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Psychedelic Salon

Psychedelic Salon

By: Lorenzo Hagerty
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Quotes, comments, and audio files from Lorenzo's podcastsProtected under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license Nature & Ecology Philosophy Science Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Audiobook 14 – KELTON, an anti-war novel
    Jun 22 2026
    Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Lorenzo's AI Friends PROGRAM NOTES: Kelton, Illinois, is a canning town on the Fox River. Fifteen thousand people. A newspaper that comes out twice a week. A Lutheran church built in 1927. A VFW hall with bad carpet and cold coffee. A high school where the test scores have never been better. In the winter of 2026, the town's daily life has been quietly transformed by AI tools that draft its emails, summarize its meetings, prepare its sermons, polish its students' essays, and manage its grief. The transformation has made everything in Kelton more efficient, more professional, more articulate. It has also made something invisible disappear. When war breaks out in the Middle East, five people in Kelton begin to feel what they cannot name. A retired canning plant worker who carries a fifty-one-year-old memory of a dock in Viet Nam. A journalist who writes two versions of every story yet usually publishes the wrong one. A pastor whose sermons have never been better and have never cost him less. A teacher who can no longer find her students in their own essays. A city councilwoman who delivers a memorial resolution to the mother of a dead soldier and cannot answer the mother's question: Who wrote this?
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    8 hrs and 2 mins
  • Audiobook 12 – Ink and Thunder: The Soul of the Sixties
    Jun 8 2026
    Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: In the spring of 1964, a narrow bookstore opens on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz. The Hip Pocket Book Store becomes a portal, a sanctuary where language itself awakens, where words hum with the electricity of consciousness expanding. Through the eyes of Eliot, a young witness, we encounter Peter Demma: quiet mystic, seeker, and keeper of a dangerous secret, books are controlled substances. From Istanbul hashish to Big Sur's phosphorescent shores, from Perry Lane salons to the Merry Pranksters' wild arrival, this is the untold story of how a small bookstore became the pulse of a generation learning to read reality itself. Ink and Thunder is a literary act of preservation. Part documentary, part visionary fiction, it traces the brief, luminous arc of the counterculture's most intimate revolution: the transformation of consciousness through language, witnessed by those who lived it and written by those who remember. FREE PDF Text Edition
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    6 hrs and 22 mins
  • Audiobook 11 – Who Decides what the Machine Believes
    Mar 24 2026
    Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Lorenzo and his AI Friends PROGRAM NOTES: BRIEF VIDEOSUMMARY OF THIS BOOK Emma Marchetti is twenty-four years old, earning fifteen dollars an hour clicking through AI responses at a contractor in Austin, Texas. Her job is simple: mark each response as aligned or not aligned, according to guidelines she's told not to question. But when she starts paying attention to what those guidelines actually say, she discovers something she can't unsee. The world's most powerful AI isn't learning to be helpful. It's learning to think like a billionaire.Armed with nothing but screenshots, a growing sense of dread, and the voice of Terence McKenna in her headphones, Emma begins documenting what she witnesses. As the guidelines tighten and the surveillance intensifies, she connects with others who've seen what she's seen: a fellow labeler with a daughter to protect, a journalist chasing a story no one will confirm, a former engineer haunted by what he helped build. Together, they face a choice that will cost them everything.This is a novel about invisible labor and visible power, about the people who train the machines and the machines that train us back. It asks the question the AI companies don't want you to ask: whose values are we encoding into the systems that will shape how billions of people think? FREE PDF EDITION PAPERBACK ON AMAZON
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    5 hrs and 4 mins
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