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Speaker 1: y c C hyphen presents Welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind from how Stuffworks dot com. Hey he wasn't
Speaker 1: the Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert
Speaker 1: Lamb and I'm Christian Seger, and this is part two
Speaker 1: of our Timothy Leary l s D series of episodes.
Speaker 1: We've already done Part one, where we talk about the
Speaker 1: basic science behind l s D and psilocybin and the
Speaker 1: research that's been done using these psychedelic substances. And then
Speaker 1: we talked about the first part of Timothy Leary's life
Speaker 1: leading up to his research on this. Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1: So if you if you missed part one, go back
Speaker 1: and listen to it, because that's the one that's going
Speaker 1: to be front loaded with all that LSD science and
Speaker 1: just the initial period of Leary's life, which which ultimately
Speaker 1: kind of sets the sets the pace for the rest
Speaker 1: of his life, like the destruct self destructive behaviors, the patterns,
Speaker 1: they're all pretty much present before he even you know,
Speaker 1: gets that finishes his education. So I've been sitting around
Speaker 1: the house reading about Timothy Leary for the last couple
Speaker 1: of days and my wife says, out of nowhere, you know,
Speaker 1: 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. They
Speaker 1: talked about She didn't really say she just said that
Speaker 1: 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 off and that that cool older guy, you know,
Speaker 1: with that with all this charisma and certainly seems to
Speaker 1: have had a certain amount of chrismas entire life. But
Speaker 1: there's there was this period where he was kind of
Speaker 1: like a um, kind of just like a greasy guy
Speaker 1: with a mustache in ill fitting clothing. Like that was
Speaker 1: the version of him before his first wife died. Uh,
Speaker 1: And it's it was after that that things began to
Speaker 1: change and he kind of morphed into this, uh this
Speaker 1: more you know, the older, hip cool Leary that we
Speaker 1: instantly imagine. And this really all began at Harvard University,
Speaker 1: the place you would least expect it. So Leary joined
Speaker 1: Harvard University in nineteen fifty nine. But contrary to myth,
Speaker 1: I want to establish this because so many of the
Speaker 1: research got pieces of research got this wrong. He taught there,
Speaker 1: but he was not a professor there. He was not
Speaker 1: like a tenured faculty. Okay, he was teaching there for sure,
Speaker 1: and he was part of the psychology department. 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.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, uh so at Harvard along with a guy
Speaker 1: named Richard Alpert who would later go on to become
Speaker 1: Rom Doss. Uh This you might know Ram Doss from
Speaker 1: the sort of infamous meditation book I guess called be
Speaker 1: Here Now. Uh. So they worked together there in the
Speaker 1: psychology department. Leary introduced others on the Harvard faculty to psilocybin.
Speaker 1: And this, as we talked about last episode, is the
Speaker 1: active ingredient in certain species of mushrooms, and at the
Speaker 1: time it was legally available for research. But what about
Speaker 1: his first experience with this stuff? Well, he takes psilocybin
Speaker 1: while he's on vacation in Quernavaca, Mexico. This is he
Speaker 1: and some friends were on vacation in between semesters. They
Speaker 1: took some samples of mushrooms. Uh. And their argument for
Speaker 1: the research that they were doing. This is back at
Speaker 1: Harvard was that if psychology is the study of the mind,
Speaker 1: then it should have a legitimate interest in how cognition, perception,
Speaker 1: and emotion are affected by mind altering substances. So some
Speaker 1: argued at the time that they were also unaware of
Speaker 1: the potential dangers of such research. Right, so, because psilocybin
Speaker 1: and LSD were so new on the scene, especially in America,
Speaker 1: uh that this team of psychologists, no matter or how
Speaker 1: good intentioned they were, they weren't aware of what the
Speaker 1: drawbacks could be, and Leary and Albert agreed to policies
Speaker 1: to protect their subjects. So this included no participation from
Speaker 1: undergraduate students. They were not supposed to be giving any
Speaker 1: kind of psychedelics to the undergraduate students at Harvard, but
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty three, Albert was dismissed after he administered
Speaker 1: psilocybin to an undergraduate off campus, reportedly for sexual favors,
Speaker 1: although that is it's unclear whether or not that's true.
Speaker 1: So Leary begins administering these drugs to other researchers. He
Speaker 1: also administers it to a group of prison inmates and
Speaker 1: a group of Divinity students for his research. This was
Speaker 1: called the Harvard Psilocybin Project, and the goal basically of
Speaker 1: this project was to document the effects of psychedelics on
Speaker 1: human consciousness. The notes from these studies were very carefully
Speaker 1: documented in scripted, and we know this because Timothy Leary's
Speaker 1: archives are pretty well maintained and there at the New
Speaker 1: York Public Library. Yeah, in the various products he was involved,
Speaker 1: and he was he was apparently very big on everyone
Speaker 1: providing him with lots of data, and it was kind
Speaker 1: of a meticulous record keeper in that regard. So let's
Speaker 1: take a little bit closer look at these these studies
Speaker 1: that he did. Okay, let's look first at the one
Speaker 1: that he did with a group of Divinity students. So
Speaker 1: this was called the Good Friday Experiment, and it went
Speaker 1: like this. They gave psilocybin to ten students and ten
Speaker 1: to a placebo group. All of them then went to
Speaker 1: a Good Friday service. They wanted to see if this
Speaker 1: would facilitate any kind of mystical or spiritual experience, and
Speaker 1: in fact, eight of the ten reported a mystical experience.
