Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In It's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault. Now this time we're
Speaker 1: going to be listening to part two of the the
Speaker 1: episode from last Saturday, the episode originally from September that
Speaker 1: you and Christian did about Timothy Leary. Yeah, we figured
Speaker 1: since we have the big psychedelic series that we've been
Speaker 1: putting out, you know, the new episodes of Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind, it made sense to revisit these older
Speaker 1: episodes that that explored some of the similar territory, you know,
Speaker 1: some similar history by focusing in on the life and
Speaker 1: death of Timothy Leary. All right, so we hope you enjoy.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Segar, and
Speaker 1: this is part two of our Timothy Leary l s
Speaker 1: D series of episodes. We've already done part one where
Speaker 1: we talk about the basic science behind l s D
Speaker 1: and psilocybin and the research that's been done using these
Speaker 1: psychedelic substances. And we talked about the first part of
Speaker 1: Timothy Leary's life leading up to his research on this. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's right. So if you if you missed part one,
Speaker 1: go back and listen to it, because that's the one
Speaker 1: that's going to be front loaded with all that LSD
Speaker 1: science and just the initial period of Leary's life which
Speaker 1: which ultimately kind of sets the sets the pace for
Speaker 1: the rest of his life, like the destruct self destructive behaviors,
Speaker 1: the patterns, they're all pretty much present before he even
Speaker 1: you know, gets that finishes his education. So I've been
Speaker 1: sitting around the house reading about Timothy Leary for the
Speaker 1: last couple of days and my wife says, out of nowhere,
Speaker 1: you know, I met him, right, And I was like, no, really,
Speaker 1: And we both went to college at the University of
Speaker 1: New Hampshire for undergraduate and before I got there, but
Speaker 1: while she was there, either as a freshman or sophomore. Uh,
Speaker 1: Timothy Learry came on one of his infamous campus speaking tours,
Speaker 1: gave one of his you know, enlightenment talks, and then
Speaker 1: afterwards my wife was outside the venue just like smoking
Speaker 1: a cigarette, and Timothy Leary came out and sat down
Speaker 1: next to her and just smoked a cigarette with her,
Speaker 1: and they chatted for like five or ten minutes, and
Speaker 1: then he got up and went on his way. What
Speaker 1: they talked about, she didn't really say. She just said
Speaker 1: that like he was this kind of kind cool older guy.
Speaker 1: But when I read about his life and all of
Speaker 1: the uh sort of women he went through, I can't
Speaker 1: help but imagine that he's the kind of like old
Speaker 1: He was the kind of older man who leeringly went
Speaker 1: up to eighteen year old girls after talks and was like,
Speaker 1: let's talk about LSD. You know. Yeah. One of the
Speaker 1: interesting things that Robert Greenfield points out in his biography, though,
Speaker 1: is that apparently, like there's the Leary that we all imagine,
Speaker 1: which is often that that cool older guy, you know,
Speaker 1: with all this charisma and certainly seems to have had
Speaker 1: a certain amount of Christmas entire life. But there's there
Speaker 1: was this period where he was kind of like a um,
Speaker 1: kind of just like a greasy guy with a mustache
Speaker 1: in ill fitting clothing. Like that was the version of
Speaker 1: him before his first wife died. Uh. And it's it
Speaker 1: was after that that things begin to change and he
Speaker 1: kind of morphed into this uh this more you know,
Speaker 1: the older hip cool Leary that we instantly imagine. And
Speaker 1: this really all began at Harvard University, the place you
Speaker 1: would least expect it. So Leary joined Harvard University in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine. But contrary to myth, I want to
Speaker 1: establish this because so many of the research got pieces
Speaker 1: of research got this wrong. He taught there, but he
Speaker 1: was not a professor there. He was not like a
Speaker 1: tenured faculty. Okay, he was teaching there for sure, and
Speaker 1: he was part of the psychology department. Now originally his
Speaker 1: research they're focused on the interaction of dimensions of personality
Speaker 1: and social relationships. He also did some work there as
Speaker 1: a psychotherapist. Leary was really anti behaviorism, and he disagreed
Speaker 1: that psychologists should only concern themselves with observable behavior. This
Speaker 1: was the exact opposite of what was in trend at
Speaker 1: the time. He more wanted to explore thoughts and beliefs
Speaker 1: and other internal mental states. He actually later on would
Speaker 1: compare himself in this role to William James, who is
Speaker 1: understood as the father of American psychology, uh and who
Speaker 1: was also known to use nitrous oxide to stimulate mystical consciousness. Well,
Speaker 1: so would Lear. Yeah. Later on, uh so at Harvard
Speaker 1: along with a guy named Richard Alpert who would later
Speaker 1: go on to become Rom Doss. Uh This you might
Speaker 1: know Ram Doss from the sort of infamous meditation book
Speaker 1: I guess called be Here Now. Uh So he they
Speaker 1: worked together there in the psychology department. Leary introduced others
Speaker 1: on the Harvard faculty to psilocybin. And this, as we
Speaker 1: talked about last episode, is the active ingredient in certain
Speaker 1: species of mushrooms. And at the time it was legally
Speaker 1: available for research. But what about his first experience with
Speaker 1: this stuff? Well, he takes psilocybin while he's on vacation
Speaker 1: in Quernavaca, Mexico. This is he and some friends were
Speaker 1: on vacation in between semesters. They took some samples of mushrooms. Uh.
Speaker 1: And their argument for the research that they were doing.
Speaker 1: This is back at Harvard was that if psychology is
Speaker 1: the study of the mind, then it should have a
Speaker 1: legitimate interest in how cognition, perception, and emotion are affected
Speaker 1: by mind altering substances. So some argued at the time
Speaker 1: that they were also unaware of the potential dangers of
Speaker 1: such research. Right, So, because psilocybin and LSD were so
Speaker 1: new on the scene, especially in America, uh that this
Speaker 1: team of psychologists, no matter how good intention they were,
Speaker 1: they weren't aware of what the drawbacks could be, and
Speaker 1: Larry and Albert agreed to policies to protect their subjects.
