From the Vault: Timothy Leary, Part 2

you and Christian did about Timothy Leary. Yeah, we figured since we have the big psychedelic series that we've been putting out, you know, the new episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, it made sense to revisit these older episodes that that explored some of the similar territory, you know, some similar history by focusing in on the life and death of Timothy Leary. All right, so we hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff

Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Segar, and this is part two of our Timothy Leary l s D series of episodes. We've already done part one where we talk about the basic science behind l s D and psilocybin and the research that's been done using these psychedelic substances. And we talked about the first part of Timothy Leary's life leading up to his research on this. Yes,

that's right. So if you if you missed part one, go back and listen to it, because that's the one that's going to be front loaded with all that LSD science and just the initial period of Leary's life which which ultimately kind of sets the sets the pace for the rest of his life, like the destruct self destructive behaviors, the patterns, they're all pretty much present before he even

you know, gets that finishes his education. So I've been sitting around the house reading about Timothy Leary for the last couple of days and my wife says, out of nowhere, you know, I met him, right, And I was like, no, really, And we both went to college at the University of New Hampshire for undergraduate and before I got there, but

while she was there, either as a freshman or sophomore. Uh, Timothy Learry came on one of his infamous campus speaking tours, gave one of his you know, enlightenment talks, and then afterwards my wife was outside the venue just like smoking a cigarette, and Timothy Leary came out and sat down next to her and just smoked a cigarette with her, and they chatted for like five or ten minutes, and then he got up and went on his way. What

they talked about, she didn't really say. She just said that like he was this kind of kind cool older guy. But when I read about his life and all of the uh sort of women he went through, I can't help but imagine that he's the kind of like old He was the kind of older man who leeringly went up to eighteen year old girls after talks and was like,

let's talk about LSD. You know. Yeah. One of the interesting things that Robert Greenfield points out in his biography, though, is that apparently, like there's the Leary that we all imagine, which is often that that cool older guy, you know, with all this charisma and certainly seems to have had a certain amount of Christmas entire life. But there's there was this period where he was kind of like a um, kind of just like a greasy guy with a mustache

in ill fitting clothing. Like that was the version of him before his first wife died. Uh. And it's it was after that that things begin to change and he kind of morphed into this uh this more you know, the older hip cool Leary that we instantly imagine. And this really all began at Harvard University, the place you would least expect it. So Leary joined Harvard University in nineteen fifty nine. But contrary to myth, I want to establish this because so many of the research got pieces

of research got this wrong. He taught there, but he was not a professor there. He was not like a tenured faculty. Okay, he was teaching there for sure, and he was part of the psychology department. Now originally his research they're focused on the interaction of dimensions of personality and social relationships. He also did some work there as a psychotherapist. Leary was really anti behaviorism, and he disagreed

that psychologists should only concern themselves with observable behavior. This was the exact opposite of what was in trend at the time. He more wanted to explore thoughts and beliefs and other internal mental states. He actually later on would compare himself in this role to William James, who is understood as the father of American psychology, uh and who was also known to use nitrous oxide to stimulate mystical consciousness. Well,

so would Lear. Yeah. Later on, uh so at Harvard along with a guy named Richard Alpert who would later go on to become Rom Doss. Uh This you might know Ram Doss from the sort of infamous meditation book I guess called be Here Now. Uh So he they worked together there in the psychology department. Leary introduced others on the Harvard faculty to psilocybin. And this, as we talked about last episode, is the active ingredient in certain species of mushrooms. And at the time it was legally

available for research. But what about his first experience with this stuff? Well, he takes psilocybin while he's on vacation in Quernavaca, Mexico. This is he and some friends were on vacation in between semesters. They took some samples of mushrooms. Uh. And their argument for the research that they were doing. This is back at Harvard was that if psychology is the study of the mind, then it should have a legitimate interest in how cognition, perception, and emotion are affected

by mind altering substances. So some argued at the time that they were also unaware of the potential dangers of such research. Right, So, because psilocybin and LSD were so new on the scene, especially in America, uh that this team of psychologists, no matter how good intention they were, they weren't aware of what the drawbacks could be, and Larry and Albert agreed to policies to protect their subjects.

