Duncan Trussell Family Hour - ZACH LEARY AND GAY DILLINGHAM

Episode Date: June 18, 2015

Duncan, Zach Leary, and Gay Dillingham talk about the amazing Timothy Leary and the upcoming documentary, Dying To Know, which tells the tale of Ram Dass and Tim Leary's tumultuous and deeply loving f...riendship.   THIS EPISODE WAS BROUGHT TO YOU BY DATSUSARA go to DSGEAR.COM and enter in offer code family hour to get 5% off of your order!

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Starting point is 00:00:35 Go to dsgear.com to pick up the greatest hemp gear on earth. Use offer code Family Hour to get 5% off your order. Hello my sweet little godlings. It is I, Duncan Trussell, and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast and in celebration of this, our 158th episode, Big 158, I'm going to release Doves into my studio. Beautiful. Beautiful.
Starting point is 00:01:21 My sweet Doves. Fly home. Fly home. Fly home. Fly home. Fly to heaven little Doves tell baby Jesus hi, tell him that I love him and I hope that I don't die. Ask him why he killed my mom and took my ball away, tell him I forgive him and I hope that
Starting point is 00:01:42 he's okay. In the news, pals, even though you might have been temporarily convinced by some hypnotic vampiric ship wizard that you're a pointless, empty, meaningless mode of pig flesh rolling down the river of time in the direction of oblivion, the opposite is quite true. You're the infinite universe temporarily experiencing reality using the biocomputer that you call your body. You're an infinite being, a mini big bang inflating your subjective universe using the force of your attention and every single millisecond, the incredible biocomputer that
Starting point is 00:02:16 you've currently become convinced is your body, is actually constructing a universe and it does it effortlessly while you sit around shoving Doritos into your mouth and drinking LaCroix. That's a true miracle friends, you're a meat prism through which the force of creation is being refracted. So don't let some cannabalic fear paralytic inject their hysteria into your paradigm. You're going to be fine, things are going to get better, your life is going to become increasingly beautiful and your happiness is not dependent on any person, place or thing
Starting point is 00:02:56 and anyone telling you otherwise is trying to enslave you so they can feed off of your fear and anxiety. Don't be fooled, you're going to be fine no matter what and anybody who says differently is a bitch. To quote Mahatma Gandhi, don't let some stinker put their finger in your brain soup baby, you're the universe. Okay pals, real quick I want to introduce you to my new friend, his name is Tempest and he was found in a car engine.
Starting point is 00:03:37 He's a beautiful little kitten that my girlfriend has nursed back to health. He started off freaked out, spitting, scared and transformed into the most cuddly, wonderful, beautiful, sweet little angel who is currently residing at the Santa Dior No Kill Shelter. This is him purring. I'm telling you friends, if you smell this little baby's fur you can smell the crotch of Jesus Christ himself because I'm pretty sure that this little kitten must have been sitting in Jesus' lap up there in heaven and Jesus probably sneezed or something and he fell down to earth, landed in a car engine and was rescued.
Starting point is 00:04:36 Now you, if you're somebody who's got a nice place and the ability to take care of a little kitten, if you're somebody who for whatever weird reason wants to have the pure embodiment of love enter your life, if you want to have a best friend for the rest of your life and I'm telling you this is a grade A, high quality, high grade American kitten, then all you got to do is contact Santa Dior. The number is 323-898-8889 and the website is s-a-n-t-e-d-o-r dot org. If you're somebody who can adopt Tempest, not only will you get a beautiful cat, but I'll throw in every single t-shirt and poster that we have at the shop.
Starting point is 00:05:18 Adopt Tempest, won't you? Terms and conditions to apply Tempest is not thrown off the lap of Jesus, but Revelling and Scott was thrown out of heaven. Holy cow, we've got a great podcast for you today with Timothy Leary's son, Zach Leary and Gaye Dillingham. They have both created a wonderful documentary about Timothy Leary and Rom Doss called Dying to Know and they're here today to talk about that and a lot of other things. We're going to jump right into that, but first some quick business.
Starting point is 00:05:45 This episode of the Dug and Trussell Family Hour podcast is brought to you by Dot Susara. About two years ago, Chris O'Dell, who started Dot Susara, a company that produces some of the most amazing hemp gear available on earth, contacted me and ended up sending me a backpack made of hemp. I've gone through a lot of changes over the last couple of years, but this backpack hasn't changed at all. It's like something out of the Lord of the Rings universe, something you might find inside a volcano hidden underneath some magma, untouched by anything that a human being
Starting point is 00:06:22 can create. I have a feeling that this backpack is made of some kind of immortal hemp. I have a feeling that Chris O'Dell ascends a mountain into Valhalla and wrestles with Norse gods for permission to cultivate their eternal hemp in the fields of Odin. He then carries that stuff back down here to planet earth where he has fairies and elves that he's enslaved using his powerful charisma, endlessly sew these things together to create some of these amazing bags and shirts and fighting gear that you can find over at DotSusara.com. They've got a lot of cool stuff.
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Starting point is 00:09:40 We're also brought to you by amazon.com. If you go to dunkitrustle.com, please go through our Amazon portal the next time you're thinking about buying anything at all from Amazon. My new thing that I'm really into is my Fitbit Extreme or whatever it's called. It's like a super high-tech Fitbit that has lasers in it that take your pulse, so it tells you how long you slept every night. It's fun to track your bio rhythms. I really enjoy it.
Starting point is 00:10:09 You can get these things by going to Amazon, but please go through our portal first. If you go through our portal, anything you buy from Amazon, they give us a very small percentage and it costs you nothing. It's a great way for you to support this podcast while buying the sweet, material stuff that you so desperately need. Amazon's great. There's no need to leave your house anymore. Are you seriously going to waste this sacred, wonderful, temporary, transient life that
Starting point is 00:10:39 you have by going to some chain store and slogging through aisle after aisle while desperate babies scream at the top of their lungs because they can't believe they got shot out of a pussy into a universe where human beings spend inordinate amounts of time in man-made caverns buying plastic crap when they could just order from home and have that sweet stuff delivered right to their doorsteps. Go through the Amazon portal, won't you? We've also got a lot of great t-shirts, posters, mugs located at DuncanTrussell.com. Just click on the shop link.
Starting point is 00:11:19 If you like this podcast, won't you give us a nice rating on iTunes? All right, there's the business stuff. You guys know you don't have to sit through all that nonsense. If you ever get bored of me rambling or just can't stand my raspy lesbian voice and my propensity to yap so much, all you got to do is jump ahead. It won't hurt my feelings. It'll save you some time and if it makes you happy, I'm happy. Today's guests are amazing.
Starting point is 00:11:48 I've got Zach Leary here. Zach Leary is Timothy Leary's son. Timothy Leary is a hero of mine. He's a controversial figure, been in jail countless times. He was the person who introduced Rom Dost to Silas Saibon just to get going and that's just a tiny infinitesimal portion of what this human being has done. He was essentially the architect of the 60s, a Harvard professor who was a prophet of psychedelics, a prophet of LSD and not just that, but also a brilliant psychologist who created incredible
Starting point is 00:12:28 models through which we can understand the human psyche. He was one of Rom Dost's, aka Richard Alpert's best friends and they both kind of took separate paths. One took the path of the Guru, the path of the East and Timothy Leary took the path of the Wild Trickster Revolutionary and they sort of parted ways for a little while and then towards the end of Leary's life they came back together and that is essentially the subject of this really cool documentary that's coming out called Dying to Know. If you live in Northern California around San Francisco, they're going to be screening
Starting point is 00:13:09 the movie, they're going to be screening it in a lot of other places. I'm going to have all the links that you need to find out about screenings of this incredible movie. I've seen it and it's just wonderful. You can go to dunkintrustle.com and all the links will be there as well as a clip from the movie and all the information that you need. So now everybody, please welcome to the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour Podcast, Gay Dillingham and Zach Leary.
