INTERVIEW: Timothy Leary



Timothy Leary Live: The '60s Counterculture Guru Looks Ahead to the 21st Century
By Jordan Elgrably. El Europeo. Jan. 1996

A tall, limber, silver-headed gentleman with boyish good looks has just leaped onto the stage of the Café Largo, a Los Angeles cabaret showcasing all manner of performance artists, visionaries and mad scientists. This solo act—coming from a man Richard Nixon couldn't wait to put in prison—will prove to be a combination of all three. "In the 21st century," our zealous prophet gleams with irrepressible enthusiasm, "whoever controls the screens controls consciousness. The screen is a mirror of your mind, get it? If you are passively watching screens, you are being programmed. If you are editing your own screen, you are in control of your mind."

The 71-year-old psychologist-cum-performance artist flashes a grand smile as he gives us the fortunate news: "You can reprogram your brain." In the future, the sprite gentleman assures us, by relying on computers, fiber optics, telepresence and the powerful new software programs called CD ROM, we will "overcome mainstream media brainwashing" and establish the new counterculture network "which will defeat the political system. We can and will control our own screens."

So much for Big Brother.

Dr. Timothy Leary, otherwise known by millions of young Americans as Uncle Tim, is just warming up. Unstoppable, he will talk at lighting speed for almost two hours as he bounds back and forth across the stage, answering affectionate hecklers and telling the Café Largo audience that the future belongs to the empowerment of the individual, to the "new model of human being, the cybernetic person. A new movement is emerging," he insists. "It's something like the Beatniks of the Fifties or the Hippies of the Sixties. It's called cyberpunk. Cyberpunks are individuals who have the intelligence and the courage to access and use high-quantum technology for their own purposes and their own modes of communication."

Intrigued by the idea that high-tech individualism may somehow take the power away from the State and put it into the hands of the people, I pin Leary down a few days later at his Beverly Hills home, where we converse on a terrace that overlooks the city Uncle Tim calls the capital of the 21st century.

Jordan Elgrably: Do you still believe, as Oscar Janiger did 30 years ago, that California and especially Los Angeles, is the place where visionary changes are happening? Why Los Angeles?

Timothy Leary: Well, we must realize there is an almost total mutual contempt between the Pacific Rim—which is Washington, Oregon, California—and the East Coast. We consider the East Coast to be just hopelessly bogged down in the 19th century, although they control a lot of the industrial power, the money and the politics (no question of that). They're stuck with that. But it's part of this on-going civil war. New York publishers, magazines and book publishers of course, simply don't recognize any culture exists west of the Rockies. On the other hand, we consider the literary output of the East Coast just pathetically barbarian. For example, Norman Mailer writes a 1,000-page book in which he's personally taking on the C.I.A. That's so pathetically old-fashioned! So self-important and so far removed from the realities of the 21st century.

Everybody, I think, would agree, that California–like it or not–represents the future. It's an experimental ground where crazy new ideas develop. And, like any frontier, or like any place where new ideas breed and emerge, a lot of them are kooky and crazy and freaky–yeah, that's part of the business of experimentation. There is, of course, a great alliance between the East Coast of the United States and Europe, particularly London and New York and Boston, geographically and culturally. Whereas on the West Coast we feel closer to...

ELGRABLY: Do you continue to have an antagonistic relationship with the F.B.I., the police–are they still gunning for you, or have they left you alone?

LEARY: Well, they don't bother me, I bother them. I'm probably the number one, passionate adversary of the American political, police and institutional system. No, I'm not harassed. They've got too many other things on their minds.

ELGRABLY: Well, that's good news. Back in 1969 the heat was on, wasn't it? You had to face charges in three different states and were facing two or three consecutive prison sentences.

LEARY: I was sentenced to 30 or 40 years' prison for the possession of two small roaches [of marijuana], which were actually planted in my ashtray by a policeman. And so I escaped, and went to Algeria. I joined the Black Panthers there. Then I had to escape from the Black Panthers, and the Algerian government, which is a very curious combination of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic communism. Not a fun place. And went to Switzerland, and was eventually captured by the C.I.A. in Afghanistan and brought back, and I did altogether about four and a half years of prison.

I've been in 40 jails and prisons on four continents, so I won't go into it now. I'm writing a guidebook of famous prisons of the world. The best prisons are in Switzerland, where they give room service if you can afford it. [laughter] Every global crook knows that.

ELGRABLY: So you've served all the sentences against you and are now free and clear?

LEARY: I was released for parole, and then I was a parolee until I got off parole. Basically for ten years, all through the 1970s, I was either in prison, in exile, or on parole.

ELGRABLY: And all of this was for those two planted roaches? And now you're done with the law?

LEARY: Well, I was so far over the guidelines, because by the time I was released [a] marijuana [charge] was a parking ticket in California, and federally it was like one year in prison, so that I'd gone so beyond what is called the guidelines. They were just keeping me in out of malice.

ELGRABLY: This will make Spaniards laugh, because in the mid- to late-'70s they were smoking their grass out on the streets.

