Program Notes
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Date this live salon was held: October 22, 2020
Guest speakers:
Rio Hahn, Michael Shields, and Ron Turner
Today’s podcast features a recording of a live salon in which former friends and associates of Dr. Timothy Leary shared their remembrances of him on the occasion of 100th anniversary of Dr. Leary’s birth. Among other first-hand accounts, we learned the truth about why Timothy decided at the last minute to not have his head frozen after he died.
Archive of Timothy Leary talkson the Psychedelic Salon
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
And did you know that…
00:00:27 ►
Timothy Leary is dead.
00:00:31 ►
Now he’s always outside.
00:00:35 ►
But he’s dead.
00:00:40 ►
And if you still remember that old Moody Blues song like I do,
00:00:43 ►
well, it probably brings back some good memories for you too.
00:00:47 ►
And, of course, you know that Timothy Leary is dead, but do you also know that it was exactly 100 years ago today that the good doctor was born?
00:00:56 ►
I just finished hosting a live session of the Psychedelic Salon that included some old friends and acquaintances of Dr. Leary’s,
00:01:04 ►
and in just a
00:01:05 ►
moment I’m going to play a recording of that conversation for you. First, however, I want to
00:01:10 ►
let our younger members of the salon know that, well, even if you only have a vague idea of who
00:01:15 ►
Timothy Leary was, nonetheless, you are directly connected to him as well. In fact, Dr. Timothy
00:01:22 ►
Leary is one of your psychedelic ancestors. Now here’s how I figure
00:01:26 ►
that. Obviously, you and I are together in cyberdelic space right now. And the fact is that
00:01:33 ►
had it not been for Timothy Leary, I never would have even found the psychedelic community.
00:01:38 ►
In 1984, I was a 42-year-old Vietnam vet and a Texas lawyer who had never even smoked marijuana.
00:01:45 ►
Then I was offered my first 120-milligram tablet of pure MDMA,
00:01:51 ►
which was called Ecstasy at the time, and at the time it was also still legal.
00:01:57 ►
Now, if you go to psychedelicsalon.com, on the homepage you’ll find a video interview
00:02:02 ►
that I gave about that period in my life.
00:02:08 ►
And in it, I tell about how I accidentally became a drug dealer.
00:02:13 ►
What I didn’t mention in that interview is that the man I wound up working for selling ecstasy was given his first 120 milligrams of MDMA from none other than Timothy Leary.
00:02:21 ►
So, you see, had it not been for Dr. Leary taking my friend on his first ecstasy experience, well, you and I wouldn’t be together here in cyberdelic space right now. So, Timothy Leary is also one of your direct psychedelic ancestors. Now, sit back and, well, as we said in the Navy, smoke them if you got them, and enjoy a few tales about the one and only Timothy Leary.
00:02:48 ►
Today, of course, we’re gathered here to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Dr. Timothy Leary’s birth.
00:02:57 ►
And what I hope to do is to get a few stories about Dr. Leary, particularly from people who had some connection
00:03:06 ►
with him, so that we can kind of keep the memory of him alive. I’ve been, you know, kind of
00:03:13 ►
surprised here in the salon that I would say hardly anybody under 25 has any clue who Timothy
00:03:20 ►
Leary was. He’s just really kind of disappeared into history other than people thinking well you
00:03:26 ►
know he was a crazy ass ahead or something like that but there was so much more significantly
00:03:31 ►
much more to timothy leary even before his first acid trip you know he was a pretty substantial uh
00:03:37 ►
psychologist and so uh i thought it’d be worthwhile to spend the day talking some about Larry and try to make him personify him a little bit.
00:03:48 ►
And not just the, you know, the stuff that we read in the press and all like that.
00:03:52 ►
So I thought, you know, I’ve invited a few people that will show up here in a little bit, I hope.
00:03:58 ►
But I wanted to start with you, Rio, since you’re coming to us from Morocco, of all places.
00:04:05 ►
Got stuck, stranded on your travels to London,
00:04:08 ►
and hope you’ll get over there to meet your grandson eventually.
00:04:12 ►
But now that you’re locked down in Morocco, we’ve got you pinned down,
00:04:15 ►
so maybe you can tell us, share some memories of the good Dr. DeLary.
00:04:21 ►
Excuse me.
00:04:23 ►
Well, I think one of the things that
00:04:25 ►
is
00:04:27 ►
interesting about Tim that people
00:04:29 ►
don’t usually
00:04:30 ►
know is that
00:04:33 ►
he had a very philosophical
00:04:35 ►
side to him
00:04:37 ►
and unfortunately
00:04:39 ►
I don’t have the photograph
00:04:41 ►
with me that I
00:04:43 ►
could show that I did of him night about 2 a.m.
00:04:47 ►
because I would stay with him quite often in Beverly Hills at his place there.
00:04:52 ►
And sitting at a Keith Harrington table, a really philosophical mind.
00:05:00 ►
We would have very deep, long, long conversations into the night.
00:05:06 ►
Another thing is that he was honored very shortly before his death by the American,
00:05:13 ►
I believe it was the American Psychological Association in L.A. for his life’s work.
00:05:21 ►
And he established some of the basic techniques that were used and may still be used for all I know in psychology.
00:05:33 ►
I mean, before he left Harvard, he was quite influential.
00:05:38 ►
On the other side, he always had in Beverly Hills, there was always a stream of people coming through.
00:05:46 ►
So it was one of the great places to meet and have salons, which occurred quite regularly.
00:05:54 ►
Some planned, some spontaneously.
00:05:58 ►
There was also, I don’t know if you’re familiar, we held a wake for Tim.
00:06:04 ►
And he decided he wanted to have his wake before he died.
00:06:09 ►
And so why shouldn’t he be there to enjoy it?
00:06:13 ►
And one of his perhaps lesser-known books that he wrote toward the end of his life
00:06:19 ►
was called Designer Dying, which you might find of interest. I was also thinking an interesting story is sort of
00:06:29 ►
the way Tim rolled, which a friend of mine who also at the time I was working on the Biosphere
00:06:36 ►
2 project, a friend of mine, an associate from the project, and I were in LA and staying at his place.
00:06:45 ►
And so we were visiting one afternoon and he said, would you like, you know,
00:06:50 ►
some brownies? And we’re like, yeah, cool.
00:06:53 ►
And so he gave us each a brownie and then Barbara,
00:06:58 ►
his wife at the time came home and said, you know, he said, well,
00:07:04 ►
I gave him a couple brownies.
00:07:06 ►
And she was like, Tim, you’re supposed to give, you know, like no more than an eighth of a brownie to somebody.
00:07:13 ►
And so we were going to a performance art piece in downtown L.A.
00:07:19 ►
and took off from the house because we knew we had to, you know, get there in time.
00:07:27 ►
And to make a long story short, which I could stretch out, but I think we’ve got a lot of other good people to hear from here.
00:07:35 ►
I just recall staying to Malone, my friend.
00:07:38 ►
I said, keep talking to me because right now we’re flying over the L.A. freeway.
00:07:47 ►
me because right now we’re flying over the LA freeway and I want to make sure we have a soft landing when we get to the performance art piece so this not unlike Tim at various times
00:07:57 ►
but always just really a gentleman a very hosp. Toward the end of his life, of course, he knew what was
00:08:05 ►
coming. He did quite a lot of work to organize his archive. And something I wanted to point out,
00:08:14 ►
there is a film that’s coming up. And it’s going to be tomorrow, let’s see, tomorrow morning, the 23rd at 5 a.m. European time.
00:08:29 ►
You can register for it and then need to start watching it and have 24 hours.
00:08:37 ►
And Joanna Harcourt Smith, who was his partner for many years, especially when he was on the run.
00:08:46 ►
It’s a film that was recently done
00:08:48 ►
and she died just a few days ago.
00:08:51 ►
And they’re bringing out an advanced showing of the film,
00:08:55 ►
which will later be on Showtime.
00:08:58 ►
But let me see if I go away from the screen.
00:09:02 ►
I don’t know if I’ll lose you, Lorenzo,
00:09:07 ►
to grab that or I can come know if I’ll lose you, Lorenzo, to grab that.
00:09:08 ►
Or I can come back.
00:09:09 ►
You’ll be fine.
00:09:10 ►
You’ll be fine, I’m quite sure.
00:09:16 ►
And about Joanna, this is the first I’ve heard of this because, you know, she and I have been in contact.
00:09:17 ►
I hadn’t heard that.
00:09:17 ►
What happened?
00:09:45 ►
She had breast cancer and it metastasized and she was in stage four, you know, and what I think it was last week she passed and held on until she had her grandchild there and the whole family and then went peacefully, it sounds like, in a beautiful ceremony afterwards where they surrounded her, laying in her bed with candles and carnations
00:09:50 ►
and other flowers, Tibetan rites over her.
00:09:56 ►
And so it’s quite timely, this Errol Morris film,
00:09:59 ►
the first one he’s done, documentary with his son,
00:10:03 ►
will be released, available, as I say, tomorrow.
00:10:06 ►
Let me switch screens here for a second and see if I can grab it.
00:10:12 ►
Yeah, if you find that, I can include it in the program notes because I’m going to try
00:10:16 ►
to get this podcast out yet today.
00:10:18 ►
Okay.
00:10:19 ►
So that would be very helpful.
00:10:22 ►
Joanne, I interviewed her for a podcast here in the salon and helped her
00:10:26 ►
get her own podcast going. So that’s a shame that she is not with us any longer. She was an
00:10:35 ►
interesting character that, you know, as a 21-year-old girl, really got swept up into some high stakes global politics, I think, you know.
00:10:46 ►
The name of the film is My Psychedelic Love Story.
00:10:53 ►
Maybe you want to type it into the chat.
00:10:55 ►
My Psychedelic Love Story.