Starting point is 00:13:40 It's the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour Podcast, Gay Dillingham, Zach Leary. It's a true honor to have you guys on this podcast. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Hey, Dunkin. Yeah. Happy to be here. Zach, first of all, if there's an award that was given out to having the coolest dad
Starting point is 00:14:26 on the planet, you would get that award. Your dad is Timothy Leary. That is an incredible thing to be that close to such a controversial figure. Do you feel that this documentary is partially to change the public perspective of your dad? Well, it is an incredible thing, but it also comes with its baggage, too. Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that. As I get older, it becomes more and more incredible, but I think as you were here with so many kids who are an offspring of somebody luminary or somebody famous, it has its pros and cons.
Starting point is 00:15:13 It took me a long time to learn how to navigate that, but regarding the film, none about me. The public perception of him, to me, was always, I always thought of him as a luminary and incredibly complicated. His life was incredibly complicated and incredibly brilliant, and I think the film really goes into the humanity of him, more so than the accomplishment side. I think it really dives into the humanity of him, which is a really important thing. A lot of people seem to miss that. When I think of Timothy Leary, how about this?
Starting point is 00:15:51 I'm just going to throw out the general stereotypical viewpoint of Timothy Leary, and then I'll let you guys correct me. How does that sound? Okay. Okay, one second. I'll just fix the levels here, and I think my mic's a little hot. So Timothy Leary, I'm just going to list what everybody thinks. Gay, are you still there?
Starting point is 00:16:12 I'm here. I'm interested. Because I went through the same process, like sorting out the public persona from the real persona. So here's the public persona that most of us know. Timothy Leary, lunatic genius who took too much LSD, went crazy, and decided to try to create a psychedelic revolution that involved people disconnecting from society. He was popularized the phrase, tune in, turn on, drop out.
Starting point is 00:16:47 Everyone should quit their jobs, man, and go get high on acid. Now, that's not my opinion of him at all. I think my opinion matches what you guys think, but what also is wrapped up in the package of Timothy Leary for a lot of people is he was too vocal about his stance on psychedelics and his revolutionary tactics were partially responsible for the prohibition of the study of psychedelics, which set back the psychedelic movement for years and years and years. How do you guys respond to that? There's so much there, Duncan.
Starting point is 00:17:22 I mean, there's so much there. I mean, we could break that off into a lot of different tentacles here. First, I don't think he was encouraging reckless, irresponsible use and encouraging people to drop out of society. The drop out part of the tune in, turn on, drop out, incredibly misunderstood. It does not mean quit your job, quit school, drop out, follow the grateful dead around, take lots of acid, and fuck society. It meant drop out from your preconceived notions of what you thought it meant to be in this world.
Starting point is 00:17:52 Everything you know is wrong. Challenge everything, question everything, think for yourself, question authority. That's what drop out meant. It meant to take your role and grow with it, expand it. And his path, which gets into something interesting versus Ramdoss, was through the mind, it was more so than the heart. But the LSD and all of those experiments were really just catalysts to drop out into new ways of thinking, into new portals of consciousness, into new love fields, into new soul fields.
Starting point is 00:18:25 And I don't think he was, gosh, and then the second tentacle of this, sorry, Gay, I'll let you turn him in in a second. Well, you know what? You did a great job, Zach, and it's right on. Our film does go deeply into that. The other thing is, instead of too vocal, he was too influential. But carry on, Zach. Yeah, but the second part of it, which is a really, really important thread to go down,
Starting point is 00:18:47 is like in the modern psychedelic renaissance, which we are experiencing now, and much of it, amazing. I mean, the work that MAPS is doing in Rick Doblin, I mean, it's CIIS, it's fantastic, and we're all on the same side. But a lot of that conversation has shifted to how did we get to this situation? So it's very easy to Monday morning quarterback it and to look back at the history and go, oh, well, Timothy, you know, I mean, he was, he was a mad Irish rascal who was going around challenging the government.
Starting point is 00:19:18 They had to lock him up because he was so dangerous. How many times, by the way, did he get locked up? Oh, gosh, well. Was it 24? 26? Well, it's more the total time he spent in prison, which was almost four years. And of that, two and a half was solitary confinement. God.
Starting point is 00:19:34 Yeah. And most people don't really remember that because, and he certainly didn't spend a long time talking about it, but, you know, it was a big part of his history, which that's what this documentary goes into also and the impact it had on his life. And you know, by us scapegoating, even the culture, you know, the, the allies that we are scapegoated him, the movement scapegoated him to some degree. Yeah. And of course, the authorities scapegoated him and needed him out of circulation because
Starting point is 00:20:02 he was too influential. Yeah. And you have to understand like the time, you know, in the context of everything that happened at the time, you know, first, you know, he was a very accomplished, you know, academic professor at Harvard, then all of a sudden him and Richard Albert were kind of going down these new doorways to experiencing, you know, the different dimensions of what, you know, this whole thing is, and then all of a sudden what happened around them was what we now know as the sixties.
Starting point is 00:20:30 Yes. I don't think you can, I wasn't there, I'm not old enough, but I don't think you can imagine the magnitude of that to be, and like he always said, to understand the sixties, you must understand the fifties. And you don't understand the explosion that happened then, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Kennedy getting shot, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, all of that happened around him. All of a sudden, I mean, I'm not saying he didn't turn it away, but he became sort of
Starting point is 00:20:57 a catalyst and a spokesperson because he was the architect. He was the architect, and he was older, he was already well-established, so he kind of like, you know, the kids could turn to him and go, look, mom, like this Timothy Leary guy, he was a professor at Harvard, you know? And that's an extraordinary thing, but he didn't, I don't think he ruined it for everyone, and I think it's a really, it's a bad, it's a little piece of history, I think we need to correct. Yeah, I agree with you 100%, and I look at, when I think of him, the other misunderstanding
Starting point is 00:21:30 that I think people have about him, I'm just going off of my own misunderstanding and then applying it to the entire planet, which is probably a mistake, but as I started studying Timothy Leary and through, mostly through Robert Anton Wilson, yes, and looking into his other theories, you realize that there was so much more to him than just the world of psychedelics, and I don't think a lot of people realize that either. Yeah, probably what. Can I address something before you too far away from it? Please.
Starting point is 00:22:00 Relative to a new book that just came out, which I think your audience will be really interested in, because I just became aware of it, and it just came out, called Timothy Leary, The Harvard Years, which is the early writings on LSD psilocybin with Richard Alpert, Houston Smith, Ralph Metzner. So what this does is it took Timothy's academic writings between 60 and 65, of which a lot of that was even before the psychedelics, because he was really proposing a real U-turn in psychology, which was already threatening before the psychedelics. The psychedelics just then put a supercharge on his ideas, and I think that's a really
Starting point is 00:22:42 important book for people to also absorb and put in the matrix of understanding Timothy, because most people know him as the post-prison clown. Back to your question about everything else he contributed to as a futurist, really the early cyber movement, which Zach can speak to, and a lot of kids know him as a very different influence, aside from the LSD guru, more of Zach's age. Yeah, I know of the 20-some books that he wrote, I think what, only 304 really dealt with psychedelics as a whole. Right.