LEARY: As a matter of fact, that was happening here in the '70s, but in my case they were using me because I was, and still am, the number one dissenter in America, probably the most influential, and probably the most widely broadcast dissenter to the American government.

ELGRABLY: You've done speaking engagements locally, at the Café Largo for instance. Do you continue to give talks on university campuses?

LEARY: I go to universities. Of course, I cannot get a teaching job. There's not one organization or one institution or one university that would hire me, because I'm still considered an extremely dangerous person, in America–

ELGRABLY: For your ideas?

LEARY: –For my ideas. And because I'm associated with drugs, and I'm totally pro-choice, for adults, when it comes to drugs. And, as a general dissident and agitator. I was appointed as a visiting professor to Penn State, to introduce computers in education, and when some politicians found out about it they complained and they had to [let me go]–

ELGRABLY: –When was this?

LEARY: This was 1989. You understand, the last ten years since Reagan and Bush, America has become the most right wing, authoritarian, mind-control country in the world. The mind-control operates here with such slickness and a polished elegance, it's done through the television, control of the media and control of the mind, and it's done so smoothly here, with the happy news and the good news and, ah, ability to keep shifting and changing that the, ah, it's a thousand times more effective than Stalinism or Maoism ever was, because it's invisible. It's like fish swimming in water. The average black household in America watches television seventy hours a week, and the average white household watches forty hours a week. Now that's mind-control.

ELGRABLY: I'm not too clear on who are the "Artists, Writers, Visionaries of the 21st Century," the topic of one of your Café Largo lectures.

LEARY: I threw the title in. I didn't even talk about that. [snickers, long pause] I think there has been an extraordinary cultural revolution that has occurred planet-wise, since the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s. It has appeared at different times in different countries, in different styles and languages, but the basic issue here is the emergence of a new breed. It's a postindustrial breed, it's a breed of young people who are global in their attitude, who are basically individualistic, who are interested in their own consumerism, and their own pro-choice. They want to choose their own lives, their sex styles, and they are basically anti-political and anti-government, and anti-organized religion. And as I say, this movement was generated by Americans and British in the '60s, and it's spread very quickly because of electronics, because of record albums and tapes, and then MTV and video tapes. It's fascinating that this new breed has now popped up in every country, more or less—the exception is China; it's been repressed totally. The Soviet Union right now is exploding. And in Japan, of all places, there's a very strong and popular movement of young people.

ELGRABLY: They don't see themselves, anywhere, as a movement, do they?

LEARY: Well, that's the point. It's not a movement, it's individualism. For example, you can tell, the old guard they're the robes, those are the religious people, the Islamic and the Catholic bishops and all that, who walk around piously, and people bow to them, and then you get the uniforms, because 80% of the countries in the world are run by booted guys in uniforms, and then there are the suits, the people who run the bureaucracy...In Africa, the uniforms are running things, the guys with suits aren't. In any case, the thing about the new breed is that they dress any fucking way they want. You know, they can have tomahawks, they can wear velvet, they can wear boots, they can wear leather, they can even dress up in uniforms if they want to. But there's hardly even a sense of, that was a nice thing about the '60s, there's was no orthodoxy. You couldn't be an orthodox hippie. If you were, you were a laughing stock. It's the individuality and the choice, personal choice, and these are changing. You grow your hair long, you cut your hair off. You wear whatever you decide to wear in the movement.

ELGRABLY: You've mentioned before that this new breed is hanging out in zones; is this the same "new breed" that you referred to as using computers and videos and fax machines?

LEARY: Yes, and drugs. And cybernetic communication.

ELGRABLY: All right. Here we come to what I think is a crucial point on this. You've said that they are going to take control of the future by "ignoring old-time institutions and archaic politics"–

LEARY : Where did I say that?

ELGRABLY: In a Rolling Stone interview.

LEARY: Yeah...I would amend that, now.

ELGRABLY: Okay. But the thing about Virtual Reality and cyberpunks, you say that "once you declare your independence in your mind, you're home free." But don't you worry that we live in age more of information than of knowledge? That this new breed may have more sheer information, in fact, than they have knowledge itself?

LEARY: [pauses] Well, you're generalizing. What is the difference between knowledge and information, to you?

ELGRABLY: Well, for example, information is something that I can assimilate and process, but not interpret, per se. This holds true for so many people, who can have only a very shallow conversation on many subjects, but often they can't go deeply into any one subject simply because they haven't read [studied] anything. In other words, most of us have so much information coming at us that we don't know quite what to do with it all. People have opinions they get from the media, but this isn't knowledge they're arguing, it's data.

LEARY: You're raising a lot of issues. First of all, the appalling state of education, both information and knowledge in America. Only fifteen percent of American students can look up a bus schedule? [snickers]

ELGRABLY: In that same Rolling Stone interview, in 1987, you remarked that, "we're dealing with the best-educated generation in history." Do you still hold to that?