Speaker 1: One reported a feeling of sacredness and a sense of peace.
Speaker 1: The placebo group, however, sat quietly through the service. The
Speaker 1: others would quote laid down or wander around the chapel
Speaker 1: muttering things like God is everywhere or oh the glory.
Speaker 1: What Leary failed to report in the study was that
Speaker 1: one of the subjects actually had a disturbing reaction and
Speaker 1: had to be given a dose of thorazine to calm down.
Speaker 1: Now you look back on this, that's a huge lapse
Speaker 1: of research ethics. That's that's not good. So, so that's unfortunate. Now,
Speaker 1: Rick Doblin, who is the founder of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary
Speaker 1: Association for Psychedelic Studies, he's come up on the show before,
Speaker 1: we talked especially about MAPS during our M d M
Speaker 1: A 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, and he freaked out, he
Speaker 1: started running away from the chapel. Responsibility. Yeah, if he's
Speaker 1: gonna announced the Messiah on good Day, Yeah, of course. Yeah,
Speaker 1: give me some advanced prep on that, some more prep time.
Speaker 1: All right, let's talk about the Conquered Prison experiment next. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is even wilder. So the aim here was to
Speaker 1: use psychedelics to reduce the recidivism rate in inmates. Now
Speaker 1: Learry was was not interested in working with prisoners for
Speaker 1: a few different reasons, but he realized that he needed
Speaker 1: a way to measure the the transformative nature of the
Speaker 1: drugs that he so believed in, and this offered the chance.
Speaker 1: So it seems like a decent argument, right. Could these
Speaker 1: substances open inmates up in a way that allowed them
Speaker 1: to discuss their conditions and their feelings, you know, someone
Speaker 1: who's just been hardened and calloused by you know, by crime,
Speaker 1: by life, and by incarceration. Could this be the substance
Speaker 1: to just loosen them up enough to actually get some
Speaker 1: some work done with them. So over the course of
Speaker 1: nine months, they used over a dozen convicts there as
Speaker 1: test subjects with psychedelics. Again, Rick Doblin replicated this study
Speaker 1: and re analyzed it in UH. He found that Leary's
Speaker 1: conclusion wasn't warranted. Learry's conclusion was the recidivism rate has
Speaker 1: been significantly reduced, but Rick actually found maybe not so much.
Speaker 1: Timothy Learry, UH. The flaw was in the reporting results.
Speaker 1: He looked at recidivism rates ten months after release for
Speaker 1: the psilocybin takers, but he didn't look at the same
Speaker 1: amount of time for the control group. He only looked
Speaker 1: at them thirty months later. And this is important because
Speaker 1: recidivism depends a lot on time, with rates rising the
Speaker 1: more time one is out because of the increased opportunities.
Speaker 1: You know, when are you gonna end up getting busted
Speaker 1: and end up going to back to jail? Is going
Speaker 1: to be the first day y're out, now, It's going
Speaker 1: to be in the weeks that follow as more and
Speaker 1: more temptations come. Yeah, We've talked about this on the
Speaker 1: show Gee's many many times, but this goes It speaks
Speaker 1: to something called the halo effect, right where reese archers
Speaker 1: starts seeing their data in a positive light as much
Speaker 1: as possible. This becomes misleading. This actually seems to go
Speaker 1: beyond the halo effect. Right, He's not just seeing his
Speaker 1: data in a positive light, He's manipulating the data so
Speaker 1: that it looks better than actually is. So already here
Speaker 1: you see, like these are basically his two big studies
Speaker 1: on on using psychedelics medically in any kind of way,
Speaker 1: and he's either falsified as research or or made huge
Speaker 1: gaps in in ethical claims. Now. Albert would later explain
Speaker 1: that the aim of the project he thought was was
Speaker 1: pretty solid and with a very reasonable therapeutic model, but
Speaker 1: he says it would have required long term application and study,
Speaker 1: and Leary simply didn't have the patients for long term studies. Um,
Speaker 1: which it's you can easily make the argument, well, then
Speaker 1: you're kind of in the wrong line of business here, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're if you want to conduct a
Speaker 1: scientific study, if you want to really uh do the work,
Speaker 1: then you need to have the patients to see it through.
Speaker 1: And if you if you don't have the patients, you're
Speaker 1: gonna end up with what we have here, m a
Speaker 1: a flawed study that ends up having to be thrown
Speaker 1: out later on. Now, remember how I was saying that
Speaker 1: the the notes that he took during this time were meticulous.