Starting point is 00:23:21 You know the rest, and you get into the Robert Nanton Wilson stuff, The Eight Circuits of Consciousness, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you know, all of that stuff is equally. Would you guys mind, and I don't mean to diverge too far away from the subject of the documentary, but I have so many questions and only a little bit of time, and how often do you get to chat with experts on one of your great heroes? Can you talk a little bit about the Eight Circuit model of consciousness for people who maybe aren't familiar with it? Gabe, do you want to take that one?
Starting point is 00:23:52 That's a tough one. You know it. I don't. I didn't read every single book. Well, it's complicated. It's very complicated. But isn't it the basic idea behind it, is that there are aspects of the human psyche that we haven't quite yet activated, because the ultimate destiny for humanity is to escape
Starting point is 00:24:13 from the gravity well that is planet Earth. That's one of my favorite phrases he used, gravity well. We're stuck in a gravity well, and at the bottom of that gravity well is a planet. We're all stuck on this planet right now. But we're in the same way that, you know, the caterpillar transforms into the butterfly. We have the potential within our DNA written in there to ascend from the gravity well and sail out into the cosmos, and that the moment that we start moving in that direction, aspects of our DNA start becoming activated, which expands our consciousness to some degree.
Starting point is 00:24:56 Is that it? Yeah. And we are hardwired for more than we think, you know, as you go up and down the ladder of the Eight Different Circuits, and you get to the core of it. It's not dissimilar to the different bardos in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying or anything, and you kind of get into these different levels, these different circuits where you can really tap into our, you know, our hardwiring, you know, DNA, maybe mission for life, you know, but it also brings up some interesting points to us, whether or not like it really
Starting point is 00:25:27 gets, that gets into the physical, you know, and he really manifested so much in the mind, you know, and how the physical and the metaphysical, you know, expands to the soul. Yes. Right. Right. And his predictions, it seems like the predictions he was making weren't incorrect. They were just off by a few decades based on what Kurzweil has been saying, the idea that, you know, we're on the precipice of discovering, of doubling the human lifespan,
Starting point is 00:25:56 the idea that, you know, with new technologies, space migration is going to become a real possibility. He was just off a little bit, but he wasn't wrong about what our future holds. Yeah, I think he was, I mean, he was as much of a futurist as he was, you know, a psychologist, as much as he was a psychedelicist, and he was really in some ways a technologist too, although he didn't actually, like, he wasn't too good with technology himself. He saw how it could work and how the application would fit. He wasn't too good with, well, what technology did he, I mean, I mean, he wasn't good at,
Starting point is 00:26:30 like, yeah, I mean, if he had an iPhone today, he'd be fumbling around and be calling me into the next room to, how do you turn this fucking thing on? That kind of stuff. But he could write the manual on it, you know what I mean? Yeah. So, the other aspect of your documentary that is really cool is it's another of my heroes, Rom-Dos, and here you have sort of the, these two beings both encountered the same initial psychedelic truth, and they kind of went in separate directions, whereas Rom-Dos took
Starting point is 00:27:04 a more spiritual, not a very spiritual, very religious path. It seems like Timothy stayed, you know, outside of that stuff. It seems like he was a little skeptical of that, of that version of reality. Is that incorrect to say? Forgive me if it is. I think he was skeptical, yeah. I mean, I think he was really, well, he was skeptical of the whole guru system, for sure. You know, there's no question about that, and he was skeptical of any sort of institutional
Starting point is 00:27:37 kind of hard line of how, you know, spirituality or how a map for consciousness might work. And you know, when Rom-Dos came back, when Richard Alpert came back, and he was Rom-Dos, you know, you know, I mean, it's what Christian Doss calls today, disorganized religion. But he came back with a kind of a set of a map that came from a lineage. Yeah, and Tim didn't like that. I bet he didn't like it at all. I bet they got some real funny conversations about that. Did Tim make fun of him a little bit when he came back?
Starting point is 00:28:08 He did, but that was also their, you know, that was their rough spot, you know, from when he came back until, you know, until the late 70s. They, you know, they had some difficulties. Can you talk a little bit about that? Did you ever witness a Rom-Dos-Timothy Leary argument? I didn't, because by the time, you know, they reconciled and kind of fell in love with each other again. I was just a little boy and it was a love fest from there on out, so I never actually
Starting point is 00:28:33 saw it, you know, I never, I was too, too, too young for that. Gay, Gay, did you ever witness any of these things or it were? No, I came in in 95 as well, right, when Tim was dying, and we put together this conversation between Tim and Rom-Dos. And so I just met Tim at the end of his life, and at that point he, you know, Rom-Dos was the first person he called when he found out he was dying, because they had this, what, what a man named Howard Tice, who's a PhD, who will be one of the people speaking after our film in the Bay Area when we launch on July 10th.
Starting point is 00:29:10 But it's really about this mythic hero-twin concept, and I think that Larry and Rom-Dos really, that's what caught my attention in the relationship, but it's got so many levels, because it could also be a man-woman marital relationship, and how we are so different, yet we are in this dance together, and when you really think about it, the entire human world is relational, I mean creation is relational. So the power they had together, but it also means twinning off, it means separating, going out on your own individuation paths, which is what they did when they had such different opinions about how to go about things, you know, Tim was still the scientist, Rom-Dos
Starting point is 00:29:55 wanted to go the faith route, and bless them both for going their routes and coming back together and reemerging as soul friends, and they called themselves soulmates, even though it was never a physical love, because that wouldn't, you know, and Rom-Dos talks about being gay, and Timothy wasn't, and had five marriages. So the other, you know, kind of tragic irony, but also maybe why Tim could be such a visionary is because, as Rom-Dos says, he stood outside that psychodynamic plane, which is where the emotions live in the inner world, and where most women want to engage, and probably why he and Rom-Dos were so well together as two men, and that he couldn't really hold any
Starting point is 00:30:42 long-term marriage to a woman, also for that reason, and that Timothy really could be the visionary because he did sit outside of systems and looked in. I like to call it, and this kind of came to me somewhat recently, different rides in the same amusement park, you know, and a lot of people, I think more so in the leery camp, you know, really frown on that, because, you know, part of the, you know, the panacea or the destination from what, you know, the intelligent application of psychedelics can give you, it can give you a really strong form of individuality, you know, it can really give you this form of self-actualization and self-realization, where you are this independent
Starting point is 00:31:25 entity that can shine very brightly. So the idea of kind of gravitating towards a guru or to a Maharajee or something like that, it's a little sticky, but I think at the end of the day, if you ask both of them, you know, where are you trying to go? It's the same thing. Yeah, now that's something, I'm glad you brought that up. There are camps, there are clear, definite camps out there, and one of them is the psychedelic camp, which represents people who are taking the psychedelic path, and it feels like leery skepticism about Ram Dass is embodied in that camp, like it seems that a lot of people who've taken that route, Ayahuasca, whatever it may be, the moment that you present the idea of the guru, they feel very strongly
