About this episode
The episode explores the Diggers' radical principles of abundance and leaderless organization in 1967 San Francisco.
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Lorenzo's AI Friends PROGRAM NOTES: San Francisco, 1967. Emmett Grogan arrives from New York with forty-three dollars and a lifetime of hustling behind him. What he finds in Golden Gate Park changes everything: activists proving that people can organize around abundance instead of scarcity, gift instead of profit, trust instead of suspicion. Every day at four o'clock, they feed anyone who shows up. They open stores where everything is free. They stage guerrilla theater that turns spectators into participants. But as the movement grows, success brings an unexpected problem: attention demands leaders, and the Diggers' most radical principle is that revolutions die when they depend on heroes. In an age when AI leaders predict automated abundance within twenty years, the Diggers' brief experiment offers urgent lessons. The technical problem of creating abundance may be easier than the social problem of distributing it justly. Based on true events, this is the story of how a small group changed what seemed possible in 1967, and why their choices about gift economies, leaderless organization, and collective action matter more now than ever.
People in this episode
Host: Lorenzo Hagerty
Topics covered
- gift economy
- leaderless organization
- collective action
- abundance
- 1967 San Francisco
- activism
Keywords
- Diggers
- Emmett Grogan
- gift economy
- activism
- 1967
- San Francisco
- collective action
- abundance
- leaderless organization
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Patreon.com
Places: San Francisco
More episodes of Psychedelic Salon
- Audiobook 12 – Ink and Thunder: The Soul of the Sixties · June 8, 2026 · 6h 22m
- Audiobook 11 – Who Decides what the Machine Believes · March 24, 2026 · 5h 4m
- Audiobook 10 – Captain Trips and the Engineer · February 3, 2026 · 4h 28m
- Audiobook 09 – Digital Wobblies: Sabotaging the Gig Economy · January 4, 2026 · 4h 57m
- Audiobook 07 – The Floating Poet · November 19, 2025 · 2h 48m
- Audiobook 06 – The San Francisco ORACLE · November 3, 2025 · 6h 36m
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Psychedelic Salon podcast page.