LEARY: That interview, good God, that was like several generations back. I must tell you, I used to say that every eighteen months everything changes, and then it was twelve months, now every six months there's a new generation of information processing technologies and ah–

ELGRABLY: –But not people. People generations occur every 20 or 25 years, yes? When we use the word "generation" that's what we're talking about, isn't it? The state of education in America, of the generation you were referring to, isn't going to change significantly between 1987 and 1991.

LEARY: You don't think so?

ELGRABLY: It's the same group of people, for instance, my age group, from 28 to 25 years of age. Either we continue learning or we stop learning; either we're "the best educated generation" or we're not.

LEARY: [snickers] Ah...I would not say that today, that quote from Rolling Stone.

ELGRABLY: But you still seemed to be convinced that those won over by Virtual Reality, that Virtual Reality has a significant future?

LEARY: Well, no I didn't say that. The concept Virtual Reality, which we were using a year ago, I'll give you a copy of an article I've written about it. But we now see that that stuff with the goggles and the gloves, and the $300,000 computers that generate those environments, we now see that these are mind-control technologies that empower the organization, not the individual, so ah, I am very passionately outspoken against what is called VR.

ELGRABLY: Oh you are?

LEARY: Because there's a new generation of technology that's come along which does not involve this expensive technology. It's CD Rom, disc, which can be hooked on to a $99, Nintendo-type video player. And CD Rom can contain maybe 2,800 or 3,000 floppy discs. In other words, a kid in the inner city can pop a CD disc into a Nintendo and she has like [the equivalent of] 10 Encyclopedia Britannicas, or she has half a film library, or maybe the entire film library of MGM. And if she does it, her friend across street does, so that...This has only happened in the last year, the explosion of CD Rom.

ELGRABLY: And this disc is now available?

LEARY: It is, yeah.

ELGRABLY : What would be on one of those discs, for example?

LEARY: [gets up to bring a sample, a Sherlock Holmes mystery] What this little gadget does, which costs them about $50, it allows a kid with this $99 player (this CD thing costs $99, so it's [a total of] $400, but that'll come down, of course, with the idea that one disc can be as inexpensive as a Walk-Man or running shoes every kid has). The kid that's playing this can basically edit films about Sherlock Holmes. You can have your character go different places, interview different people. If you edit it the correct way you may end up solving the problem, and there are three different scenarios here. Now that's ah...

ELGRABLY: This is fascinating. I'm just concerned: do the users of this program need to be literate, and if they do, don't inner-city kids need to read well, decently at least, in the English language at school, before they'll be able to benefit from all this technology?

LEARY: No. As a matter of a fact, literacy is the number one enemy of the future of the human species, according to our point of view. Literacy has always been a technique used by the powerful to control the powerless, the educated to control the uneducated, the rich to control the poor, and the elite, blah blah blah. But no, a lot of this is oral, so that Sherlock Holmes talks. A lot of it, see you've got this disc. Until CD Rom came along, computers were basically left-brain, linear, alphanumeric devices. And ah, the ugly screens and tables, and basically pages. The CD Rom, your screen explodes with several thousand colors, it can ah, mix three or four different movies. You can design your own, scan in your own photos. So literacy is less and less necessary.

ELGRABLY: I can't believe that you would discourage literacy.

LEARY: What? It doesn't matter what I would encourage or discourage. These are genetic. You're dealing with the brain, here. Literacy is a little part of the left brain, not even a left brain. We know of literacy [that it] is the software, tiny little systems of software, which perhaps represent one billionth of the potential of the human brain. And the genetic importance of CD Rom is that it allows you to by-pass the linear. Now, don't worry about language. There's going to be a global language. As a matter of fact I'm going to consult your man, here Enrique, or maybe you would be interested in this. I'm putting out a new book, called The New Breed, and I think that the description of this book will answer the question that you had about literacy. We're going to take up about a hundred concepts–

ELGRABLY: When you say "we" who do you refer to?

LEARY: Yeah, the people I'm working with. I'll explain. This is an international group of people. We're working together on this project. A hundred concepts that have to do with human evolution, personal freedom, liberty, intelligence, [grace?], psychological sophistication. A hundred basic concepts. And we're going to write about the history of these concepts, in different [countries], in India, in Persia, in Athens, where these concepts, of freedom, of the self, of self-expression, renaissance, you know, these concepts which are woven through human history. And, ah, the book is going to be published in many different countries. The first version is coming out in Japan, and I'm writing with a co-author, who's a young, 26-year-old Japanese guy. And we'll have about twelve Japanese observers, people, contribute the Japanese flavor to this...Do you know what the concept meme is? It comes from genes. Genes are molecules of self-replication, which cause biological evolution. Memes are ideas, or icons, or concepts, which are self-replicating, and which can infect or which can impregnate other minds, and which can pass ideas along.

ELGRABLY: These "memes" are in the DNA?