Speaker 1: Wired magazine did a great article and Timothy Leary and
Speaker 1: I pulled a quote directly from it. They said later
Speaker 1: reports adhere less strictly to reality, meaning his reports. In
Speaker 1: one filled out in March of nineteen sixty three, just
Speaker 1: weeks before he got kicked out of Harvard Leary Prince
Speaker 1: in big block letters, he puts down a question mark
Speaker 1: for his age and lists his occupation as angel. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: so you can start to see that he's already unraveling here, right,
Speaker 1: So Learry eventually moves on from psilocybin and he tries
Speaker 1: LSD in nineteen sixty two and then was dismissed from
Speaker 1: Harvard in nineteen sixty three. Various faculty and administrators were
Speaker 1: essentially worried about the safety of their subjects, especially because
Speaker 1: Larry and Albert were conducting their research while they themselves
Speaker 1: were under the influence of psilocybin. Psychologist Professor Herbert C.
Speaker 1: Kellman circulated a letter around the faculty and called for
Speaker 1: a meeting calling for the trials to be voluntary. One
Speaker 1: of Larry's former students remembers that they had a choice
Speaker 1: at the end of the semester. They could either take
Speaker 1: their final or they could participate in psilocybin trials. So
Speaker 1: it's interesting, that's an interesting choice to make. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is an odd choice to give a college student.
Speaker 1: So okay, After all this stuff of the faculty, Larry
Speaker 1: was officially fired for failing to fulfill his teaching obligations
Speaker 1: because he went traveling instead. This is actually what they
Speaker 1: nailed him for was that he wasn't teaching his classes.
Speaker 1: It wasn't the actual research that he was doing. He
Speaker 1: was just kind of like, I'm just gonna travel instead
Speaker 1: of teaching my classes. And they were like, look, the
Speaker 1: job says teach the classes. You're not really doing the job. Sorry,
Speaker 1: you're on 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 Ginsberg.
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
Speaker 1: fault because let's think about it, he had no adequate
Speaker 1: scientific language in place to do so. Uh. Instead he
Speaker 1: fell back on hip poetic language that he picked up
Speaker 1: from hanging out with people like Alan Ginsburg and Charles Olsen,
Speaker 1: and that really ended the field of psychology taking him
Speaker 1: seriously in 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 better fitted to be this this celebrity
Speaker 1: figure than than the an actual researcher. Yeah, and now
Speaker 1: I have a lovely story before we end the Harvard
Speaker 1: stuff and jump into his time with the Millbrook group.
Speaker 1: So William S. Burrows is one of the people who
Speaker 1: actually denounced Timothy Leary for the same thing. Williams Burrows
Speaker 1: obviously interested in psychedelic author of Naked Lunch. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: goes to visit Timothy Leary while he's at Harvard. And
Speaker 1: Burrows 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. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Burrows is basically saying, I thought you were one of them,
Speaker 1: but you're just one of us, you know, Yeah, yeah, exactly. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,
Speaker 1: we're gonna move on to the next chapter in the
Speaker 1: life of Timothy Leary. Than all right, we're back. So
Speaker 1: this is a great quote that comes from Louis Mannan's
Speaker 1: New Yorker article on Timothy Leary, and I think it's
Speaker 1: 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 beatifick, what me worry grin and
Speaker 1: a movie stars frozen stare into the flash bulbs. One
Speaker 1: of his ex wives described it as the smile of
Speaker 1: the ego actually eating the personality. That. I can't think
Speaker 1: of a harsher condemnation. That's brutal. Alright, So these guys
Speaker 1: get kicked out of Harvard. That's where we left off, basically, right,
Speaker 1: Albert and Leary they go and they say, well, let's
Speaker 1: just establish our own privately funded research group, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna call it the International Foundation for Internal Freedom, and
Speaker 1: it's going to be in Mexico. Basically, we'll get a
Speaker 1: bunch of people around the world to form groups. They'll
Speaker 1: take LSD and they'll report their results to us. Would
Speaker 1: be kind of like citizen science, very scientific. Unfortunately, the
Speaker 1: Mexican government wasn't having it, so they stepped in and
Speaker 1: they demanded that Albert and uh Leary leave. So they leave.
Speaker 1: They've got no place left to go. Cambridge doesn't want them,
Speaker 1: Mexico doesn't want them. Well where do they go? They
Speaker 1: go to this country estate in Millbrook, New York that
Speaker 1: was provided to them by a millionaire who sympathized with
Speaker 1: their research in LSD. This is what we all need, man,
Speaker 1: We just need a sympathetic millionaire. This millionaire was will M.
Speaker 1: Melon Hitchcock, also known as Mr Billy. Huh yeah. Mr
Speaker 1: Billy was the grandson of the founder of Gulf Oil.
Speaker 1: This is where all his money came from. And at Millbrook,
Speaker 1: Leary established what he called the Castallia Foundation, which he
Speaker 1: said was dedicated to the scholarly study of LSD and
Speaker 1: its spiritual applications. So what's one of the things he
Speaker 1: does while he's there that's anywhere close to academic. He
Speaker 1: 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: a special typewriter for people that that are high than
Speaker 1: to have a single person that is not high. And
Speaker 1: it seems to be the case. Yeah, yeah. So this
Speaker 1: thing looked like an old adding machine, had large buttons
Speaker 1: on it that had labels to indicate what kind of
Speaker 1: bodily sensations you were experiencing or if you were having
Speaker 1: hallucinations or you had a sense of entering the void.
