#891 - Zach Leary

Joe Rogan (0:05)

All right, man, we're live.

Zach Leary (0:06)

Awesome, thanks for having me, man.

Joe Rogan (0:08)

Thanks for being here.

Zach Leary (0:08)

Yeah, this is cool, this is cool.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

Any friend of Duncan's, a friend of mine.

Zach Leary (0:12)

Likewise, likewise, it's cool, it's fun.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Dude, okay, so I have to ask the opening question. What the fuck is it like being the son of Timothy Leary?

Zach Leary (0:22)

The opening question, right?

Joe Rogan (0:24)

It has to be the opening question.

Zach Leary (0:25)

It has to be, okay, that's cool. Yeah, man, you know, and the answer to the question, it's changed a lot over the course of time, obviously, because when I was younger, when I was a kid, really up until my mid-20s, even my late 20s, I didn't know how to answer that question. How could I? It's just all I knew, it's just life. It's just my dad, it's just how I grew up. He would take me to Little League, he'd make sure I did my homework or didn't do my homework in my case, but whatever it was, you know what I mean? It just was life. I didn't have any objectivity to it, I didn't have any distance from it, I couldn't be remote from it. I didn't know that it was perhaps really strange.

And then he died in 96, I was 22, and then kind of after that, then I sort of got some distance from it, then I was like, oh shit.

Things were a little different at home, they were.

Joe Rogan (1:22)

Well, your dad is probably one of the most important, if not the most important people ever in terms of the psychedelic revolution.

Zach Leary (1:31)

He was. My relationship with him and my relationship especially with his work was, yeah, of course the psychedelic part was a core pillar and I understood that's what made him famous. But I considered him to be, he was a futurist really.

During my formative years, the psychedelic thing was always there, but he was much more interested in technology and cyber culture and the progressive technology arts and things like that. And in the 80s, he called the PC the LSD of the 80s. So he was really shifting and I considered him somebody who just had the innate ability to constantly reinvent himself. And of course, the psychedelics were the core, I guess.

Joe Rogan (2:19)

Probably is also probably a big part of how he can reinvent himself, right?

Zach Leary (2:23)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, that's true. I mean, well, and considering, and you can relate with this, I think, too, and he didn't do his first psychedelic until he was 40

Oh, wow. You were, what, 30 or something?

Joe Rogan (2:35)

Yeah.

Zach Leary (2:36)

Right.

So it's a similar, like you're well into your adult life and you're well formed. You have an identity.

Joe Rogan (2:42)

That's Jack Harrah's story, too.

Zach Leary (2:44)

Oh, is it?

Joe Rogan (2:45)

Yeah. Jack Harrah was a gold water Republican, like deep into his, I think he was getting divorced. Really?

Met a young gal and she turned him on to the weed and all of a sudden he was like, hey, what the fuck have I been missing?

Zach Leary (2:59)

Yeah. He's still, to this day, still the strongest weed I've ever had.

Joe Rogan (3:03)

Jack Harrah's train?

Zach Leary (3:04)

Yeah. Fuck, man.

Joe Rogan (3:05)

He was a cool guy, man.

Zach Leary (3:07)

He was a cool guy.

Joe Rogan (3:07)

He bummed me out when he left.

Zach Leary (3:08)

Yeah. And did good work.

Joe Rogan (3:10)

So, your dad probably would have had an amazing time with what's going on today in terms of virtual reality and the integration of cell phones into our life in an almost inescapable way.

Zach Leary (3:23)

I mean, it's funny, like the VR thing, we were just, Jamie and I were just talking about it before we rolled tape. We were doing VR like, yeah, we were at the NASA Ames Research Center. People were like Jaren Lanier, and we're like really, Jaren Lanier was kind of the godfather of VR. And he was bringing kind of set up storehouse in the early 90s.

And like really early kind of almost 8-bit rudimentary VR. But it was there.

Joe Rogan (3:49)

So what did that stuff look like?

Zach Leary (3:50)

It kind of looked like being inside of an Atari video game.

Joe Rogan (3:57)

So real pixelated.

Zach Leary (3:59)

Pixelated 8-bit kind of clunky block like, but with full 3D dimensionality and stuff like that.