Speaker 1: So this included no participation from undergraduate students. They were
Speaker 1: not supposed to be giving any kind of psychedelics to
Speaker 1: the undergraduate students at Harvard, but in nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: Albert was dismissed after he administered psilocybin to an undergraduate
Speaker 1: off campus, reportedly for sexual favors, although that is it's
Speaker 1: unclear whether or not that's true. So Leary begins administering
Speaker 1: these drugs to other researchers. He also administers it to
Speaker 1: a group of prison inmates and a group of Divinity
Speaker 1: students for his research. This was called the Harvard Psilocybin Project,
Speaker 1: and the goal basically of this project was to document
Speaker 1: the effects of psychedelics on human consciousness. The notes from
Speaker 1: these studies were very carefully doc commented in scripted, and
Speaker 1: we know this because Timothy Leary's archives are pretty well
Speaker 1: maintained in there at the new York Public Library. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the various product he was involved, and he was
Speaker 1: he was apparently very big on everyone providing him with
Speaker 1: lots of data, and it was kind of a meticulous
Speaker 1: record keeper in that regard. So let's take a little
Speaker 1: bit closer look at these these studies that he did. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's look first at the one that he did with
Speaker 1: a group of Divinity students. So this was called the
Speaker 1: Good Friday Experiment, and it went like this. They gave
Speaker 1: psilocybin to ten students and ten to a placebo group.
Speaker 1: All of them then went to a Good Friday service.
Speaker 1: They wanted to see if this would facilitate any kind
Speaker 1: of mystical or spiritual experience, and in fact, eight of
Speaker 1: the ten reported a mystical experience. One reported a feeling
Speaker 1: of sacredness in a sense of peace. The placebo group, however,
Speaker 1: sat quietly through the service. The others would quote laid
Speaker 1: down or wander around the chapel muttering things like odd
Speaker 1: is everywhere or oh the glory. What Leary failed to
Speaker 1: report in the study was that one of the subjects
Speaker 1: actually had a disturbing reaction and had to be given
Speaker 1: a dose of thorazine to calm down. Now you look
Speaker 1: back on this, that's a huge lapse of research ethics.
Speaker 1: That's that's not good. So so that's unfortunate. Now, Rick Doblin,
Speaker 1: who is the founder of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for
Speaker 1: Psychedelic Studies, he's come up on the show before. We
Speaker 1: talked especially about MAPS during our M d M A
Speaker 1: two parter. He went back and he replicated this study,
Speaker 1: and he interviewed seven of the ten students involved, and
Speaker 1: they all said the experience reshaped their lives in profound ways.
Speaker 1: The student who reacted poorly actually said that he became
Speaker 1: convinced that he had been chosen to announce the arrival
Speaker 1: of the Messiah and ran from the chapel. So this
Speaker 1: is apparently what actually happened. He freaked out, he started
Speaker 1: running away from the chapel. Responsibility like you need that
Speaker 1: now if he's gonna announced the Messiah on Good Friday, Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, yeah, give me some advanced prep on some
Speaker 1: more prep time. All right, let's talk about the Conquered
Speaker 1: Prison experiment next. Okay, this is even wilder. So the
Speaker 1: aim here was to use psychedelics to reduce the recidivism
Speaker 1: rate and inmates. Now, Leary was was not interested in
Speaker 1: working with prisoners for a few different reasons, but he
Speaker 1: realized that he needed a way to measure that the
Speaker 1: transformative nature of the drugs that he so believed in,
Speaker 1: and this offered the chance. So it seems like a
Speaker 1: decent argument, right. Could these substances open inmates up in
Speaker 1: a way that allowed them to discuss their conditions and
Speaker 1: their feelings, you know, someone who's just been hardened and
Speaker 1: calloused by you know, by crime, by life, and by incarceration.
Speaker 1: Could this be the substance to just loosen them up
Speaker 1: enough to actually get some some work done with them.
Speaker 1: So over the course of nine months, they used over
Speaker 1: a dozen convicts there as test subjects with psychedelics. Again,
Speaker 1: Rick Doblin replicated this study and re analyzed it in UH.
Speaker 1: He found that Learry's conclusion wasn't warranted. Larry's conclusion was
Speaker 1: the recidivism rate has been significantly reduced, but Rick actually
Speaker 1: found maybe not so much. Timothy Learry, Uh, the flaw
Speaker 1: was in the reporting results. He looked at recidivism rates
Speaker 1: ten months after release for the psilocybin takers, but he
Speaker 1: didn't look at the same amount of time. For the
Speaker 1: control group, he only looked at them thirty months later.
Speaker 1: And this is important because recidivism depends a lot on time,
Speaker 1: with rates rising the more time one is out because
Speaker 1: of the increased opportunities. You know, when are you gonna
Speaker 1: end up getting busted and end up going to back
Speaker 1: to jail? Is going to be the first day year out? Now,
Speaker 1: it's going to be in the weeks that follow as
Speaker 1: more and more temptations come. Yeah, We've talked about this
Speaker 1: on the show Gee's many many times, but this goes
Speaker 1: It speaks to something called the halo effect, right, where
Speaker 1: researchers start seeing their data in a positive light as
Speaker 1: much as possible. This becomes misleading. This actually seems to
Speaker 1: go beyond the halo effect. Right, He's not just seeing
Speaker 1: his data in a positive light. He's manipulating the data
Speaker 1: so that it looks better than actually is. So already
Speaker 1: here you see, like these are basically his two big
Speaker 1: studies on using psychedelics medically in any kind of way,
Speaker 1: and he's uh either falsified as research or or made
Speaker 1: huge gaps in in ethical claims. Now. Albert would later
Speaker 1: explain that the aim of the project he thought was
Speaker 1: was pretty solid and with a very reasonable therapeutic model.
Speaker 1: But he says it would have required long term application
Speaker 1: and study, and Leary simply didn't have the patients for
Speaker 1: long term studies. Um, which it's you can be to
Speaker 1: make the argument, Well, then you're kind of in the
Speaker 1: wrong line of business here, right. I mean, if you
Speaker 1: if you want to conduct a scientific study, if you
Speaker 1: want to really um do the work, then you need
Speaker 1: to have the patients to see it through. And if
Speaker 1: you if you don't have the patients, you're gonna end
Speaker 1: up with what we have here, a a flawed study
Speaker 1: that ends up having to be thrown out later on. Now,
Speaker 1: remember how I was saying that the the notes that
Speaker 1: he took during this time were meticulous. Wired magazine did
Speaker 1: a great article and Timothy Leary and I pulled a
Speaker 1: quote directly from it. They said later reports adhere less
Speaker 1: strictly to reality, meaning his reports in one filled out
Speaker 1: in March of nineteen sixty three, just weeks before he
Speaker 1: got kicked out of Harvard Leary Prince in big block letters,
Speaker 1: he puts down a question mark for his age, enlists
Speaker 1: his occupation as angel. Okay, yeah, so you can start
Speaker 1: to see that he's already unraveling here, right. So Larry
Speaker 1: eventually moves on from psilocybin and he tries LSD in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two and then was dismissed from Harvard in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three. Various faculty and administrators were essentially worried
Speaker 1: about the safety of their subjects, especially because Larry and
Speaker 1: Albert were conducting their research while they themselves were under
Speaker 1: the influence of psilocybin. Psychologist Professor Herbert C. Kellman circulated
Speaker 1: a letter around the faculty and called for a meeting
Speaker 1: calling for the trials to be voluntary. One of Larry's
Speaker 1: former students remembers that they had a choice at the
Speaker 1: end of the semester. They could either take their final
Speaker 1: or they could participate in psilocybin trials. So it's interesting.
