Stop me if this story sounds familiar: Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Ram Dass and Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann walk into a bar…
OK, well maybe they didn’t walk into a bar, but they did all sit down nearly 50 years ago to have a long discussion about life, culture and their philosophies, and it was all recorded, via audio tape, though New Dimensions Radio, a nonprofit and early progenitor of recorded and distributed longform interviews. These are more commonly known today as podcasts.
And while the aforementioned guests are indeed an impressive lineup for a conversation, New Dimensions Radio has hundreds of thousands of similarly intriguing conversations all recorded on antiquated physical media, hoping to soon be digitized and released back into the world as a way to show how far we’ve come as a species and culture, or maybe how far we still have to go.
New Dimensions Radio is the life’s work of Justine Toms, who started the venture back in 1973 alongside her husband Michael, who passed away in 2013, as a way to bring voices of some of the world’s most insightful speakers to the masses, mainly via public radio which, in case one hasn’t noticed, is also in need of our support. But that’s another story.
Asked for an elevator pitch about what the project is all about and what it seeks to do, Toms says, “What we produce is an antidote to despair. As corporate media floods us with half-truths and noise, our content really talks about resilience, awakening to joy, reminding us that life’s beauty is not lost and to keep on keeping on, to be a vital companion for turbulent times.” If that’s not enough of a positive and motivating spin to get one through a day in this modern world, not sure there’s much more we can say here.
The list of people interviewed and recorded is exhaustive, but some other highlights include the Dalai Lama, Linus Pauling, Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller, David Bohm, Alice Walker, Dr. Andrew Weil, Charles Reich and Maya Angelou.
Toms says Stanford University currently has more than 8,000 analog tapes housed at their library in special collections, and New Dimensions Radio needs to “restore them by doing editing of sound quality and light editing, taking out long music interludes that we used to do back in the old KQED days. And then the main part is to update the program descriptions. The descriptions are very brief, and now we’re adding much longer and much more suitable descriptions that people can research and look up.”
Clearly, this is a massive undertaking, and Toms isn’t doing it completely on her own. She is proud to note that her small team—operations manager and podcast producer Dan Drasin, chief engineer and audio editor Lou Judson—have been together from the beginning and are helping as much as they can. “We’re kind of unusual in that way,” Toms notes. “To have three people that have actually been here since the beginning.”
Toms also admits that for as old-school as this endeavor is, she’s using AI as a tool to help with descriptions and timestamps within the newly digitized recordings.
“I started using that rather than going through every transcript myself and figuring out a new description. That has really helped the whole process. Although we still have over 400 programs that need describing,” Toms says with a laugh. “Even with AI, I have to check it. I can’t just trust it and say, OK, this is a description. I have to look it over and make sure it’s OK. So it still takes some time, but much less time.”
At this point in the conversation, Toms pauses, and it’s clear something has come to mind. “Have you heard of Ted Roszak?” she queries. “He was a counterculture scholar. He wrote a famous book (The Making of a Counter Culture, released in 1969) that was non-fiction, but he also wrote a fictional novel called Bugs, which was unusual for him. Anyway, in that novel, he really outlines everything that’s going on with AI today. It was just amazing.”
From there, Toms springboards to another prescient guest with an early eye towards the future. She recalls, “Charles Reich really did an incredible thing about democracy, and that was back in the ’70s or early ’80s, and it’s what we’re facing today (in politics). Those two interviews were so prescient for these times, and I was just amazed at what we were talking about back then and what’s happening today.”
When asked if these ideas and notions seemed kind of crazy at the time, Toms says, “What I recall is that they were exciting, because they pointed to the future in a way that nobody else was reporting on at the time.”
She continues, “We have many, many hours of interviews with Buckminster Fuller (on) his understanding of the history of civilization. He would never even talk about anything or answer any question until he outlined the whole history of civilization… And the last interview that we did with Bucky, we only had him for one hour. It went longer; it became a four-hour program.” And yes, Toms gets to call Fuller “Bucky.”
With so much knowledge gleaned from these interviews and the sort of, more recent clicking into place of many of these, at the time, seemingly far-fetched theories, a natural question is raised: Is Toms scared for the ever-evolving future?
“No,” Toms unequivocally states, an effervescent, positive vibe in her voice. “We’ve done interviews with the Dalai Lama several times now, and I remember when we first did our first interview with him, someone asked him, ‘How do you stay so happy all the time? You know, your culture, the Tibetan people are being just brutalized, and you’ll probably not ever get back to Tibet yourself.’”
Toms continues, “And I remember what he said, and it changed my life. He said, ‘Well, I don’t know the future. I don’t know how things are going to turn out. But every day I wake up, and I do what is right and good for me to do.”
For more information on New Dimensions Radio and how to help their cause, visit newdimensions.org.