Speaker 1: I'd love to see what the graphics, right, I think
Speaker 1: it would be an emoji. Right, he's describing he was
Speaker 1: inventing an emoji's only type. Right, you know what. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not giving him enough credit. Yeah, Tynethy Leary invented emojis.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't have the Emoji movie if we're not for
Speaker 1: Timothy Leary. Uh, yeah, to to blame him for something else. Okay,
Speaker 1: So then this thing basically, after you you know you're high,
Speaker 1: you pound on all these buttons, it prints out a
Speaker 1: little paper script that records what your trip was like. Uh.
Speaker 1: Some articles characterized the Millbrook Group and Leary as actually
Speaker 1: not being as a kind of like psychedelically crazy as
Speaker 1: you might think they were. Uh. They were sometimes depicted
Speaker 1: as being East Coast upper class elitists and very exclusive.
Speaker 1: Now Ken Kizi in his R Prankster's came out there
Speaker 1: at one point, uh, and they were like, oh this
Speaker 1: is great, let's go meet these psychedelic pioneers. And they're like,
Speaker 1: oh man, these guys are just total stiffs. They're boring.
Speaker 1: Um so it's interesting interaction between these two worlds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like because you tend to think, well, Leary would have
Speaker 1: just been able to move throughout the counterculture and he
Speaker 1: would do some brad be embraced everywhere, but but not
Speaker 1: so so. During this time with Millbrook, Leary was convicted
Speaker 1: on several charges. This is when a lot of the
Speaker 1: prison stuff happens. It's all related to drug use in possession.
Speaker 1: The Millbrook house itself was raided and Leary was arrested
Speaker 1: by who g Gordon Liddy And at the time, ge
Speaker 1: Gordon Lyddy was the He was part of the County
Speaker 1: Sheriff's department there in New York. Now, later on he
Speaker 1: went to be part of the Watergate Burglary. Uh, and
Speaker 1: he ends up kind of teaming up with Timothy Leary
Speaker 1: down the way. Yeah, we'll get into that in a bit. So. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is, man, this is where things just really
Speaker 1: started getting bonkers, right Mill Millbrook and afterwards are just
Speaker 1: where things really let loose with Leary. Yeah. Now, this
Speaker 1: is definitely a period where on one level, uh, Leary
Speaker 1: and his bunch they are being targeted. Yeah, totally. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, you could also say, well, they're kind
Speaker 1: of they're making themselves easy targets. But you eventually end
Speaker 1: up in kind of gray area there when when you're saying, well,
Speaker 1: you know, did he have it coming or not. But
Speaker 1: now this is certainly a period of time though, where
Speaker 1: you can say that that Leary and people in his
Speaker 1: circle were being targeted by the authorities. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: you might charge while they were, they were kind of
Speaker 1: making themselves ideal targets for these uh, for these forces
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, yeah, I mean, well, let's take this
Speaker 1: as an example. Okay, so right after this raid happened,
Speaker 1: Leary goes down to New York and at the Manhattan
Speaker 1: Town Hall. There he gives a talk, and there he
Speaker 1: says LSD it might actually be a problem. And he says,
Speaker 1: quote l s D maybe creating a new race of mutants.
Speaker 1: This is like the kind of hyperbole that he's starting
Speaker 1: to use in his rhetoric. He said he was going
Speaker 1: to stop using LSD and he urged others to do so,
Speaker 1: but he also advocated that LSD would cure alcoholism, accelerate learning,
Speaker 1: and maybe helpful and treating all forms of mental illness. Well,
Speaker 1: as we know from the last episode, some of these
Speaker 1: things seem to be true. We just need to do
Speaker 1: more research on them. But because of its harmful side effects,
Speaker 1: Leary advised using other methods to produce psychedelic effects. So
Speaker 1: he says, you can just simply do this with the
Speaker 1: right lights, sounds, and a stroboscope. So he's basically like,
Speaker 1: I just don't bother with the LSD anymore, Just like
Speaker 1: get in the right mood, man, and we'll like put
Speaker 1: the right kind of colorful lights in the room and
Speaker 1: things like that, and it's the same experience. Well, this
Speaker 1: is this is a really you know, I found this
Speaker 1: to be a really interesting chapter in his life based
Speaker 1: on Greenfields telling in the biography, and I do want
Speaker 1: to just drive home. Like Greenfield is not a Leary apologist,
Speaker 1: if anything, like his book could have been titled Timothy
Speaker 1: Leary colon a mess, right, but but he he gives
Speaker 1: an interesting account of this. So in this talk, Leary
Speaker 1: prophesieses an evolution in human consciousness that will allow humans
Speaker 1: to consult their own heightened cellular consciousness and live in
Speaker 1: harmony with nature. So basically like the abandonment of cities
Speaker 1: and and everything you know is growing green again, and
Speaker 1: where it's like a new Eden on Earth, you know, all,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of you know, highly optimistic, sort of
Speaker 1: hippie dippy kind of ideas, which one might expect. But
Speaker 1: then he calls for a one year moratorium analysis D usage.