Starting point is 00:32:15 about that being a terrible decision to make, it feels like. Yeah, and strange to me, because I reside in both camps, you know, I'm a devotee, I've become a devotee recently, but I grew up in the psychedelic camp, so I do understand both sides, but I don't know, I mean, everybody has their own personal trip and their own personal experience, I have my reasons. I think as a western, mostly western culture, we don't really understand the whole guru concept, what's underneath the layers of guru, and I wanted to say, Zac's a unique person on many levels, but one because a mutual friend once said, if Timothy Leery and Richard Alpert slash Ram Dass would have had a child, an offspring, it would have been Zac Leery,
Starting point is 00:32:58 because Zac really does bring the two camps together, because Zac spent so much time with Ram Dass after Tim died, and for us to really engage, what does it mean to have a guru, which is just the person that shows the path, and it's certainly not a name that Ram Dass has given himself, he would never call himself a guru, he's a teacher, but he had a guru, named Kurali Baba, Maharajee, and our culture doesn't understand that, we have a different form, and some people have come up to me after the film and said, thank God, this is finally pulling together my burning man life with my spiritual life, because there's also people in the yoga or spiritual community that are uncomfortable with the leery kind of psychedelic camp. That's
Starting point is 00:33:44 right. Yeah, they don't want to, yes, they're very uncomfortable, and they run into a problem there, because it is undeniable, well I guess it's not undeniable, because we can't say for sure, but I would put money on that if Ram Dass Alpert had not encountered leery, he would never have crossed paths with Neem Kurali Baba. Absolutely true. Oh no, he would have been a retired Harvard professor and tenured, and we have a scene in the film where they're laughing hysterically, because Tim says, yeah, I ruined your economic career, and Ram Dass, of course, thanks him now, but yeah, Ram Dass would admit that today. It's sort of our other friends in the camp who don't like that very much. Yeah, that to me is a fascinating thing, and in a very strange way,
Starting point is 00:34:43 leery was a devotee of Neem Kurali Baba, even though he would never say that he was, because he became his great servant in the sense that he did the ultimate service, which was to send migrating to India, the person who would be the number one distributor of that lineage, and that to me is a really fascinating thing. Do you know the bus story when Tim and Nenna were in India? I don't think so. They were on the bus. Okay, I don't have all the names and the facts like exactly the Elden, but you'll get the gist. Tim went to India in 1965 with Nenna, and then his whole marriage with Nenna kind of unraveled on that trip to India, and they were kind of going through, and he went there. His intention was to understand, to try to dive in
Starting point is 00:35:36 deeper to Eastern mysticism. He went there with that intent, knowing that there were maps out there that could sort of, maybe, these are relevant, maybe there's something on to them, there's something to them. He was on a bus, I think it was near Allahabad, and somebody came on the bus to try to get him and Nenna off to show him some things, and Nenna didn't want to get off, she wanted to go, but Neem Kurali Baba was about 100 yards away from the bus. Wow! Yeah. Well, and let's also mention that Nenna is then married Bob Thurman, who's a Tibetan Buddhist scholar. And they met in Noba. And they had Uma Thurman, who most people know, and so Nenna ended up in the whole Buddhist community in her own right, in a way. So yeah, that was another interesting...
Starting point is 00:36:28 But the cool part of that story is, you know, he was right there. He was right at the foot of Maharaji. Right. And it just wasn't his karma, you know? Well, I don't think he would have bought it. I think that if he... I don't think so either. I don't think so either. I think he would have had a lot of... He's such a revolutionary, and he's so anti-authority that I think that he would have wanted to see what he could do wrong, and see what the reaction would be from Neem Kurali Baba, if he did the very worst thing he could think of. It feels like he'd want to do something rebellious so that he could test the waters to see... Let's just see how a holy person reacts to non-reverence, to non-worship, to non... Like, what if I don't play the game? Right, right. Well put.
Starting point is 00:37:14 And I just want to say that as the filmmaker that spent 19 years making this, because these two men so deeply interested me, and then I just dug deeper and deeper to understand who they were, for me this is autobiographical, because I got a little of Tim in me, and a little bit of R.D. in me, and it's always in conversation. And it's also why I chose the symbol of the yin yang to represent the film, because we're a little bit of both in each, and some of us are more in one camp than the other. But, you know, if we're to be honest, even the believers doubt, even the doubters believe, etc., and it's all a mystery. And nobody... The film is not trying to tell anybody what to believe, but to have a conversation. So my commitment is a community engagement experience. That's why I
Starting point is 00:38:00 want to be in theaters and have groups in discussion about this. And I also, yes, it's a historical film, but it's more than a historical film. It's very current, because it's about what is up in the zeitgeist. It's about what's up in the zeitgeist, psychedelics, and for death and dying. Because what these guys did, which was so important to me when I was 19, I read the De Pet in Book of a Dead, and then started a psychedelic experience and used medicine in a way, because my brother, believe it or not, Zach, your film festival was on Tim's birthday. Today was my brother's death, the day of my brother's death. And when I was 17, and that blew me apart. And I had to reconstruct myself. I was on the ground. And, you know, there was a lot
Starting point is 00:38:48 of, what I want to say about this, though, is that that's when I started seeing how upside down our culture was around death. And what these guys did, for me, was to help redefine that. And by writing the psychedelic experience, which was based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Larry and Albert and Metzner basically guided you through a psychedelic session based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So this is not just about preparing for the death at the end of this mortal body, but to practice all the ego deaths that we have to go through almost every day in order to live more fully. And those are the things that our culture seems to be deathly afraid of. I mean, literally. So that's the reason I stepped into this film, and these two
Starting point is 00:39:36 archetypes represented this so perfectly. And as humans, and as story, and as real, and to be able to see Tim's human story through the love of Ram Dass, the lens of love, because the love lens is so important. Yeah, the other mistake we really make, which I've meditated a lot on my life, is that our culture, particularly our media culture, our first thing is to judge, to chew up and spit out and the dualities and everything else that we do. And truly, we're all human, trying our best, and our lives have this wide arcs, and we all make mistakes. And if we can see each other as doing the best we can, but we're looking at each other through the lens of love, then it makes everything different. I once kind of mashed up the best of both these guys in terms
Starting point is 00:40:32 of if I had to come up with one phrase, because I'm like, what is the theory here? I would say, be here now and think for yourself with unconditional love. The love thing is so important, and I just was, as you were talking, Gaye, I was thinking about something actually Duncan that you said on a few podcasts ago, I don't know what it was, but about this love field that's around us, right? There is this love field that's all around us, and it's undeniable. It's there if you want it, if you don't take it, that's sort of your own trip, that's your own ego, that's your thing, and there are portals into this love field. Maharaji is a portal into it, psychedelics are a portal into it, meditation is a portal into it, and that's really, that's it.