Speaker 1: That's an interesting choice to make. Yeah, yeah, it is
Speaker 1: an odd choice to give a college student. So okay,
Speaker 1: after all this stuff of the faculty, Larry was officially
Speaker 1: fired for failing to fulfill his teaching obligations because he
Speaker 1: went traveling instead. This is actually what they nailed him
Speaker 1: for was that he wasn't teaching his classes. It wasn't
Speaker 1: the actual research that he was doing. He was just
Speaker 1: kind of like, I'm just going to travel instead of
Speaker 1: teaching my classes. And they were like, look, the job,
Speaker 1: says teach the classes. You're not really doing the job. Sorry,
Speaker 1: you're done. Now. This is the moment where Leary and Alpert, though,
Speaker 1: are propelled into stardom because they get kicked out of
Speaker 1: Harvard and that's a big deal, right, and they become
Speaker 1: proponents for psychedelics. Peter Connors writes this book called The
Speaker 1: White Hand Society about Leary and his relationship with Alan Ginsburg.
Speaker 1: He says, this is really there's a certain point, and
Speaker 1: this is it where Larry gives up on science. Instead
Speaker 1: of looking for data to legitimize his psychedelic research, he
Speaker 1: started talking about spiritual enlightenment instead. This wasn't entirely his fault,
Speaker 1: because let's think about it, he had no adequate scientific
Speaker 1: language in place to do so. Uh. Instead he fell
Speaker 1: back on hip poetic language that he picked up from
Speaker 1: hanging out with people like Alan Ginsberg and Charles Olsen,
Speaker 1: and that really ended the field of psychology taking him
Speaker 1: seriously and anyway. But it also makes me think like
Speaker 1: ultimately Leary, like this is a guy who was better
Speaker 1: suited to be a shaman than a scientist. This is
Speaker 1: a guy who's beterfitted to be this this celebrity figure
Speaker 1: than than than an actual researcher. Yeah, and now I
Speaker 1: have a lovely story before we end the Harvard stuff
Speaker 1: and jump into his time with the Millbrook group. So
Speaker 1: William S. Burrows is one of the people who actually
Speaker 1: denounced Timothy Leary for the same thing. WILLIAMS Burrows obviously
Speaker 1: interested in psychedelics, author of Naked Lunch. Yeah, he goes
Speaker 1: to visit Timothy Leary while he's at Harvard. And Burrows
Speaker 1: gets there and he's like, where are the scientific studies?
Speaker 1: Like I expected there to be mazes with rats running
Speaker 1: through them and electrodes and stuff. What you aren't proving anything.
Speaker 1: All you're doing is just sitting around and getting high
Speaker 1: and enjoying yourself. So even william S Burrows was like, no, sorry,
Speaker 1: Like I'm not buying this. So it makes you sympathize
Speaker 1: with this Harvard faculty crew who are like kind of
Speaker 1: painted throughout the history of psychedelics as just being these
Speaker 1: like stodgy old men, right, But like even william S
Speaker 1: Burrows was like, you're not really doing anything here. Yea.
Speaker 1: Burrows is basically saying, I thought you or one of them,
Speaker 1: but you're just one of us, you know, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when
Speaker 1: we come back, we're gonna move on to the next
Speaker 1: chapter in the life of Timothy Leary. Alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: So this is a great quote that comes from Louis
Speaker 1: Mannan's New Yorker article on Timothy Leary, and I think
Speaker 1: it's a good segue into his time with the Millbrook Group.
Speaker 1: He says the only things Leary was serious about were
Speaker 1: pleasure and renown. He underwent no fundamental transformation when he
Speaker 1: left the academic world for the counterculture. He liked women,
Speaker 1: he liked being the center of attention, and he liked
Speaker 1: to get high. And then there's this is another quote
Speaker 1: from it. He was a counter culture salesman, and he
Speaker 1: wore on every occasion the same blissed out smile, a
Speaker 1: rictus somewhere between a beat a fick, what me worry
Speaker 1: grin and a movie stars frozen stare into the flash bulbs.
Speaker 1: One of his ex wives described it as the smile
Speaker 1: of the ego actually eating the per sonality that I
Speaker 1: can't think of a harsher condemnation. That's brutal. Alright, So
Speaker 1: these guys get kicked out of Harvard. That's where we
Speaker 1: left off, basically, right, Albert and Leary they go and
Speaker 1: they say, well, let's just establish our own privately funded
Speaker 1: research group, and we're going to call it the International
Speaker 1: Foundation for Internal Freedom, and it's going to be in Mexico. Basically,
Speaker 1: we'll get a bunch of people around the world to
Speaker 1: form groups. They'll take LSD and they'll report their results
Speaker 1: to us. Will be kind of like citizen science, very scientific. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the Mexican government wasn't having it, so they stepped in
Speaker 1: and they demanded that Albert and uh Leary leave. So
Speaker 1: they leave. They've got no place left to go. Cambridge
Speaker 1: doesn't want them, Mexico doesn't want them. Well, where do
Speaker 1: they go? They go to this country estate in Millbrook,
Speaker 1: New York that was provided to them by a millionaire
Speaker 1: who sympathized with their research in LSD. This is what
Speaker 1: we all need, man, We just need a sympathetic millionaire.
Speaker 1: This millionaire was William Melon Hitchcock, also known as Mr Billy.
Speaker 1: Huh yeah, Mr Billy was the grandson of the founder
Speaker 1: of Gulf Oil. This is where all his money came from.
Speaker 1: And at Millbrook, Leary established what he called the Castallia Foundation,
Speaker 1: which he said was dedicated to the scholarly study of
Speaker 1: LSD and its spiritual applications. So what's one of the
Speaker 1: things he does while he's there that's anywhere close to academic.