LEARY: No, no, memes are produced by human minds. They're basically artistic, poetic concepts. Like, freedom is a meme. We're going to develop this book so that when it comes out in English, we will have pictures of the same concept, with the words in different languages that describe that. I'll give you an example of a concept. The concept "yuppie." That concept exists in every [country, culture?], it hasn't appeared in East Europe yet, but when it does that will mean that evolution has lurched ahead in Poland. I'll give you an example. There's a concept in Japan which is called "kiroshi," which means killing yourself from overwork. That's an old Japanese virtue, which the new breed doesn't like. See, I have a picture of a crowded street in Tokyo. A photo. There'll be a man lying down, clutching a briefcase, and he's dead. He just collapsed. And a group of people is standing around, holding briefcases, looking at him. The Japanese word for "working yourself to death" will be there, but it'll also say "work by death" in English, and in Spanish, and in every language, you get the idea of that concept of people that wear suits and carry briefcases and overwork, so that a new language is going to develop, which is a multimedia language, which is the language of basically audio-video, but you see we won't have to worry about the words as much because we're going to be using film clips, we can use three of four different visual collages to get the idea across. Without the words.

ELGRABLY: When you're by yourself and dealing with a screen, that's fine, but when you want to communicate something to someone else you use a letter or you use a fax, or are we all going to be connected through screens?

LEARY: It's a screen.

ELGRABLY: And we're going to communicate just using images?

LEARY: No, we're going to use words, words are very valuable. Words are going to be used like neon lights. When you to an international...This, by the way, is very subversive and many intellectual, educated people hate me when I say these things, and ah think I'm a raving lunatic. When you go to an international airport now, it's interesting how you can walk around and there are signs, for example, the question mark means Information, and the dollar sign means Currency or Exchange, and a certain graphic line means Women's and anther means Men's room, and a red cross means health, and that sort of thing. So that we're going to have a global language that will be multimedia, and if I wanted to describe something to you I would the global [equivalent]. On my compact disc, multimedia imager, I'll get my image out and flash it on your screen.

ELGRABLY: This language sounds like pictographs, which were great five or ten thousand years ago, but we're more sophisticated now.

LEARY: Exactly. We're going back to the original language, which was ideograms, yeah. The oriental languages. And the oriental languages until recently stayed away from...[Marshall] McLuhan wrote a book called The Gutenburg Galaxy Is Over. McLuhan understood that lettered words, which they say were developed by the Phoenicians, or by Middle Eastern people, are basically used for "in" groups to conspire and to deceive or conceal from those that don't know your code. They're basically codes, and that's the problem with literacy.

ELGRABLY: But isn't language such an accessible code that almost anyone has access to it? Hasn't the advent of publication education (whatever it's present state in the U. S.) made it possible for everyone to be "in" and know the code? Why would you want to eliminate our current language codes?

LEARY: I'm not trying to eliminate anything. Whatever works is going to happen, and believe me, in this game of evolution you don't have to have a cause. Just watch what happens. At the present time in the United States, there are about 40 million Nintendo machines, used by 10 and 12-year-old kids, and the neurological hand-eye skill involved in using these, you know, is pretty awesome. Most adults can't do it. Now, these kids as they grow up, are not going to settle down to reading Norman Mailer's 1000-page book. That is an indulgence, that is a stage we have to go through as a species. And there will people writing books, just as there are still people oil painting. At one time oil paintings were the main way we communicated. And I myself have written 30 books and have contributed to the massacre of more trees in the Amazon rainforest than I'd like to admit. So I'm a writer and I'm not in any way depreciating writing, but writing is a stage that we went through as a species, that is part of the industrial, mechanical, factory age. You crank out books and you crank out newspapers.

The idea that every morning hundred and hundreds of trucks go around Los Angeles dropping off the Los Angeles Times to––what, a million subscribers?––with the same mass-assembled format, and hardly ten percent of the people who pick that paper up read more than ten percent of the paper. So it's an enormous waste of energy, of natural resources, of the oil and machinery to fabricate and deliver it, and it's all cluttering up and it's all polluting. The brain, basically can handle...see there's an old educator's complaint about the quick attention span, bing, bing, bing, that kids have today. Yeah, they don't sit down and read a book, as though there's something good about a slow attention span. If you want to do that [read], that's fine. There's a concept now which is called RPM, that's Revelations Per Minute (it's like an inside joke, RPM you know, revolutions per minute), and ah, my RPMs have gone up like a hundred times in the last ten years.

ELGRABLY: Well, I'm all for a lot of Revelations Per Minute, but it gives thought for pause, precisely because few of us today ever take enough time to stop and think all our ideas, or revelations, completely through. Remember how people used to be Sunday philosophers? Which of us, when not professional thinkers, routinely think things through? There's so much information coming at us that we have to quickly receive, sort, throw away and use–quickly–the ideas we have or the information thrown at us.

