Leary: We're talking about the brain. And unless you have some way of really activating the brain, people are going to use electrons as simply as external devices for power, control and money. So, yes, unless someone has had psychedelic experiences, they simply don't understand how to operate or use electronic devices except for materialistic reasons. It's no accident that the people who popularized the personal computer were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both barefoot, longhaired acid-freaks. It's no accident that most of the people in the software computer industry have had very thoughtful, very profitable and creative psychedelic experiences. Bill Gates, rumor has it, was a very active psychedelic proponent when he was at Harvard, before he, uhh . . .

Fahey: Founded Microsoft.

Leary: Yeah. So, you could go right down the line of the people who are the . . . it's well-known that the software, not the hardware, but the software so-called industry is saturated with people who have been turned on profitably, respectably and creatively by LSD.

Fahey: Is there any future for the psychedelics, in either medical research or social applications? Or do you see any in the future?

Leary: Well, I think the medical profession, we all know that, is totally corrupt. Every doctor now is a corporation. And medical research in this country is government-sponsored and government-funded or funded by large drug companies. I think that government corporations should fucking keep their hands off the brain-change substances. The idea of a government-sponsored, authorized, doctor giving LSD to mess around with people's brains is the ultimate Orwellian nightmare. The operational access to and use of your own mind and brain is a highly individual choice. Just as the right-wing government and politician's religions want to control women's reproductive organs, they want to control brains. The key, here, is that . . . the adult American should be able to do with their mind or their body what she wants to.

So, I'm bored with discussions of the social, because it's highly individual--it's not just individuals, it's individuals in small groups. Because individuals, by themselves, taking psychedelics are alienated, lost, fucked up; you've got to do it in small groups. That's the basic shamanic [pause], which Socrates taught us, and which Aldous Huxley taught us at Harvard. Small groups.

Fahey: Do you run into [Augustus Stanley] Owsley [the Sixties' Robin Hood of LSD]?

Leary: I see Owsley every time I go to a Grateful Dead concert. He's there backstage. He's selling jewelry, which you have to look at through a magnifying glass; incredibly talented miniature, almost molecular jeweler now.

Fahey: His days of production are over, I assume. Long over.

Leary: [shrugs] None of my business.

Fahey: Where are we in the process of expanding our horizons? What do you see as the next wave, or the current wave?

Leary: By "we," I assume you mean the human race; which always means individuals. The use of multimedia electronic software--CDROM discs, audiovisual disks--will put into the hands of every Third World kid, every inner-city kid in America the ability to boot up, activate, turn on their right brain, to reprogram their left brain. The use of electrons for brain-change and for brain-fucking and brain-reprogramming has been perfected in the form of the television commercial. And I totally admire a thousand years of the Catholic Church, using jewels, organs, rose windows and that sort of stuff to, uhh [pause]. What we're understanding now is that the human brain is a photovore. That means that the human brain lives on light.

Fahey: How so? Explain that to someone having difficulty understanding the concept.

Leary: Every metaphor approximating the visionary experience is optical: illumination, revelation, insight, perspective, reflection. Right down the list. I'm too senile to remember all of them, but punch "illumination" up into your computer thesaurus, and you'll get [laughs, nods, fades]. Light has always been the statement of the ultimate brain experience: Tibetans talk about the White Light of the Void. Dante's Heaven was total white . . . the Egyptian religions, sun. These are primitive anticipations of what we now have available. The human brain is starved for electronic stimulation; the human brain is addicted to light. We can't control the sun, but through diamonds and rose windows [interrupted by waitress; Leary orders cup of coffee].

Leary: . . . we're now using electrons to create what's called "virtual reality," electronic realities, which mean brain realities of course, because for the brain to use the body to communicate in terms of words--nine muscles of your vocal chords to create the words that I am now, or printing presses to print out book--is extremely crude, when you consider the human brain can deal with a hundred and fifty million signals a second. We use oral and hand tools, mechanical forms of communication, basically for material purposes; but we're now into the concept of direct brain exchange or brain communication, on screens. I think perhaps as important as LSD is a new device called the video projector; and what this means is that you have a small hand-held device that you can plug in a videotape, anywhere you go--which means you can bring one, I can bring one, and on our wall we can mix our electronic environments: you can have George Bush giving a speech on your projector, and I can be putting in Madonna taking off her clothes. I'm kidding, of course [winks].

The video projector is an extraordinary empowerment of the individual. We can no longer sit in front of the television screen like ameboids, just sucking up what they're putting there. We can now move around and put on the walls what we have stored in our CDROM computers.

The empowerment of the individual implied in video projectors, of course, was not understood by the engineers who designed it; but it is thrilling. And in retrospect, you see, it was entirely predictable. Forty years ago, you had to go to a theater to see electrons sprayed on a big screen. Then you had television, and you could sit in your livingroom and you could have your own little screen. Now, with the multiplication of cable and the clicker, you can lie in bed and change your screen; now, with wall-sized screens, operating on a hand-held projector is just the ultimate empowerment of the individual to communicate brain-to-brain.