Speaker 1: He helps develop a device that's called the experiential typewriter. Uh,
Speaker 1: and this allows psychedelic subjects to record what they're experiencing
Speaker 1: as it's happening. Otherwise they can't tell you. This is
Speaker 1: essentially him saying I can't not be high while I'm
Speaker 1: doing these studies on people, So we need something that
Speaker 1: we can just hit buttons of to get across what's happening,
Speaker 1: rather than have somebody who's in the room who can
Speaker 1: sort of translate it. Right, It's easier to have a
Speaker 1: special typewriter for people that that are high then to
Speaker 1: have a single person that is not high. And seems
Speaker 1: to be the case. Yeah, yeah. So this thing looked
Speaker 1: like an old adding machine, had large buttons on it
Speaker 1: that had labels to indicate what kind of bodily sensations
Speaker 1: you're experiencing or if you were having hallucinations or you
Speaker 1: had a sense of entering the void. I'd love to
Speaker 1: see what the graphics. I think it would be an emoji. Right,
Speaker 1: he's describing he was inventing an emoji's only type. Right.
Speaker 1: You know what, Yeah, we're not giving him enough credit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Tnethy Leary invented emojis. We wouldn't have the Emoji movie
Speaker 1: if we're not to Timothy Leary. Uh, you know, to
Speaker 1: to blame him for something else. Okay, So then this
Speaker 1: thing basically, after you know you're high, you pound on
Speaker 1: all these buttons, it prints out a little paper script
Speaker 1: that records what your trip was like. Uh. Some articles
Speaker 1: characterized the Millbrook Group and Leary as actually not being
Speaker 1: as a kind of like psychedelically crazy as you might
Speaker 1: think they were. Uh. They were sometimes depicted as being
Speaker 1: East Coast upper class elitists and very exclusive. Now Ken
Speaker 1: Kisi and his Mary Pranksters came out there at one point, uh,
Speaker 1: and they were like, oh this is great, let's go
Speaker 1: meet these psychedelic pioneers. And they're like, oh man, these
Speaker 1: guys are just total stiffs. They're boring. Um, So it
Speaker 1: is interesting interaction between these two worlds. Yeah, like because
Speaker 1: you tend to think, well, Leary would have just been
Speaker 1: able to move throughout the counterculture and he would do
Speaker 1: to be embraced everywhere. But but not so so. During
Speaker 1: this time with Millbrook, Leary was convicted on several charges.
Speaker 1: This is when a lot of the prison stuff happens.
Speaker 1: It's all related to drug use in possession. The Millbrook
Speaker 1: house itself was raided and Leary was arrested by who
Speaker 1: G Gordon Liddy. And at the time G. Gordon Liddy
Speaker 1: was he was part of the County Sheriff's department there
Speaker 1: in New York. Now, later on he went to be
Speaker 1: part of the Watergate Burglary. Uh, and he ends up
Speaker 1: kind of teaming up with Timothy Leary down the way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll get into that in a bit. So yeah, so
Speaker 1: this is, man, this is where things just really started
Speaker 1: getting bonkers, right Mill Millbrook and afterwards are just where
Speaker 1: things really let loose with Leary. Yeah. Now, this is
Speaker 1: definitely a period where on one level, uh, Leary and
Speaker 1: his bunch they are being targeted, Yeah, totally. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, you could also say, well, they're kind of
Speaker 1: they're making themselves easy targets. But you know, you eventually
Speaker 1: end up in kind of gray area there when when
Speaker 1: you're saying, well, you know, did he have it coming
Speaker 1: or not. But now, this is certainly a period of
Speaker 1: time though, where you can say that that Leary and
Speaker 1: people in his circle were being targeted by the authorities.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, you might charge while they were,
Speaker 1: they were kind of making themselves ideal targets for these uh,
Speaker 1: for these forces as well. Yeah, yeah, I mean, well,
Speaker 1: let's take this as an example. Okay, so right after
Speaker 1: this raid happened, Leary goes down to New York and
Speaker 1: at the Manhattan Town Hall. There he gives a talk,
Speaker 1: and there he says ls it might actually be a problem,
Speaker 1: And he says, quote l s D maybe creating a
Speaker 1: new race of mutants. This is like the kind of
Speaker 1: hyperbole that he's starting to use in his rhetoric. He
Speaker 1: said he was going to stop using LSD and he
Speaker 1: urged others to do so, but he also advocated that
Speaker 1: LSD would cure alcoholism, accelerate learning, and maybe helpful and
Speaker 1: treating all forms of mental illness. Well, as we know
Speaker 1: from the last episode, some of these things seem to
Speaker 1: be true, we just need to do more research on them.
Speaker 1: But because of its harmful side effects, Leary advised using
Speaker 1: other methods to produce psychedelic effects. So he says, you
Speaker 1: can just simply do this with the right lights, sounds,
Speaker 1: and a stroboscope. So he's basically like, yeah, I just
Speaker 1: don't bother with the LSD anymore, just like get in
Speaker 1: the right mood, man, and we'll like put the right
Speaker 1: kind of colorful lights in the room and things like that,
Speaker 1: and it's the same experience. Well, this is this is
Speaker 1: a really you know, I found this to be a
Speaker 1: really interesting chapter in his life based on Greenfields telling
Speaker 1: in the biography, and I want to just drive home,
Speaker 1: like Greenfield is not a Leary apologist, if anything, Like
Speaker 1: his book could have been titled Timothy Leary colon a mess, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but he gives an interesting account of this. So
Speaker 1: in this talk, Leary prophesieses an evolution in human consciousness
Speaker 1: that will allow humans to consult their own heightened cellular
Speaker 1: consciousness and live in harmony with nature. So basically like
Speaker 1: the abandonment of cities and and everything you know is
Speaker 1: growing green again and where lives like a new Eden.
Speaker 1: On Earth, you know all, you know, sort of you know,
Speaker 1: highly optimistic, sort of hippie dippy kind of ideas, which
Speaker 1: one might expect. But then he calls for a one
Speaker 1: year moratorium analysis D usage. And this is because of
Speaker 1: the changing legal status of of of l s D
Speaker 1: and on the heels of all these various legal problems
Speaker 1: that he's encountering. And uh In Greenfield points out that
Speaker 1: this was quote a calculated strategy to curry favor with
Speaker 1: the establishment. With the current level of LSD use in
Speaker 1: America having reached epidemic proportions, Tim wanted to restore his
Speaker 1: own credibility by becoming the man with a solution to
Speaker 1: the problem. Yeah. I mean, I think this is really
Speaker 1: where we start seeing that he unfortunately made decisions for
Speaker 1: his own well being over the decisions that may have
Speaker 1: you know, helped highlight what these psychedelics were capable of
Speaker 1: any kind of medical or mental health prospect right, Uh,
Speaker 1: and any really was self serving. Yeah. Now you mentioned
Speaker 1: how he said, well you can use all alternate methods. Well,
Speaker 1: he had told he told everyone, well, if you've used
Speaker 1: l s D, then you maybe don't need it anymore.