LEARY: [lights a cigarette] Okay, now here's the problem. You have very accurately put your finger on the problem. The problem today is that the information [comes] from networks, and it's controlled in a top-down, master-slave relationship, by the people who own the information that is generated from radio stations, television stations, film studios, publishers and so forth. And [for those receiving] it's all passive, and you're describing it, you're admitting it as being washed by all this information that's coming at us. We want to stop that. The answer to that is hand-held electronic editing devices that a five, six, ten-year-old kid will be able to use to create, and edit. See, the kid that uses this computer program is selecting, is choosing, instead of just passively using it. He's solving the mysteries and going around, see, you can use the map of London, and you can visit Mr. Jones at the morgue, you can see Professor Smith at the museum, so that everything you say about a passive drowning in information assumes passivity, and I'm saying if you're active... RPMs is revelations, not that you're receiving but that you're processing. For thousands of years we've known that the brain, when activated and turned on, can have visions and hallucinations and revelations and mystical experiences and so forth. We've never been able to express them, but now with the use of this inexpensive CD Rom knowledge processors, you can...Conversations in the future are not going to be like telephone, one kid calls another, but on screens, and you'll be sending me very complicated, multi-layered, multi-leveled messages, and I'll be editing them and sending them back to you.

ELGRABLY: I'm just trying to grasp all this, and I'm very slow.

LEARY: I understand this is all very new stuff. I couldn't have said this six months ago.

ELGRABLY: What might be of concern to some people is that already we live in an age when we don't have a communitarian sense like we did in the '60s. Especially in a city like Los Angeles. Nobody feels a sense of community, we're out on our own, there's a genuine sensation of isolation, and as most of us spend more and more time in front of screens––whether television or computer––we're becoming more isolated as individuals.

LEARY: Thank you. The key concept to all of this is that the computer is a lonely instrument. We call it a Peewee Herman instrument. Basically, it's a masturbatory device. We see the screen, which we call a telepresence, as a communication device. And what we know about electronic information is that it requires a sender and a receiver, and you simply cannot use electronics unless you have someone that you're in the electronic network with. What that means is that you will belong, in three or four years, in dozens of small groups of people which share the information. One can be in Tokyo, one member of your group can be in Madrid, and you're meeting on screens to share whatever project you're working on. It can be a school project, it can be gossip, it can be entertainment, whatever. So that, I don't think that the telephone has isolated human beings; the telephone, I think, actually encourages people to meet. It's the book–you know, Norman Mailer's book is a menace! If you're gonna read Norman Mailer's book you're going to be absolutely out of touch for about 20 hours [snickering].

ELGRABLY: Are these CD Rom groups modeled, perhaps, on existing computer-user groups?

LEARY: Everything I'm talking about is grounded in the philosophy that emerged around the turn of the century called quantum physics. It's Einstein. Einstein says that everything is relative. I cannot measure you, you've got to measure me and, it's relativity. Quantum physics says that everything is singular but it exists only in connection to something else, it's changing all the time...The philosophy and the psychology of quantum physics is extraordinarily practical and common sensical, and it all has to do with connection, and inter-activity.

ELGRABLY: Well, I'm somebody who works at a computer and I don't feel it connects me with anybody.

LEARY: You work at a computer. Well, that's right–the computer until recently has been a workstation. In the future you'll be saying that you're transmitting through the computer.

ELGRABLY: So we're going to be spending a lot of time in front of a screen, and dealing with people all over the world. CD Rom communication may not be as passive as sitting in front of the TV or the workstation computer, but won't it still mean less human contact?

LEARY: It's true, things will invariably...But basically you're going to have more time for rich...See if you can have electronic telepresence relationships going with small groups–by the way, it's all small groups–around the world, then when you turn it off, you'll have much more time to make what we call Personal Appearances. It's almost the concept that everyone is a movie director and when you turn off your system, you make a personal appearance, when you meet someone in the flesh, it's going to be literally almost a sacred, almost a special, rich encounter, because you're not doing it for any purpose of work. The only reason you should meet anyone in the flesh is to do things that can't be done with [CD Rom] telepresence. When I see people driving around in their cars, or when I put myself in a plane, I wonder why 90% of the running around in cars could be done much more effectively in your own home, meeting, you know, if you meet someone in Tokyo and someone in Paris and someone here, and you're having a meeting, in a half hour you've accomplished a great deal and it's all over. Imagine if you all had to fly, the amount of petroleum that's wasted, and pollution of the atmosphere, and strapping yourself. The only reason you should ever move your body is for pleasure, or for personal body motion stuff.

Now, when I say that it sounds like I'm smoking funny cigarettes; if I were to have told you or you were to have told me a hundred years ago, do you know that in a hundred years, the only reason people will get on boats is for tourism and pleasure? 'Cause the only way you get from Europe to America was on a boat. It was the main, the central highway that connected the world were these boats. Now the only reason boats are used is for the transportation of freight. The same thing is true of horses. A hundred and fifty years ago, horses were the main means of transportation. A hundred years ago the number pollution problem in New York City was horseshit. [laughs] And you that in a hundred years you know the only reason you'll use horses is for pleasure or health? They'd laugh. So the analogies are all there.

ELGRABLY: If CD Rom and telepresence are to have the effect you predict, I imagine you'll have to face the oil and auto industries, the airlines?

