what I learned from timothy leary
Life is the classroom that teaches you who you are. Good students learn quickly. Others struggle for a lifetime.
My journey started in a conservative family on a beach in Florida. That bubble popped, as with many kids, when I went away to school and started to become who I am now. Looking back, it was an interesting ride, stressful but productive, funny at times. I’m just now realizing how different I was from many of my friends and what I could have done to change that. But I’m happy where I am in life. I became an outgoing person who covets solitude and a businessman who followed his dreams and not the money. This is my story.
The biology room at Exeter was something out of an old English novel…elegant wood panels lined the room adorned with pictures of distinguished dead professors. You get smart by just sitting in the room. Such are the prep schools in New England. Mr. Merriam, my biology instructor, was finishing a lecture on the cellular structure of plants, most of which I knew from my nerdiness as a kid. But then the discussion got interesting. We started talking about the mind-altering ability of certain plants…something I knew little about.
My older brother Jack and I had been sent off to boarding school in the summer of 1966 to see if we liked it. Actually, it was to make sure we liked it since my parents planned to send us away for the last few years of high school regardless. The schools in Florida at the time were having problems. Teacher strikes were looming and my father, a Yale graduate, wanted to make sure we would follow his footsteps. We lived on a beach in Hollywood, Florida, right in front of one of the few good surfing spots. Surfing was just migrating to the East Coast in the 60’s along with the culture that came with it. My parents were strict and we were well sheltered. We loved the beach and surfing, but they hated the long-haired surfers and what they thought they stood for. So that summer, I ended up at Exeter.
It was the first time we were away from each other and away from home. I remember befriending a black classmate. He called himself King Bee. He was funny and I liked him. He was in my dorm room one afternoon. His hair was cut close to his head and I said, “Do you have to cut your hair?”. He turned to me with an expression like I was from mars and quite a bit upset and said, “Of course,…what do you think it does…just fall out?”. I pretended I was just kidding, but inside I knew I wasn’t. It was a naïve question, not racist. It came from not having any black friends while growing up in a highly segregated town. It was a defining moment for me and one I’ve remembered all my life. I realize my vanilla upbringing was not in touch with the rest of the world. My hope was that this was not a defining moment for King Bee where I opened his eyes to the blinders a large segment of the white population wore back then. But my sense is that a black kid in the 60’s learned this well before they turned 16.
The biology lecture stopped, but a few of us remained after class and continued the mind-altering discussion. Mr. Merriam told us about cannabis and derivatives and talked about molecules and receptor sites on neurons. He said he was at Harvard where he participated in some experiments with “acid” with a guy named Timothy Leary.
“Timothy Leary”, exclaimed Scott, one of my classmates. “You worked with Timothy Leary?”.
“Yes, I was one of his subjects. I took acid”, replied Mr. Merriam.
“You drank acid?”, I giggled…since the only acids I knew were hydrochloric, sulphuric, and the others that came in my chemistry set.
“No” he said. “Lysergic acid diethylamide….LSD. It makes you hallucinate”.
Earlier that same year, Leary had been dismissed from Harvard for his (then legal) experiments with LSD along with his colleague Richard Alpert. It made national news. They were both highly acclaimed psychologists but got blindsided by faculty dissent and a changing political and social scene. The war on drugs, hippies, rock and roll…and communists… had begun. And the war in Viet Nam was dragging on.
After the summer at Exeter, my father sent me away from the surfing and hippie scene on the beach to finish high school at an uppity prep school in Connecticut with a clear path to Yale and the hope I would maintain the lifestyle I was taught. He didn’t realize what he was doing. And how could he? The country was about to change radically and nobody could have predicted what was to come. I’m sure I would have remained conservative and nerdy, and much more to my parents’ liking, had I stayed on the beach. In reality I was sent away from a close-knit family with a domineering mother and a religious and strict father. And thank God I was sent away as it was the only way I would find out who I really was. Timothy Leary always said, “treasure your own uniqueness”. Had I stayed in the beach town, there would have been nothing to treasure.
Sometime during the first few weeks at Choate I was in my dorm room one evening reading Halley’s Bible Handbook which I had brought from Florida. I read from this book or the Bible every evening; much more as a ritual than anything meaningful. It came from years of church and Sunday School and parents wanting their boys to grow up in their likeness. That night, John Connell, one of the cool kids in the dorm, came in my room, saw what I was reading, and said, “You read that stuff?” with a look on his face like I was mentally ill. He then left.
For the next few minutes, I stared straight ahead at the blank wall in front of me while his words, ever so slowly, sank in, like Liquid Wrench on a stuck bolt. That evening, my brain did a reset. And a much needed one. I had lived in a bubble in Hollywood with most of my friends going to the same school and the same church. I had never had anyone my age say anything against religion, but certainly a lot against those who weren’t religious and even those of a different religion. John’s simple words told me I wasn’t in Hollywood anymore and my parents weren’t around. And why was I performing this ritual every evening when I never really believed in it. I slowly closed the book and put it down and never picked it back up. The bubble popped that night and I took a big step towards finding out who I really was.