Speaker 1: You can use alternate methods, and if you don't know
Speaker 1: alternative methods, I'll teach you. You know, this is a
Speaker 1: subch price, I bet, but this is an area where
Speaker 1: I feel like, um, like Leary is correct. You we
Speaker 1: know that there are other ways to to have hallucinatory experiences,
Speaker 1: including meditation, including things like yoga. So he's actually correct here.
Speaker 1: You know, his whatever, his his exact motivations aside. You know,
Speaker 1: he's saying, yeah, you can, you can have some sort
Speaker 1: of heightened sense of of being. You can you can
Speaker 1: have this alternate experience without the use of this substance
Speaker 1: that's becoming problematic now. He even goes on to testify
Speaker 1: before the Senate in nineteen sixty six on the nature
Speaker 1: of l s D. But this turns out to be
Speaker 1: a rather lackluster performance. So he wasn't very assertive. And
Speaker 1: there's it's I was reading the the back and forth
Speaker 1: here and there's just like a lot of stuff where
Speaker 1: he makes a statement and then they're asking him if
Speaker 1: is that is are you being metaphorical or is that
Speaker 1: a literal statement? And they spend time discussing that. They
Speaker 1: talk about how l s D might theoretically be controlled
Speaker 1: in some fashion, but everyone was pretty much disappointed with
Speaker 1: how it came out, Like he basically, this was a
Speaker 1: point where Leary could really stand up and be the like,
Speaker 1: the positive, optimistic voice of the of the counterculture and
Speaker 1: speak for for this substance and speak for its research potential,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't able to come through. I just imagined
Speaker 1: like people like John C. Lily or Sasha Shogun were
Speaker 1: like just sitting at home, like face to palm, just like, oh,
Speaker 1: like man, like you were supposed to be the one
Speaker 1: that made this accessible for the rest of us, and
Speaker 1: now we're all screwed. Also, I'm really glad Twitter wasn't
Speaker 1: around when Timothy Learry was alive. Can you imagine he
Speaker 1: would have been insufferable on Twitter? Probably? All right? This
Speaker 1: is also around the time where he gives his infamous
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties six Playboy interview. This came up in every
Speaker 1: single article I read about him, So I went and
Speaker 1: I pulled the actual text and read the interview. This
Speaker 1: was man. Playboy must have spent a lot of money
Speaker 1: on the sheets of pay bro that they printed this
Speaker 1: interview on because it was like a novel. Uh. He
Speaker 1: makes some really outrageous claims here, including that women commonly
Speaker 1: can have several hundred orgasms during sex on l s D,
Speaker 1: So that doesn't seem to be true. Again, fair enough,
Speaker 1: we haven't done that much research on it, but I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure that's not true. Uh. Some other stuff he said.
Speaker 1: He talks more about the LSD cease fire, basically saying
Speaker 1: that he thinks that the two generations that are you know,
Speaker 1: battling over LSD right now need to just like cool
Speaker 1: off for a little while so they can get to
Speaker 1: the point where they can start looking at it analytically.
Speaker 1: He also says like some frankly really misogynistic stuff here,
Speaker 1: not just about you know, women and sex, but he
Speaker 1: says every woman has built into her cells and tissues
Speaker 1: the longing for a hero sage mythic male to open
Speaker 1: up and share her own divinity. But casual sexual encounters
Speaker 1: do not satisfy this deep longing. Uh. So he's just
Speaker 1: he's really making these like huge mythic pronouncements. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it's just I think in poor taste. Maybe in sixties
Speaker 1: six it was taken as being sort of a little
Speaker 1: bit more eccentric and interesting. Yeah, this is certainly to
Speaker 1: modern readers, this does sound like the ego consuming the personality. Now,
Speaker 1: this is this next quote is really one of the
Speaker 1: worst ones he's asked about homosexuality, and he says, the
Speaker 1: fact is that l s D is a specific cure
Speaker 1: for homosexuality. It's well known that most sexual perversions are
Speaker 1: the result not of biological binds, but of freaky, dislocating
Speaker 1: childhood experiences of one kind or another. Consequently, it's not
Speaker 1: surprising that we've had many cases of long term home
Speaker 1: sexuals who under l s D discover that they are
Speaker 1: not only genitally but genetically male. I don't even know
Speaker 1: what he's saying there, uh that they are basically attracted
Speaker 1: to females. The most famous in public of such cases
Speaker 1: is that of Alan Ginsburg, who has openly stated that
Speaker 1: he the first time that he turned onto women was
Speaker 1: during an LSD session several years ago. This is only
Speaker 1: one of many such cases. Okay, so I have a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of problems with with all this stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I mean one of them is that it's not
Speaker 1: like Leary didn't, did not and had not had numerous
Speaker 1: friendships and professional relationships with with with homosexual people, including
Speaker 1: Alan Ginsberg. Yeah, and uh dr D was another one
Speaker 1: I mentioned, Uh, you know, Tuscalaloose has been kind of
Speaker 1: this uh uh, the university there being this this sort
Speaker 1: of you know, fortress of of of liberal minds at
Speaker 1: the time, and a number of different homosexual professors, many
Speaker 1: of which had you know, had gone to bat for
Speaker 1: for Leary and helped him with the connections he needed
Speaker 1: to navigate that portion of his life. So it just
Speaker 1: seems just completely ridiculous and u uh and disappointing to
Speaker 1: to hear him talk about Yeah, I mean, he's saying
Speaker 1: stuff that's like patently untrue. He has no evidence for that,
Speaker 1: but that on top of all of it, he's throwing
Speaker 1: his friends under the bus. You know. It's just it's strange. Uh.
Speaker 1: And So really this is the point where a lot
Speaker 1: of people feel like he helped hasten the blackout on
Speaker 1: psychedelic research, because every time he had a stunt like
Speaker 1: this or the one where he gave that talk in
Speaker 1: the Manhattan town Hall, it would just accelerate the establishments
Speaker 1: thoughts that, oh my god, we absolutely have to shut
Speaker 1: this down, right. So the Millbrook Group goes on to
Speaker 1: disband and Leary becomes a psychedelic speaker coach, and this
Speaker 1: is really the latter part of his life what most
Speaker 1: people know him for. Uh. He's a public figure. He's
Speaker 1: associated with psychedelics and spiritual discovery. He even starts his
Speaker 1: own church called the League for Spiritual Discovery. He writes
Speaker 1: a bunch of books. In a one segment that I
Speaker 1: read about this, a guy named Steve Silverman described Leary
Speaker 1: as a genius marketer during this time. He says he
Speaker 1: could have had a brilliant career hyping up luxury cars,
Speaker 1: iPads are social media startups. Instead he was hawking LSD
Speaker 1: and psychedelic nosis. Uh. And then in that same conversation, Connors,
Speaker 1: who wrote that White Hand Society book that I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: he responds and he says Leary got caught in a
Speaker 1: circular trap of marketing himself so he could get money
Speaker 1: to then afford to defend himself from his prosecutors. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's just all kinds of crazy stuff are going on.