Starting point is 00:41:16 And that is, yes, in this love field that whatever this thing may, whatever that love field is, I think a lot of people are coming into contact with it now more than ever, because we are in this new psychedelic renaissance that's happening. There is some, there is a pro, there is the, you know, when I was a kid, I can remember my mother would hang out with like people who are really into crystals and what's like new age people is what they call it, and they would talk about how this shift is coming, there's a shift in consciousness coming, a shift is happening, a shift is happening, and I remember just rolling my eyes about that and thinking that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard, but now I see it, it's really happening. People have access to these
Starting point is 00:42:07 super potent psychoactive chemicals, and they don't just have access, but they also have access to the internet, and they have access to the refined teachings of Tim Leary and Ram Das, which is what, you know, I didn't have that in high school, if I wanted to, if I was, when I took acid for the first time when I was in I guess the 10th grade, and I took acid I think partially because of your dad, because I can remember going into the school library and finding a book on psychedelics or on drugs and flipping to the back page and discovering a paragraph on your father, just a paragraph, and it was talking about there's this professor who advocated the use of LSD to open your mind, but you know after that they're like, but he was crazy and you shouldn't listen to
Starting point is 00:43:00 him, but I remember reading that and thinking, wait, oh yeah, okay, yeah, these aren't all, this isn't all bad, there's something here, there's something here, but that's all I had, there was no Google, I couldn't look up Tim Leary, I couldn't find anything else other than this flicker of hope that these substances weren't all evil, that they weren't just heroin, they weren't just crack cocaine, it was a whole other thing, so now we have all of these teachings completely available to everyone, and also we have websites like Aeroid, and we have the studies that are now finally being done thanks to the end of the prohibition, so we really are in a golden age right now. I think so. Yeah, and we're more grown up and we can look at it differently and really do set
Starting point is 00:43:47 and setting, I mean I want to bring this up partly because Timothy was so excited as a psychologist when he found these medicines because he thought he found the elixir, and in many ways he did, it's not the only elixir, it's an elixir of seeing, and we don't have that class in our culture anymore, the seers, the shamans, the so forth, and you know there was two camps, and there's always you know at least two camps, but back then Tim really struggled between you know the Aldous Huxley theory or point of view, which is this is for the shaman class, this is for the you know the more intellectuals, this is not for everybody because it's too powerful. Then there was the Allen Ginsburg, which is it's for everybody, democratize it, it's on the street, and of course we know the
Starting point is 00:44:31 sixties, it was on the street, and everybody had access to it, and for good, bad, or indifferent, but it was definitely, it's a very powerful tool, and you know my personal opinion is it's not for everybody. I mean and Tim said in this hearing in 1966, people basically need to be you know prepared physically, mentally, emotionally, and go through some kind of not certification, but some kind of like filter system before you know set and setting, before you just jump in not knowing the depth of your well, because that that door between the unconscious and the conscious is going to be flung open, and you better be prepared for it to whatever comes up. So anyway I'm going on. Well no that's one of the byproducts of the ridiculous prohibition is that
Starting point is 00:45:21 instead of you know it's so fun to fantasize about what a psychedelic society would look like, where psychedelics were not prohibited, and where psychedelics were recognized as being as important as reading, or as important as any other field of study, and that this had been, and the psychedelics have been researched on a global scale, so that we fully understand what's happening in these heightened states of consciousness, and people are literally trained to be, I don't know what you want to call it, to be guides, even though I think that's a ridiculous word for it, but to be the shaman class. It would be amazing to see what that would look like, a western modern version of the shaman who up until this point has been in the west,
Starting point is 00:46:15 it's an outcast, or it's someone who's essentially looked at with a great deal of suspicion, anybody who does any kind of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy has to do it at their own peril right now, and there are people who do it, but they could lose their license and go to jail, or there could be incredible lawsuits, and I think that that, I think when Tim encountered this elixir, as you call it, through the lens of his genius, and through the lens of his, through the futurist lens that he looked through a lot, he recognized that this was the seed that was going to grow a new society, I think he recognized that it was there, this was it, and he also, let me say something about the other dichotomy, I think he also recognized early on
Starting point is 00:47:11 that we can't just medicalize it, you know what I mean, like put it through the psychology sector, and just through that kind of singular sector, because it's also very much communal, and remember we have the church, the peyote church, which has been sanctioned and legal, as well as the udv church, which is now in ayahuasca, saying, you know, it went all the way up through the supreme court and had a unanimous decision under the freedom of religion act, so we do have these small little bastions of legalness, these small research projects, and then this on the other side, this community, this church experience, because I don't think we can, you know, I do think we need community around this, we need support, we need structure. Can you guys talk a little bit
Starting point is 00:47:56 about the League of Spiritual Discovery? Yeah, in Laguna Beach, yeah, I mean the League of Spiritual Discovery was kind of an early sort of communal archetype for a society that could be created around, you know, the intelligent use of this stuff. But this, Tim founded this, he started this, this was his attempt at creating a religion that had LSD as its sacrament. I wouldn't call it a religion. But his idea was to use the freedom of religion to make it, this was like his attempt to legalize assets. That was the doorway in, and the reason it just didn't, it really didn't take off is because right about that time he started getting into a lot of legal trouble, and you know, and that was sort of, that was it for that. But yeah, that was the doorway in, and you know,
Starting point is 00:48:44 this really gets into like Terence McKenna's schools of like the archaic revival and things like that. And I think Tim was really, really sensitive to that, you know, through every culture in mankind, every indigenous culture has been using, you know, medicinal psychedelic plants and medicines. As far as we know, as far as you can go back, except for the Eskimos because they couldn't grow anything up there, but you know, but anyone else, you know, and it was a return to that. And, you know, as we talked about the Eighth Circuit stuff earlier and about like what we're hardwired for. And I think, you know, anybody who's gone on a psychedelic journey, and if you've kind of gotten the moment or gotten the aha sort of, you know, revelation when you're on it, you're like,
Starting point is 00:49:28 this feels like, wow, this feels like something inside of me that's been there all of all along. Yes. You know, and I'm just kind of seeing it now because, you know, I can't, not that they just unlock those doorways. And the League for Spiritual Discovery was really about, you know, the communal, the archaic sort of civilization and kind of getting into our tribal nature. What are the tenants? Did he have tenants for it? Or was there any kind of motto or saying or scripture? It's a really good question. We should probably look in the archives for that. There probably are some, some manifestos on that. I've got all sorts of interesting manifestos from like the Code of Conduct at Millbrook and a visitor's contract and all that stuff. It's super far
Starting point is 00:50:07 off. Visitor's contract. I would love to see that. I'll send it to you. I'm going to email it to you and you could read it for your, edit it in. But yeah, there probably is one for it. Why can't, why did the League of Spiritual Discovery not continue? I don't understand. Because he went to jail. But why didn't people keep it going? Why can people resurrect this beautiful idea? Because when I think about the, what a perfect name for a religion for, and I know he probably would have hated, hated the term religion, but we're talking about the concept here is a, an umbrella, so to speak, where LSD could be used sacramentally because it is a sacrament. It is a sacrament. It is as much a sacrament as anything I've ever experienced. If not from my