LEARY: Believe me, in this business of personal freedom and self-expression, we've always had to face––we know who the enemies are. The big threat to what I'm talking about is control of telephone lines, because–Chinese communism caught on. The reason they had Tianamen Square thing was that the kids, mainly young people in universities, were faxing each other and were telephoning, so that the great mistake the hardliners made in that last coup in Moscow was that they didn't control the telephone lines quickly enough. So they're gonna learn from that, so that the great threat to small group, or individual human freedom is control of the telephone lines. Particularly when you're gonna fiber optics, when Jesus, you're going to have coming in on a fiber optic cable enough information in a minute that would fill a room full of books, varooom!

ELGRABLY: Well, the fact that the national telephone company was broken up here and privatized into several small companies is probably good for this. It's harder to control several different companies than one conglomerate.

LEARY: Yeah, but still, who controls the telephone lines is going to have a very great power. But the answer is this: When I tell you that there's a CD Rom compact disc, that any kid in the inner-city, for a few dollars, can put in their pocket, then hey, I give it to you, and he gives to a truck driver, and he's going to drive it across the country. The compact disc plus satellites, being able to jump on to satellites, and to be able to pick up a phone a line and I can fill up a whole compact disc Rom for you, so there's gonna be the guerrilla individualism movement is going to involve our ability to exchange an enormous amount of information. If I hand you a CD Rom, I'm giving you the equivalent of twenty encyclopedias.

ELGRABLY: Isn't the question not how much information you have, but what you do with it? You say that "the overthrow of the political system won't be political,: yet things still have to be done. Information by itself isn't enough to do things...You talk about people using CD Rom being able to create their own reality, using images for example from classic and contemporary films. Where does that leave the full-time artist, the filmmaker, the writer?

LEARY: The movie director who takes a crew of a hundred people out to the desert to produce "Lawrence of Arabia"? He's like running a coal mine. He's out there, working hard, to produce to the raw material which then will be cut into a, a hundred thousand people will use those images to fit into, a, yeah–

ELGRABLY: So he'll still be a movie director but he'll be received in a different way or paid in a different way?

LEARY: Yeah, they will be paid, instead of just we coming and watching it, they will be paid by the bank, and anyone who wants to borrow and use their stuff, they'll get two cents a minute or something. They'll be paid. They're doing a wonderful thing. You see, they're using industrial-age, factory-machine techniques to go out to the desert and bring the trucks for the make-up and for the food and to take all those, and to put it on pieces of film that can be immediately digitized. A 90-minute film can be digitized and then can be sent around the world in two or three minutes. They will perform, they're like producers of raw material, like the oil drillers, the coal miners or the, they are performing a wonderful function.

ELGRABLY: Well, we're going to have to change our concept of what a screenwriter is or even of what a novelist is.

LEARY: You understand you using, the very notions are from the industrial age, where everything was pegged. You're a screenwriter, and you're a screen director, and you belong to this union, so that's all industrial, factory-age. In the future, the first thing kids will learn in first grade is how to edit and direct and distribute tiny little films. It's happening already in young people in Tokyo and in London and Berlin, and this country, are making their own video clips, and showing them at clubs.

ELGRABLY: They're borrowing images?

LEARY: Oh, sampling. My words are now out on about twenty different records. People just pull 'em off tapes. You know about sampling? This offers tremendous possibilities. You can take "Lawrence of Arabia" and you can make the sand green. You can shoot the battle of Waterloo and have the blood run yellow.

ELGRABLY: It sounds like a lot of fun, but what about Woody Allen?

LEARY: Woody Allen is classic. Woody Allen used an Old Testament phrase, he said literally, "Anyone who colorizes my film, it's a sin." It's change the word of God. All that stuff is just fundamental[ist]: You're not allowed to change the word of prayer, God made the Bible.

ELGRABLY: Woody Allen made "Manhattan."

LEARY: Yes sir, and he used the word sin. Of course, I love Woody Allen in black & white. On the other hand, once it gets shown on TV, a million people can pull it off and put it on a tiny bit of their monthly CD Rom, and use any part of it they want. They take Woody Allen's picture and paint him orange and have Minny Mouse's voice. [laughs].

ELGRABLY: For those of us who've taken LSD, we can appreciate this a lot more than those who haven't.

LEARY: It's all neurological. We're moving from the small, conditioned, linear left brain to the multimedia, multisensory, overload, jumble spaghetti of what we used to call the right brain. An interesting thing too, with these new techniques we're developing with CD Rom, you can develop your own multimedia, audio-visual graphics, so that you can actually, ah, give yourself a high, so that you can actually reprogram your own brain. You follow that?

ELGRABLY : To reprogram your own brain wouldn't you actually have to get in there?

LEARY: The way to get in is how? The eyeball. Whosoever controls your eyeball controls your brain, controls your mind. And the Catholic Church has learned that. The wizards of the Catholic church, 1200 years ago learned how to use incense, and the lights and the candles, I mean it's no accident every time you go into a dark Catholic Church there's a rose window, all lit up, and suddenly there's the candles, and you light a candle, and here comes the cardinal, and he's got all these jewels. Jewels by the way are very important. You know why? Because they get your eye, illumination. And even the terms they use: illumination, revelation, insight, vision, see they're all, recognizes it's folk wisdom saying that who controls your eyeballs control...