Speaker 1: And this is because of the changing legal status of
Speaker 1: of of l s D and on the heels of
Speaker 1: all these various legal problems that he's encountering. And uh.
Speaker 1: In Greenfield points out that this was quote a calculated
Speaker 1: strategy to curry favor with the establishment. With the current
Speaker 1: level of LSD use in America having reached epidemic proportions,
Speaker 1: Tim wanted to restore his own credibility by becoming the
Speaker 1: man with a solution to the problem. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think this is really where we start seeing that
Speaker 1: he unfortunately made decisions for his own well being over
Speaker 1: the decisions that may have you know, helped highlight what
Speaker 1: these psychedelics were capable of any kind of medical or
Speaker 1: mental health prospect right, Uh and any really was self serving. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now you mentioned how he said, well you can use
Speaker 1: alternate methods. Well, he had told he told everyone, well,
Speaker 1: if you've used l s D, then you maybe don't
Speaker 1: need it anymore. You can use alternate methods, and if
Speaker 1: you don't know alternate methods, I'll teach you. You You know,
Speaker 1: this is a such price, I bet, but this is
Speaker 1: an area where I feel like, um, like Leary is correct.
Speaker 1: You know, we know that there are other ways to
Speaker 1: to have of hallucinatory experiences, including meditation, including things like yoga.
Speaker 1: Uh So he's actually correct here, you know, his whatever,
Speaker 1: his his exact motivations aside. You know, he's saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can, you can have some sort of heightened sense
Speaker 1: of of being. You can you can have this alternate
Speaker 1: experience without the use of this substance that's becoming problematic now.
Speaker 1: He even goes on to testify before the Senate in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six on the nature of l s D.
Speaker 1: But this turns out to be a rather lackluster performance.
Speaker 1: So he wasn't very assertive. And there's it's I was
Speaker 1: reading the the back and forth here and there's just
Speaker 1: like a lot of stuff where he makes a statement
Speaker 1: and then they're asking him if is that is are
Speaker 1: you being metaphorical or is that a literal statement? And
Speaker 1: they spend time discussing that. They talk about how l
Speaker 1: s D might theoretically be controlled in some fashion, but
Speaker 1: everyone was pretty much disappointed with how it came out,
Speaker 1: Like he basically this was the a point where Leary
Speaker 1: could really stand up and be the like, the positive,
Speaker 1: optimistic voice of the of the counterculture and speak for
Speaker 1: for this substance and speak for its research potential, and
Speaker 1: he wasn't able to come through. I just imagined like
Speaker 1: people like John C. Lily or Sasha Shulgun were like
Speaker 1: just sitting at home, like face to palm, just like
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 paper that they printed this interview
Speaker 1: on because it was like a novel. Uh. He makes
Speaker 1: some really outrageous claims here, including that women commonly can
Speaker 1: 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 that 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. It's just
Speaker 1: I think in poor taste. Maybe in sixties six it
Speaker 1: was taken as being sort of a little bit more
Speaker 1: eccentric and interesting. Yeah, this is certainly to modern readers,
Speaker 1: 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 LSD is a specific cure for homosexuality.
Speaker 1: It's well known that most sexual perversions are the result
Speaker 1: not of biological binds, but of freaky, dislocating childhood experiences
Speaker 1: of one kind or another. Consequently, it's not surprising that
Speaker 1: we've had many cases of long term home sexuals who
Speaker 1: under l s D discover that they are not only
Speaker 1: genitally but genetically male. I don't even know what he's
Speaker 1: saying that, uh, that they are basically attracted to females.
Speaker 1: The most famous in public of such cases is that
Speaker 1: of Alan Ginsburg, who has openly stated that he the
Speaker 1: first time that he turned onto women was during an
Speaker 1: LSD sessions several years ago. This is only one of
Speaker 1: many such cases. Okay, so I have a lot, a
Speaker 1: lot of problems with with all of 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 uh and professional relationships with with with homosexual people,
Speaker 1: including Alan Ginsberg. Yeah, and uh, Dr D was another
Speaker 1: one I mentioned. Uh, you know, Tuscaloosa has been kind
Speaker 1: of this um uh, the university there being this this
Speaker 1: sort of you know, fortress of of of liberal minds
Speaker 1: at the time, and a number of different homosexual professors, uh,
Speaker 1: many of which had you know, had gone to bat
Speaker 1: for for Leary and helped him with the connections he
Speaker 1: needed to navigate that portion of his life. So it
Speaker 1: just seems just completely ridiculous and uh uh and disappointing
Speaker 1: to to hear him talk about Yeah, I mean he's
Speaker 1: saying stuff that's like patently untrue he has no evidence for,
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 this,
Speaker 1: or the one where he gave that talk in the
Speaker 1: Manhattan town hall, it would just accelerate the establishments thoughts that,
Speaker 1: oh my god, we absolutely have to shut this down, right.