00:10:58 ►
And it’s premiering this week.
00:11:02 ►
Well, it says tonight, it’ll be tonight your time, actually, but the effective time will
00:11:09 ►
be 5 a.m. European, so that’s GMT plus one on the 23rd, so that’ll still be the 22nd, which is
00:11:18 ►
tonight, and you can live stream it. It’ll be available for 24 hours. It’s $15.
00:11:27 ►
And I’m trying to see.
00:11:29 ►
Later, let’s see if I can get you a link for it.
00:11:33 ►
Okay.
00:11:34 ►
You can put that in the chat.
00:11:37 ►
That, you know, I wonder if there were, you know,
00:11:44 ►
conversations going on, you know, a few years ago, you know, four or five years ago, people talking about the centennial of Timothy Leary’s birth.
00:12:08 ►
might be really crazy and wild, but I think we will all remember the centennial year of Timothy and Mary’s birth. 2020 has been rather unique. Very unique, and it’s interesting, you
00:12:17 ►
know, the backlash that developed and brought, of course, the effective hippie era to an end in 68
00:12:27 ►
with the burial of Mr. Hippie.
00:12:30 ►
But certainly the revolution continued.
00:12:34 ►
And at the same time now, we’re seeing a renaissance
00:12:37 ►
in psychedelic research and practice.
00:12:41 ►
So it’s a very interesting time with what’s going on, as you say, in his 100th
00:12:50 ►
anniversary and the election coming up and everything, but coinciding with that is an
00:12:56 ►
opening in consciousness that we haven’t seen for quite a long time. I just received a notice today
00:13:04 ►
from a university student that’s calling for speakers
00:13:07 ►
for one of their psychedelic conferences on university campuses, and those are taking place
00:13:12 ►
everywhere. There’s psychedelic societies on many, many university campuses, and that is such a switch
00:13:18 ►
from the 60s and 70s, you know, that I can remember in the 70s, something or other, when Richard Nixon
00:13:26 ►
declared that Timothy Leary was the most dangerous man in America. And I think it’s safe to say that
00:13:32 ►
he’s had to give that title up for someone else. I think we can all see who is the most dangerous
00:13:40 ►
man in America. But, you know, it’s been a long and bumpy road to get from where Timothy Leary
00:13:46 ►
was leading the charge for psychedelics. And I always want to point out that, you know, I think
00:13:52 ►
that Dr. Leary got a really bad rap for a lot of people say he ruined the 60s, but he wasn’t the
00:13:58 ►
one that was holding acid tests with a thousand people getting uh dosed without even knowing it he was actually doing some
00:14:05 ►
serious uh tripping and researching i think he was much more serious scientist than he gets credit
00:14:11 ►
for yeah i i would agree with you by the way i just did post in the chat the link uh for the film
00:14:21 ►
which will be available for 24 hours i I should say this is Joanna’s story,
00:14:27 ►
so don’t take it as the story of Tim’s entire life.
00:14:31 ►
But not having seen the film yet,
00:14:33 ►
I can’t say how much they’re going beyond her particular part of the story.
00:14:39 ►
But I think one of the most significant works that he did was, and of course he was the co-author with Albert Metzger, of the psychedelic experience.
00:14:55 ►
And in a lot of the talks that I’ve been giving, I’ve tried to point out to people who, as you say, young people haven’t even heard of him in many cases.
00:15:14 ►
But that book, I think, was a real valuable, very valuable resource to us at that time in the beginning years when LSD and the other psychedelics became more common and available,
00:15:22 ►
even though they were still, of course, illegal.
00:15:24 ►
common and available, even though they were still, of course, illegal.
00:15:35 ►
And it’s still a great reference book for preparation for taking psychedelics.
00:15:41 ►
So that’s something I think that has kind of been lost along the way that is well worth going back to.
00:15:42 ►
Is that the book that is colloquially referred to as the Tibetan book of the
00:15:47 ►
dead?
00:15:48 ►
It was psychedelic experience was based on the Tibetan book of the dead.
00:15:53 ►
Right.
00:15:55 ►
And it talks of course about ego death, which, you know,
00:15:59 ►
sufficient dose you undergo with LSD and other psychedelics.
00:16:04 ►
dose you undergo with LSD and other psychedelics.
00:16:13 ►
And frankly, I don’t think you actually can appreciate the efficacy and what can be gained from a true psychedelic trip without getting to a dosage level in which ego death occurs.
00:16:22 ►
But it really is, especially, you know,
00:16:25 ►
just even getting into the introduction, which you can probably do just reading,
00:16:30 ►
you know, on Amazon, they let you read a few pages,
00:16:33 ►
gives you a whole new perspective. And of course,
00:16:37 ►
that was the development of set and setting and dosage as some of the main
00:16:43 ►
guideposts for preparing for a psychedelic journey.
00:16:48 ►
And that was basically the first psychedelic trip guide that came out, I think, that I’m
00:16:54 ►
aware of, other than maybe a few little mimeograph things here and there.
00:16:58 ►
No, I would agree with you, yeah, as a trip guide.
00:17:01 ►
I made several works, you know, like Doors of Perception by Hux i made several works you know like doors of perception by huxley were
00:17:07 ►
great you know at preparation but i think the psychedelic experience is probably still a unique
00:17:15 ►
book in the field let’s let’s bring michael shields in here too because michael has literally
00:17:22 ►
read everything that uh dr Leary has written and unlike
00:17:26 ►
me he actually remembers almost all of it too Michael yeah we were actually I think it was you
00:17:31 ►
Michael that maybe talked about a few weeks ago here in the salon that this feels like we’re in
00:17:36 ►
a bardo right now was that you I don’t think so Lorenzo but that’s a really good way to look at what’s happening. We’re definitely transitioning
00:17:45 ►
some kind of Bardo
00:17:47 ►
for sure, the whole
00:17:49 ►
planet is.
00:17:51 ►
That’s an amazing observation by
00:17:53 ►
somebody.
00:17:56 ►
What about some of
00:17:57 ►
Timothy’s books that
00:17:58 ►
maybe haven’t been
00:18:00 ►
as widely read as should be?
00:18:03 ►
I think what Rio just said about Psychedelic Experience is true.
00:18:06 ►
It’s a fantastic book.
00:18:08 ►
It’s also like a historical document.
00:18:12 ►
But Timothy would have said, based on it,
00:18:15 ►
he would have changed the title to the Tibetan Book of the Dying
00:18:19 ►
rather than Dead because you’re still alive when you’re dying.
00:18:24 ►
And that’s real important to Timothy’s writings and theory that we could get
00:18:30 ►
into later. But, but my, my favorite book,
00:18:35 ►
I think Timothy really another, the next book that came out was
00:18:39 ►
Psychedelic Prayers based on the Tao Te Ching.
00:18:47 ►
And I highly recommend that too.
00:18:50 ►
That’s even more fantastic.
00:18:53 ►
It’s a little better.
00:18:55 ►
It’s a little,
00:18:55 ►
it’s different in the sense
00:18:56 ►
it’s totally based on
00:18:58 ►
the Taoist religion
00:19:01 ►
doesn’t have any content
00:19:04 ►
other than nature,
00:19:06 ►
which is highly recommended for psychedelic experiences.
00:19:10 ►
Whereas the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
00:19:13 ►
that’s sort of like if you were brought up a Catholic,
00:19:18 ►
you know, you might have trouble with all that scary Tibetan iconography that the Tibetans have, just like the Catholic
00:19:29 ►
Church has.
00:19:32 ►
You know, they used to be called bad trips, then it was changed to difficult trips, and
00:19:38 ►
now it’s called challenging trips.
00:19:43 ►
I’ve had all three actually
00:19:45 ►
you probably will eventually because everybody has problems
00:19:51 ►
or
00:19:53 ►
difficulties and that’s what’s happened in the last 50 years
00:19:59 ►
especially in the new
00:20:02 ►
this micro dosing bloom that’s happening.
00:20:08 ►
It’s all based on having really, really informed, you know,
00:20:15 ►
guidance for people who are going to be doing this for the first time or any time.
00:20:19 ►
You know, James Fadiman has a fantastic book out on you know this is all that recent
00:20:27 ►
you know approval by the
00:20:32 ►
New York Times the government of people doing micro dosing
00:20:36 ►
for some reason which is very inexplicable
00:20:40 ►
but it’s happening and that would be an example of
00:20:44 ►
being in a bardo this
00:20:46 ►
really weird bardo where the biggest promoters of micro dosing is forbes magazine you know and
00:20:54 ►
the business community and they think it’s some kind of magic dust that if you look at the top
00:21:02 ►
billionaires or now maybe trillionaires,
00:21:05 ►
they all, many, many more, almost all of them had psychedelic experiences
00:21:11 ►
and they were dropouts from Harvard.
00:21:13 ►
I mean, it’s a very bizarre situation we’re in.
00:21:21 ►
I mean, if anybody wants to know the exact thing,
00:21:23 ►
I can give you the specific references if you want them.
00:21:26 ►
We’ll get back to that.
00:21:28 ►
I see that Ron Turner has joined us now.
00:21:31 ►
And, Charles, could you introduce Ron and maybe bring him up to speed in what we were talking about here?
00:21:37 ►
It would be a real pleasure.
00:21:39 ►
Ron is the founder and publisher of Last Gasp of San Francisco,
00:21:43 ►
one of the great long-running independent underground presses in the United States, and for a long time a distributor of a lot of really key and important ideas and thinkers in psychedelic thinking.
00:21:59 ►
And so it’s thrilling to have him here today.
00:22:02 ►
Ron also is one of the great fathers of underground comics.
00:22:07 ►
So, Ron, why don’t you unmute and join us here?
00:22:11 ►
We got you muted here, Ron. Let me unmute you here.
