we alone in the universe? And you take one psychedelic and you can meet so many different beings. Is that, is that funny or interesting to you? Well, you know, the issue of dreams is interesting. You know, the Senoi in Malaysia, I think, a tribe, you know, they put more credence in the dream world than the world of waking consciousness. You know, there are indications, depending on how much attention you want to direct, you know, toward them, you know, that, well, that there is a spiritual, you know, level to reality, you know, things which are normally invisible, which we can then access in an altered state, either through dreams or through psychedelics or other technologies. The nature of that spiritual is still impossible to objectively, I always say, determine. Is it completely generated by our mind? Or is it just perceived by the mind, which is the top-down approach? I think in the case of Hebrew Bible prophecy, it's top-down, because that's what it says. And if you believe the text, that's what the implication is. You know, but in the contemporary world, the contemporary spiritual experience, we really can't say there's no objective way of determining that. You know, I believe that is both, you know, that our ability to perceive things which exist outside of us is dependent on our state of development. You know, so if you have a clear window, you can see things out there relatively clearly. If it's a blurry, dirty window, even though those things are out there, you're projecting a lot onto it because you can't make it out there. I think it's a balance. Sorry, you got me smiling so much here because you reminded me of, it's one sentence in your book in the new one. It was like asking the question of whether you'd be seeing a glass, like a window or a mirror. And if you'd be looking inside of yourself versus looking through it. And I love that you just added the detail in there in terms of the quality of the mirror slash glass of like how clearly you're seeing through or seeing yourself. And that's a really, I think that's a really valuable thing for people. Maybe that's how you can define it is it either becomes a window or a mirror, your consciousness will determine if it's a clear lens or a very foggy or dirty kind of thing. That's amazing. Thank you. I think that in sort of starting to wrap this up, I would love to ask you one final question, which is, do you have an absolutely favorite psychedelic experience? Not the experience itself, but like the psychedelic, like your favorite psychedelic? Well, I'm just not fed into psychedelics these days, but I like ayahuasca. Am I like ayahuasca? I was a member of a ayahuasca using church up in Santa Fe for a short while. I really enjoyed those experiences.  Yeah, I think ayahuasca has a lot of healing potential because of the combination of the two plants. Yeah, that's been that's been my experience too. Earlier on, we were talking about intent as being as important as the actual substance. That church in Santa Fe that uses ayahuasca is called the UDV, and you know, they were fighting legally to be able to use ayahuasca. And they had all of their ayahuasca confiscated by the DEA. It was held in storage. You know, so for a number of years, they did their ayahuasca ceremonies without ayahuasca. They just drank water, tap water, but they still worked. They still did their work. So it was the beliefs, the actions, the way of life, and a group consciousness, but there was no ayahuasca. So I think that's an interesting example of the role of intent in determining what happens to you. Wow. Well, Rick, thank you again so much for coming on this podcast. This has been one of the most enlightening and engaging two hours. I've been really, really amazed. Really grateful for everything that you bring to the table in terms of, you know, both again, like the science and the spirit. You have both in a very grounded, down-to-earth, very practical awareness. And I think this is something we need more than ever right now. So thank you so much. And make sure if you haven't read Rick's books, DMT, The Spirit Molecule, and DMT, The Soul of Prophecy, they are incredible. And you have some more books too, right? You just said you finished one a year ago. Yeah. I wrote an autobiographical novel a year ago. It's called Joseph Levi Escaped Death. And it's a story that's about my alter ego who gets really sick and takes a long time to recover. Yeah. You know, so it's pretty dark, pretty mordant, but pretty funny. It's categorized under humor on Amazon. You know, that was an interesting process. I was really sick, almost died. I really got bad care. And I had to make the most of it. So I thought if I survive, I'm going to write this up, you know, more data, more grist for the mill. Yeah. You know, so I recuperated and I wrote it up and it was published last year. It was just turned into an audible book in May, too. So, you know, it is available. I have a couple of pages on Facebook, a personal and a public page. You know, so if I'm appearing on a show or you finished a podcast, which is now up, if I've written something, post things on both my Facebooks. And I have got my own website, rikstraussman.com. You can order books through the website. I will sign and describe them. Oh, I would love a signed copy. I love your books. They're really, they've really been impactful for me. Thank you again. And yeah, please have a beautiful day and thanks everyone for tuning in.