So this included no participation from undergraduate students. They were not supposed to be giving any kind of psychedelics to the undergraduate students at Harvard, but in nineteen sixty three, Albert was dismissed after he administered psilocybin to an undergraduate off campus, reportedly for sexual favors, although that is it's unclear whether or not that's true. So Leary begins administering

these drugs to other researchers. He also administers it to a group of prison inmates and a group of Divinity students for his research. This was called the Harvard Psilocybin Project, and the goal basically of this project was to document the effects of psychedelics on human consciousness. The notes from these studies were very carefully doc commented in scripted, and we know this because Timothy Leary's archives are pretty well

maintained in there at the new York Public Library. Yeah, in the various product he was involved, and he was he was apparently very big on everyone providing him with lots of data, and it was kind of a meticulous record keeper in that regard. So let's take a little bit closer look at these these studies that he did. Okay, let's look first at the one that he did with a group of Divinity students. So this was called the

Good Friday Experiment, and it went like this. They gave psilocybin to ten students and ten to a placebo group. All of them then went to a Good Friday service. They wanted to see if this would facilitate any kind of mystical or spiritual experience, and in fact, eight of the ten reported a mystical experience. One reported a feeling of sacredness in a sense of peace. The placebo group, however,

sat quietly through the service. The others would quote laid down or wander around the chapel muttering things like odd is everywhere or oh the glory. What Leary failed to report in the study was that one of the subjects actually had a disturbing reaction and had to be given a dose of thorazine to calm down. Now you look back on this, that's a huge lapse of research ethics.

That's that's not good. So so that's unfortunate. Now, Rick Doblin, who is the founder of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, he's come up on the show before. We talked especially about MAPS during our M d M A two parter. He went back and he replicated this study, and he interviewed seven of the ten students involved, and they all said the experience reshaped their lives in profound ways.

The student who reacted poorly actually said that he became convinced that he had been chosen to announce the arrival of the Messiah and ran from the chapel. So this is apparently what actually happened. He freaked out, he started running away from the chapel. Responsibility like you need that now if he's gonna announced the Messiah on Good Friday, Yeah, of course, yeah, give me some advanced prep on some more prep time. All right, let's talk about the Conquered

Prison experiment next. Okay, this is even wilder. So the aim here was to use psychedelics to reduce the recidivism rate and inmates. Now, Leary was was not interested in working with prisoners for a few different reasons, but he realized that he needed a way to measure that the transformative nature of the drugs that he so believed in, and this offered the chance. So it seems like a

decent argument, right. Could these substances open inmates up in a way that allowed them to discuss their conditions and their feelings, you know, someone who's just been hardened and calloused by you know, by crime, by life, and by incarceration. Could this be the substance to just loosen them up enough to actually get some some work done with them. So over the course of nine months, they used over

a dozen convicts there as test subjects with psychedelics. Again, Rick Doblin replicated this study and re analyzed it in UH. He found that Learry's conclusion wasn't warranted. Larry's conclusion was the recidivism rate has been significantly reduced, but Rick actually found maybe not so much. Timothy Learry, Uh, the flaw was in the reporting results. He looked at recidivism rates ten months after release for the psilocybin takers, but he

didn't look at the same amount of time. For the control group, he only looked at them thirty months later. And this is important because recidivism depends a lot on time, with rates rising the more time one is out because of the increased opportunities. You know, when are you gonna end up getting busted and end up going to back to jail? Is going to be the first day year out? Now, it's going to be in the weeks that follow as

more and more temptations come. Yeah, We've talked about this on the show Gee's many many times, but this goes It speaks to something called the halo effect, right, where researchers start seeing their data in a positive light as much as possible. This becomes misleading. This actually seems to go beyond the halo effect. Right, He's not just seeing his data in a positive light. He's manipulating the data

so that it looks better than actually is. So already here you see, like these are basically his two big studies on using psychedelics medically in any kind of way, and he's uh either falsified as research or or made huge gaps in in ethical claims. Now. Albert would later explain that the aim of the project he thought was was pretty solid and with a very reasonable therapeutic model. But he says it would have required long term application and study, and Leary simply didn't have the patients for

long term studies. Um, which it's you can be to make the argument, Well, then you're kind of in the wrong line of business here, right. I mean, if you if you want to conduct a scientific study, if you want to really um do the work, then you need to have the patients to see it through. And if you if you don't have the patients, you're gonna end up with what we have here, a a flawed study that ends up having to be thrown out later on. Now, remember how I was saying that the the notes that

he took during this time were meticulous. Wired magazine did a great article and Timothy Leary and I pulled a quote directly from it. They said later reports adhere less strictly to reality, meaning his reports in one filled out in March of nineteen sixty three, just weeks before he got kicked out of Harvard Leary Prince in big block letters, he puts down a question mark for his age, enlists his occupation as angel. Okay, yeah, so you can start

to see that he's already unraveling here, right. So Larry eventually moves on from psilocybin and he tries LSD in nineteen sixty two and then was dismissed from Harvard in nineteen sixty three. Various faculty and administrators were essentially worried about the safety of their subjects, especially because Larry and Albert were conducting their research while they themselves were under