Right now there's the Michelob beer commercial, you know, "The night belongs to Michelob"? That's an absolute perfect example.....But the interesting thing about this book we're developing, The New Breed, it's going to out in Japan first, and it's going to be mainly graphics, and we're going to concentrate on the maybe a hundred of the most important terms that have to do with the new breed, which are singularity, individuality, self-expression, self-divinity, communication, tolerance, blah-blah-blah, with the opposed repression, intolerance and so on. It's going to be in Japanese, then we'll have a version in English, but we'll use a lot of the same pictures with the Japanese words so that by the time it's going to Spain it's gone to, it's gone to Germany, a new version will come out in Japan. Matter of fact we're thinking of having the book like a notebook that you can clip stuff in, so the book continues to grow, instead of having a book that's printed in final form and no one touch, who dare touch Norman, Norman Mailer'd be upset if you went in there and tried to change his words, but this way the book continually changes and it grows, and you'll be learning different languages and become more and more global, because the keys to the new breed are internationality, the global nature, the self-expression, small group.

ELGRABLY: I don't want to harp on this question of literacy, but for instance I'm someone who loves languages and I wouldn't have been able to learn the other languages I know if I didn't know my own. There are ways of teaching languages without using grammatical structures. Nobody likes grammar.

LEARY: The grammarians like it. The people who want to get you to line up, because grammar is part of the factory age, you've got to be able to do things exactly this way. And it's true, to run a factory you've have to have grammar. If you're going to put the tire on you can't have five tires and you got to have a nut, so the grammar is the part of assembling of machines.

ELGRABLY: But we need it to speak our language, too.

LEARY: Language is the key to quantum physics. Everything is language.

ELGRABLY: Language is linear isn't it?

LEARY: No, there's lettered language, you see the difference between language and information and literacy: literacy is letters. Letters go to together. There are spelling bees, and you have to spell the word correctly. Precision, perfection of repetitive...you need that for a factory civilization.

ELGRABLY: If you saw that your own kids couldn't spell, as a lot of kids can't today, that wouldn't bother you?

LEARY: I'm much more concerned with how they think. It doesn't bother me whether he can spell or not. I'm more interested in what he's saying. And those people that pride themselves on spelling correctly, would you have rather you kid win a spelling bee or understand and carry on a sophisticated conversation?...Language is very divisive. If you control the language you control the people. The English language, it's amazing the power of the British Empire, with their machines that made English an international language...

ELGRABLY: I took LSD for a year when I was a teenager and loved it but I had to stop after two very bad trips. What I noticed later as time went on was that my memory didn't seem as strong as before, before I took the drug. Does LSD harm the memory, and is it true that it destroys brain cells?

TL: That's not true. It's a total lie. What it does, it does definitely, the more you experience, the more files you build up in your personal–I don't think you can understand memory or LSD unless you know something about computers. The psychedelic experience is very much like senility. The symptoms of senility are very similar to the symptoms of strong marijuana or LSD experience. You see a lot but you forget, which is called long-term memory gain and short-term memory loss. And the more you experience the more energies you pile up. Like in your computer, you just pile up all these files and these names and these dates and the more you're out there doing it, it gets cluttered up. The answer to that of course is to keep notes, keep your mental filing system up to date. Know how to access...

ELGRABLY: You still contend that LSD doesn't destroy brain cells?

LEARY: I know it doesn't destroy brain cells; it does fuck up your memory...When Guttenburg invented the press there was a tremendous criticism of reading, because reading and the book was seen as a crutch, and would hurt your memory. Before Guttenburg memory was the key to wisdom...It's true that the more information you're exposed to, memorization, rote memory, becomes fucked up, which simply means indexing and knowing how to locate and find any clump of information you need.

ELGRABLY: In that Rolling Stone interview you pointed out that the baby boomer generation, those born between 1946 and 1964, is now some 76 million strong, and that they are going to shape the future of this country. You seem to have a lot of faith in them, but don't their non-communitarian, selfish attitudes in the '80s and '90s betray that faith?

LEARY: I think that's total bullshit. We're dealing since 1980 with a Reagan-Bush administration which totally, totally, openly, ruthlessly for the rich. The Republican Party in eleven years has been more corrupt than any other corrupt regime in this country's history, and they've walked away.

ELGRABLY: You're referring, for example, to the fact George Schultz, while Reagan's secretary of state, opened up trade with China, then went back to the private sector to head up Boeing, which is now doing a lot of business with the Chinese? Conflict of interest?

LEARY: There you go. Bush's family owns part of one of those countries over there. Yeah, I'm talking about the savings and loans, I'm talking about the defense overruns, I'm talking about the insurance scams. So we've had eleven years of total, open corruption. And used to be that we would look down on Central American countries, because they were corrupt. But Noriega is a piker, Marcos was a nickel and dimer compared to what the Republicans have done in this country. And the very notion that you should be concerned with racial minorities, or the poor, is considered almost wimpish. The classic socialist reaction was to spend more money to help the poor, government money to help education.