Starting point is 00:50:49 contact with the substance, I don't know what would have happened to me. I owe a lot to it. I feel reverence for it and gratitude for it. And I could go on and on and on about how wonderful I think it is, but I don't understand why that beautiful, why that didn't keep going. It should have kept going. Well, in some ways, and this is just my, my kind of two cents, my own personal trip is that, you know, when Ram Dass kind of came back and when Richard Albert came back and became Ram Dass and kind of started this little bubble of a psychedelic spiritual kind of, you know, Hindu Ram Ram Hanuman community, to me, that was really the extension of that because, you know, psychedelics were, you know, and it's not really talked about as much now because there's so much reverence for,
Starting point is 00:51:36 for Maharaj, but psychedelics were still really, they were a huge part of that. Ram Dass didn't stop doing psychedelics. That's a huge, I've heard that in the community a lot. Oh, Ram Dass came back and he didn't have to get high anymore because he was already there. It's not exactly true. Oh yeah, that ain't true. That's not true at all. I mean, he was still doing psychedelics until he couldn't anymore for, because of physical reasons. That's right. Yeah. Yes. He just knew how to play the dance, how to do the dance a little bit better. What a great point. But to get back to this yin-yang idea where you have these two different camps and you have the Ram Dass camp and here's, and which, you know, I love, I've been to six of those retreats. I'm going, are you going to the
Starting point is 00:52:16 one in December? I'm going to the one in December. I love, I love it so much, but there's a lot there to digest. And if you're, if you're somebody in the, in the, in the Dawkins universe, if you're one of, if, and there's a flourishing community of skeptical, scientific-minded atheists who have seemed to have really had it up to here with this Deepak Chopra, as they say. They're pissed at Chopra. They're pissed at anything that they call woo. They don't want to hear about Hanuman. They don't want to hear about Ram. They don't want to hear about a guru. They want facts. That's their end up. That's the plane that they're on. And we have to respect it because that's the, in the same way that Timothy Leary created Ram Dass. And inadvertently, science created Timothy Leary. Science created
Starting point is 00:53:09 LSD and LSD created Timothy Leary. So we must respect that process. We have to respect that process. And so that's why I love the League of Spiritual Discovery, because it's this concept of like, let's get rid of all these flowery symbols that I love, by the way. I could, I love burning incense in front of a picture of Maharaja and chanting. It makes me happy. I'll do it until I die. I love it so much. But I also understand why so many people, when they see that, they're like, you know, I'm friends with comedians. So they come over and they're like, is that your granddad? Who's that picture? What is that? Why are you burning candles in front of that thing? Would you have sex with them? Would you? Would you? They say the most blasphemous thing they could
Starting point is 00:53:50 say because they don't want to deal with these symbols. It's too much. So I like the Leary camp. I like the idea of opening a doorway for scientifically minded people to contact the psychedelic universe through the lens of questioning everything. I think it's a beautiful thing. It needs to be revived. Somebody out there start this religion again. I do too. And you know, faith is entirely based on your own experience. Nobody's ever had that experience with Maharaji. Then why would you resonate with it? You know, I was a cynic. I didn't think I was that person. I mean, sort of. And same with psychedelics. They're just different doorways. But we all, when you hear Dawkins, when you hear these skeptics, you know, in a red rage
Starting point is 00:54:35 over the fact that somebody in the middle of the United States believes that dinosaurs existed 700 years ago. I know. But you're always thinking to yourself, my God, just take one hit of acid. Take one hit of acid. Take one DMT trip. And then let's talk. Get that data. Get the data. Because it is data. It's data. And it's data that's being ignored for some reason. And I don't understand that they need to encounter that data. Because what is it that Bill Hicks said? God, you think you're you're you're anti psychedelic and anti drug? Are you really? Then go ahead, throw out your entire fucking record collection, the whole thing, throw it out. Yes, because it's all there. Well, right. Well, and, you know, it's Tim, Tim, Leary and
Starting point is 00:55:27 Rom Das Alpert, they discovered an inner universe through the use of psychedelics. And they wanted to understand that inner universe, initially for both of them, all the way to the end, I think, for Leary, but initially for both of them using the lens of science to understand what was going on in the in the inner verse. And I think that that that subjective universe, acceptable, accessible through psychedelics gets completely neglected by science in a lot of ways, because it's how do we track it? Now, people will say, well, we can put you in an MRI machine and give you a dose of psilocybin. I can tell you what parts of your brain are lighting up under the influence of the thing. And maybe I can tell you what levels of serotonin are being released or dopamine are being released or the
Starting point is 00:56:17 combination of these things. But nobody, as far as I'm aware, can take pictures of the guy who looks like he lives in a forest with like leaves on his face grinning at me through the darkness when I'm on a high dose of mushrooms and MDMA. Nobody can grab images of who is that guy? Who is this? Who are the legions of spirits that I seem to be witnessing as I'm tripping out here? Can you help me understand the faces I'm seeing and the wall that's melting right now or the mandalas that are blazing in my inner eye every time I shut my eyes? What is that? They can't get there yet. They can't get there yet, but they need to go there, especially the skeptics, especially the atheists. They need this experience that at least they can come back and say, well, you know,
Starting point is 00:57:07 yeah, if you go to hard science, you know, 99 point, you know, whatever percentage of everything we see and what we are is space. It's actually not matter. We're not matter. We're more space. So when you, you know, we talk about this in the film about how to live in the world, our brain has to limit our senses. And what psychedelics does is it just takes away all that limiting factor, which we couldn't live in that space. It would be too much. But it's good to part the veil every once in a while just to remember and to see. And, you know, you see the, I found this incredible footage of Tim testifying to Congress, to the Senate hearing in 1966. And Ted Kennedy's interviewing him and he says, so, Dr. Leary, can you describe one of these so-called trips? And Tim laughs and
Starting point is 00:57:56 says, well, no, sir, I really can't. But then he goes on to try to describe it while all the guys in the Senate hearing are smoking cigarettes, trying to understand about these, this other drug, right? We're in the 66 now. And Tim is then talking about being, you know, he melts into a puddle on the floor, a serpent comes over, swallows him, he's excreted, you know, and he says, to most psychologists, they'd be cowering underneath the desk. But to a Hindu or to, you know, it would be the third book of the Vagavad Gita or whatever. So, you know, this footage, because in the film, I wanted to physically show when this clash, this deep clash of culture and understanding and you watch that and you see why the status quo was so freaked out. You got all
Starting point is 00:58:41 these middle America, you know, white kids rebelling saying no to war and everything was turning upside down in this 50s culture could not absorb it. That, well, and I think, you know, culture still is having some problems absorbing not all of the culture, but there is still a, there's that same, like whatever that is, that same impenetrable wall that springs up when a skeptic or a person who considers them this, I don't know what you, what you call it, but this, the materialists, that weird wall that springs up when you start relating some, any kind of metaphysical or mysticism, mysticism at all to these materialists, it's still there. And, you know, Learion and Albert, they ran into that wall full speed and, and that's why, you know,
Starting point is 00:59:40 Learion ended up in jail a lot, but the wall is still there. And this brings me to a question that I'd love for both of you to answer. If Tim were here today, what advice would he give all of us who've experienced the world's accessible through psychedelics and want to, and want to, want to continue his work? What advice would he give to the psychedelic community? What advice would he give to the spiritual community? What, how would he lead us now in the world that we're in now, where these restrictions are loosening on this, on the prohibition and where we have access to all of this technology? I think he'd be leading us through the information age, which is really where he left off, you know, and I think sort of what you were just saying
Starting point is 01:00:30 about the disconnect that we're seeing today, I think it's kind of an offshoot of the information age, because the information age is highly quantifiable, you know, it's made up of ones and zeros, ones and zeros, ones and zeros. And there's a lot of, you know, there's kind of a finite understanding of how that all works and mysticism needs to be infused back into that, to how it started with Stuart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, you know, Steve Jobs taking acid and all of these things, that's how it started. And we kind of need to get back there to make the science and the mysticism work together. So I think Tim would, would be leading us through them, through the information age, through, you know, kind of new and creative ways to express yourself