the influence of psilocybin. Psychologist Professor Herbert C. Kellman circulated a letter around the faculty and called for a meeting calling for the trials to be voluntary. One of Larry's former students remembers that they had a choice at the end of the semester. They could either take their final or they could participate in psilocybin trials. So it's interesting. That's an interesting choice to make. Yeah, yeah, it is

an odd choice to give a college student. So okay, after all this stuff of the faculty, Larry was officially fired for failing to fulfill his teaching obligations because he went traveling instead. This is actually what they nailed him for was that he wasn't teaching his classes. It wasn't the actual research that he was doing. He was just kind of like, I'm just going to travel instead of teaching my classes. And they were like, look, the job,

says teach the classes. You're not really doing the job. Sorry, you're done. Now. This is the moment where Leary and Alpert, though, are propelled into stardom because they get kicked out of Harvard and that's a big deal, right, and they become proponents for psychedelics. Peter Connors writes this book called The White Hand Society about Leary and his relationship with Alan Ginsburg. He says, this is really there's a certain point, and

this is it where Larry gives up on science. Instead of looking for data to legitimize his psychedelic research, he started talking about spiritual enlightenment instead. This wasn't entirely his fault, because let's think about it, he had no adequate scientific language in place to do so. Uh. Instead he fell back on hip poetic language that he picked up from hanging out with people like Alan Ginsberg and Charles Olsen, and that really ended the field of psychology taking him

seriously and anyway. But it also makes me think like ultimately Leary, like this is a guy who was better suited to be a shaman than a scientist. This is a guy who's beterfitted to be this this celebrity figure than than than an actual researcher. Yeah, and now I have a lovely story before we end the Harvard stuff and jump into his time with the Millbrook group. So William S. Burrows is one of the people who actually denounced Timothy Leary for the same thing. WILLIAMS Burrows obviously

interested in psychedelics, author of Naked Lunch. Yeah, he goes to visit Timothy Leary while he's at Harvard. And Burrows gets there and he's like, where are the scientific studies? Like I expected there to be mazes with rats running through them and electrodes and stuff. What you aren't proving anything. All you're doing is just sitting around and getting high and enjoying yourself. So even william S Burrows was like, no, sorry,

Like I'm not buying this. So it makes you sympathize with this Harvard faculty crew who are like kind of painted throughout the history of psychedelics as just being these like stodgy old men, right, But like even william S Burrows was like, you're not really doing anything here. Yea. Burrows is basically saying, I thought you or one of them, but you're just one of us, you know, yeah, yeah, exactly. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna move on to the next

chapter in the life of Timothy Leary. Alright, we're back. So this is a great quote that comes from Louis Mannan's New Yorker article on Timothy Leary, and I think it's a good segue into his time with the Millbrook Group. He says the only things Leary was serious about were pleasure and renown. He underwent no fundamental transformation when he left the academic world for the counterculture. He liked women, he liked being the center of attention, and he liked

to get high. And then there's this is another quote from it. He was a counter culture salesman, and he wore on every occasion the same blissed out smile, a rictus somewhere between a beat a fick, what me worry grin and a movie stars frozen stare into the flash bulbs. One of his ex wives described it as the smile of the ego actually eating the per sonality that I can't think of a harsher condemnation. That's brutal. Alright, So

these guys get kicked out of Harvard. That's where we left off, basically, right, Albert and Leary they go and they say, well, let's just establish our own privately funded research group, and we're going to call it the International Foundation for Internal Freedom, and it's going to be in Mexico. Basically, we'll get a bunch of people around the world to form groups. They'll take LSD and they'll report their results

to us. Will be kind of like citizen science, very scientific. Unfortunately, the Mexican government wasn't having it, so they stepped in and they demanded that Albert and uh Leary leave. So they leave. They've got no place left to go. Cambridge doesn't want them, Mexico doesn't want them. Well, where do they go? They go to this country estate in Millbrook, New York that was provided to them by a millionaire

who sympathized with their research in LSD. This is what we all need, man, We just need a sympathetic millionaire. This millionaire was William Melon Hitchcock, also known as Mr Billy. Huh yeah, Mr Billy was the grandson of the founder of Gulf Oil. This is where all his money came from. And at Millbrook, Leary established what he called the Castallia Foundation, which he said was dedicated to the scholarly study of