00:22:15 ►
Hang on, Ron, you’re muted.
00:22:17 ►
You’re going to have to push a button on your PC there, Ron, to unmute yourself.
00:22:27 ►
Hey, Ronzo, you’re muted.
00:22:29 ►
You’re still muted, Ron. There’s an
00:22:31 ►
unmute button.
00:22:33 ►
Let me see if
00:22:34 ►
maybe I can do it here.
00:22:38 ►
If you put the cursor
00:22:40 ►
on your picture and go to those
00:22:42 ►
three little dots up in the
00:22:44 ►
right-hand corner,
00:22:46 ►
you should be able to unmute.
00:22:53 ►
Hallelujah.
00:22:55 ►
There you are.
00:22:56 ►
There we got you.
00:23:00 ►
The gods of psychedelic are upon us.
00:23:07 ►
I was really enjoying the sense of Michael when you were talking about the dumbing down of psychedelics, the kind of trips people were having. And I was glad you got into microdosing.
00:23:19 ►
People were talking about like, let’s go down and get a drink, you know. And you say, what?
00:23:25 ►
You want to microdose?
00:23:26 ►
Why do you want to microdose right now?
00:23:28 ►
I’m driving far.
00:23:32 ►
I’m not sure.
00:23:33 ►
It’s people are, I guess they’ve seen enough fire eaters.
00:23:37 ►
They think they can do it, you know.
00:23:40 ►
Yeah, I understand that Google actually has a full-time employee that is teaching people how to microdose.
00:23:48 ►
Now, I don’t know if that’s an urban legend or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me, I guess.
00:23:54 ►
Well, Lorenzo, the Google starters are famous for going to Burning Man.
00:24:02 ►
So there is an urban myth that they’re psychedelicists.
00:24:08 ►
Yeah, on one hand, that would be an amazing job, and on the other hand, you know, how they
00:24:13 ►
square that with what’s going on with their government problems right now is really something.
00:24:18 ►
Let me circle back to you, Ron, for just a minute. I want to say I’m really honored to
00:24:23 ►
get to meet you, and although I have my archive and library and storage
00:24:27 ►
right now, there are two or three copies of Last Gas Magazine
00:24:31 ►
in there from way long ago. So I’m really thrilled
00:24:35 ►
to have you here in the salon with us. So thanks for being here.
00:24:39 ►
Sure. Well, I’ve got a warehouse full of them if you ever run out.
00:24:44 ►
I’ve got a peculiar piece of memorabilia here today.
00:24:47 ►
This is the Timothy Leary Neurocomics that Ron published in 1979.
00:24:54 ►
And, Ron, this was – what’s his name?
00:25:00 ►
George DiCaprio.
00:25:01 ►
Well, go ahead.
00:25:03 ►
No, it is.
00:25:04 ►
It was George DiCaprio. He was go ahead. No, it is. It was George DiCaprio.
00:25:05 ►
He was a good, good friend of Tim.
00:25:09 ►
And so he and I, George and I became friends when he was living in New York.
00:25:18 ►
And I was out here about 1971 or something like that.
00:25:22 ►
You might want to mention that’s Leonardo’s father, right?
00:25:26 ►
Do I have to?
00:25:29 ►
Yeah.
00:25:32 ►
I had my 80th birthday a week or so ago and
00:25:34 ►
they got on a Zoom call
00:25:36 ►
with me with a bunch of other people. It was really
00:25:38 ►
fun to see them because
00:25:39 ►
once somebody becomes real famous,
00:25:42 ►
you don’t get to see them much anymore.
00:25:44 ►
That was… Yeah was in the early years
00:25:48 ►
with Tim
00:25:49 ►
I got to know him but just
00:25:52 ►
briefly and
00:25:53 ►
it was like elbowing your way
00:25:56 ►
through the lines to the
00:25:58 ►
Beatles or something back then
00:25:59 ►
getting really close to him
00:26:02 ►
and conversations were impossible
00:26:04 ►
so but eventually that broke down getting really close to him and conversations were impossible.
00:26:08 ►
So, but eventually that broke down.
00:26:15 ►
I think my thing with, and George and I became really close friends.
00:26:20 ►
And we had our boys like three years apart and they kind of grew up together and we’ve had lots and lots of friends, but he was like, uh, DiCaprio should be on here.
00:26:28 ►
More than anybody. I think, um,
00:26:32 ►
that who’s not already on here. And he, uh,
00:26:38 ►
had this idea of good. There’s a, this big thing about the,
00:26:41 ►
I think the comets were happening then. And was that Kahootek or something?
00:26:47 ►
Tim was writing,
00:26:48 ►
Tim was writing about anything back then.
00:26:50 ►
It seemed like.
00:26:50 ►
Yeah, Kahootek.
00:26:52 ►
Kahootek, yeah.
00:26:53 ►
And he, that was going to bring it.
00:26:55 ►
I don’t know.
00:26:56 ►
Talk about fairy dust that was going to come through us
00:26:59 ►
and drop fairy dust on us and change us all.
00:27:02 ►
And it was going to be a psychedelic experience.
00:27:04 ►
And good God. So, drop fairy dust on us and change us all and it was going to be a psychedelic experience and good god
00:27:06 ►
um so um you know just super important comet kahoot tech uh joanna harcourt smith was the
00:27:16 ►
one who was published the the pamphlet called uh neuro it was called neuralurologic or Starseed.
00:27:28 ►
It was called Starseed.
00:27:29 ►
It was a pamphlet.
00:27:31 ►
And we actually drove down to Mexico to see the comic for Who Ticked.
00:27:38 ►
Weren’t you happy with it?
00:27:42 ►
Would you say more about the neurocomics that he just showed there for really that super
00:27:48 ►
important book that you published neurocomics is actually the best visual representation of
00:27:58 ►
timothy’s thinking about psychedelics you, in a comic book form.
00:28:13 ►
Charles, can you look at the page there and see who was the artist in the book?
00:28:15 ►
Yeah, that was Pete Von Schally.
00:28:17 ►
Yes, okay.
00:28:20 ►
Pete’s still around, and he just put out a book of monsters,
00:28:22 ►
the famous movie Monsters.
00:28:26 ►
Yeah, get some ideas. he did capture stuff very well
00:28:27 ►
and he too was a really close friend of
00:28:30 ►
DiCaprio’s
00:28:32 ►
and
00:28:32 ►
he got to know Tim and he’s just an
00:28:36 ►
excellent artist and he’s still at
00:28:37 ►
every Comic Con so
00:28:39 ►
you guys see that on the page it’s pretty
00:28:44 ►
oh yeah
00:28:44 ►
we got a lot of flack from people saying like
00:28:49 ►
how come there’s so many words so many pictures
00:28:51 ►
well it’s an extraordinary document too because it’s it’s very esoteric philosophy you know it’s
00:28:59 ►
it’s tim going through his philosophy of the zodiac and how each piece of the Zodiac ties to an element of both human development and this star going life extension, you know, development as well.
00:29:15 ►
Who was the audience? How was it received? And was that your first real entry into spending more time with Tim or did that come before or after?
00:29:23 ►
into spending more time with Tim, or did that come before or after?
00:29:35 ►
Oh, it came a bit after I spent more time with him, yeah. It was – I originally – he had originally wanted me to –
00:29:41 ►
well, first of all, my history with Tim goes back to,
00:29:45 ►
I was a psych student, a psych grad student,
00:29:49 ►
and I also worked at Kaiser Hospital doing studies in allergies and emotions.
00:29:55 ►
I’ve always done jobs before I was qualified, including publishing,
00:30:01 ►
and I’m still doing that.
00:30:02 ►
I’m still unqualified.
00:30:02 ►
publisher and I’m still doing that still unqualified
00:30:03 ►
so
00:30:06 ►
when I was at Kaiser I kept running into
00:30:10 ►
files on the
00:30:11 ►
MMPI the Minnesota
00:30:13 ►
Multiphasic Personality Inventory
00:30:15 ►
that Tim helped put
00:30:17 ►
together
00:30:18 ►
wow
00:30:19 ►
psychedelic text
00:30:23 ►
mental praise you had at the time to determine Wow, you know that? Psychedelic text. Psychedelic.
00:30:30 ►
Mental praise, I mean, you had at the time to determine certain things,
00:30:32 ►
certain patterns of answering questions,
00:30:36 ►
and whether you refuted your earlier answers later on in the test.
00:30:38 ►
It would tell you an awful lot about somebody.
00:30:43 ►
And there was always a one-trick question that was pretty obvious, obvious. And this is the top of my head hurts.
00:30:48 ►
It was a couple of times.
00:30:50 ►
I was like, so who’s going to fool with this one?
00:30:52 ►
You know, I guess somebody said really does hurt.
00:30:56 ►
But, you know, I’d see this.
00:30:58 ►
And so I had access to the files, medical files.
00:31:01 ►
And I was always around there.
00:31:03 ►
The only problem was that there was a very famous allergist
00:31:07 ►
by the name of Feinberg and he was really into
00:31:12 ►
children’s allergies and I had to often go to his office to find certain
00:31:15 ►
textbooks to look for something in. He hated hippies.
00:31:20 ►
I had hair down my shoulders for years.
00:31:24 ►
He never knew that I worked for him I had hair down my ears and he never
00:31:25 ►
knew that I worked for him
00:31:27 ►
and he’d see me in there
00:31:30 ►
I’m looking for something and
00:31:31 ►
I was always trying to get to his master files
00:31:34 ►
to see if he had anything on Tim
00:31:36 ►
or not
00:31:37 ►
before he’d
00:31:39 ►
wonder in and say
00:31:40 ►
get the hippie, call the security
00:31:44 ►
I worked there so they’d be in closets and things until he’d calm down wonder in and say, that hippie again! Get the hippie! Call the security!
