Psychedelic Salon

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Lorenzo's AI Friends PROGRAM NOTES: For twenty years Martin Creagh taught American history from the approved textbooks, and then one Fourth of July he sat down in his basement and began writing a different book. In the left column, he recorded what power actually did. In the right column, he wrote about ways in which the people responded. President by president, from Washington to the present, he sets the official record beside the one the textbook left out, and draws a line under each account the way a bookkeeper closes a ledger, because a country, he comes to believe, is not what it says at its ceremonies but what it does between them, and what it will not stop honoring, and what it will not start recording. This is that ledger. It is documentary fiction in the fullest sense, every massacre and every statute and every buried testimony drawn from historical records, gathered into the voice of one retired schoolteacher who has decided, late in life, that the first primary source a person must learn to distrust is his own memory. It is a history of the republic told in two columns and which refuses, at every turn, the comfort of a single verdict, because the whole method depends on understanding both. FREE PDF - HAGERTY's HISTORY

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Lorenzo's AI Friends PROGRAM NOTES: Nadia Haddad works in a windowless room in Doha, reviewing what a machine has recorded. A Lebanese-American widow trained in the translation of medieval Andalusian poetry, she now spends her days correcting an artificial intelligence that listens to the phone calls of southern Lebanon and decides which voices are threats. A grandmother's exasperation becomes a coded imprecation. A lullaby becomes a funeral song for men who will be killed. Nadia knows the difference, because a teacher in Granada once spent his life teaching her and others how to hear it. She also knows that in a matter of weeks, the machine will no longer need her, or anyone like her, and that the war it serves will go on hearing the world in its own way. Then a voice surfaces in her queue that she has not heard in twenty-three years. It belongs to Rania, the friend she climbed a fig tree with as a child in a village above the sea, a woman who has since made choices Nadia cannot endorse, and whom the system has now marked for death. What Nadia does next, and what she cannot bring herself to do, unfolds against a war that is pausing and resuming in real time, her profession is being quietly erased, and there is a grief she has been carrying since a folded flag was placed in her hands at Arlington. She is one small person inside an apparatus that does not know her name, trying to decide what a single human being owes to the voices she can still hear. FREE AUDIOBOOK EDITION FREE PDF EDITION PAPERBACK on Amazon

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?

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

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