Speaker 1: He gets pulled over in nineteen sixty eight. Uh, he's
Speaker 1: he's driving down Laguna Beach and he's arrested for drugs.
Speaker 1: His son was so stoned in the back seat that
Speaker 1: when they pulled him into the jail, he took off
Speaker 1: all of his clothes and started masturbating. When he was
Speaker 1: shown what his son was doing, Leary laughed. His daughter
Speaker 1: was sentenced to six months in prison. Jack was ordered
Speaker 1: to undergo psychiatric observation. Leary got one to ten for
Speaker 1: possession of marijuana. So this is one of many cases
Speaker 1: where he goes to jail and he gets out right.
Speaker 1: He's described in the New York Times obituary when he died.
Speaker 1: This is how the New York Times described him as
Speaker 1: having an elegant, happy contempt for authority. And this is
Speaker 1: around the time where Richard Nixon infamously refers to him
Speaker 1: as the most dangerous man in America. Again, hyperbole everybody
Speaker 1: all over the place sounds a lot like right now
Speaker 1: people are just throwing out like this stuff that is
Speaker 1: just like super extreme. Uh. He talks to Marshall McCluin
Speaker 1: during this period of time. This is when McCluin advises him,
Speaker 1: you know what you should do. You need to come
Speaker 1: up with a catchy slogan to advertise the wonders of LSD.
Speaker 1: This is where we get turn on, tune in, drop
Speaker 1: out from basically McLuhan saying like you need to get
Speaker 1: better at brand marketing. Dude. I I never thought that
Speaker 1: that was a really great slogan for anything. I mean
Speaker 1: the dropout part especially. It's just like, I don't want
Speaker 1: to try something that's gonna make me drop out of something, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: He basically be comes a celebrity during this time. I
Speaker 1: said this at the top of the first episode. This
Speaker 1: is where he becomes famous for being famous. Right. He
Speaker 1: ends up associating and taking trips with and I mean
Speaker 1: psilocybin trips with authors, musicians, criminals, and movie stars. Right.
Speaker 1: He just gets famous for hanging out with these people.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy, he declares his candidacy for governor of California.
Speaker 1: Who's he running against? Ronald Reagan? Now this was interrupted
Speaker 1: when he was convicted on marijuana charges again. Uh, and
Speaker 1: he escaped. This is this is the craziest part of
Speaker 1: the whole story. He escapes prison. This is at San
Speaker 1: Luis Oba Sipo. I guess that's a prison in California,
Speaker 1: and his followers help him get to Algeria. He essentially
Speaker 1: goes from Algeria to Switzerland and then to Afghanistan before
Speaker 1: returning to the United States in nineteen seventy three, eventually
Speaker 1: serves three more years in prison. But hold on, I
Speaker 1: just jumped over like four years of crazy behavior. Let's
Speaker 1: zoom in on this a little bit. Supposedly, his escape
Speaker 1: from prison was assisted by the weather underground and in
Speaker 1: Algeria he was the house guest of Eldridge Cleaver, who
Speaker 1: was part of the Black Panthers. That they didn't get along,
Speaker 1: So he goes on to Switzerland. You know who he
Speaker 1: meets in Switzerland, Albert Hoffman, the guy who invents LSD.
Speaker 1: They sit down and have a conversation. But uh, I
Speaker 1: also want to mention Greenfield, who we've been talking about
Speaker 1: this whole time. It's in Algiers with the two of
Speaker 1: them first meet up. So this is Greenfield's first experience
Speaker 1: with with Timothy Leary is while he's on the run
Speaker 1: from escaping prison. When he returned to the US, here's
Speaker 1: the thing, he was facing way more jail time than
Speaker 1: three years, and he informed on all of his previous
Speaker 1: associates to the authorities. That includes his third wife, Rosemary,
Speaker 1: so he informed on her as well. She had left him.
Speaker 1: During the middle of all of this, he ends up
Speaker 1: writing articles for the conservative magazine National Review. And in
Speaker 1: these articles he starts attacking John Lennon and Bob Dylan.
Speaker 1: And the reason why was he wanted to demonstrate that
Speaker 1: he had rehabilitated so they wouldn't put him back in prison.
Speaker 1: Oh and this this again sounds like the classic pattern
Speaker 1: with Leary that the Greenfield points out that he'll he'll
Speaker 1: get on a kick where he's following a rigid system
Speaker 1: and adhering to some sort of you know, expectation of
Speaker 1: what he should be, but it's only gonna last for
Speaker 1: so Yeah, he turns around and bites the hand that
Speaker 1: feeds him. Yeah. Yeah, so okay. After this, he mainly
Speaker 1: spends time on the campus lecture circuit. This includes public
Speaker 1: debates with G. Gordon Liddy. This is like one of
Speaker 1: the most fascinating parts that we found in this entire
Speaker 1: affair here. Yeah, the Liddy thing is interesting because both
Speaker 1: Leary and Liddy had become caricatures of themselves at this point. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, inflated cartoon characters of liberal goofiness and conservative
Speaker 1: uh uh curmudgeonary. Uh. They even made a movie, uh
Speaker 1: to capitalize on on their fame or or I guess
Speaker 1: to squeeze the last bits of juice out of it
Speaker 1: um And there's a New York Times review of the
Speaker 1: film by Vincent can Be, and he shares the following
Speaker 1: I thought, I thought this was particularly telling. The two
Speaker 1: men are not exactly freaks, but one has the suspicion
Speaker 1: that they wouldn't be showing off in this way if
Speaker 1: they could possibly make a living in some other fashion.