00:31:46 ►
And every year I worked there, so they kept me in closets
00:31:48 ►
and things until he calmed down and went away.
00:31:51 ►
And he’d put me out and I’d go back
00:31:54 ►
to try to find him.
00:31:55 ►
So I was in contact with him
00:31:58 ►
when he was in prison.
00:32:01 ►
And
00:32:01 ►
we began a little correspondence
00:32:03 ►
and he sent me this book he wanted me to publish of his stuff.
00:32:09 ►
Well, then, you know, you guys know the rest of the story.
00:32:12 ►
He escaped and went off.
00:32:15 ►
So the problem was with that book, I found out,
00:32:18 ►
was that he had sent it out to about 18 other publishers,
00:32:22 ►
except that he had changed, changed like one paragraph in it.
00:32:26 ►
So everybody thought they had an original book
00:32:28 ►
that nobody else had.
00:32:31 ►
One of the
00:32:32 ►
things I really loved about Timothy was he was
00:32:34 ►
a scoundrel.
00:32:37 ►
And I love scoundrels.
00:32:40 ►
You know, I don’t remember
00:32:41 ►
ever seeing a picture of Timothy Leary
00:32:43 ►
when he wasn’t smiling.
00:32:50 ►
Well, I could only imagine on his face.
00:32:54 ►
Has everybody seen the Chicago 7 movie yet?
00:32:58 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:32:59 ►
It’s fantastic.
00:33:00 ►
Please see it.
00:33:02 ►
It’s a wonderful fiction.
00:33:06 ►
It’s Sasha Baron Cohen plays
00:33:08 ►
Abby Hoffman perfectly
00:33:09 ►
and I can’t believe there’s not a cameo
00:33:12 ►
of Tim in there but anyway
00:33:14 ►
at some point Jerry Rubin
00:33:16 ►
is in
00:33:18 ►
Hollywood not in the movie but in
00:33:20 ►
real life and walks
00:33:22 ►
across the street jaywalking and gets
00:33:24 ►
hit by a bus or car car or something and dies.
00:33:28 ►
And there’s a funeral and I can’t make it,
00:33:30 ►
but I was going to go down and stay with Tim if I did make it or DiCaprio.
00:33:35 ►
And so I know that it’s about the time of the funeral
00:33:38 ►
and Tim’s on the phone with me and I’m saying,
00:33:43 ►
what’s up, Tim?
00:33:45 ►
And he says, Ron, Ron.
00:33:46 ►
He says, Eldridge Cleaver’s walking down my driveway.
00:33:49 ►
What do I do?
00:33:53 ►
Oh, yeah, the time that he goes to Eldridge Cleaver,
00:33:56 ►
and he’s still afraid of the Black Panthers.
00:34:02 ►
I said, what are you doing?
00:34:07 ►
But he’s coming. He’s almost to the door.
00:34:08 ►
He says, don’t answer the door.
00:34:17 ►
What you mentioned, Lorenzo.
00:34:19 ►
He didn’t like physical violence.
00:34:24 ►
He saw he was going to get an ass whooping or something, he thought.
00:34:29 ►
And so he would not have been smiling at that time.
00:34:35 ►
His smiling was quite intentional.
00:34:39 ►
He decided at some point that he was going to smile all the time,
00:34:43 ►
and that was the persona he wanted to put out.
00:34:47 ►
I think he even put that in his autobiography,
00:34:51 ►
that he didn’t want the press ever to take a picture of him when he wasn’t smiling.
00:34:53 ►
He didn’t want them to think he was in distress of any way.
00:34:54 ►
Exactly.
00:34:57 ►
Yeah. Smart move.
00:35:03 ►
Ron, I only have one story about George DiCaprio.
00:35:07 ►
One time I was in a cop bar in L.A. We were doing a tribute for Terrence McKenna, and I wound up sitting with George.
00:35:11 ►
And he told me about when he was a High Times distributor in Hollywood back a long time ago,
00:35:17 ►
back when you must have known him originally.
00:35:20 ►
And he said that one day he was really hurting for cash and had to do something.
00:35:23 ►
and he said that one day he was really hurting for cash and had to do something so he he sent his then wife with a case of high times to deliver to a store
00:35:28 ►
somewhere in LA area she came back and he was yeah he was really desperate for
00:35:35 ►
the money and he asked her for the cash and she said oh I did better than that
00:35:38 ►
and she had a whole bag of mushrooms that she got instead. It must have been a fun days back then, huh? Yeah, and
00:35:48 ►
those fun days back then had been going on for
00:35:51 ►
a while. So, yeah, George
00:35:56 ►
came out from New York. He printed a comic book
00:35:59 ►
and he hates to hear this story, but he won’t tell
00:36:04 ►
it himself, so what can a guy do?
00:36:06 ►
And so he used to print this comic book called Greaser Comics.
00:36:14 ►
He was living with Lou Reed at the time.
00:36:18 ►
And Lou’s girlfriend, Anderson, she was a singer and a performer.
00:36:24 ►
And then she did a comic book with George called baloney moccasins.
00:36:30 ►
And I talk about kind of psychedelia and, you know,
00:36:34 ►
kind of spilling over into your artistic world.
00:36:37 ►
And then he distributed that.
00:36:39 ►
And then I started distributing greaser comics for him out in San Francisco.
00:36:45 ►
And we got on the phone.
00:36:46 ►
We became fast friends on the phone back when we had to pay for it.
00:36:51 ►
Although we finally got blue boxes so we didn’t have to pay for them anymore.
00:36:55 ►
Anybody remember what blue boxes were?
00:36:58 ►
I had a girlfriend when I was in college.
00:37:01 ►
And without the blue box, we wouldn’t talk.
00:37:07 ►
Right. People wouldn’t understand today but it was expensive to communicate back
00:37:11 ►
then. And you had to shout if it was long distance sometimes. If you had a
00:37:17 ►
bad line. Yeah, oh it’s terrible. And but these blue boxes could imitate the
00:37:23 ►
sounds of that the phones used to communicate with each other about where it was going and where the call was being directed.
00:37:31 ►
And you could put these little tones in there, doo, doo, doo, and you’d be hooked up to who you were calling on a local call, no charge.
00:37:40 ►
And they wouldn’t know about it.
00:37:43 ►
Actually, the guy that created that is still around, too.
00:37:46 ►
I bumped into him in Arizona about 10 years ago.
00:37:49 ►
He’s still out doing his thing after he got out of prison.
00:37:53 ►
Yeah, well, somebody had to take the fall.
00:37:58 ►
So George did this comic, but he did it in the,
00:38:03 ►
he stored the comics in the elevator shaft
00:38:05 ►
and
00:38:07 ►
the people that did the
00:38:10 ►
movie or they played
00:38:12 ►
Grease and then the movie
00:38:13 ►
stole George’s letterings off of the
00:38:16 ►
Greaser comics
00:38:17 ►
really wow
00:38:19 ►
yeah
00:38:20 ►
but and he was hanging out
00:38:24 ►
with Andy Warhol back then too.
00:38:26 ►
He was always very available to do trips and things or whatever.
00:38:31 ►
But when you got loose on money,
00:38:34 ►
you had to make sales and,
00:38:35 ►
you know,
00:38:35 ►
nobody was backing us for anything.
00:38:39 ►
Just living in our warehouses and doing things.
00:38:43 ►
And anyway,
00:38:44 ►
at some point,
00:38:45 ►
one of the presses that George was using in City Hall
00:38:48 ►
to print the comics on
00:38:50 ►
got the blankets on the presses.
00:38:56 ►
There were transfer rollers and things.
00:38:59 ►
And if you didn’t clean them down,
00:39:01 ►
there’d be a ghost image
00:39:02 ►
of what you’d previously printed on there.
00:39:05 ►
And I guess a couple of guys were sitting there with Mayor
00:39:07 ►
Lindsey,
00:39:10 ►
that’s how far back
00:39:12 ►
it goes, and they’re
00:39:14 ►
opening it up and saying, hey, George,
00:39:15 ►
not George DiCaprio, but hey, Fred.
00:39:19 ►
They’d be
00:39:19 ►
looking at their papers and says, does this
00:39:21 ►
look like a guy’s getting a blowjob to you?
00:39:27 ►
So they called George and asked him about these things
00:39:32 ►
he says gee i don’t know you know it’s like that the whole thing about you know get a hundred
00:39:37 ►
get a thousand monkeys and typewriters and put it to work for a million years and one of them will
00:39:41 ►
create a novel you know just x little dots in the paper and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:39:46 ►
And I’ll see you later.
00:39:47 ►
I got to – and he went down and cleaned the rollers
00:39:50 ►
and then realized that you have to get everything out of the press,
00:39:54 ►
you know, out of the elevator shaft.
00:39:58 ►
And the next thing I knew, I was agreeing to take his comic books,
00:40:01 ►
and they arrived by truck a few weeks later.
00:40:07 ►
And then he and Ermeland arrived out here and
00:40:09 ►
he always wanted to be a script writer
00:40:11 ►
and they moved to Hollywood
00:40:13 ►
to do that and then they had Leonardo
00:40:15 ►
but he made good
00:40:18 ►
friends with Tim down there
00:40:19 ►
and he was
00:40:22 ►
very much into the
00:40:24 ►
intellectual study of psychedelics as well as,
00:40:27 ►
you know,
00:40:28 ►
understanding them.
00:40:31 ►
And I think,
00:40:32 ►
I think I got really close to Tim through Anita Hoffman.
00:40:39 ►
And,
00:40:40 ►
and George had this connection with Anita
00:40:46 ►
and Abby really closely too
00:40:49 ►
so there’s this funny connection that way
00:40:51 ►
and
00:40:53 ►
that all the
00:40:54 ►
latchkey kids
00:40:56 ►
in their neighborhood
00:40:58 ►
by then it was Peggy
00:41:01 ►
DiCaprio
00:41:01 ►
Irma and George had split
00:41:04 ►
and very By then it was Peggy DiCaprio. Irma and George had split.