LSD and its spiritual applications. So what's one of the things he does while he's there that's anywhere close to academic. He helps develop a device that's called the experiential typewriter. Uh, and this allows psychedelic subjects to record what they're experiencing

as it's happening. Otherwise they can't tell you. This is essentially him saying I can't not be high while I'm doing these studies on people, So we need something that we can just hit buttons of to get across what's happening, rather than have somebody who's in the room who can sort of translate it. Right, It's easier to have a special typewriter for people that that are high then to have a single person that is not high. And seems

to be the case. Yeah, yeah. So this thing looked like an old adding machine, had large buttons on it that had labels to indicate what kind of bodily sensations you're experiencing or if you were having hallucinations or you had a sense of entering the void. I'd love to see what the graphics. I think it would be an emoji. Right, he's describing he was inventing an emoji's only type. Right. You know what, Yeah, we're not giving him enough credit. Yeah,

Tnethy Leary invented emojis. We wouldn't have the Emoji movie if we're not to Timothy Leary. Uh, you know, to to blame him for something else. Okay, So then this thing basically, after you know you're high, you pound on all these buttons, it prints out a little paper script that records what your trip was like. Uh. Some articles characterized the Millbrook Group and Leary as actually not being as a kind of like psychedelically crazy as you might

think they were. Uh. They were sometimes depicted as being East Coast upper class elitists and very exclusive. Now Ken Kisi and his Mary Pranksters came out there at one point, uh, and they were like, oh this is great, let's go meet these psychedelic pioneers. And they're like, oh man, these guys are just total stiffs. They're boring. Um, So it

is interesting interaction between these two worlds. Yeah, like because you tend to think, well, Leary would have just been able to move throughout the counterculture and he would do to be embraced everywhere. But but not so so. During this time with Millbrook, Leary was convicted on several charges. This is when a lot of the prison stuff happens. It's all related to drug use in possession. The Millbrook house itself was raided and Leary was arrested by who

G Gordon Liddy. And at the time G. Gordon Liddy was he was part of the County Sheriff's department there in New York. Now, later on he went to be part of the Watergate Burglary. Uh, and he ends up kind of teaming up with Timothy Leary down the way. Yeah, we'll get into that in a bit. So yeah, so this is, man, this is where things just really started getting bonkers, right Mill Millbrook and afterwards are just where

things really let loose with Leary. Yeah. Now, this is definitely a period where on one level, uh, Leary and his bunch they are being targeted, Yeah, totally. On the other hand, you could also say, well, they're kind of they're making themselves easy targets. But you know, you eventually end up in kind of gray area there when when you're saying, well, you know, did he have it coming

or not. But now, this is certainly a period of time though, where you can say that that Leary and people in his circle were being targeted by the authorities. On the other hand, you might charge while they were, they were kind of making themselves ideal targets for these uh, for these forces as well. Yeah, yeah, I mean, well, let's take this as an example. Okay, so right after this raid happened, Leary goes down to New York and

at the Manhattan Town Hall. There he gives a talk, and there he says ls it might actually be a problem, And he says, quote l s D maybe creating a new race of mutants. This is like the kind of hyperbole that he's starting to use in his rhetoric. He said he was going to stop using LSD and he urged others to do so, but he also advocated that LSD would cure alcoholism, accelerate learning, and maybe helpful and

treating all forms of mental illness. Well, as we know from the last episode, some of these things seem to be true, we just need to do more research on them. But because of its harmful side effects, Leary advised using other methods to produce psychedelic effects. So he says, you can just simply do this with the right lights, sounds,

and a stroboscope. So he's basically like, yeah, I just don't bother with the LSD anymore, just like get in the right mood, man, and we'll like put the right kind of colorful lights in the room and things like that,

and it's the same experience. Well, this is this is a really you know, I found this to be a really interesting chapter in his life based on Greenfields telling in the biography, and I want to just drive home, like Greenfield is not a Leary apologist, if anything, Like his book could have been titled Timothy Leary colon a mess, right, Yeah,

but but he gives an interesting account of this. So in this talk, Leary prophesieses an evolution in human consciousness that will allow humans to consult their own heightened cellular consciousness and live in harmony with nature. So basically like the abandonment of cities and and everything you know is growing green again and where lives like a new Eden. On Earth, you know all, you know, sort of you know, highly optimistic, sort of hippie dippy kind of ideas, which

one might expect. But then he calls for a one year moratorium analysis D usage. And this is because of the changing legal status of of of l s D and on the heels of all these various legal problems that he's encountering. And uh In Greenfield points out that this was quote a calculated strategy to curry favor with the establishment. With the current level of LSD use in America having reached epidemic proportions, Tim wanted to restore his own credibility by becoming the man with a solution to

the problem. Yeah. I mean, I think this is really where we start seeing that he unfortunately made decisions for his own well being over the decisions that may have you know, helped highlight what these psychedelics were capable of any kind of medical or mental health prospect right, Uh, and any really was self serving. Yeah. Now you mentioned how he said, well you can use all alternate methods. Well, he had told he told everyone, well, if you've used l s D, then you maybe don't need it anymore.

