Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show features unconventional conversation and comedy, hosted by Phil Proctor and Ted Bonnitt. Featuring celebrity guests that share funny and formerly unheard stories about their careers and lives.
Summer of Love in San Francisco: How Hippies, LSD, and Rolling Stone Transformed America
Phil fled to Canada (can you blame him?), so Ted is holding down the fort.
How did one foggy city end up with the Beats, the hippies, the biggest gay community and the loudest rock scene of the 60s and 70s? Follow the trail back to the Gold Rush, where the lights came on all at once and nobody ever turned them off.
Peter Richardson, author of Brand New Beat: A New History of Rolling Stone’s Early Years in San Francisco, takes us back to the city where it all caught fire. Think the Beats, LSD (legal until October 1966), the Human Be-In, the Summer of Love, and a few hundred hippies who just wanted to dance and accidentally rewired American culture.
Then came Rolling Stone. Jann Wenner was a 21-year-old college dropout with big ambition and bigger moxie. Ralph Gleason was the grown-up in the room, a Chronicle jazz critic who ended up on Nixon’s enemies list. Together they bet the farm that rock and the counterculture were no fad, and they were right. The mainstream press called hippies candidates for “a very sound spanking.” Rolling Stone called them readers.
We dig into how a scrappy magazine in a town that was never a media capital landed Hunter S. Thompson, Annie Leibovitz, Greil Marcus, and broke national stories like Altamont and Karen Silkwood.
We also get into how Jann sweet-talked record labels into buying ads and then ran the bad reviews anyway. Plus the Reagan and Nixon years, the dark turn of the 70s, and Rolling Stone's move to New York, where, Peter says, the real reason was that the parties were better.
Peter is a Berkeley-trained scholar who taught California culture at San Francisco State for 17 years. He also wrote Savage Journey and No Simple Highway. He explains exactly how a city, a drug, a soundtrack and a masthead made history.
Phil will be back. Hopefully with maple syrup.
Links referenced in this episode:
sexyboomershow.com (https://sexyboomershow.com)
Brand New Beat- The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine (https://www.ucpress.edu/books/brand-new-beat/hardcover)
1 Oct 2026
Revolution in America- On the run with the Weather Underground
Zayd Ayers Dohrn, son of Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, grew up as a toddler on the lam, dodging the FBI while his parents traded protest signs for pipe bombs. Then a West Village townhouse blew sky high and took three of their own with it. The kids got the bill: arrests, exile, and scars that never healed. So what happens when people give up on democracy and start building bombs? Zayd knows. He was raised in the fallout.
Takeaways:
The Weather Underground moved from peaceful protest to planning violent bombings after key killings and frustrations.
The West Village townhouse explosion was a catastrophic turning point that killed comrades and halted lethal plans.
Parents used payphones, code words, and secret networks to evade the FBI while underground for years.
Parents faced a moral dilemma: balancing child safety with commitment to revolutionary struggle and social change.
The damaging effects on children who experienced instability, separation, and abandonment due to radical actions and arrests.
FBI overreach, COINTELPRO abuses, and how illegal actions by authorities led to dropped charges against fugitives.
Historical parallels and warnings that prolonged democratic failure can drive some toward radical and violent methods.
The Weather Underground's campaign avoided civilian casualties after the explosion, yet its legacy remains morally and politically fraught.
Read Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/zayd-ayers-dohrn/dangerous-dirty-violent-and-young/)—an inside look at a fugitive childhood and a searing account of a revolutionary era.
Zayd’s own podcast, Mother Country Radicals (https://crooked.com/podcast-series/mother-country-radicals/), offers even more untold stories from the underground.
24 Sept 2026
UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny with D.W. Pasulka
Season 7 blasts off with a mind-expanding conversation with bestselling author D.W. Pasulka, whose new book The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny has everybody from Silicon Valley to the Vatican talking.
Pasulka pulls back the curtain on how faith traditions, Catholicism especially, saw this coming: a seismic shift in human consciousness now being accelerated by AI and emerging tech.
Behold apocalyptic dread in Silicon Valley boardrooms, the rise of "grief tech" and AI resurrections of the dead, ancient biblical mysteries getting a 21st-century reboot, and why the smartest people in tech are suddenly reaching for scripture to make sense of what they've built.
Pasulka connects the dots from visionaries like Teilhard de Chardin and Marshall McLuhan straight through to today's AI arms race, and asks the question none of us can quite look away from: as the synthetic starts to feel sacred, how do we know what — or who — to believe?
Plus, Phil has a cigar with media prophet Marshall McLuhan, and Ted gets a personal transmission from Arthur C. Clarke in Saudi Arabia.
History, science, and spirituality collide at warp speed. Season 7 is officially airborne!
Topics include:
How technology and AI are reshaping human consciousness and perception at scale.
How social media amplifies mimetic desire and enables collective scapegoating that harms communities.
Grief tech and AI-based resurrections can hinder healthy grieving and distort relationships with the dead.
Religion provides the most adaptive framework to interpret nonhuman intelligence and potential disclosure responsibly.
Historical examples show that anomalous aerial phenomena have long been mediated through religious language and ritual interpretation.
The urgent need to protect children's interior life and cognitive development from early and constant screen exposure.
Advances in sensor and military technology transformed UAP study from anecdote into verifiable data requiring national security attention.
Links referenced in this episode:
D.W. Pasulka (https://dwpasulka.com)
Hereticon (https://www.hereticon.com)
SexyBoomershow.com (https://SexyBoomershow.com)
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