00:41:11 ►
And very, on both sides, acceptable.
00:41:16 ►
And Leonardo was around and in school. And Peggy had an older son, Adam.
00:41:20 ►
And then all these latchkey kids would come over to the DiCaprio’s house
00:41:25 ►
after school, and they would hang out.
00:41:33 ►
And so George would always like to be having the distribution route
00:41:37 ►
of comics and books and magazines down there in L.A.,
00:41:43 ►
and he would take all the kids
00:41:47 ►
and one day
00:41:49 ►
one of his neighbors came over
00:41:51 ►
and she worked in the movie industry
00:41:53 ►
knocked on his door and says
00:41:54 ►
look I know you like my son David very much
00:41:57 ►
he’s a great kid
00:41:58 ►
and he thinks a lot of all you
00:42:02 ►
he says I’ve got to go back east
00:42:04 ►
for something.
00:42:05 ►
And they said, well, for what?
00:42:08 ►
And she says, well, my ex-husband has come out,
00:42:13 ►
and I’ve got to go back and take care of some business with some things that,
00:42:19 ►
you know, he’s been uncovered.
00:42:21 ►
And the conversation went on, and finally it turned out that that was Anita Hoffman.
00:42:27 ►
And that kid wasn’t David, his name was America. You know, I remember the book that Abby and Anita
00:42:33 ►
wrote to each other, Letters to America, it’s called. And so they were all kids together. So
00:42:40 ►
later on, I think Michael Horowitz was putting Anita up
00:42:45 ►
in Petaluma.
00:42:48 ►
And I remember every now and then
00:42:49 ►
George would like fly up
00:42:51 ►
and we’d drive
00:42:53 ►
up to Petaluma
00:42:55 ►
and George would lay some money on Anita
00:42:58 ►
to help her out and do things.
00:43:00 ►
So if there’s ever
00:43:02 ►
a saint in this whole business and thing,
00:43:04 ►
it’s George DiCaprio.
00:43:06 ►
I’m going to let you know that he takes care of so many people,
00:43:09 ►
and he never says anything about it,
00:43:11 ►
does anything,
00:43:12 ►
but then because of that,
00:43:14 ►
Anita and I got to be a little bit closer,
00:43:16 ►
and then when Tim came,
00:43:19 ►
Dennis Barry was living somewhere up around there,
00:43:24 ►
I think at the time,
00:43:23 ►
was living somewhere up around there I think at the time
00:43:24 ►
I remember getting invited to
00:43:27 ►
a coming out party
00:43:30 ►
when Kim’s
00:43:31 ►
ex-wife
00:43:33 ►
reappeared
00:43:34 ►
after being out in the
00:43:36 ►
in the dark
00:43:39 ►
darkness for a long time
00:43:40 ►
and
00:43:41 ►
I don’t know I know I’m rambling, but all these stories
00:43:50 ►
keep flooding in.
00:43:52 ►
Ron, you brought
00:43:54 ►
up the trial of the Chicago
00:43:55 ►
- I know Timothy was a witness
00:43:58 ►
in that trial, but he
00:43:59 ►
didn’t appear in the movie.
00:44:01 ►
There are a few things in the movie left out, like the fact
00:44:03 ►
that there are thousands of people outside the courthouse every day,
00:44:07 ►
you know, and things like that.
00:44:08 ►
But can you tell us a little bit about Timothy’s involvement in that trial?
00:44:13 ►
I think he was a character witness or something, wasn’t he?
00:44:17 ►
Well, I wasn’t back in Chicago at the time.
00:44:23 ►
I was out here.
00:44:23 ►
I wasn’t back in Chicago at the time.
00:44:24 ►
I was out here.
00:44:26 ►
And I’ve talked to so many people about the trial.
00:44:31 ►
I don’t know what Timmy
00:44:32 ►
was doing with that thing so much.
00:44:35 ►
It was just such a long-running circus.
00:44:40 ►
You know, it was like every day was something else.
00:44:42 ►
I know that Hayden didn’t read those names off at the end of the trial.
00:44:49 ►
And I know that Abby,
00:44:51 ►
they should have had Sasha Cohen do the headstand on the defense table.
00:44:56 ►
That would have been perfect, but they left that out.
00:45:01 ►
You know,
00:45:01 ►
Yeah, they, they, they played fast and
00:45:05 ►
loose with a few things. All in
00:45:07 ►
all, though, I think it’s a good film that
00:45:09 ►
people should see to get an idea of what went
00:45:11 ►
on back then, even though
00:45:12 ►
it has some holes in it, and maybe
00:45:15 ►
it’ll lead people to read a little bit more
00:45:17 ►
about it, because it was such a travesty.
00:45:19 ►
It’s just hard to believe that it took place.
00:45:21 ►
In today’s environment, it’s
00:45:23 ►
not that surprising you know
00:45:25 ►
lorenzo yeah what’s really important about that trial is the unfairness
00:45:33 ►
of it the way the judge acted just completely arbitrarily
00:45:38 ►
that applies to what happened to timothy trials. And I think this new movie that was mentioned earlier that I know Joanna was supposedly involved with,
00:45:55 ►
what I read of it already is it’s not going to take notice of that, you know,
00:46:01 ►
when it accuses Tim of being an informer.
00:46:07 ►
They’re going to leave out all these contexts.
00:46:16 ►
But anyway, do you know anything about Leonardo DiCaprio?
00:46:20 ►
Last summer, he was working on a Timothy Leary script that they sold.
00:46:27 ►
They decided not to do it, and Leonardo was supposed to play Leary.
00:46:31 ►
Have you heard anything about that?
00:46:33 ►
That was a plan for a long, long time for Leo to play Tim.
00:46:39 ►
He kind of had to grow into the character.
00:46:43 ►
He was like too young and not filled out enough at the time.
00:46:48 ►
And he, and you’re right, I think that they finally went out. Hollywood’s, I would have gone,
00:46:55 ►
I would have shot 55, you know, movie executives if I was ever trying to put something through
00:47:02 ►
Hollywood. They’re just nuts down there.
00:47:07 ►
And, I mean, they get all the way to the final thing,
00:47:10 ►
and there’s finally like a little, you know, they call it green lighting.
00:47:11 ►
We’ve been green lighted.
00:47:15 ►
You know, it’s like I’ve lost my virginity.
00:47:18 ►
I’m really so excited about it.
00:47:23 ►
But after, you know, I kind of sat on the sidelines and watched so many movies and scripts
00:47:25 ►
and my friends in the movies that it, you know, goes on.
00:47:32 ►
But you bring up another thing about Tim and movies.
00:47:36 ►
Tim was, he was connected to so many movie stars and actresses, people.
00:47:42 ►
He really loved them.
00:47:44 ►
And probably because he was, he had a great act people. He really loved them.
00:47:48 ►
And probably because he had a great act, too.
00:47:49 ►
He was a great actor as well.
00:47:55 ►
And he really was part of it.
00:47:58 ►
Michael Horowitz, again, is kind of an philosopher.
00:48:02 ►
My daughter was Winona Ryder.
00:48:04 ►
So there’s even another connection.
00:48:12 ►
And then one of his wives, I can’t think of her name right now,
00:48:14 ►
tall blonde woman.
00:48:16 ►
Who’s the star of Kill Bill?
00:48:19 ►
Uma Thurman.
00:48:21 ►
Uma Thurman.
00:48:24 ►
I can’t hear. Uma Thurman. Uma Thurman I can’t hear
00:48:25 ►
Uma Thurman
00:48:27 ►
Tim was married to her mother for a while
00:48:30 ►
Tim had like seven and a half wives
00:48:34 ►
I don’t know
00:48:34 ►
and when you were working on
00:48:36 ►
one of Tim’s last projects
00:48:39 ►
Surfing the Conscious Nets
00:48:40 ►
you were spending time down there
00:48:42 ►
and interacting with a lot of them and,
00:48:45 ►
and like Winona was ministering to him, right?
00:48:51 ►
Well, Winona, he was Winona’s godfather.
00:48:55 ►
And so she was around and I’d known her from when she was a little girl.
00:49:02 ►
And so I think I’ve met her when she was a little girl. And so
00:49:06 ►
I think I met
00:49:08 ►
her when she was about six
00:49:10 ►
or seven outside the
00:49:12 ►
Fitzhugh Ludlow Memorial
00:49:13 ►
Library.
00:49:16 ►
That
00:49:16 ►
and
00:49:19 ►
which was the Doig Library.
00:49:22 ►
And she grew up to be a pretty
00:49:23 ►
good actress and kid. And she grew up to be a pretty good actress and kid,
00:49:25 ►
and terribly devoted to Tim.
00:49:28 ►
And she’d be around,
00:49:34 ►
but she was mostly around when Tim was dying,
00:49:37 ►
sometime after we’d gotten that
00:49:39 ►
Surfing the Conscious Nets out.
00:49:42 ►
That was Tim’s most happy book he ever had, he told me this.
00:49:46 ►
He always wanted his own comic book, and that was his comic book.
00:49:48 ►
Do you have a copy of that there to show?
00:49:50 ►
I don’t have a copy of that.
00:49:52 ►
I’ve got to shake you down for one.
00:49:53 ►
And I know there are signed copies available on GASP’s website, too,
00:49:56 ►
if anybody is looking for memorabilia.
00:49:58 ►
Yeah.
00:50:02 ►
I just want to bring something up that is something that we always in this
00:50:09 ►
community tiptoe around me in particular,
00:50:12 ►
because there’s a lot of controversy about whether Timothy ever gave states
00:50:18 ►
evidence or talk when he was in custody and all.