You can use alternate methods, and if you don't know alternative methods, I'll teach you. You know, this is a subch price, I bet, but this is an area where I feel like, um, like Leary is correct. You we know that there are other ways to to have hallucinatory experiences, including meditation, including things like yoga. So he's actually correct here. You know, his whatever, his his exact motivations aside. You know, he's saying, yeah, you can, you can have some sort

of heightened sense of of being. You can you can have this alternate experience without the use of this substance that's becoming problematic now. He even goes on to testify before the Senate in nineteen sixty six on the nature of l s D. But this turns out to be

a rather lackluster performance. So he wasn't very assertive. And there's it's I was reading the the back and forth here and there's just like a lot of stuff where he makes a statement and then they're asking him if is that is are you being metaphorical or is that

a literal statement? And they spend time discussing that. They talk about how l s D might theoretically be controlled in some fashion, but everyone was pretty much disappointed with how it came out, Like he basically, this was a point where Leary could really stand up and be the like, the positive, optimistic voice of the of the counterculture and speak for for this substance and speak for its research potential,

and he wasn't able to come through. I just imagined like people like John C. Lily or Sasha Shogun were like just sitting at home, like face to palm, just like, oh, like man, like you were supposed to be the one that made this accessible for the rest of us, and now we're all screwed. Also, I'm really glad Twitter wasn't around when Timothy Learry was alive. Can you imagine he would have been insufferable on Twitter? Probably? All right? This is also around the time where he gives his infamous

nineteen sixties six Playboy interview. This came up in every single article I read about him, So I went and I pulled the actual text and read the interview. This was man. Playboy must have spent a lot of money on the sheets of pay bro that they printed this interview on because it was like a novel. Uh. He makes some really outrageous claims here, including that women commonly can have several hundred orgasms during sex on l s D,

So that doesn't seem to be true. Again, fair enough, we haven't done that much research on it, but I'm pretty sure that's not true. Uh. Some other stuff he said. He talks more about the LSD cease fire, basically saying that he thinks that the two generations that are you know, battling over LSD right now need to just like cool off for a little while so they can get to the point where they can start looking at it analytically.

He also says like some frankly really misogynistic stuff here, not just about you know, women and sex, but he says every woman has built into her cells and tissues the longing for a hero sage mythic male to open up and share her own divinity. But casual sexual encounters do not satisfy this deep longing. Uh. So he's just he's really making these like huge mythic pronouncements. Uh. And it's just I think in poor taste. Maybe in sixties six it was taken as being sort of a little

bit more eccentric and interesting. Yeah, this is certainly to modern readers, this does sound like the ego consuming the personality. Now, this is this next quote is really one of the worst ones he's asked about homosexuality, and he says, the fact is that l s D is a specific cure for homosexuality. It's well known that most sexual perversions are the result not of biological binds, but of freaky, dislocating

childhood experiences of one kind or another. Consequently, it's not surprising that we've had many cases of long term home sexuals who under l s D discover that they are not only genitally but genetically male. I don't even know what he's saying there, uh that they are basically attracted to females. The most famous in public of such cases is that of Alan Ginsburg, who has openly stated that he the first time that he turned onto women was during an LSD session several years ago. This is only

one of many such cases. Okay, so I have a lot of a lot of problems with with all this stuff. Yeah, but I mean one of them is that it's not like Leary didn't, did not and had not had numerous friendships and professional relationships with with with homosexual people, including

Alan Ginsberg. Yeah, and uh dr D was another one I mentioned, Uh, you know, Tuscalaloose has been kind of this uh uh, the university there being this this sort of you know, fortress of of of liberal minds at the time, and a number of different homosexual professors, many of which had you know, had gone to bat for for Leary and helped him with the connections he needed

to navigate that portion of his life. So it just seems just completely ridiculous and u uh and disappointing to to hear him talk about Yeah, I mean, he's saying stuff that's like patently untrue. He has no evidence for that, but that on top of all of it, he's throwing

his friends under the bus. You know. It's just it's strange. Uh. And So really this is the point where a lot of people feel like he helped hasten the blackout on psychedelic research, because every time he had a stunt like this or the one where he gave that talk in the Manhattan town Hall, it would just accelerate the establishments thoughts that, oh my god, we absolutely have to shut

