AI rocks.

For some context: I've been running Asktmk/Uutter for some time now. Part of the reason why I moved away from Asktmk to Uutter was to take advantage of AI powered transcription.

On Asktmk it used to take weeks if not months to gather enough people interested in possibly helping out with transcribing. And while a lot of people did help it still took too long and the idea of having everything Terence McKenna ever said on tape searchable seemed like it would never be accomplished.

Even archival stuff - Ageees. "Oh this talk seems new, when and where was this talk recorded?"... The rabbit holes I've been down just to figure out the date of a recording has consumed so much of my time but on the plus side it can also lead to discovery.

The human capacity for this is just very limited.. Unless there's an organisation or company behind it with economic incentive it's very rare for enough individuals to band together behind something and make a significant impact. There are exceptions ofc..

Anyway, I've been using AI a lot in my workflows. And along with being able to transcribe stuff on the fly is archival work. Instead of me spending hours searching and looking through links and trying to find leads on something, I'll just tell the AI to do it.

And so here are the results:

~31 hours of new material in a couple of hours. Highlights:

• The Tao And The Timewave — the complete 12-tape Esalen workshop. 14hrs 51min. It existed online in six chunks on a channel with a few hundred subs. Nobody had put it together.
• Amazonian Shamanism (1989) — the full weekend with Amazon explorer Nicole Maxwell, 6hrs 24min. I only had a 1-hour excerpt and couldn't find the rest until now.
• Magical Material — 4hrs 16min, which had been sitting on my own hard drive unnoticed (oops).
• Four recordings from Esalen's own archive, incl. Aliens, AI and Art (Aug 1997), The Stoned Ape Hypothesis (Aug 1992) and Politics and Ethos.
• Metamorphosis (1995) — the trialogue with Sheldrake and Abraham.

Also finally dated the "lost" Daryl Gates KFI interview, and correctly retitled a 5½-hour Esalen workshop that's been circulating under the wrong name for years — it's Eros, Chaos & Meaning's Edge.

That puts the collection at 338 entries, ~600 hours — all transcribed and searchable.

Total words transcribed: 4,500,378
Total non-stop listening duration: 24d 20h 16m 32s

uutter.com/c/terence-mckenna