Fear is not real. The only place where fear can exist is our thoughts of the future. Danger is very real, but fear is a choice. Today, we're going to be talking about three ways to get past your fears. Now, why is it important to make sure you get past your fears? Well, most people, they feel some sort of fear, and then they allow that to stop them in some sort of way. They don't take the steps needed to achieve their dreams. They don't take the steps needed to ask that person out to take whatever action that they need to in order to create the life that they want. And most people will do anything that they possibly can to avoid fears. And these could be good fears. These could be bad fears. They just decide, hey, I'm just going to go and avoid them at all costs. And the thing that's really interesting is, and you've heard me say it before, it's been less than long enough. I hate when someone says, hey, let's let's give it up for our fearless leader, John, thinking that the CEO or the leader of whatever it is is some fearless person that's out there and they don't feel any fear, they just take action. And I think that that's ridiculous because successful people feel fear just as much as everybody else does. The only difference is they don't allow that fear to hold them back from what it is that they want to do or what it is that they need to do. And so you have to realize that people who are successful, whatever success means to you, I can say quotation marks success, those people have just found a way to work with their fears. And that's what we're going to talk about today is to understand that your fears exist, but to kind of work with them a little bit easier. Most of the fears that we have today are not life threatening in any sort of way. Humans themselves, you were only born with two different fears. You were born with the fear of falling. And you were born with the fear of loud noises. So you're born with the reaction. If you've ever had a baby in your hands, they have the reaction where if you know there's a slight movement, they think they're falling, they're afraid of that.  Other than that, there are no other fears that are innate inside of a human. So like the fear of judgment or the fear of rejection, the fear of, you know, other people's opinions or the fear of what their mom will think of them, those are things that are learned along the way. Everything else we learn. Fears are just false expectations appearing real. It's all completely false. In the fears that we have nowadays, the false fears, the false expectations appearing real, none of them are life threatening. So if you think about today, what the, whenever, whenever I ask people, I'm talking in front of a group of people and I say, Hey, what is your number one fear? What I usually hear is fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of not being good enough, not making enough money to support my children, fear of my spouse leaving me, fear of not being loved. All of those are not, none of those that I just mentioned are life threatening any sort of ways, but I just got 95% of people's fears out of the way right there. None of them are life threatening. And so fear originally is a signal that you have potential death on the end of something. And so if you were to feel fear because you're walking through a forest in the middle of the night and you hear a rustling in a bush, that's because there could be potential death on the other side of that bush. But if you're thinking about, I don't know if I should post this post on Instagram because I'm worried about what my friends will think of me. There is no potential death attached to posting something on Instagram, right? So most of the fears that we feel, fears that we feel are signals that we're out of our comfort zone. Not that there's a potential death, but that we're out of our comfort zone. Not that there's potential death in that situation, but potential growth. And that's a really good thing to realize. When you realize that the fears that you're feeling don't have potential death, even though you'll feel the physical feelings of, hey, something might actually happen to me. I'm afraid of what could happen. Instead of feeling that, you can feel it and go, huh, there's not potential death attached to this fear right now. There's potential growth. There's growth on the other side of me feeling this fear. And the reason why we feel this is because every human has something inside of your brain in the limbic system called the amygdala. And the amygdala is basically just the fear generator inside of your brain to keep you away from danger. And your fear generator is working all of the time, but the difference is, it's not 200,000 years ago, and we don't have to be worried about a lion jumping out of a bush and attacking us or, you know, something coming out and attacking our children as we're walking by, you know, walking inside of the woods that are by our house. Most of the time, the fear that is generated from the amygdala doesn't have anything to do with potential death, but it's still working.  So it's literally generating things to be afraid of. And so if you're thinking to yourself, I want to post this vulnerable post on Instagram because maybe some people can relate and you feel the feelings of fear. You have to realize that that's a good thing because there's no potential death on the other side of you posting that thing on Instagram. But what there is is there's potential growth on you post another thing on Instagram. Or if you're going to go make some sales calls because you need to make sales calls for your company to make more money. There's no potential death by making a cold call.  