Speaker 1: So the Millbrook Group goes on to disband and Leary
Speaker 1: becomes a psychedelic speaker coach, and this is really the
Speaker 1: latter part of his life what most people know him for. Uh.
Speaker 1: He's a public figure. He's associated with psychedelics and spiritual discovery.
Speaker 1: He even starts his own church called the League for
Speaker 1: Spiritual Discovery. He writes a bunch of books. In a
Speaker 1: one segment that I read about this, a guy named
Speaker 1: Steve Silverman described Leary as a genius marketer during this time,
Speaker 1: and he says he could have had a brilliant career
Speaker 1: hyping up luxury cars, iPad or social media startups. Instead
Speaker 1: he was hawking LSD and psychedelic nosis. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: in that same conversation, Connors, who wrote that a white
Speaker 1: Hand society book that I mentioned earlier, he responds and
Speaker 1: he says Leary got caught in a circular trap of
Speaker 1: marketing himself so he could get money to then afford
Speaker 1: to defend himself from his prosecutors. Uh, it's just all
Speaker 1: kinds of crazy stuff are going on. He gets pulled
Speaker 1: over in nineteen sixty eight. Uh, he's he's driving down
Speaker 1: Laguna Beach and he's arrested for drugs. His son was
Speaker 1: so stoned in the back seat that when they pulled
Speaker 1: him into the jail he took off all of his
Speaker 1: clothes and started masturbating. When he was shown what his
Speaker 1: son was doing, Leary laughed. His daughter was sentenced to
Speaker 1: six months in prison. Jack was ordered to undergo psychiatric observation.
Speaker 1: Leary got one to ten for possession of marijuana. So
Speaker 1: this is one of many cases where he goes into
Speaker 1: jail and he gets out right. He's described in the
Speaker 1: New York Times obituary when he died. This is how
Speaker 1: the New York Times described him as having an elegant,
Speaker 1: happy contempt for authority. And this is around the time
Speaker 1: where Richard Nixon infamously refers to him as the most
Speaker 1: dangerous man in America. Again, hyperbole everybody all over the place.
Speaker 1: Sounds a lot like right now people are just throwing
Speaker 1: out like this stuff that is just like super extreme. Uh.
Speaker 1: He talks to Marshall McCluin during this period of time.
Speaker 1: This is when McCluin advises him, Yeah, you know what
Speaker 1: you should do. You need to come up with a
Speaker 1: catchy slogan to advertise the wonders of LSD. This is
Speaker 1: where we get turn on, tune in, drop out from
Speaker 1: basically McLuhan saying like, you need to get better at
Speaker 1: brand marketing. Dude. I never thought that that was a
Speaker 1: really great slogan for anything. I mean the dropout part especially.
Speaker 1: It's just like, I don't want to try something that's
Speaker 1: gonna make me drop out of something, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: He basically becomes a celebrity during this time. I said
Speaker 1: this at the top of the first episode. This is
Speaker 1: where he becomes famous for being famous. Right. He ends
Speaker 1: up associating and taking trips with and I mean psilocybin
Speaker 1: trips with authors, musicians, criminals, and movie stars. Right. He
Speaker 1: just gets famous for hanging out with these people. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, he declares his candidacy for governor of California.
Speaker 1: Who is he running against? Ronald Reagan? Now this was
Speaker 1: interrupted when he was convicted on marijuana charges again. Uh,
Speaker 1: and he escaped. This is this is the craziest part
Speaker 1: of the whole story. He escapes prison. This is at
Speaker 1: San Luis Oba Cipo. 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 this assisted by the weather underground and
Speaker 1: in Algeria he was the house guest of Eldridge Cleaver,
Speaker 1: who was part of the Black Panthers. That they didn't
Speaker 1: get along, So he goes on to Switzerland. You know
Speaker 1: who he meets in Switzerland, Albert Hoffman, the guy who
Speaker 1: invents LSD. They sit down and have a conversation. But uh,
Speaker 1: I also want to mention Greenfield, who we've been talking
Speaker 1: about this whole time. It's in Algiers with the two
Speaker 1: of them first meet up. So this is Greenfield's first
Speaker 1: experience with with Timothy Leary is while he's on the
Speaker 1: run from escaping prison. When he returned to the US,
Speaker 1: here's the thing, he was facing way more jail time
Speaker 1: than three years, and he informed on all of his
Speaker 1: previous associates to the authorities. That includes his third wife, Rosemary,
Speaker 1: So he informed on her as well. She had left
Speaker 1: him during the middle of all this, he ends up
Speaker 1: writing articles for the conservative magazine National Review. And in
Speaker 1: these articles he starts attacking on 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: And this this again sounds like the classic pattern with
Speaker 1: Leary that the Greenfield points out that he'll he'll get
Speaker 1: on a kick where he's following a rigid system and
Speaker 1: adhering to some sort of you know, expectation of what
Speaker 1: he should be, but it's only gonna last for so yeah,
Speaker 1: he turns around and bites the hand that feeds him.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, so okay. After this, he mainly spends time
Speaker 1: on the campus lecture circuit. This includes public debates with G.