Speaker 1: Whether accurately or not. The movie suggests that the world
Speaker 1: has passed them by and that this personal appearance tour
Speaker 1: is one of the last ways in which each can
Speaker 1: turn his individual notoriety to profit now. The reviewer also
Speaker 1: goes on to say that despite their their personas, there
Speaker 1: is a scene in the film where where each man
Speaker 1: um in their current lives sit down and have breakfast
Speaker 1: together and they're having just this a very normal conversation
Speaker 1: about you know, just just everyday stuff, like not a nothing,
Speaker 1: nothing about law or politics or drugs or counterculture. Like
Speaker 1: there is this moment where you see this idea that
Speaker 1: there perhaps just yet two people who are just trying
Speaker 1: to make a living for the time being, and this
Speaker 1: is what they have. This would have been like, uh,
Speaker 1: if Steve Bannon and Lindsay Lohan went on tour together,
Speaker 1: had like a reality TV show together where they just
Speaker 1: constantly argued, Yeah, and and if you've neither had you know,
Speaker 1: a significant enterprise to to back them up with that, Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of I get the impression. That's kind of
Speaker 1: like it's kind of like celebrity TV. If if if
Speaker 1: this had happened today, it would have been a Leary
Speaker 1: and Liddy television show on some reality network, right, them
Speaker 1: trying to learn how to dance better than one another? Exactly?
Speaker 1: All right, why don't we take one more break, and
Speaker 1: then when we get back, we're gonna talk about the
Speaker 1: end of Leary's life and his focus on of all
Speaker 1: things cybernetics than all right, we're back. So we've talked
Speaker 1: a lot on our show before about cyborgs and cybernetics
Speaker 1: and trans human as him and what that has to
Speaker 1: do with space travel. It turns out Timothy Leary in
Speaker 1: his seventies became fascinated by all this stuff, specifically electronic communication,
Speaker 1: and he would tell his audiences that electronic communication was
Speaker 1: going to be what would free their brains and souls
Speaker 1: from oppressive orthodoxies like education, religion, and politics. In particular,
Speaker 1: he was fascinated by things like virtual reality computer games.
Speaker 1: He even went so far as to start his own
Speaker 1: software company before he died. He also predicted that implanted
Speaker 1: acceptal electrodes would one day be used recreationally. Uh, and
Speaker 1: we're not quite there yet, But it just goes to
Speaker 1: show how how interested he became in the role technology
Speaker 1: could play in alternate states of of awareness. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I'm I'm I don't know if I'm quite
Speaker 1: there with Timothy Leary on this one, because we are
Speaker 1: now in an age where electronic communication is so vast.
Speaker 1: Like I said earlier, he would have been insufferable on Twitter.
Speaker 1: I imagine I can't imagine what this would be like.
Speaker 1: And I don't know necessarily that these technologies have enabled
Speaker 1: us to break free of oppressive orthodoxy like education, religion,
Speaker 1: in politics. But hey, there's still time, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's only been like twenty years since he passed away.
Speaker 1: Speaking of which, So, he died in nine at his
Speaker 1: home in Beverly Hills, California. He was seventy five years old.
Speaker 1: Interesting thing about this is, outside of his fascination with
Speaker 1: psychedelics and electronics, his other fascination was with death and
Speaker 1: out of body experiences near death. So this was something
Speaker 1: that he turned into a public performance as well. He
Speaker 1: made it an event. He had video cameras record his death.
Speaker 1: He built the whole thing up from a year before
Speaker 1: when he was first told that he was diagnosed with
Speaker 1: prostate cancer, and his friends collected his writings and his
Speaker 1: papers all on a leery themed website and they posted
Speaker 1: films of him there. He even corded his daily drug
Speaker 1: intake on this website. It was basically a blog before
Speaker 1: there were blogs. Uh, now I want to recap here.
Speaker 1: Let's return just We've been hitting on this over and
Speaker 1: over and over again throughout the episode, how self destructive
Speaker 1: he was. He went through two divorces. He went through
Speaker 1: one separation, his first wife committed suicide. His second wife,
Speaker 1: who was the mistress that he he left his first
Speaker 1: wife over and who she committed suicide over. That woman
Speaker 1: left him after he struck her and their landlady called
Speaker 1: the police on them. And then his daughter also committed
Speaker 1: suicide in nineteen nine. So he left this wake of
Speaker 1: broken people behind him. It just doesn't leave a good
Speaker 1: taste in my mouth. Yeah, that was That was my
Speaker 1: experience with the research as well. I didn't go into
Speaker 1: this idolizing Leery, but but I went and went into
Speaker 1: it like appreciating some of the things he'd said before
Speaker 1: and the use of his persona in various to fiction
Speaker 1: and music. And it was it was disappointing to to really, uh,
Speaker 1: not only to see this pattern, but then to spend
Speaker 1: a lot of time reading about it. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: like after he had been like, you know, he's been
Speaker 1: mythologized over the years, especially for our generation, I expected more.
Speaker 1: You know, well, a lot of you know, I noticed
Speaker 1: that a lot of people were kind of critical on Amazon,
Speaker 1: for instance, of the green Field biography because they thought,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like, oh, he's just kind of a
Speaker 1: it's kind of a hatchet job or whatever. But uh,
Speaker 1: I think the thing is that the biography reveals more
Speaker 1: about the real Timothy Leary than a lot of people,
Speaker 1: you know, we're comfortable confronting. Yeah, now he's dying, as
Speaker 1: he said, and uh, and he's keeping a track of
Speaker 1: the various substance he's he's taking. So Leary actually considered
Speaker 1: taking LSD on his deathbed, and this would have and
Speaker 1: in doing this, he would have been following the lead
Speaker 1: of Altre Huxley, who took an injection of a hundred
Speaker 1: micrograms on his deathbed. Um. Now, in the time leading
Speaker 1: up to his death, Leary did use ketamine and enhanced
Speaker 1: it with nitrous hawks side he drank Towards the end
Speaker 1: there was a lot of smoking, especially Carol Rosen, a
Speaker 1: friend who was at at his bedside, said that his
Speaker 1: penultimate words were why not, why not? Why not, repeating
Speaker 1: the final question fifty times fifty times in different voices,
Speaker 1: and then, according to his son, he said beautiful and died. Okay,
Speaker 1: part of me is very cynical and has to wonder
Speaker 1: how much of that was performed. Yeah, given that he
Speaker 1: knew that the cameras were on and everything, that's yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's true. Now, he had pursued chronic suspension at
Speaker 1: one point, but his final wishes were that his cremated
Speaker 1: remains be distributed among his friends, as well as shot
Speaker 1: into space. So indeed, a year later, seven grams of
Speaker 1: his ashes and a vial went into a space into
Speaker 1: space on a Pegasus rocket. And this, by the way,
Speaker 1: it was the rocket that also contains seven grams of
Speaker 1: ashes from a few other notable individuals, including Gene Roddenberry. Now,
Speaker 1: so how do you get Do you buy into that
Speaker 1: ahead of time or does somebody sponsor you? How's that work? Um?