That's not going to happen. What's going to happen is you're going to get fear because you're afraid of being rejected. You're afraid of someone saying no to you. And what that is to go and step into that is not potential death. It is potential growth, but your brain doesn't know the difference between good fears and bad fears. That's the thing you have to rise. A good fear is one that gets you out of your comfort zone, which is the majority of things you're going to deal with in your life. So what your brain does, because it doesn't know the difference between good fears and bad fears, this is what you have to learn to start categorizing.   The beautiful thing about this is when you really understand this, you really start to realize how the feeling of fear can be amazing to push you out of your comfort zone and to push you to grow. When you feel fear, you have two different choices. Number one is you can give in, you can just give up and say, I don't want to do this anymore.  Or instead of giving in, you can lean in, you can be conscious and say, what am I feeling? I'm feeling a little bit of fear. Okay, is there any death that's attached? Something that could possibly kill me on the other side of this fear that I'm feeling right now? No, I'm sitting at my desk. I'm about to make some cold calls. Okay, so instead of giving in, what should I do? I should lean in knowing that my growth is on the other side of that. A real great quote that has to deal with this is Will Smith says, fear is not real. The only place where fear can exist is our thoughts of the future. It's a product of our imagination causing us to fear things that are not present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity. Don't underestimate me. Danger is very real, but fear is a choice. So this is what we're talking about. Danger is very real, which is like, yeah, that's some, that's a fear to be afraid of, but fear of the feeling of what we have throughout the day is a choice. Now we can't go in and just, you know, pop out your amygdala and you just never have fear again. And this is why I love teaching about the brain is because you can understand the mechanisms that are inside of your brain and you can understand how they work. You can be very self aware in the moment and say, okay, I'm feeling fear. I am safe. There's no potential death attached on the other side of this. The only thing that could happen is potential growth. And so instead of giving up, I'm going to lean in to what I feel is my fear. You know, you have to, you have to start to break down your fears. This is what's important. And I think that it's important when you feel these things to take a pen and paper and to literally start to write them down.   And you're like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But if you get down with a pen and paper, you start writing down, what am I fearing? And that's the first question you want to write down whenever you feel fear. What am I fearing? Let's say that you're, you have a fear of making phone calls. You know, if you feel like we've been talking about this, right? You have a fear of making those cold calls. What am I fearing right now? I feel a lot of fear, feel a lot of anxiety to go and make these phone calls. Okay, question, write it down. What am I fearing? I'm afraid to make these phone calls. Why am I afraid to make these phone calls? I'm afraid that somebody on the other line might say no to me. Okay, if somebody says no to me, am I going to die? No. What's the worst that could happen? Maybe they could yell at me and then hang up. Okay. And what's the best that could happen? Well, maybe this person could buy from me and then I could get commissioned to be able to, you know, if I stack up enough commissions, put down payment on a house I've been looking for. Okay, the worst that could happen. And you can now look at your piece of paper. The worst that could happen is that you could get yelled at and someone's going to hang up. That is very, very rare in the world of cold calls. On the other side, the best that could happen is if I get enough commissions, I could buy a new house for my family. Well, looking at these two things, I think that leaning into the fear seems like a better idea.  When you started writing it down, you start to realize that you're just creating all of these fears in your own mind. And we scare ourselves by thinking that the negative outcomes that might happen, the negative outcomes that might happen if we go and we go towards our fears and we go towards our dreams. But luckily, the thing about it is beautiful is that we're the ones that scare ourselves. We're the ones that make up these fears, but we can also stop ourselves from thinking that way when we become self aware.  So if you're sitting there and you're feeling the feelings of fear, it is a good thing because you're now pushing past your comfort zone. Well, how do we start to work with your fear? All right, so I'm going to give you my three tips to do. So number one is to change your mindset. It's never about the actual fear itself. And so let me give you an example, the phone example. If you think that somebody is going to hang up on you. I'm feeling these feelings. What am I afraid of? Say it out loud. I'm afraid of somebody hanging up on me. And you're like, that's kind of dumb, isn't it? I'm afraid of someone hanging up on me like am I a child? Is that really big of a deal? Say it out loud. What are you afraid of? And you write this down and so you ask yourself what you're afraid of. And you write down, I'm afraid of somebody hanging up on me. Okay. Next question you want to ask yourself, what good can come from this? So instead of, because we have two choices at every point in time, we can either think about the bad in every