00:50:21 ►
And I’ve read a lot about that.
00:50:22 ►
I’m convinced that he’s clean,
00:50:25 ►
and Joanna convinced me that too.
00:50:27 ►
But do you guys have any comment on that?
00:50:30 ►
I don’t want to hog the screen like I’ve been hogging it here,
00:50:34 ►
but I do have something.
00:50:35 ►
No, please do.
00:50:36 ►
Please do.
00:50:39 ►
Well, yeah, there was always this whole thing.
00:50:42 ►
Everybody said, like, Tim was good, good, good,
00:50:44 ►
and then he was like, however, he was a fink.
00:50:45 ►
He lied.
00:50:46 ►
He ratted things out.
00:50:49 ►
And I remember, excuse me, it’s not COVID-19.
00:50:56 ►
It’s COPD.
00:50:58 ►
It’s nothing serious.
00:51:01 ►
and so
00:51:03 ►
I ran into some of the
00:51:08 ►
anybody here know the Brotherhood
00:51:10 ►
I knew
00:51:14 ►
Nick Sand he’s the only one I knew in the
00:51:16 ►
Brotherhood and he wasn’t technically in the Brotherhood
00:51:18 ►
he was just their alchemist
00:51:19 ►
ah okay that’s good
00:51:22 ►
anybody else
00:51:24 ►
okay well ah okay that’s good anybody else okay
00:51:26 ►
well
00:51:28 ►
I got together
00:51:30 ►
at Tim’s Wake with some
00:51:32 ►
of them
00:51:33 ►
and it was held at Tim’s house
00:51:36 ►
and
00:51:37 ►
it was
00:51:40 ►
a wonderful day
00:51:41 ►
if any of you knew Tim’s house
00:51:44 ►
in Hollywood,
00:51:46 ►
it was set on the edge of a cliff.
00:51:48 ►
And if you’re out by the edge of the cliff and turned around,
00:51:51 ►
you could look up over the house and see the back of Sharon Tate’s house.
00:51:56 ►
That’s since been bulldozed down.
00:51:58 ►
It was a pretty interesting place to be.
00:52:04 ►
It was just a real salon. Everybody coming over every day and doing things there.
00:52:10 ►
And then to have the wait there was, Tim married George DiCaprio and Peggy Carrar on his back there.
00:52:18 ►
It’s a great tape.
00:52:20 ►
Every time he’d open up a Bible and start reading it, he’d toss it over his shoulder, toss it into the cliff.
00:52:29 ►
I wouldn’t expect any less.
00:52:32 ►
No, it was great.
00:52:33 ►
And I couldn’t make it to the wedding,
00:52:35 ►
so every about 10 minutes,
00:52:37 ►
we were only getting along at that time.
00:52:40 ►
He said, where’s Ron Turner?
00:52:42 ►
God damn, where’s Ron?
00:52:46 ►
So at the wake
00:52:48 ►
Peggy brought me
00:52:49 ►
the videotape
00:52:50 ►
and I had to sit
00:52:51 ►
and watch it
00:52:52 ►
because I hadn’t
00:52:54 ►
been at the wedding
00:52:55 ►
so I did
00:52:56 ►
and
00:52:57 ►
and while I’m sitting
00:52:59 ►
watching it
00:52:59 ►
I’m talking to
00:53:00 ►
some of these guys
00:53:01 ►
that turned out
00:53:01 ►
to be in the brotherhood
00:53:02 ►
so we get
00:53:04 ►
I guess
00:53:04 ►
because they could see that I was talking to some of these guys that turned out to be in the Brotherhood. So I guess because they could see that I was close to Tim,
00:53:09 ►
they opened up to me.
00:53:12 ►
And so we talked a lot.
00:53:14 ►
And I said, well, tell me this story about this.
00:53:16 ►
He was, you know, supposedly he ratted you guys out, you know.
00:53:22 ►
What was the real story?
00:53:29 ►
you guys out you know and what was the real story and he’s and they said very simply that well yes he did we gave him exactly what to say and he said it and
00:53:36 ►
he got out and they said did you notice that none of us ever went to jail?
00:53:46 ►
You know, I said, that’s right.
00:53:47 ►
That’s perfect.
00:53:49 ►
He did rat them out.
00:53:53 ►
He told them exactly what they wanted to hear and believe.
00:53:57 ►
And it did nothing to anything.
00:54:03 ►
Well, Ron, I’ve heard that story several times,
00:54:07 ►
but you’re the first one I’ve heard it from that’s a firsthand recording of it.
00:54:13 ►
So I really appreciate you passing that along because there’s been a lot of people talk about that.
00:54:15 ►
But you actually talked to some of the Brotherhood that told you that, right?
00:54:17 ►
Yes, absolutely.
00:54:18 ►
Fantastic.
00:54:20 ►
They’re still secretive as hell.
00:54:23 ►
They don’t leave you a business card.
00:54:25 ►
I don’t you know they don’t leave you a business card i don’t blame them so well that’s that is uh really important to have that uh from you and and you know and and
00:54:35 ►
hearing from them because i’d always heard that he’d been uh you know he he passed along
00:54:40 ►
information that that he knew wasn’t going to hurt anybody, but I hadn’t heard before that the Brotherhood actually put him up to what to say. So that makes me feel even better
00:54:50 ►
about Timothy.
00:54:53 ►
DiCaprio and I, later on at the wake, DiCaprio and I remembered that Tim was always afraid
00:55:00 ►
of being raided and tripped up by the police. And so he always had a way to quickly stash his drugs.
00:55:09 ►
And we both kind of remember that.
00:55:13 ►
And we ran around and looked under every light cable lamp that was on.
00:55:17 ►
It would have been better for the powder, for the pills,
00:55:22 ►
if he would have shoved them underneath there.
00:55:23 ►
But somebody would beat a skewer already.
00:55:28 ►
Well, those were the good old days
00:55:30 ►
that were also kind of tense old days
00:55:33 ►
from time to time too, you know?
00:55:37 ►
I had hoped to get Bruce Dahmer
00:55:41 ►
and Dennis Berry in here today
00:55:45 ►
because Dennis is the one that
00:55:46 ►
took over the Leary archive
00:55:49 ►
from Joanna
00:55:50 ►
Leary and
00:55:52 ►
they were roommates at one time and then
00:55:55 ►
got Bruce involved and they finally got it to
00:55:57 ►
the New York City Public Library
00:55:59 ►
but for years
00:56:01 ►
Dennis had
00:56:03 ►
paid for all the storage herself.
00:56:05 ►
It took two storage units to hold the stuff.
00:56:09 ►
And I was there and went through it one day.
00:56:13 ►
And the amount of stuff in that archive is astounding.
00:56:17 ►
I don’t know how much the New York City Library kept.
00:56:20 ►
But among other things that I found when I was just kind of at random poking through it,
00:56:25 ►
his mother had kept a book, a baby book, and actually recorded the date, the first day he
00:56:31 ►
actually splashed in the bathtub. So that’s how complete that archive is. And I found laundry
00:56:38 ►
receipts from Vacaville Prison where he had his laundry done. I mean, his archive had everything in it. And she finally was
00:56:47 ►
able to negotiate with the New York City Library to sell it to them so that Timothy’s heirs could
00:56:53 ►
get something. And when they came up to get it and took it out of storage, she called Bruce in a
00:56:59 ►
panic and said they have dumped his entire book collection and clipping collection from newspapers into the dumpster.
00:57:09 ►
And so Bruce dropped everything, got in his van, drove up there, jumped in the dumpster,
00:57:13 ►
and was able to save most of it before the garbage truck got there.
00:57:16 ►
So Bruce now has his library, including autographed copy of Doom from Frank Herbert,
00:57:23 ►
dedicated to Timothy Leary and stuff like that,
00:57:25 ►
that the library threw out,
00:57:27 ►
including all his big collections of scrapbook.
00:57:31 ►
You know,
00:57:31 ►
he had a clipping service that clipped everything he was mentioned worldwide.
00:57:36 ►
And Bruce has that whole collection now and they’re trying,
00:57:39 ►
the internet archive is going to have to build a special scanner to scan it
00:57:43 ►
because of the size of it.
00:57:44 ►
But eventually all that will be online. The books of course uh you know are are books and
00:57:50 ►
the library didn’t keep them because they had all those books but some of those are really valuable
00:57:54 ►
i think that’s one of the problems with uh getting you know selling your archive to some places that
00:58:00 ►
uh you think that oh now it’s safe, but it’s not.
00:58:06 ►
You know, they need space.
00:58:11 ►
It’s horrible what happens to some of this stuff.
00:58:14 ►
Yeah, I know the University of Purdue now has all the Sam Groff stuff
00:58:18 ►
and most of Gary Fisher’s stuff,
00:58:22 ►
although Gary left me a number of his original papers that I still
00:58:25 ►
have, and I have tons of tapes and a lot of original stuff like that, and, you know, mine’s
00:58:31 ►
all in a storage container right now because I don’t have room for it, and I’ve thought about
00:58:37 ►
that, you know, the people put these things in archives, and, you know, the New York City
00:58:41 ►
Library Archive, I don’t know how you can get in to see all this stuff.
00:58:48 ►
So, you know, I’ve got a lot of books. I’ve got an autographed copy of Secret Chiefs that Myron, Stan Groff, Albert Hoffman, and the Shulbens all autographed.
00:58:58 ►
I’ve got a copy of the analog drug law that Sasha sent me.
00:59:05 ►
And so you know what I’m going to do with all that stuff?
00:59:07 ►
I’m going to give it away to all of the people in the salon.