this down, right. So the Millbrook Group goes on to disband and Leary becomes a psychedelic speaker coach, and this is really the latter part of his life what most people know him for. Uh. He's a public figure. He's associated with psychedelics and spiritual discovery. He even starts his own church called the League for Spiritual Discovery. He writes a bunch of books. In a one segment that I read about this, a guy named Steve Silverman described Leary

as a genius marketer during this time. He says he could have had a brilliant career hyping up luxury cars, iPads are social media startups. Instead he was hawking LSD and psychedelic nosis. Uh. And then in that same conversation, Connors, who wrote that White Hand Society book that I mentioned earlier, he responds and he says Leary got caught in a circular trap of marketing himself so he could get money

to then afford to defend himself from his prosecutors. Uh. It's just all kinds of crazy stuff are going on. He gets pulled over in nineteen sixty eight. Uh, he's he's driving down Laguna Beach and he's arrested for drugs. His son was so stoned in the back seat that when they pulled him into the jail, he took off all of his clothes and started masturbating. When he was shown what his son was doing, Leary laughed. His daughter was sentenced to six months in prison. Jack was ordered

to undergo psychiatric observation. Leary got one to ten for possession of marijuana. So this is one of many cases where he goes to jail and he gets out right. He's described in the New York Times obituary when he died. This is how the New York Times described him as having an elegant, happy contempt for authority. And this is around the time where Richard Nixon infamously refers to him

as the most dangerous man in America. Again, hyperbole everybody all over the place sounds a lot like right now people are just throwing out like this stuff that is just like super extreme. Uh. He talks to Marshall McCluin during this period of time. This is when McCluin advises him, you know what you should do. You need to come up with a catchy slogan to advertise the wonders of LSD. This is where we get turn on, tune in, drop out from basically McLuhan saying like you need to get

better at brand marketing. Dude. I I never thought that that was a really great slogan for anything. I mean the dropout part especially. It's just like, I don't want to try something that's gonna make me drop out of something, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um. He basically be comes a celebrity during this time. I said this at the top of the first episode. This is where he becomes famous for being famous. Right. He ends up associating and taking trips with and I mean

psilocybin trips with authors, musicians, criminals, and movie stars. Right. He just gets famous for hanging out with these people. In nineteen seventy, he declares his candidacy for governor of California. Who's he running against? Ronald Reagan? Now this was interrupted when he was convicted on marijuana charges again. Uh, and he escaped. This is this is the craziest part of the whole story. He escapes prison. This is at San Luis Oba Sipo. I guess that's a prison in California,

and his followers help him get to Algeria. He essentially goes from Algeria to Switzerland and then to Afghanistan before returning to the United States in nineteen seventy three, eventually serves three more years in prison. But hold on, I just jumped over like four years of crazy behavior. Let's zoom in on this a little bit. Supposedly, his escape from prison was assisted by the weather underground and in Algeria he was the house guest of Eldridge Cleaver, who

was part of the Black Panthers. That they didn't get along, So he goes on to Switzerland. You know who he meets in Switzerland, Albert Hoffman, the guy who invents LSD. They sit down and have a conversation. But uh, I also want to mention Greenfield, who we've been talking about this whole time. It's in Algiers with the two of them first meet up. So this is Greenfield's first experience with with Timothy Leary is while he's on the run

from escaping prison. When he returned to the US, here's the thing, he was facing way more jail time than three years, and he informed on all of his previous associates to the authorities. That includes his third wife, Rosemary, so he informed on her as well. She had left him. During the middle of all of this, he ends up writing articles for the conservative magazine National Review. And in these articles he starts attacking John Lennon and Bob Dylan.

And the reason why was he wanted to demonstrate that he had rehabilitated so they wouldn't put him back in prison. Oh and this this again sounds like the classic pattern with Leary that the Greenfield points out that he'll he'll get on a kick where he's following a rigid system and adhering to some sort of you know, expectation of what he should be, but it's only gonna last for so Yeah, he turns around and bites the hand that feeds him. Yeah. Yeah, so okay. After this, he mainly

spends time on the campus lecture circuit. This includes public debates with G. Gordon Liddy. This is like one of the most fascinating parts that we found in this entire affair here. Yeah, the Liddy thing is interesting because both Leary and Liddy had become caricatures of themselves at this point. Um, you know, inflated cartoon characters of liberal goofiness and conservative

uh uh curmudgeonary. Uh. They even made a movie, uh to capitalize on on their fame or or I guess to squeeze the last bits of juice out of it um And there's a New York Times review of the film by Vincent can Be, and he shares the following I thought, I thought this was particularly telling. The two men are not exactly freaks, but one has the suspicion that they wouldn't be showing off in this way if they could possibly make a living in some other fashion.

