Podcasts are a dime a dozen these days, but the really good ones are a rare find. By ‘good ones’ I don’t just mean funny, or entertaining enough to make your daily commute less awful, but the ones that have a *serious* effect in your way of thinking, and open you up to topics and ideas you hadn’t even consider you’d be interested in.
Such is the case with Tangentially Speaking, hosted by Dr. Christopher Ryan. Chris is the New York Times best selling co-author of Sex at Dawn, the book that threw a monkey wrench (pun intended) to the notion that Homo Sapiens is a monogamous species by nature. His equally controversial new book Civilized to Death will come to light in the near future –hopefully before Armageddon knocks us back into the Stone Age– but in the meantime Chris has been very busy amassing an impressive catalog of audio interviews with interesting individuals from all over the world and all walks of life –Stanley Krippner, Dennis McKenna covering a wide range of diverse subjects and often times jumping back and forth between topics (hence the ‘tangentially’ prefix) making all the discussions as lively as they are deep and transformative.
Recently Chris had the idea of compiling some of those interviews in a book format (Tangentially Reading) which had such a great reception he’s decided to embark on a project to release more thematically-based books derived from past TS interviews in digital format. The first two e-books will be dealing with two topics which are no doubt of great interest to the Daily Grail community:
- Drugs and Consciousness, and
- Sex
When Chris asked me if I wanted to participate, I enthusiastically accepted, and requested to be involved with the Drugs/consciousness book. As members of our community are well aware of, I have come to see psychedelics not only as a powerful tool for the exploration of the human psyche, but also as one of the most effective avenues for changing once and for all the current reductionist/materialist paradigm ruling over our society –I may not be able to force a flying saucer to land on the White House lawn (yet) but I can sure as hell make more people interested in traveling to the land of the machine elves, and demand their elected politicians to end the war on drugs.
Erin Ginder-Shaw is a Northern CA writer who will be in charge of the Sex e-book. As with Tangentially Reading, Chris wants to manage both of these projects as a crowd-sourced endeavor: Listeners who want to volunteer and participate can contact Erin and I through the e-mail accounts at the bottom of this post, in order to help us out transcribing episodes so we can compile the text and highlight the most relevant portions of it; if you don’t have the time nor the inclination to transcribe episodes, you could also help us out by pointing out which memorable conversations or moments within the episodes should be included, in case we missed them out or overlooked them.
All the volunteers will receive Amazon credits so they can get the e-books for free, and their names will also be included in the book acknowledgements for posterity.
We are also looking for artists who want to contribute with illustrations –and yeah, I might even chip in with one or two images myself, but other artists are more than welcome to join us.
Tangentially Speaking e-book project’s contact info:
- TS1DRUGS[at]gmail[dot]com (Miguel)
- TS1SEX[at]gmail[dot]com (Erin)
So jump in and tangentially participate!