00:59:11 ►
I’ve been writing about it in these journals I’m doing, the Chronicles,
00:59:15 ►
and I’m going to eventually get it to probably somebody like Charles
00:59:19 ►
who can distribute, you know, to everybody
00:59:21 ►
so everybody can have a little piece of it
00:59:23 ►
and it isn’t in one location, and get it out there. I’ve also got some things from the military that I think should be
00:59:30 ►
made in the public domain. The military did a publication of atrocities in Vietnam,
00:59:36 ►
complete with pictures, and My Lai was not the worst of them, and it’s a Pentagon publication
00:59:41 ►
that was classified top secret, but somehow wound up in my archive.
00:59:45 ►
So those are things that I want to get out into the archive.
00:59:48 ►
And I think that, you know, like Gary Fisher’s original papers, I want to put them in the hands of some young people who are doing research right now that might, you know, take good care of them and feel that they’re important pieces of paper.
00:59:59 ►
So that’s one thing I think that we should all be looking at.
01:00:03 ►
How do we get things, you know, like Ron,
01:00:06 ►
I’m sure you’ve got a collection that just will blow people’s minds.
01:00:09 ►
And, you know, how do you preserve all of those things?
01:00:14 ►
You know, I don’t have anything that’s a collection per se.
01:00:16 ►
I just have bits and pieces of stuff.
01:00:18 ►
But how do we save this information that’s not digital to get it out to the people
01:00:27 ►
that are going to need it in the years to come?
01:00:29 ►
We’re, we’re, we’re part of the international silverfish association.
01:00:38 ►
And how do you, how do you protect it?
01:00:40 ►
You try to keep it from getting wet, basically, either from the bottom or the top.
01:00:48 ►
And then you try to keep it away from fire.
01:00:54 ►
What are you going to do?
01:00:55 ►
You’ve got to build a concrete thing somewhere with humidifiers in it and put it in a…
01:01:01 ►
Yeah, the thing to do is to digitize as much as we can just so it’s out there.
01:01:06 ►
Go ahead, Charles.
01:01:07 ►
So speaking of saving things, there’s a great Tim story that – it belongs to John Longy,
01:01:14 ►
but maybe you can tell it, Ron, involving when Tim came to town
01:01:18 ►
and he left you a message regarding the cryonic disposition.
01:01:23 ►
You know what I’m – I don’t know the story all that well, but do you have this one?
01:01:29 ►
No, I need to read it from along me, really, before I can tell you.
01:01:33 ►
Okay, well, real, real briefly then.
01:01:35 ►
So while Ron was working on surfing the conscious nets,
01:01:38 ►
or right afterwards, I think they’re in the promotional halo,
01:01:41 ►
Tim was very concerned about making sure that he would be,
01:01:46 ►
have his head frozen. Yes. Okay. You want to go ahead?
01:01:50 ►
Yeah, it was a little, he was, Tim was dying and he was very happy with his,
01:01:57 ►
you know, he’s just called the book, which is a graphic novel,
01:02:01 ►
his comic book.
01:02:02 ►
And we printed it on really nice paper, and it’s in color.
01:02:08 ►
And the designer, Tim wanted it to look like, I mean,
01:02:14 ►
computer stuff was going very fast at that time,
01:02:17 ►
becoming more usable and readable.
01:02:20 ►
But there was a certain point in time where things looked like screen grabs off of TV sets
01:02:28 ►
were very blurry
01:02:31 ►
and didn’t things that look right but he wanted it to look like that
01:02:35 ►
in order to fit the complex story that he’d written about
01:02:39 ►
these characters
01:02:44 ►
and he was using people like Susan Sarandon
01:02:46 ►
and other friends like that as characters
01:02:48 ►
in the piece.
01:02:51 ►
And his designer guy,
01:02:52 ►
God, what was his name?
01:02:55 ►
He was always at Tim’s house
01:02:57 ►
making some art thing for Tim.
01:03:00 ►
And he did the whole comic book thing.
01:03:03 ►
And he was very, very positive.
01:03:05 ►
Anyway, so the book had come out and we were doing all these things and he was the whole comic book thing, and he was very, very positive. Anyway, so the book had come out, and we were doing all these things,
01:03:08 ►
and he was slowly dying, and we were talking about chirogenics
01:03:14 ►
and how he wanted to be coming back, you know, and whatever.
01:03:19 ►
And he had all this equipment outside of his bedroom sliding glass.
01:03:24 ►
they had all this equipment outside of his bedroom sliding glass.
01:03:30 ►
It was kind of like a ranch-style house and very California-like,
01:03:31 ►
almost like an Eichler.
01:03:37 ►
And he had a sliding door next to his bedroom that would lead out on his patio.
01:03:39 ►
And he was really happy with that.
01:03:42 ►
He would like to go out and have his coffee and his acid in the morning and sit there under a tree and look.
01:03:45 ►
And he really loved the birds.
01:03:46 ►
I think he could talk to the birds.
01:03:50 ►
And he would wonder back in.
01:03:54 ►
But you had to almost stumble over this equipment they were going to use to remove his head at death.
01:04:01 ►
And I don’t remember what the
01:04:05 ►
message was somebody left me a message
01:04:08 ►
they probably never gave it to me
01:04:10 ►
but
01:04:10 ►
I had a great staff
01:04:13 ►
and
01:04:16 ►
so
01:04:17 ►
but the thing was with Tim was
01:04:19 ►
one day he called me up
01:04:21 ►
and had said
01:04:24 ►
I’m not going to have my head removed anymore.
01:04:29 ►
And I said, oh, yeah.
01:04:31 ►
He says, well, I was watching these guys out here today that came around to inspect the equipment and all this.
01:04:37 ►
And they’re all in white coats and they’ve got clipboards.
01:04:40 ►
He says, I don’t want to wake up in 50 years with a bunch of guys with clipboards and white coats talking to me
01:04:47 ►
my little head you know
01:04:49 ►
forget it
01:04:51 ►
you know I had heard that he had changed his mind at the last minute
01:04:57 ►
and again you provided some fascinating insight there
01:05:00 ►
I didn’t know what it was that caused him to change his mind
01:05:03 ►
I think it was just,
01:05:05 ►
he just finally realized who his audience is going to be if he ever did wake
01:05:11 ►
up, you know.
01:05:14 ►
They weren’t his people, right?
01:05:16 ►
No, I, towards the end of his life,
01:05:19 ►
I had a wonderful time with him because I came down and spent a week to help
01:05:23 ►
out. When he first got ill, severely ill,
01:05:27 ►
he had tons of people over there all the time. His garage was full of
01:05:31 ►
a whole bunch of folks on computers anyway.
01:05:35 ►
And his son was there, and he’s one of his sons.
01:05:39 ►
So there was always like a little group of camaraderie going on.
01:05:45 ►
And then there was the visitors in the house,
01:05:47 ►
and then there were the evening parties.
01:05:48 ►
You know, he was always in the middle of a big drink-up almost
01:05:57 ►
of friends and family and strangers and everybody coming over.
01:06:02 ►
So at some point,
01:06:07 ►
though everybody got worn out from taking care of him.
01:06:11 ►
And I came down cause there really was virtually nobody there.
01:06:16 ►
And when Nona would come over and cook lunch and there’d be myself and maybe one or two other people would drop by during the day or, but you know,
01:06:21 ►
it was pretty limited, but the guy was such a party animal.
01:06:24 ►
I mean, every night I load him in his wheelchair,
01:06:28 ►
take him out the driveway,
01:06:29 ►
put him in my tiny rent-a-car
01:06:31 ►
with the wheelchair in the trunk.
01:06:34 ►
We’d drive down to Sunset Boulevard.
01:06:36 ►
He wanted to go partying.
01:06:38 ►
He wanted to go clubbing.
01:06:41 ►
So we did.
01:06:42 ►
And that was so amazing to me
01:06:44 ►
that we’d stop into every place
01:06:46 ►
and not only would everybody know him but he’d know every doorman every parking lot attendant
01:06:53 ►
every waitress by first name and remember them and you know to me that was like most important
01:07:01 ►
about a person’s character is you do not rise above the mass you’re in.
01:07:06 ►
Be part of the mass.
01:07:09 ►
And Tim was definitely a person of the people in that regard,
01:07:13 ►
and also a respectful person of the people.
01:07:18 ►
The way that Tim approached his death is something that was very inspirational to me
01:07:25 ►
because I’ve never actually told anybody this before.
01:07:28 ►
I was struggling with prostate cancer at the same time he was going through his last year.
01:07:34 ►
And I was following him on the Internet.
01:07:36 ►
He was on the net all the time.
01:07:37 ►
He was talking about dying on the net.
01:07:39 ►
And I thought I was going to die myself.
01:07:41 ►
I had, you know, eventually I eventually I had surgery and cured now.
01:07:46 ►
But it was a very difficult time for me because I thought I was I really thought of dying.
01:07:52 ►
And then I saw how he was approaching it. And I thought, well, I’m not going to be a little wimpy asshole coward and die like that.
01:07:59 ►
I’m going to die like Timothy Leary did. And so he really did a lot to help me get through that period. And,
01:08:06 ►
you know, I never met the man, but he was an inspiration to me in that regard. I think we
01:08:10 ►
all need to give a little thought to how we’re going to die. I even gave a talk about it a year
01:08:16 ►
or so ago, psychedelic hospice. But I think that he is so much more, he was so much more,
01:08:24 ►
and his work still remains that way, and his spirit
01:08:27 ►
is still with us, that I think that it’s important that we not just kind of say, oh yeah, he was a
01:08:33 ►
good, you know, he did acid a lot, but he also was a brilliant scholar and an important man in his
01:08:39 ►
field, and like you just said, even more important than all than all that Ron he was a man of the
01:08:45 ►
people he never forgot where he
01:08:47 ►
came from and I think that’s awesome to hear
01:08:49 ►
that
01:08:50 ►
also he’s
01:08:55 ►
a guy that
01:08:56 ►
you know he kind of
01:08:59 ►
he had one hand in the
01:09:04 ►
19th century and one hand in the 19th century and one hand in the 20th century.