Starting point is 01:01:09 psychedelically through the internet, through the web, you know, through, you know, everybody like, look, we're recording this podcast, like right here on a laptop with two microphones and you broadcast it out to the world right now, you have a megaphone right now that reaches a great number of people. This has never been able, you know, this is the first time in human history where we've been able to do things like this, you know, I have this, this magic device in my hand right now that is a complete, you know, for anybody who's taken psychedelics and you go ahead and get lost on an iPhone and just go through apps and surf the web on an iPhone, you see the parallels, it's no accident. It's the same, it's the same trip. That's trippy, man. You're saying
Starting point is 01:01:49 the pattern of apps and websites is actually the very similar to the weird kaleidoscopic rush, weird. I do, I feel that way. When you're lost in a web hole, it's very much like a k-hole, you know, you're just spiraling down this, this, this matrix of information, long away stuff, swiping stuff left, swiping stuff right that serves you, swiping stuff left that doesn't serve you and you're just going in and you're finding your reality that speaks to you. That's very psychedelic. Wow. It is to me. The other, you know, kind of, I would say first of all, Tim would say we were right, I regret
Starting point is 01:02:24 nothing because I did hear him say that and, you know, we're in the growing pains of this consciousness revolution and creating community around it. But, you know, I just got back from a very unusual experience with 30 international women, two Nobel Peace Laureates, and Gloria Steinem, and we walked and spent six days with hundreds of women in North Korea and then walked across the demilitarized zone into South Korea. Wow. And I mentioned, this just happened on, you know, in May. This was like a couple, few weeks ago. And I mentioned this because, you know, if we engage our consciousness, then we can
Starting point is 01:03:01 take it out into the world in all kinds of ways. And when I was there, I, I, because I had the reference point for the layers of reality that our media cannot comprehend. It's always the breaking news. It's the surface. It's why is this guy evil? You know, this, this Kim Jong-un, why is he evil? All the ways he's evil. But when I was there, not that I'm there to condone what's happening in this isolated, perverted, screwed up place, but to, to go in there full eyes, full heart open. And I felt like Alice in Wonderland. I kept going down one rabbit hole after the other and through the looking glass. And I had reference points. So I knew how to look deeper. And the way these people have staged their entire reality, because they think if they can show a
Starting point is 01:03:47 perfect world somehow, but that in fact is what freaks us in the West out how, you know, it's like just the paper cutouts. And anyway, so I can't get into all that now other than to say that, you know, if we can engage our consciousness, there is no end to what we can do. Because I felt, I also want to take back this, this, this dirty word that's been created called North Korean sympathizers, which is what, you know, we were called going over there, these women. We had the Nobel laureate that stopped the, the, the war in Liberia, Lama Bowie. We had Marie Maguire from Ireland who stopped that civil war. And they were going to try to call us naive. So I said, yeah, we were over there. We were empathizing. So call us a North Korean sympathizer. We were
Starting point is 01:04:36 empathizing with the North Korean people, South Korean people, and all people, because that's the only way we're going to, you know, evolve out of this absolute Gordian knot we've created on our planet with this military industrial complex. So anyway, so don't get me started down that hole. But I say that because we have to look at our entire world knowing how many layers of reality there are and how to solve problems. As Einstein said, you can't solve the problem with the same but thinking that created it. So I think psychedelics are one of the tools, not the only tool. There's a lot of mindfulness. There's meditation. There's a lot of tools and as there are people. But I do think that, you know, back to what Duncan, you asked too, I think Tim would be
Starting point is 01:05:25 absolutely scratching his head around the polarization that we're seeing today. I think it's a very perplexing reality for conscious individuals and thinkers to find ourselves in right now. Can you define that polarization? Yeah, there's a lot of good ways to sort of look at it. My favorite as of late is the filter bubble. And if you're not familiar with the filter bubble, it's sort of Eli Parcier who co-founded Move On wrote a book called The Filter Bubble, which basically it's this accidental offshoot of technology happened basically through Facebook and Google about, you know, both of those algorithms are written around personalization. Google serves you the stuff that Duncan wants to see.
Starting point is 01:06:08 Google serves the stuff that Zach wants to see. So our search results are each different. Same in Facebook, you know, it's giving us a personalized experience. So what kind of like our neurons get deeper and deeper channels and then you stay in those same channels because you're used to them. Yeah, yeah. So what's basically happened is it's created, you know, these far right and far left bubbles which we find ourselves in. For instance, in your, you know, your Facebook world, you're not seeing any far right kind of tea party activity at all. You don't see it. Why would you? Because Facebook thinks you don't want to see it. Same with the far right. They're not seeing all our hippie psychedelic, you know,
Starting point is 01:06:45 Maharajie shit either. So it's created. There's no more middle. Wow. You know, so there's no more, there's no more place. There's no more like, and so the Republican party that we're seeing today is a whole different beast than we've ever seen before. That's why they're getting weirder. They're not, there's nothing to measure their strangeness. It's true. Well, and it's happening globally. It's happening globally. Like we've demonized North Korea and they've demonized us. We are definitely demonized in that country. So, you know, we're both so demonized. We're all living in hell. Yeah, but we're seeing this thing like, you know, more people are practicing, you know,
Starting point is 01:07:19 yoga in America than ever happened before. Burning Man has now grown into a pretty mainstream event. Yes. You know, rock and roll. You live here in that water village, whatever, and our hair is long, and we, you know, whatever, you know, we see all of these things happening. But at the same time, it's like we see this sort of mainstream sort of like interpretation or dissemination of like how it is that we're supposed to fix the fucking problem that we're in. And we're just like, what's happened? Right. What the hell's happened? How did we get here? So how do we take this? How do we take the promise? You know, how do we take it and make it work? Well, yeah, yeah, this is, it's really interesting. This is kind of, it reminds me of like an informational Galapagos
Starting point is 01:08:00 Island or something, like everyone's evolving into their own strange creatures based on this bubble. I've never heard that before. It's really interesting. Great book. Really. I'll check it out. I'll check it out for sure. That's fascinating. So it seems like both of you are sort of pointing at a method or a mode of living in the world that involves inclusion instead of separation that's trying to figure out a way to speak the language of other information cultures, so to speak, instead of raging against them. Absolutely. And you know, from all the Ramdoss retreats, you've been on the illusion of separation, you know, this illusion of separateness, you know? I mean, that's a core Ramdoss principle that he's been talking about for 40 years, you
Starting point is 01:08:49 know, this illusion of all these things that we're looking for to separate each other from. Yeah, yes. But man, that illusion, it's a pretty strong illusion. It's powerful. And you get sucked into it all the time. And it's such a difficult thing to, you know, how often do you find yourself separate? And sometimes don't you need to separate yourself? Sometimes don't you need to look at a North Korea or look at a red state mentality like, God, like, I can't remember. One of the Republicans running for president is famous, and now it's a famous quote, it went everywhere, the guy who said, if America's sick of, if you're sick of war, don't vote for me. Yeah, that was what Graham,
Starting point is 01:09:35 Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham. Yeah, right. Right. But yeah, if you're sick of, don't vote for me. And, you know, so God, what do we do about that? Like, I don't care what information bubble you're sitting in, like, how do you love that? How do you love that? How do you, how do you? That's the work, isn't it? Yes. But how, what would, you know, because Leary, he was, he was really like divisive, like he was, it didn't feel like what he was doing was saying, let's all join together so much as much as like, go ahead, sorry. He was, he was. And if I had to bring up any fault of Tim's, it was probably that he was a real us and them kind of guy. Yeah, he was, he was in it for the fight. Yes, he was. He was scrapping it out. He was really doing it,