Whether accurately or not. The movie suggests that the world has passed them by and that this personal appearance tour is one of the last ways in which each can

turn his individual notoriety to profit now. The reviewer also goes on to say that despite their their personas, there is a scene in the film where where each man um in their current lives sit down and have breakfast together and they're having just this a very normal conversation about you know, just just everyday stuff, like not a nothing,

nothing about law or politics or drugs or counterculture. Like there is this moment where you see this idea that there perhaps just yet two people who are just trying to make a living for the time being, and this

is what they have. This would have been like, uh, if Steve Bannon and Lindsay Lohan went on tour together, had like a reality TV show together where they just constantly argued, Yeah, and and if you've neither had you know, a significant enterprise to to back them up with that, Right, Yeah, it's kind of I get the impression. That's kind of

like it's kind of like celebrity TV. If if if this had happened today, it would have been a Leary and Liddy television show on some reality network, right, them trying to learn how to dance better than one another? Exactly? All right, why don't we take one more break, and then when we get back, we're gonna talk about the end of Leary's life and his focus on of all

things cybernetics than all right, we're back. So we've talked a lot on our show before about cyborgs and cybernetics and trans human as him and what that has to do with space travel. It turns out Timothy Leary in his seventies became fascinated by all this stuff, specifically electronic communication, and he would tell his audiences that electronic communication was going to be what would free their brains and souls

from oppressive orthodoxies like education, religion, and politics. In particular, he was fascinated by things like virtual reality computer games. He even went so far as to start his own software company before he died. He also predicted that implanted acceptal electrodes would one day be used recreationally. Uh, and we're not quite there yet, But it just goes to show how how interested he became in the role technology

could play in alternate states of of awareness. Yeah, I don't know, I'm I'm I don't know if I'm quite there with Timothy Leary on this one, because we are now in an age where electronic communication is so vast. Like I said earlier, he would have been insufferable on Twitter. I imagine I can't imagine what this would be like. And I don't know necessarily that these technologies have enabled us to break free of oppressive orthodoxy like education, religion,

in politics. But hey, there's still time, right, I mean, it's only been like twenty years since he passed away. Speaking of which, So, he died in nine at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was seventy five years old. Interesting thing about this is, outside of his fascination with psychedelics and electronics, his other fascination was with death and out of body experiences near death. So this was something that he turned into a public performance as well. He

made it an event. He had video cameras record his death. He built the whole thing up from a year before when he was first told that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and his friends collected his writings and his papers all on a leery themed website and they posted films of him there. He even corded his daily drug intake on this website. It was basically a blog before there were blogs. Uh, now I want to recap here.

Let's return just We've been hitting on this over and over and over again throughout the episode, how self destructive he was. He went through two divorces. He went through one separation, his first wife committed suicide. His second wife, who was the mistress that he he left his first wife over and who she committed suicide over. That woman left him after he struck her and their landlady called the police on them. And then his daughter also committed

suicide in nineteen nine. So he left this wake of broken people behind him. It just doesn't leave a good taste in my mouth. Yeah, that was That was my experience with the research as well. I didn't go into this idolizing Leery, but but I went and went into it like appreciating some of the things he'd said before and the use of his persona in various to fiction and music. And it was it was disappointing to to really, uh, not only to see this pattern, but then to spend

a lot of time reading about it. Yeah. I think like after he had been like, you know, he's been mythologized over the years, especially for our generation, I expected more. You know, well, a lot of you know, I noticed that a lot of people were kind of critical on Amazon, for instance, of the green Field biography because they thought, you know, it's like, oh, he's just kind of a

it's kind of a hatchet job or whatever. But uh, I think the thing is that the biography reveals more about the real Timothy Leary than a lot of people, you know, we're comfortable confronting. Yeah, now he's dying, as he said, and uh, and he's keeping a track of the various substance he's he's taking. So Leary actually considered taking LSD on his deathbed, and this would have and in doing this, he would have been following the lead of Altre Huxley, who took an injection of a hundred

micrograms on his deathbed. Um. Now, in the time leading up to his death, Leary did use ketamine and enhanced it with nitrous hawks side he drank Towards the end there was a lot of smoking, especially Carol Rosen, a friend who was at at his bedside, said that his penultimate words were why not, why not? Why not, repeating the final question fifty times fifty times in different voices, and then, according to his son, he said beautiful and died. Okay, part of me is very cynical and has to wonder

how much of that was performed. Yeah, given that he knew that the cameras were on and everything, that's yeah, that's that's true. Now, he had pursued chronic suspension at one point, but his final wishes were that his cremated remains be distributed among his friends, as well as shot into space. So indeed, a year later, seven grams of his ashes and a vial went into a space into space on a Pegasus rocket. And this, by the way, it was the rocket that also contains seven grams of