Speaker 1: I think in Leary's case it was a sponsorship situation. Now,
Speaker 1: Greenfield in his biography has some everything up that I
Speaker 1: think rather succinctly. At the end, he says, a self
Speaker 1: proclaimed at cheer leader for change who himself had never
Speaker 1: been able to change, Timothy Leary had finally achieved his
Speaker 1: heart's desire in death as he could never be in life.
Speaker 1: He was not only free, but soaring through the heavens
Speaker 1: at which he had gazed so often in wondering during
Speaker 1: his most improbable life. That's a that's a very nice eulogy,
Speaker 1: I think, Yeah, I mean, but I mean it also
Speaker 1: just sums up that, you know, a lot of the
Speaker 1: disorder that was there as well. Yeah. Absolutely, But it
Speaker 1: paints him in a nicer picture than I think. Honestly,
Speaker 1: maybe we have in the last two episodes of the show,
Speaker 1: we've been trying. I really wanted to give him the
Speaker 1: benefit of the doubt, you know. Yeah, it's the same here. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: actually I mentioned this earlier, but Leary's archives are today's
Speaker 1: stored at the New York Public Library. Reportedly, the library
Speaker 1: paid nine hundred thousand dollars for them, uh and a
Speaker 1: portion of that, just to be clear, went back toward
Speaker 1: processing the collection. These archives had an interesting life before
Speaker 1: they showed up the library because they were moved from
Speaker 1: place to place so that they could avoid the FBI season. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they they actually did end up getting seized by
Speaker 1: the FBI regardless, and then they were returned. They ended
Speaker 1: up in a storage facility in California until now the
Speaker 1: library houses his documents alongside George Washington, Herman Melville, and
Speaker 1: Truman Capote. So in closing, um, yeah, there was there
Speaker 1: was definitely a lot more chaos and disorder in Leary's
Speaker 1: life than than than I anticipated going in, again, not
Speaker 1: not being very familiar with the details of his life,
Speaker 1: just sort of having a pop culture awareness of him
Speaker 1: and a media filtered awareness of him. Um. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: ended up being, uh at times a depressing journey to
Speaker 1: to uh to read more in detail about his life
Speaker 1: and his work. Yeah. I agree. The New Yorker review
Speaker 1: of the Greenfield biography that we use for a lot
Speaker 1: of this compares him to Wilhelm Reich, who we also
Speaker 1: have an episode on uh, and they basically say, look,
Speaker 1: they were both renegade psychologists who became brand fads among
Speaker 1: quote unquote enlightened people. Uh. To me, Larry seems to
Speaker 1: be more like a sly huckster than any kind of
Speaker 1: contributor to philosophy or psychology. Like I said, that's unfortunate.
Speaker 1: I guess I just expected more. Uh. The Don Latin
Speaker 1: book The Harvard Psychedelic Club, which I also read through,
Speaker 1: refers to him as the trickster throughout the book, like
Speaker 1: they give a sort of like mythal mythical status to
Speaker 1: each of the characters from the Harvard Psychedelic Club. Richard
Speaker 1: Alpert or rumdsk gets the term the seeker, but Leary
Speaker 1: is the trickster, so he'd be kind of like the
Speaker 1: low key of this Avengers. Yeah, it seems like. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had a hard time reading all this research and
Speaker 1: not seeing a selfish, kind of egomaniacal guy who seemed
Speaker 1: to sacrifice all of his family and friends along the
Speaker 1: way just so he could extend his five minutes of
Speaker 1: either fun or fame or both. I don't know. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was really disappointing unfortunately. UM yeah, I'm curious. I'm
Speaker 1: sure that there are plenty of people who are listening
Speaker 1: to this episode who are real, uh, devout you know,
Speaker 1: fans of Leary and his wisdom, and maybe there's something
Speaker 1: that Robert and I are missing out on here. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Well, I will say this and to sort of,
Speaker 1: you know, ended on a positive note. Leary's words have
Speaker 1: definitely inspired me in the past, and I think I'll
Speaker 1: continue to find inspiration in some of his words. One
Speaker 1: of the weird things that happens with icon celebrities and
Speaker 1: and even profit is that there emerges this disconnect between
Speaker 1: self and perception, between actuality and the ideal. So, you know,
Speaker 1: the pop culture Leary here is I think, something of
Speaker 1: a fiction, but it can serve as a as a
Speaker 1: beneficial fiction, I think at times. So I'd like to
Speaker 1: to close out here with a quote that I've always valued,
Speaker 1: uh and and one that I tend to sort of
Speaker 1: employ as a guiding principle for for stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. So I will read it once again in
Speaker 1: UH in my impersonation of Timothy Leary. Throughout human history,
Speaker 1: as our species is faced the frightening terrorizing fact that
Speaker 1: we do not know who we are or where we
Speaker 1: are going. In this ocean of chaos. It has been
Speaker 1: the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who
Speaker 1: attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing,
Speaker 1: forming in our minds their view of reality. To think
Speaker 1: for yourself, you must question authority and learn how to
Speaker 1: put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open mindedness, chaotic,
Speaker 1: confused vulnerability to inform yourself. Now that I can agree with, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that I think that lines up with with how we
Speaker 1: tend to approach topics here. How I think we should
Speaker 1: always approach any kind of you know, authority figure, even
Speaker 1: when that authority figure is Timothy Learry. So hope you
Speaker 1: enjoyed this marathon of Timothy Leary and l s D
Speaker 1: information that we gave you this week. We are probably
Speaker 1: going to be doing a Facebook Live trailer talk event
Speaker 1: the day after this episode releases, So if you're listening
Speaker 1: the day of go to our Facebook page. That Friday
Speaker 1: morning will probably be on Facebook Live talking about movies
Speaker 1: that are related to Timothy Leary and or LSD and psilocybin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some sort of psychedelic cinema celebration. We haven't figured it
Speaker 1: out yet, but it'll probably probably be more fun than
Speaker 1: the details of Larry's life. Yeah, maybe so so right.
Speaker 1: If you want to contact us or follow us on
Speaker 1: that or find out when that's happening, we're all over
Speaker 1: social media. We'll try to post an advance let you
Speaker 1: know what the timing is on that. We're on Facebook,
Speaker 1: we're on Twitter, we're on Tumblr, and we're on Instagram.
Speaker 1: And if you want to get in touch with us
Speaker 1: the old fashioned way, just shoot us an email and
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