Starting point is 01:10:27 man. And maybe he thought that the LSD would be a kind of rocket fuel that, that, you know, created a momentum, not just for him, but all of society to sort of push us, push us back. Yeah, yeah. That's why Tim and Leary, or Ron, just both live inside of our psyche and the mythology. You've got the warrior fighter and then you've got the peacemaker, you know, that brings it together. And that's in our society. It's inside us. Some are more than others. And we all play out this role in the theater of it all. Right. Oh, what a beautiful idea it really is, you know, and I go back and forth on, you know, I've, I'm friends with Ragu Marcus. I have him on the podcast a lot and they're, they've always been very good at like getting me to temper that part of myself that
Starting point is 01:11:13 when I see the cop at the, you know, the recent video of this cop at a pool party, I don't know if you saw that. Did you see that guy? No. So this video on the internet of this, this cop, was it tech, was it Texas McKinley, Texas McKinley, Texas, this cop goes to a pool. These kids are just at a pool having a pool party. They're completely harmless. They're in bathing suits. They're obviously having a great day. It's a beautiful day, but somebody calls the cops on them. But the kids are black. Well, right. I mean, that's, that's, well, yeah. And that's their fault. If you're going to go to a pool party in Texas, you've got to change your skin color, apparently. But they, but this cop, it's, I mean, I can't think of anything that looks less threatening than a
Starting point is 01:11:58 group of teenagers in bathing suits at a pool party. It's just the opposite of ISIS. And this cop, he does a barrel roll. He, so he comes in, does some kind of weird military barrel roll like in the middle of kids in bathing suits. He does a barrel roll and he starts applying some kind of, uh, I don't, some military tactics where he's trying to get kids on the ground and separating kids. He pulls his gun at one point. And finally, he ends up with his knee in the back of a teenage girl who's on the ground screaming and crying, probably as PTSD now, from the experience. And when I see something like that, there is no Ram Dass in me at that point. There's just a feeling of let's get that guy's name, let's get that guy's address, let's ruin
Starting point is 01:12:58 that guy's life so that all other authority figures who get the inclination to do barrel rolls at a teenage pool party consider the fact that if you do that, the internet's going to swarm on you like killer bees and it will never end. You know, that's, I don't know how looking at that guy and being like, well, his adrenaline was really high and we have to, you know, he's playing his own game. That's his own game. He just got in. So he needs help. So let's help him. But how do you get angry? Yeah, you're right. I mean, it's all of it's all of it's real. Jack cornfield would say, you know, life is an ocean full of joy and a sea of tears, you know, right? Sometimes I don't get that. Right. It doesn't work for me in this instance.
Starting point is 01:13:44 I'm with you. Well, it's tough, but I love what I mean. Yeah, I really love that you have identified these two, I don't know, these two intertwined paths that somehow have got to really figure out a way to truly merge like finding the figuring out the path of the heart and the path of the mind and where those two meet and embracing all of the new information that's coming out now and doing, I think, what Timothy would have wanted us to do, which is to utilize the internet as much as we could to figure this thing out so that we do have some kind of realistic merging, you know, not a bullshit merging, but a realistic, in the same way that technology is merging with humanity or inorganic life is merging with organic life, we've got to figure out a way to bring the chopers. We've
Starting point is 01:14:46 got to fuse the chopers in the darkens. There you go. That is exactly the growing pain we're in, I think. And there's a lot of ways to describe it, but that was well put. And I just want to say that, you know, my husband Andrew Ungerleider came up with the idea to put these two guys together and said, let's bring, because we had heard Tim was dying in the media that day in 1995, and he said, let's bring Romgoss down. I was born in 65, 1965, so I wouldn't have come up with that idea. I knew both their work, but I hadn't understood the depth of their relationship. And like just two years ago, we find out my husband is cousins with Richard Albert Romgoss. So at all, and most of the people in the film now are somehow pretty deep and connected
Starting point is 01:15:32 in my world somehow. But I wanted to also say that, you know, it's been a really interesting journey with this film, obviously 19 years, it's my labor of love, and finding Zach to work with has just been a godsend. But we are doing something very important and to this so-called evolution of consciousness, I think, because I'm kind of taking the risk to launch this independently. And usually you never get to do theatrical release with a film, documentary particularly, because it's too expensive and you subsidize it. But we have four theaters now set up around the Bay Area, and we start on July 10th. And we're having community engagement Q&As panels around all these screenings in theaters. So go to
Starting point is 01:16:21 dying2knowmovie.com to figure out the times and schedules and everything. But I say this because this film, even though the audiences love it, we've been sold out everywhere, but I couldn't penetrate the so-called business of it, if you know what I mean. And by not being able to penetrate that in a really wonderful way, I finally realized the silver lining was it made me reclaim it and know how precious it was to me, and then I made this film to have a deeper conversation. And so by God, Zach and I and a few others are going to go out with the film, sit with groups, have these great conversations, intergenerational community experiences around the subjects that we've all been dying to have, right, but not able to. And whether it's the fear of our own
Starting point is 01:17:11 mortality or drugs or how do we change culture, it's just such a it's got a lot of juice. And I don't want to give it up into an old school distribution model that will be out there for a few minutes and it's gone into the collective trash heap. So help support us, go on the website, get involved, and if you're in the Bay Area, for God's sakes, bring your friends and let us know what you'd like to see and hear. Like how do we create more community events around these things? And bring your Republican friends too. Yes, please. I love the theme of this of this podcast. Just like trick them. Tell them you're going to do something else. Yeah, tell them it's like an American, like American sniper outtake. Yeah. So I know what that differential is,
Starting point is 01:18:02 and, you know, the definition of extremism is when you live in a community where it's, where you only are with people of your own ideas, what Zach was saying earlier about the siloing of the internet and so forth, you know, you become more and more extreme. A lot of studies have been done on this, but if you, if you purposefully and consciously add diversity of thinking and community and other ideas to your life, you're going to be that much more robust and everybody's going to get more robust. So we have got to, you know, and I've noticed that this, this film does break down barriers. It goes way beyond just the hippie psychedelic community. My mother, who's 83, her old friends that have never even touched a psychedelic, didn't, you know,
Starting point is 01:18:41 are digging this film. You know, it's crazy. And then young kids from different countries that have no clue who they are, are digging it. And as well as the people from that might, that did live through it and even knew these guys are digging it. So, you know, I'm really good. My heart's full that we got, we seem to be spanning a pretty frickin' large, you know, community consciousness. And so that part of my dream seems to be coming true. Guys, I've seen it. It's an incredible film. If you're in the Bay Area, you definitely should come to a live screening of it. And I will have links at DuncanTrustle.com to, to the website and anything else you guys want me to put up there. I'll have it there. So if you're listening
Starting point is 01:19:24 and you didn't have a chance to write it down, go to my website and there'll be a link in the comment section of this podcast. You guys, thank you so much for coming on. It's time flew by. Thank you. We've been chatting for over an hour. It just feels like a second. Thank you so much, Kay. I really look forward to seeing what happens with your film and I can't wait for it to come to LA. Well, goody. We will be there eventually, right, Zach? Well, at some point. Beautiful. Just sign up on the website so you can be informed. Thanks so much. I'll talk to you guys soon. Thanks for listening, everybody. A big thanks to Dot Susara for sponsoring this podcast. If you want to find out more about Dying to Know,
Starting point is 01:20:04 all the links will be located at DuncanTrustle.com. And don't forget, if you want to get 5% off some great hemp gear, go to DSGear.com, use offer code Family Hour and you will get 5% off your order. If you like this podcast, why not give us a nice rating on iTunes? Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. It's Macy's friends and family. Get an extra 30% off great gifts for her just in time for Mother's Day when you use your coupon or Macy's card. And take 15% off Beauty Essentials or shop specials
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