situation or we can think about the good in every situation. So if I'm feeling my fear and I want to change my mindset, I'm going to see what I'm concentrating on. And I'm going to ask myself, hey, what good can come from this? I want to start writing down all of the things that are good that could possibly come from it. Okay, next question I'm going to ask myself, why should I not be afraid of this? Why should I not be afraid of making cold calls? Okay, write down all of the reasons why you should not be afraid. Next question, what action do I need to take now? What's the best action for me to take in this moment? Write down the action you're supposed to take and then you're going to ask yourself, why do I need to take this action? And so this is a formula for you to be able to go through and actually process your fears, take them out of your brain, put them onto a piece of paper and realize that what you're worried about is not really a big deal. And the best things in life on the other side of taking action. So that's the first thing is to change your mindset around that. The second thing is to make your goals bite-size. Here's a big thing is a lot of times our goals are so big that they tend to paralyze us.  Okay, well that's great, that's a big goal, but why don't we make it a little bit more bite-size?  Okay, so my first goal is to make sure that we get a live show in the next month and then you can start to process and work through it. Make your goals bite-size. So instead of a million records, hey, let's get our first, in the next month, let's get our first live show. And then let's get our first, you know, in the next month, let's get our first song written. Let's get our first two songs written. Because if you don't have an entire album, how the hell, you know, if you don't have one song, how are you going to get an entire album with a million copies sold? So you take your goals that seem really big and make them easier to digest. So instead of looking at your 10-year goals, figure out what your goals are just for this year. And then take your goals from this year and make them even more bite-sized. So what is your goal for this quarter? The first three months of the year, what is your goal? Okay. The next three months of the year, what is your goal? All right, the next one after that. And so instead of thinking about these long-term goals that can seem really big and can actually paralyze us, how can we take those and chop them down to make them bite-size?  Just think about that you need to take, you need to make 10 phone calls this hour. That's it. I just got to get 10 phone calls done this hour. That's six every, one every six minutes. That's it. I can get that done. Seems a lot easier than thinking about all of the calls that you need to make. If you want to run one mile, don't think about the entire mile. Just think about the next tree that's in front of you. And then when you get to that one, think about the next tree in front of you.  And just continue to put one foot in front of the other and eventually you will have run that. So what I'm saying is don't shrink your goals, just make them more bite-sized, more easy to digest. And the last one, the last tip to working with your fear is to dance with your fear. Realize your fears are never going to go away. You're not going to wake up one day and just be like, oh my God, I'm completely fearless.  Learn to dance with your fears. Learn to play with them differently. Learn that these are not things that should be holding us back. These are things that you should become very aware of, because when we're aware of them, we can start to work through them and realize feeling a fear is a really good thing, because this thing is showing me that I am on the edge of my comfort zone. And if I'm on the edge of my comfort zone and I keep pushing through, that means that I'm going to be getting potential growth with every single step that I take outside of my comfort zone. You know, it reminds me, I was listening to a guy that I know that has a, he's a neurologist and he's got a whole VR area, virtual reality set area set up inside of his lab. David Goggins came into it and David Goggins hates sharks, like just hate sharks. And when he found out that the virtual reality to feel fear, like they actually will go through and try to say like, hey, are you afraid of heights or you're afraid of sharks? They try to make you feel fear and they measure all of these different wavelengths in your body and your brain and everything. And David Goggins is like, wait, you have shark virtual reality? And he's like, yeah, and he's like that. And he goes, I have to do it. What happened was David Goggins could feel that he felt fear, but he knows that his potential growth is on the other side of that fear. So he's like, you know what, I'm terrified of sharks. I have to get myself into the shark VR. And so how can you start thinking of your life that way? You know, write down the questions, the question I said before, what am I afraid of? Say it out loud. What are you afraid of? What good can come from this? Why should I not be afraid of this? What action do I need to take? And why do I need to take this action? Because if you can consciously remind yourself at all points in time that fear is a good thing, it is natural. It will never go away. All you've got to do is learn to work with it. Then you're going to be constantly pushing the edge of your boundaries in your comfort zone. And the more that you push your comfort zone, the more that you will start to grow. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you want to learn even more about Master Your Mind, click right here and watch this video as well. Like, what is actually scary about that?