Freedom and individuality requires an incredible amount of responsibility, and I've been in favor of the empowerment of the individual. To carry this to the extreme, you get Schwarzenneger, the empowerment of the individual. So we've modified that to the empowerment of the individual in small groups. Once you free yourself from the larger bureaucracy, then you look around for people that share your particular ah [concerns], and the solution to the compassion and the caring is not going to be by voting for a different politician, or by voting money. Everything that I'm doing involves getting the power of the mind into the hands of the Third World kid or the inner-city kid. When I show this Sherlock Holmes movie-editing kit, which works in a $99 Nintendo, that is an empowerment of the individual. Also, this is something you do together, you do it with somebody else. You don't just sit there by yourself. Not just the individual, that's the Me generation, that is shallow. We're going to come back to small groups, many different small groups. Compassion has got to be almost Zen. You don't just vote for someone or you pay for someone else to do it for you.

It's my central ambition to get into the inner-city schools with this kind of equipment that will allow...See, a kid in the American inner city, now, is trapped, cannot get out, because of economics, because of geography, because of race, and language. The concept we're working is called telepresence. We're going to do this at Penn State University this winter. The kids at Penn State...we're going back to the one-room schoolhouse, an electronic schoolhouse. We're using this equipment to put people in touch with each other, and to break down the barriers of...Suppose you had kids in Kenya who could be sending a picture of their little village, saying here's where we live, and the kids here...The way to break down these barriers of geography is by moving your eyes and moving your brain.

ELGRABLY: You converted to Hinduism in 1965. Are you still practicing its beliefs?

LEARY: It's not like Christianity. Hinduism is the basic pagan or nature religion that [believes] divinity is within, the aim of human life is self-search. It's called yoga, it's called to look for illumination and transcendence, to continually look for a life of growth and development and change. And to respect the divinity of everyone else that you meet. I would change that now to respect the brain potential of the person you meet, and that things are changing all the time, and that there're as many gods as there are points of you. That's basic Hinduism. Of course there are gurus, swamis, shakers and fakirs that want to sign you up for their course, and in some cases they may be helpful.

ELGRABLY: Do you meditate?

LEARY: I don't even know what that means. I just think all the time. My mind is scanning and thinking all the time.

ELGRABLY: I guess you're not doing LSD anymore.

LEARY: Sure.

ELGRABLY: You never had a bad trip?

LEARY: Well, I've had bad moments in bad trips, yeah. There's a time in your life when you want to explore and there are times when you don't want to. There are rhythms...There's more LSD being used right now than there was in the early '60s or even the height of the '60s. People that are using it are doing it for the right reasons. They're kids in colleges who meet and study and they do it quietly, they don't talk about. They do it as part of some vague plan of self-growth and self-discovery.

ELGRABLY: Aren't most drugs popular in the United States now more drugs that alter mood rather than mind states?

LEARY: Well, I distinguish between Republican drugs and Democrat drugs. Republican drugs are the hard-line drugs like cocaine, crack and base and steroids, and of course alcohol is the classic mood drug, and the Republican drugs give you confidence, they make you feel number one, they make you strong, they make you get out there and compete. The drugs that are popular now, the non-Republican drugs, of course, make you wimpy. Marijuana and psychedelics make you easy-going and peaceful and a little bit spacey and you love everybody. You definitely can't run an army on psychedelic drugs. There's a certain logic behind the fact that the drugs that are popular now and which were in the '80s are very different from the drugs that were popular in the '60s and '70s. And the attitudes of peace and brotherhood and tolerance and sisterhood are very different too.

ELGRABLY: The last thing I wanted to ask you about was your work in film.

LEARY: Well, when I got out prison in 1976 I was unemployable, and I could not get a job.

ELGRABLY: Teaching?

LEARY: Any kind of a job. No organization would pay me. And I had no pension or medical stuff and I have a family and so forth, so I got a job in acting and in the last ten years, I'm a ten-year veteran now of SAG [Screen Actors Guild]. So I get dental and mental and physical coverage for myself and my family, a little pension, and I act in two or three, four movies a year. That's not my profession, but I enjoy doing it, I like the concept of the movie crew, because the movie crews that I get hired for are not big budget films. I'm never going to be in a Stallone or a Schwarzenneger movie, because a movie with an $85 million budget couldn't afford to have me on it, could they? But the movie crews that I work with are experimental, they're younger, they have a great sense of teamwork, and in a sense it's an economic and social model for work in the future, where you sign up with a group and you work together. Everybody works their ass off and then you move on to something else.

ELGRABLY: What kind of roles are you being asked to play.

LEARY: Well, I play a lot of judges, and police commissioners, which I enjoy, and I play ministers. I'm not an actor although I'm learning how to act, which is a very difficult thing to do.

ELGRABLY: Do you ever play a character something like your '60s guru self?

LEARY: See "Roadside Prophet"...

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