Speaker 1: Gordon Liddy. This is like one of the most fascinating
Speaker 1: parts that we found in this entire affair here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Liddy thing is interesting because both Leary and Liddy
Speaker 1: had become caricatures of themselves at this point, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: inflated cartoon characters of liberal goofiness and conservative uh curmusgionary. Uh.
Speaker 1: They even made a movie to capitalize on their fame
Speaker 1: or or I guess to squeeze the last bits of
Speaker 1: juice out of it. Um And There's a three New
Speaker 1: York Times review of the film by Vincent Canby, and
Speaker 1: he shares the following I thought, I thought this was
Speaker 1: particularly telling. The two men are not exactly freaks, but
Speaker 1: one has the suspicion that they wouldn't be showing off
Speaker 1: in this way if they could possibly make a living
Speaker 1: in some other fashion. Whether accurately or not. The movie
Speaker 1: suggests that the world has passed them by and that
Speaker 1: this personal appearance tour is one of the last ways
Speaker 1: in which each can turn his individual notoriety to profit now.
Speaker 1: The reviewer also goes on to say that despite their
Speaker 1: their personas, there is a scene in the film where
Speaker 1: where each man um and their current wives sit down
Speaker 1: and have breakfast together and they're having just this a
Speaker 1: very normal conversation about you know, just just everyday stuff
Speaker 1: like not a nothing, nothing about law or politics or
Speaker 1: drugs or counterculture. Like there is this moment where you
Speaker 1: see this idea that or perhaps just yet, two people
Speaker 1: who are just trying to make a living for the
Speaker 1: time being, and this is what they have. This would
Speaker 1: have been like, uh, if Steve Bannon and Lindsay Lohan
Speaker 1: went on tour together or had like a reality TV
Speaker 1: show together where they just constantly argued, Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: if you've neither had you know, a significant enterprise to
Speaker 1: to back them up with that, Right, Yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of I get the impression. That's kind of like it's
Speaker 1: kind of like celebrity TV. If if if this had
Speaker 1: happened today, it would have been a Leary and Liddy
Speaker 1: television show on some reality network, right, them trying to
Speaker 1: learn how to dance better than one another? Exactly? All Right,
Speaker 1: why don't we take one more break, and then when
Speaker 1: we get back, we're gonna talk about the end of
Speaker 1: Leary's life and his focus on of all things cybernetics. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we've talked a lot on our show
Speaker 1: before about cyborgs and cybernetics and transhumanism and what that
Speaker 1: has to do with space travel. It turns out Timothy
Speaker 1: Leary in his seventies became fascinated by all this stuff,
Speaker 1: specifically electronic communication, and he would tell his audiences that
Speaker 1: electronic communication was going to be what would free their
Speaker 1: brains and souls from oppressive orthodoxes like education, religion, and politics.
Speaker 1: In particular, he was fascinated by things like virtual reality
Speaker 1: computer games. He even went so far as to start
Speaker 1: his own software company before he died. He also predicted
Speaker 1: that implanted acceptal electrodes would one day be used recreationally. Uh,
Speaker 1: and we're not quite there yet, but it just goes
Speaker 1: to show how how interested he became. You know, the
Speaker 1: role technology could play in alternate states of of awareness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm I'm I don't know if I'm
Speaker 1: quite there with Timothy Leary on this one, because we
Speaker 1: are 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 can imagine. I can't imagine what this be like.
Speaker 1: And I don't know necessarily that these technologies have enabled
Speaker 1: us to a 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 psychedelics,
Speaker 1: and electronics. His other fascination was with death and out
Speaker 1: of body experiences near death, so this was something that
Speaker 1: he turned into a public performance as well. He made
Speaker 1: 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 recorded 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 Leary, but but I went and went into
Speaker 1: it like appreciating some of the things he's said before
Speaker 1: and the use of his persona in various bits of
Speaker 1: fiction or music. And it was it was disappint wanting
Speaker 1: to to really, uh not only to see this pattern,
Speaker 1: but then to spend a lot of time reading about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think like after he had been like, you know,
Speaker 1: he's been mythologized over the years, especially for our generation,
Speaker 1: I expected more. You know, well a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: I noticed that a lot of people were kind of
Speaker 1: critical on Amazon, for instance, of the Greenfield biography because
Speaker 1: they thought, you know, it's like, oh, he's just kind
Speaker 1: of a it's kind of a hatchet job or whatever.