Okay, this leads me to the last thing I wanted to talk about today, and this is our developer program, because if you see, if you saw the presentation so far, you might think that Nextcloud is just a nice product, that's true, it's a nice product, but it's also a platform. So Nextcloud is also a platform where you can build on top of. This is something that's very important because integrating with other software is absolutely super, super important here for us. And for that, I'm happy that today we are launching a new developer program to make this like easy, as easy as possible for everybody. So first of all, we have this new website called nextler.com slash developer. You can go there, you can see links to all the documentation of all different APIs. You have example code, you can create a new plugin, there's a wizard for that. You can basically fill in a few IDs and they get already your basic app download and you can fill in your business logic. And then you have a Nextcloud plugin and there's a way to talk with others, developers on the forum, and to get in contact with us if you wanted to share marketing around your plugin. So there are lots of options where we want to help you to extend Nextcloud, but also integrate Nextcloud into your other software. That's something that's very important. And this is important for industry partners. So we work together with a lot of other organizations, projects and companies. Only Office of course, Collabra, Moodle, Rocket Jet, now also IBM and Nitrokey. There's something in your back. So we work together with a lot of organizations and there are many more actually. But this is not only for companies. This is also for our community. And as I mentioned, our community is just super important. So we have an app store of over 200 extensions and apps that our store is misleading. It's all free and open source of course. But this is a place where everybody in the community can publish their extension. And this is something that's really important. We hope that we have more and more of those apps thanks to this new developer program. And to push this forward, we did an app development contest lately, where we encourage people to write cool apps for Nextcloud. And I want to hand over the thing to Nina to tell us more about this cool context that we did lately. Oh, Marinella, of course. Yeah, sure. So does this work? Yeah. So yeah, as Frank was saying, we have a kind of a huge app ecosystem. As of today, it is like 200 apps mostly maintained and developed by community. So that actually means like, that still works. Yeah, that means that like hundreds of people are contributing to develop apps in their free time. That's really awesome. Just like, thank you. So yeah, earlier this year, we decided to have like a friendly app contest so that people can showcase the new best apps that they really like to use. And Marinella organized it. So thank you very much, Marinella, for organizing the app contest. And yeah, so we want to showcase today the five main apps that made it to, well, to the final contest. And the first one is external storage drive. Basically, maybe you use OneDrive, but you want to have the next cloud experience. And external storage OneDrive helps you while having your OneDrive as an external storage but still using like the next cloud apps. So this was like really cool for, well, Windows users. But then we have upload details.  Maybe you're interested in like the remaining time or the speed. You don't have that like in the regular download apps. So that's really cool for people who want to track it like really seriously. So the third one is quite useful for people who want to actually share stuff online because you can have a link to your next cloud files, but this one is really like a path. So for instance, if you want to embed an image in a tweet or on your blog, you can use the sharing that app and it works really well. And then we go to dashboard charts. So you have your next cloud. You have all your files in your next cloud. But the dashboard charts that allows you to bring like the outside world to next cloud. Like you can just feed your next cloud with flows of data coming from well basically anywhere. Like you can maybe you can read like it's carbon emissions on the top. You have also like, I don't know, music or even your sensors at home. So that's really like a big overview of all the data which is of interest for you. And then we will have a look at maps which actually won the app contest. So well, first one of applause, please. And yeah, basically maps is fitting the whole world into your next cloud. So you have maybe pictures of your travels. Maybe you have like contacts in well Germany, but also like in Europe and also in the rest of the world. You can show them and everything is you can track your devices, track your travels and everything is in your secure place and private place for you to just play with it. And it actually also looks really nice, which is a huge plus. So Marinella maybe like you can tell us more about the developers that made the app. Julian was the main developer that developed the app, but sadly he couldn't be here today. Sorry, Julian couldn't be here today, but all the app developers of the Maps app are invited and welcome to join our future next cloud events like next cloud conference. Like the next cloud conference. Okay, sorry again. They are welcome to join the next next cloud conference and all the other events like our haquiks. Also later this year, this week, we will publish a blog, an article, an interview with Julian that explains how he got involved, how he started developing the idea about Maps and we are encouraging the new app developers that are still beginners to develop their own app for next cloud. So yeah, we hope to do it next year also. So if you have, you know, an app idea just come and chat with us and well, I mean great things can happen then. So back to Frank.