Leary said he was torn between his Irish Catholic desire to conform and his desire to step outside of these constraints. We both chose the latter. Leary was brilliant. Before his recruitment at Harvard, he had already written a seminal book The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality that was widely acclaimed. He latched on to an idea that psychedelics could be used to assess the multiple dimensions of personality and he pursued it with a passion. That passion took him to court and to prison multiple times but didn’t distract him. I became similarly passionate about the brain, I followed my dreams, and never gave up. With my inventions, I was able, in a small way to change the way medicine was practiced. My passion and life paralleled Leary’s…but without the notoriety and without the prison time. The seeds for this passion started at Choate.
At Choate, I became good friends with Bill Collins. His family lived down Route 5 on the Yale campus. His father was the head of neurosurgery at Yale. We would sneak out of Choate and head to New Haven on the little one-track train that went through Wallingford. Choate was an all-boys school and leaving campus was like a prison break. OK…so I was in prison…but a different kind. Bill’s father knew I was interested in going to medical school and would take me into his lab to show me research they were doing on brain and spinal cord injury. Just a year earlier I was spending time with my chemistry set in Hollywood trying to develop a better wax for surfboards, one that wouldn’t flake off and one that had some grit in it. But that didn’t compare to what I saw at Yale. This was the real thing. The seed was planted that led me to invent brain monitors that were used around the world.
Dr. Collins gave me some important advice back then. He said don’t major in pre-med in college, you’ll get it all in medical school only faster. Major in something different. I took that advice and ended up at Penn majoring in Electrical Engineering. His son Bill went there too and we roomed together. I didn’t go to Yale. My father was disappointed.
In college, as I tried to figure out who I was…so was the country. 1969 was a tumultuous time to enter college with students front and center rebelling against the Vietnam War, capitalism, and greed. The hippie movement made its way out of Haight Ashbury and spread to every campus in the country. The Beatles were replaced by Jefferson Airplane and other psychedelic rock bands. That summer Woodstock defined the music and to a larger degree, the culture. The first Earth Day was that fall and launched the mission to save the planet. The Chicago 7 Trial in September helped fuel the largest anti-war protest in DC that November…which is where I got tear gassed for the first time. Drugs and free love were everywhere.
A girlfriend from the summer, Claudia, visited me at Penn and brought Laura with her. Laura was a hippie poster child; long straight brown hair, thin, cute, flowered headband, somewhat out there. Our apartment was small and Laura quickly found the drug mecca down the hall and ended up staying with Sam.
It was the Thanksgiving holiday and several of us stayed on campus. We were planning a dinner together and I went to Sam’s apartment to borrow some extra silverware. Laura answered the door. She was completely naked.
“Hi Dick”, she said. “Have you seen Sam?”
Her words bounced around in my head like a ball on a pool table before they made any sense. Seeing her nonchalantly standing there naked had again pressed the restart button on my brain. I wasn’t used to this having grown up with three brothers on an isolated beach and then sent to an all-boys school. Women, and all they brought with them, were still very new to me.
“Uh…no”, I replied to Laura. I thought she was going to run back to the bedroom…but she just stood there as I tried very hard to carry on a normal conversation. This was one of my first introductions to the free love movement and another big step away from Hollywood. I was taught nudity was sinful. But I started thinking a little bit of sin can’t be that bad for you.
Our dorm rooms were in a newly-built high-rise apartment building on campus and we ended up setting up our dinner table, chairs, and food in one of the large elevators. We were all high and just let the elevator take us where it was going. When the doors opened on a floor, we would invite new friends to join us. Most just stared at the big turkey on the table and laughed and a few joined in for the ride. A photo of us appeared in the student newspaper the next week. They were fun times.
But within a year, my roommate Bill dropped out due to drugs, disillusionment, and depression. Claudia’s father, also a neurosurgeon, made her undergo shock therapy to try to re-program her brain away from this culture. Yeah, really…his own daughter. And that summer, from an overdose, Laura died.
In December, during my first few months at Penn, they had the first draft lottery where one night on TV they sequentially and randomly picked all the dates of the year. The first date was September 14. If you were born between 1944 and 1950 and that date was your birthday, your number was 1. The next date pulled was 2. Numbers below about 100 were an automatic ticket to Viet Nam. For almost 300,000, it was a one-way ticket. My number was 315 and I never had to go. My brother’s number was 1.
Unlike my father’s experience in World War II, Viet Nam was a made-up war resulting in a lot of deaths without a cause and the backlash was gaining momentum. My brother got a medical deferment as did many who despised the war…or they joined the National Guard, moved to Canada, or went to jail when they refused to show up. All this caused an inordinate number of minorities to be sent to war…just as the civil rights movement was in full swing from the assassination of Martin Luther King…just a year before. My distrust of the government and awareness of inequality started in these years. Sadly, not much has changed.