ashes from a few other notable individuals, including Gene Roddenberry. Now, so how do you get Do you buy into that ahead of time or does somebody sponsor you? How's that work? Um? I think in Leary's case it was a sponsorship situation. Now, Greenfield in his biography has some everything up that I

think rather succinctly. At the end, he says, a self proclaimed at cheer leader for change who himself had never been able to change, Timothy Leary had finally achieved his heart's desire in death as he could never be in life. He was not only free, but soaring through the heavens at which he had gazed so often in wondering during his most improbable life. That's a that's a very nice eulogy, I think, Yeah, I mean, but I mean it also just sums up that, you know, a lot of the

disorder that was there as well. Yeah. Absolutely, But it paints him in a nicer picture than I think. Honestly, maybe we have in the last two episodes of the show, we've been trying. I really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, you know. Yeah, it's the same here. Yeah. So, actually I mentioned this earlier, but Leary's archives are today's

stored at the New York Public Library. Reportedly, the library paid nine hundred thousand dollars for them, uh and a portion of that, just to be clear, went back toward processing the collection. These archives had an interesting life before they showed up the library because they were moved from place to place so that they could avoid the FBI season. Uh. And they they actually did end up getting seized by

the FBI regardless, and then they were returned. They ended up in a storage facility in California until now the library houses his documents alongside George Washington, Herman Melville, and Truman Capote. So in closing, um, yeah, there was there was definitely a lot more chaos and disorder in Leary's life than than than I anticipated going in, again, not not being very familiar with the details of his life, just sort of having a pop culture awareness of him

and a media filtered awareness of him. Um. Yeah, it ended up being, uh at times a depressing journey to to uh to read more in detail about his life and his work. Yeah. I agree. The New Yorker review of the Greenfield biography that we use for a lot of this compares him to Wilhelm Reich, who we also have an episode on uh, and they basically say, look, they were both renegade psychologists who became brand fads among

quote unquote enlightened people. Uh. To me, Larry seems to be more like a sly huckster than any kind of contributor to philosophy or psychology. Like I said, that's unfortunate. I guess I just expected more. Uh. The Don Latin book The Harvard Psychedelic Club, which I also read through, refers to him as the trickster throughout the book, like they give a sort of like mythal mythical status to

each of the characters from the Harvard Psychedelic Club. Richard Alpert or rumdsk gets the term the seeker, but Leary is the trickster, so he'd be kind of like the low key of this Avengers. Yeah, it seems like. Yeah, I had a hard time reading all this research and not seeing a selfish, kind of egomaniacal guy who seemed to sacrifice all of his family and friends along the way just so he could extend his five minutes of either fun or fame or both. I don't know. So, yeah,

it was really disappointing unfortunately. UM yeah, I'm curious. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who are listening to this episode who are real, uh, devout you know, fans of Leary and his wisdom, and maybe there's something that Robert and I are missing out on here. I don't know. Well, I will say this and to sort of, you know, ended on a positive note. Leary's words have definitely inspired me in the past, and I think I'll

continue to find inspiration in some of his words. One of the weird things that happens with icon celebrities and and even profit is that there emerges this disconnect between self and perception, between actuality and the ideal. So, you know, the pop culture Leary here is I think, something of a fiction, but it can serve as a as a

beneficial fiction, I think at times. So I'd like to to close out here with a quote that I've always valued, uh and and one that I tend to sort of employ as a guiding principle for for stuff to blow your mind. So I will read it once again in UH in my impersonation of Timothy Leary. Throughout human history, as our species is faced the frightening terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are or where we

are going. In this ocean of chaos. It has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing, forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself, you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself. Now that I can agree with, Yeah, that I think that lines up with with how we

tend to approach topics here. How I think we should always approach any kind of you know, authority figure, even when that authority figure is Timothy Learry. So hope you enjoyed this marathon of Timothy Leary and l s D information that we gave you this week. We are probably going to be doing a Facebook Live trailer talk event the day after this episode releases, So if you're listening the day of go to our Facebook page. That Friday morning will probably be on Facebook Live talking about movies

that are related to Timothy Leary and or LSD and psilocybin. Yeah, some sort of psychedelic cinema celebration. We haven't figured it out yet, but it'll probably probably be more fun than the details of Larry's life. Yeah, maybe so so right. If you want to contact us or follow us on that or find out when that's happening, we're all over social media. We'll try to post an advance let you know what the timing is on that. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on Tumblr, and we're on Instagram.

And if you want to get in touch with us the old fashioned way, just shoot us an email and blow the mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com b