Stewart Brand: belief

Transcript context

…What led you to take that plunge? Someone said, “Do this.” It wasn’t a known thing back then. Why did you do it? I wouldn’t have done it. [laughs] Oh, I was young and careless. I was jumping out of airplanes and climbing things and doing all the dangerous stuff that you do when you’re young and witless. That one, I think, was an outgrowth of the Bay Area of Midpeninsula T-groups that developed the confrontational personal interaction in group sessions. That developed in the ’50s at Stanford and in that area. That led to a very transformational approach to ideas of human potential and so on. When Esalen Institute got started, I had already been doing seminars on my own with the students from Stanford at Slates Hot Springs — it later became Esalen — and got to be friends with Mike Murphy when he and Richard Price were starting Esalen Institute. All of that human potential stuff was looking at religion, looking at meditation, looking at drugs. We were reading about Aldous Huxley and what he got from peyote, and I was hanging out with peyote Indians a lot, increasingly in the ’60s. Friends in the Stanford area said LSD was just starting to turn up. It was still legal through the early ’60s, and there was a so-called therapeutic model, which is now completely revived. It’s interesting that it had to go through a long hiatus, that psychedelics can be useful as mental — in significant personal therapy. Remember before that, when psychoanalysis first came along, all the anthropologists felt they had to get psychoanalyzed. This was a similar thing: “There’s this new therapy, and it’s supposed to be used on sick people, but if it works for sick people, let’s try it on healthy people to see if it makes them even healthier.” That was the theory we were going on. As it happened in that set and setting of a therapy, I basically flunked out. It was just a not very pleasant, long episode. But later on, I had personal LSD experiences that were transformative, including one that got me going on what a difference the photograph of the whole Earth would make. As you know, San Francisco was a relatively small city. Why did it, and not Los Angeles, become the center of hippie culture?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.