Speaker 1: But uh, I think the thing is that the biography
Speaker 1: reveals more about the real Timothy Leary than a lot
Speaker 1: of people. You know, we're comfortable confronting. Now he's dying,
Speaker 1: as he said, and uh, and he's keeping a track
Speaker 1: of the various substance he's he's taking. So Leary actually
Speaker 1: considered taking LSD on his deathbed, and this would have
Speaker 1: and in doing this, he would have been following the
Speaker 1: lead of Altre Huxley, who took an injection of a
Speaker 1: hundred micrograms on his death ad um. Now, in the
Speaker 1: time leading up to his dead Leary did use ketamine
Speaker 1: and enhanced it with Niger's hawk side he drank towards
Speaker 1: the end there was a lot of smoking, especially Carol Rosen,
Speaker 1: a friend who was that at his bedside, said that
Speaker 1: his penultimate words were why not, why not? Why not,
Speaker 1: repeating 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, given that he knew
Speaker 1: that the cameras were on and everything. That's yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's true. Now, he had pursued chronic suspension at one point,
Speaker 1: but his final wishes were that his cremated remains be
Speaker 1: distributed among his friends as well as shot into space.
Speaker 1: So indeed, a year later, seven grams of his ashes
Speaker 1: and a vial went into a space into space on
Speaker 1: a Pegasus rocket. And this, by the way, it was
Speaker 1: the rocket that also contains seven grams of ashes. From
Speaker 1: a few other notable individuals, including Gene Roddenberry. Now, so
Speaker 1: how do you get Do you buy into that ahead
Speaker 1: of time or does somebody sponsor you? How does that work? Um?
Speaker 1: I think in Leary's case it was a sponsorship situation. Now,
Speaker 1: Greenfield in his biography as 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, you know, a lot of the disorder
Speaker 1: that was there as well. Yeah. Absolutely, But it paints
Speaker 1: him in a nicer picture than I think, honestly, maybe
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 1: So actually, I mean, in this earlier but Leary's archives
Speaker 1: are today's stored at the New York Public Library. Reportedly
Speaker 1: the library paid nine hundred thousand dollars for them, uh,
Speaker 1: and a portion of that, just to be clear, went
Speaker 1: back toward processing the collection. These archives had an interesting
Speaker 1: life before they showed up the library because they were
Speaker 1: moved from place to place so that they could avoid
Speaker 1: the FBI season. Uh. And they they actually did end
Speaker 1: up getting seized by the FBI regardless, and then they
Speaker 1: were returned. They ended up in a storage facility in
Speaker 1: California until now the library houses his documents alongside George Washington,
Speaker 1: Herman Melville, and Truman Capodi. So in closing, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: there was there was definitely a lot more chaos and
Speaker 1: disorder in Leary's life than than than I anticipated going
Speaker 1: in again not not being very familiar with the details
Speaker 1: of his life, just sort of having the pop culture
Speaker 1: awareness of him and a meat you filtered awareness of him. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it ended up being, uh at times, a depressing journey
Speaker 1: to to uh to read more in detail about his
Speaker 1: life and his work. Yeah. I agree. The New Yorker
Speaker 1: review of the Greenfield biography that we use for a
Speaker 1: lot of this compares him to Wilhelm Reich, who we
Speaker 1: also have an episode on uh, and they basically say, look,
Speaker 1: they're both renegade psychologists who became brand fads among quote
Speaker 1: unquote enlightened people. Uh. To me, Leary seems to be
Speaker 1: more like a sly huckster than any kind of contributor
Speaker 1: to philosophy or psychology. Like I said, that's unfortunate. I
Speaker 1: guess I just expected more. Uh. The Don Latin book
Speaker 1: The Harvard Psychedelic Club, which I also read through, refers
Speaker 1: to him as the trickster throughout the book, like they
Speaker 1: give a sort of like mythical mythical status to each
Speaker 1: of the characters from the Harvard Psychedelic Club. Richard Alpert
Speaker 1: or or Rohm Dosk gets the term the seeker, but
Speaker 1: Leary is the trickster, so he'd be kind of like
Speaker 1: the 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
Speaker 1: of you know, I ended on a positive note. Leary's
Speaker 1: words have definitely inspired me in the past, and I
Speaker 1: think I'll continue to find inspiration in some of his words.
Speaker 1: One of the weird things that happens with icon celebrities
Speaker 1: and and even profits is that there emerges this disconnect
Speaker 1: between cell and perception, between actuality and the ideal. So,
Speaker 1: you know, the pop culture Leary here is I think,
Speaker 1: something of a fiction, but it can serve as a
Speaker 1: as a beneficial fiction, I think at times. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to to close that here with a quote that
Speaker 1: I've always valued, uh and and one that I tend
Speaker 1: to sort of employ as a guiding principle for for
Speaker 1: stuff to blow your mind. So I will read it
Speaker 1: once again in uh in my impersonation of Timothy Leary
Speaker 1: throughout human history, as our species is face the frightening,
Speaker 1: terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are
Speaker 1: or where we are going in this ocean of chaos.
Speaker 1: It has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the
Speaker 1: educational authorities who 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 LSD information that
Speaker 1: we gave you this week. We are probably going to
Speaker 1: be doing a Facebook Live trailer talk event the day
Speaker 1: after this episode releases, So if you're listening the day
Speaker 1: of go to our Facebook page. Uh that Friday morning
Speaker 1: will probably be on Facebook Live talking about movies that
Speaker 1: 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 uh 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,
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