My parents had their heroes starting with FDR who led the country out of the depression and then generals like MacArthur and Eisenhower who led the country to a victory in WWII. But where were mine? President Kennedy was shot, Martin Luther King was shot, Bobby Kennedy was shot, Malcolm X was shot and all this with a background of the failed Viet Nam war where a good friend from high school, Bill Buckles, was shot…and killed. His name is on the Wall in DC.
Many in my generation turned to other cultures and religions like Buddhism and spiritual leaders in India. Leary’s colleague, Richard Alpert, became Ram Das. The simmering anti-government sentiment exploded with protests in the 60s, and 70s and the unforgettable shooting of a protesting student at Kent State University. Our heroes arrived in the form of Abbie Hoffman, John Lennon, Ram Dass, Timothy Leary and a host of others. They provided a needed alternative to the not-to-be-trusted government. And it was all about rebellion and planting the seeds for a revolution.
All of these new leaders had unbridled passion for what they believed, they were smart, they were persistent, and they took risks. Many went to jail at some point and some like Leary, multiple times. They were driven by their passion and nothing else mattered.
I absorbed that passion in college from Leary, Lennon, and others and would later learn the risks. In engineering school, our heroes were Bill Hewlett and David Packard, the duo credited with starting a billion-dollar corporation in a garage that, in turn, started Silicon Valley. Later, in my involvement in the early days of personal computers, I had the good fortune to meet both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in their start-up days and then see the success of their persistence in following a dream.
Growing up during these times with my entrepreneurial spirit gave me a love for the U.S. as I saw the opportunities other countries didn’t have. I travelled to Europe frequently and saw how difficult it was to start a company and pursue your dreams. The U.S. was an amazing garden for ideas, with rich soil and unlimited water and sunlight. Mix that with the seed of an idea and unlimited passion and, most of the time you had success.
But in 1986, I was having lunch with Vinco Dolenc, a neurosurgeon in Ljubljana when it was still Yugoslavia. We sat in a quaint café up on a hill overlooking the river. I was there with another neurosurgeon I was travelling with giving lectures on brain monitoring. Dr. Dolenc was fascinated with the U.S. but as an outside observer. He told me something I never forgot. He said, “Democracy is still an experiment”. I never forgot it because I thought he was wrong. How could a government that rang so true in terms of what it provided for its citizens still be an experiment? And how many times had I recited the Pledge of Allegiance as a kid? All this for an experiment? That can’t be true.
Over the next decades my lunch conversation with Dr. Dolenc started to make sense. I saw how lies about Viet Nam, and later Iraq, led to massive shifts of wealth at the expense of a lot of dead Americans. I saw corporations and paid-off-politicians lie about the effects of cigarettes, climate change, and guns. I started to develop a distrust in the government. More precisely, a distrust of individuals who saw the immense wealth in the U.S. and decided some of that should be theirs. And they did what it took to get it. It showed me how money and greed are the Achilles Heel of a Democracy. I started four companies and always put the dream before profits…most likely as a backlash to what I saw. In the end I realized I was on one end of a spectrum, but I had seen too many on the other end.
About 25 years later I was driving Timothy Leary around Philadelphia in my beatup yellow Honda wagon that looked like a miniature school bus. Dr. Leary was speaking at a computer art symposium I had organized. This was in the pioneering days of using computers in the arts. I invited Dr. Leary on a long-shot that he would attend…and he accepted. He had gotten into using personal computers for creativity and mind expansion later in his career. I picked him up at the airport and drove him around. We talked about his early experiments. I asked him about his most famous quote, “Turn on, tune in, drop out”. He turned to me with a grin and said, “Yeah, they took me seriously.”
So who am I? What did life teach me? What is unique about me? From the social turmoil in my college years and seeing how greed corrupts, I gained a fundamental First Principle in that everyone needs to leave this planet having made it a better place however large or small that effort is. Moving from a small conservative town to a university and then to a large city exposed me to different people and ideas and the realization that I can’t impose my ideas on others and I can’t judge people for theirs. Growing up the runt with three brothers who were all captains of the swim team kept me introverted and focused on science all through college. It wasn’t until I got to medical school that I broke from my shell and became the person I was meant to be. It took that long to gain the required self-confidence. I came to grips all too late with the fact that I am a starter not a finisher. I’ve had many good ideas several of which have turned into products sold worldwide but the diligence needed to turn that idea into a thriving company came from those around me. And my home is a museum of unfinished projects.
So after all these years I’m still in life’s classroom and still taking notes. However, I’m also reading old notes now to find the message I need to pass on. Steve Jobs, in his famous Stanford commencement address, talked about connecting the dots in his life. He said you can only connect life’s events looking backwards. Going forward the dots aren’t there yet. You have to trust your gut, he said, as it likely already knows what you want to be. Similarly, Leary taught me to discover my uniqueness, who I am, what’s in my gut. In the end, it’s been the most reliable guide in my journey through life.