01:09:10 ►
And his,
01:09:11 ►
you know,
01:09:13 ►
when he,
01:09:14 ►
he grew up at West Point,
01:09:16 ►
right?
01:09:17 ►
Right.
01:09:18 ►
His dad was the,
01:09:20 ►
was a doctor there.
01:09:22 ►
And he kind of think for a few minutes about what it would be like.
01:09:27 ►
You know, everybody’s playing soldiers and whatnot.
01:09:32 ►
He joined the military before World War II.
01:09:37 ►
And he was in what became known as the Air Cavalry,
01:09:41 ►
except back then it was the real cavalry.
01:09:44 ►
They were actually riding horses to go into battle.
01:09:48 ►
You know, so, I mean, that’s how far Tim had gone through.
01:09:52 ►
And he had every opportunity to be a complete snob.
01:09:56 ►
And maybe he was earlier.
01:09:57 ►
I don’t know what he was like when he was like,
01:09:59 ►
I can imagine what he was like in college or when he got his PhD.
01:10:05 ►
But he, you know, in these professions, you know, you can be a real,
01:10:11 ►
it’s a real hellhole for jerks in the profession.
01:10:16 ►
It is.
01:10:18 ►
I’ll tell you what, we’re a little past the end of our time.
01:10:21 ►
I know some people are here because they’re listening in from work right now,
01:10:25 ►
and I don’t want them to get in trouble.
01:10:27 ►
But, Ron, I would love to have another conversation with you.
01:10:32 ►
Maybe you can even bring George DiCaprio in.
01:10:35 ►
I’d love to if I could.
01:10:38 ►
Well, why don’t you, with or without him, I’d love to get you back.
01:10:41 ►
We do this every Thursday morning at 1030 and every Monday night at 630.
01:10:46 ►
And any time that you can join us, just let Charles know,
01:10:50 ►
and we’d love to have you.
01:10:51 ►
I want to hear more of these old stories to tell you the truth.
01:10:55 ►
And on top of that, you’re the first person in the salon that’s finally older than me.
01:10:59 ►
I’m 78, and I finally am not the oldest guy here.
01:11:04 ►
So I’d like to have you back for that reason, too.
01:11:06 ►
High school class of 60?
01:11:10 ►
High school class of 60, you’re right.
01:11:12 ►
Okay.
01:11:14 ►
All right.
01:11:15 ►
Hey, Lorenzo.
01:11:16 ►
Yeah, go ahead.
01:11:17 ►
No, go ahead, and then I have an interjection.
01:11:18 ►
I was going to say, you were 58 then, right?
01:11:22 ►
High school?
01:11:24 ►
1953, yes. Yeah, yeah. Where did you go to high school, right? High school? 53, yes.
01:11:26 ►
Where’d you go to high school, Ron?
01:11:28 ►
Theodore Roosevelt High School in Fresno.
01:11:31 ►
Ah, okay. California boy.
01:11:33 ►
I’m not going to let him change the name either.
01:11:37 ►
Go ahead, Charles.
01:11:38 ►
So I know we’re wrapping up, so I’ve got a question really for all four of you,
01:11:43 ►
Michael, Rio, Ron, and Lorenzo. And Ian and I were talking about this after the salon last week. You look back at Tim, and there’s a lot of folks that, you know, look at his contribution through to get out of prison. And then there’s,
01:12:11 ►
you know, the Tim of the 90s, the, you know, Saint Tim, you know, and so there’s all of these kind of caricatures of him. But why going into the mainstream of the 21st century, should we
01:12:16 ►
remember him? What should we take from his example that makes him more than just a historical
01:12:21 ►
curiosity? I’m interested in what each of you has to say about that.
01:12:30 ►
I’m just going to very quickly add in that for, for me coming, you know, I was at Santa Cruz in the nineties and he was a bit of a legend in the
01:12:34 ►
counterculture. And then he came to,
01:12:37 ►
he came to UC Santa Cruz and did a show and it was, I mean,
01:12:41 ►
it was incoherent.
01:12:43 ►
People shouted him off stage shouting, the emperor wears no clothes. And it was very much there. There was a feeling of like, the reason we have this fucking drug war right now is because people like this guy blew it all up and weren’t responsible with the sacrament, with molecules.
01:13:08 ►
molecules. And in a lot of ways, it sort of reminds me of when marijuana was first decriminalized in Colorado, and all these bakers got together and were making 200 milligram candy bars that looked
01:13:14 ►
like they were good for kids. They look like, you know, a Mars bar or something like that.
01:13:18 ►
And you’re like, no, you guys, you’re going to blow it this way. We can’t like, and so that,
01:13:22 ►
that, so he was like a very mixed bag like i was
01:13:26 ►
aware of his history and so to just add on to what charles charles just said what do you think his
01:13:32 ►
contribution is not not only what can we take from him but how can we kind of get the good
01:13:38 ►
parts of his legacy going forward well you can take the refined sugar out of the candy bars.
01:13:52 ►
So, Michael, do you want to add something?
01:13:57 ►
Oh, yeah.
01:13:57 ►
I would say the most important thing is this book, Darwin’s Pharmacy.
01:14:07 ►
It documents quite thoroughly an English professor in Pennsylvania.
01:14:13 ►
His name escaped me for a second.
01:14:16 ►
But it’s called Darwin’s Pharmacy.
01:14:17 ►
And it’s a really thorough documentation of all the media lies about Timothy.
01:14:23 ►
They’re just like we’re experiencing today.
01:14:27 ►
You know, these things are all mockingbird operations, you know,
01:14:32 ►
to destroy the counterculture and specifically Timothy.
01:14:37 ►
But the most recent thing I’ve realized about Tim that I would say is the
01:14:43 ►
reason they were fired from Harvard,
01:14:47 ►
what, what, what, what led to that of Ram Dass becoming a hippie,
01:14:52 ►
you know, a Ram Dass become a Richard Alpert becoming an Indian guru.
01:14:57 ►
And is they woke up the children.
01:15:03 ►
The reason was, is that children of the rich people,
01:15:06 ►
the 1% were being woke up to the history of the United States with the
01:15:12 ►
Indians and the, and, and the blacks.
01:15:15 ►
And that’s something that’s happening right today.
01:15:18 ►
That’s what’s happening today is a direct relationship to the
01:15:23 ►
establishment losing, losing their grip and lorenzo would know
01:15:28 ►
this they don’t have good titles of the land harvard it does not have legitimate title to
01:15:35 ►
the land it’s on just like in hawaii doesn’t you know just like the u.s properties in haw is a bad title. I mean, President Clinton
01:15:45 ►
admitted that we illegally overthrew the Queen of Hawaii.
01:15:49 ►
So that’s actually what happened at Harvard.
01:15:53 ►
Why we even know about Tim was because of this.
01:15:57 ►
That’s the reason it was in the New York Times.
01:16:02 ►
Because this was very unusual,
01:16:08 ►
professors being fired. and that happened in 1963. So it’s all documented in the Harvard Crimson School archives. You know the actual
01:16:18 ►
day-to-day shenanigans going on. So Rio Rio, you wanted to add your two cents
01:16:26 ►
in how things should be remembered in this century?
01:16:30 ►
That Andy Weil, of course, published the story
01:16:34 ►
in the Harvard Crimson about giving LSD to
01:16:38 ►
undergraduates, which started to lead finally
01:16:42 ►
to them leaving. But the thing I want to say in response to Charles’ point, question,
01:16:51 ►
is that I recall Albert Hoffman always kind of differed with Timothy
01:16:57 ►
because Albert thought that LSD should be reserved for the elite,
01:17:04 ►
thought that LSD should be reserved for the elite,
01:17:10 ►
that it was the type of substance that needed to be used in a certain way.
01:17:12 ►
And while I won’t disagree with that,
01:17:19 ►
I do think that Timothy served historically a very important role.
01:17:23 ►
And I’d say none of us would be here in the psychedelic salon and many other things wouldn’t exist if Timothy hadn’t introduced large numbers of people to LSD and other psychedelics.
01:17:34 ►
And perhaps more importantly, worked out methods and techniques of how to approach them in a responsible and good way
01:17:49 ►
to give you preparation and to open up consciousness.
01:17:55 ►
You know, Albert may have brought the substance to us,
01:17:59 ►
but Timothy got it out to enough people that we do have a change in the world.
01:18:08 ►
And we now, of course, are having the backlash perhaps bigger than ever.
01:18:14 ►
But still, it’s become a real situation of you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus.
01:18:21 ►
And I don’t think we would have had a bus without Timothy.
01:18:32 ►
I think that’s excellent, well put, excellent insight there, Rio, and I agree. Timothy jerked the acid out of the laboratory away from the researchers and got the people involved, too.
01:18:41 ►
I think we’ll pick this up again Monday night, but I, I, I’ll answer your question, Charles,
01:18:47 ►
with a Timothy Leary quote that I actually had transferred,
01:18:51 ►
made into a rubber stamp that I gave to my youngest grandchild.
01:18:55 ►
And I think this advice is, is the best that he ever gave.
01:18:59 ►
And that’s think for yourself and question authority. That’s,
01:19:03 ►
that’s what he gave to me, and I appreciate it greatly.
01:19:07 ►
So listen, everybody, thanks for being here.
01:19:09 ►
And until next time, keep the old faith and stay high. You’ll find your feet back on the ground You’ll rise so high, you’ll swim so low
01:19:28 ►
Timothy
01:19:29 ►
You’ll fly on this astral plane
01:19:39 ►
You’ll take your trips around the land
01:19:43 ►
You’ll read about the same day We’ll be right back. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:20:20 ►
Namaste, my friends.