Gabriel Kennedy: Yes, I agree. Bob and Timothy Leary were kindred spirits. They had a bond that ran deeper than their shared views on developmental psychology. They first met in 1964 when Bob interviewed Leary at the Millbrook mansion where Leary and his crew were conducting their psychedelic explorations. Both Bob and Arlen believed that Leary was really onto something in 1964, and Bob continued to believe so for the rest of his life. 

In 1964, Leary had not yet created the 8-Circuit model of intelligence. At the time, Leary was fascinated with the valuable language that Game Theory and The Tibetan Book of the Dead offered for understanding the mind-blowing effects of entheogens like LSD and psilocybin. One could conceive of those spaces where ‘no-self’ exists through a framework provided by Game Theory (or so thought Leary and RAW.) 

When Leary did come up with the 8-Circuit Brain Model, he asked Bob to help him co-author a book about it, which Leary was calling The Periodic Table of Energy. They created something quite magic(k)al. [RU: Much of this material wound up being used in Leary’s future history series, some of which had Wilson credited as a contributing author.] Leary had conducted his own in-depth studies of Crowley, Gurdjieff, the Kabala, and, of course, a ton of western psychology. He was thrilled that Wilson could not only keep up but also suggest new insights about his psychological systems.

I write in my book that Bob was fascinated with a fourfold understanding of the psyche dating back to high school when he first read Philip Wylie’s An Essay on Morals, which unpacked Carl Jung’s ideas on personality attitudes and types. There are two attitudes: extroversion and introversion. And there are four ‘functions’ or types of personality: thinking, sensation, intuition, and feeling. A careful study of the Leary-Wilson 8-Circuit Brain Model immediately reveals these influences. Then again, Jung influenced a whole lot of people. 

Wilson took the four functions seriously as a teenager. He used that model of the psyche to analyze himself, and determined that he was more a thinking type than an intuitive and sensational type. So he made it an early life mission to develop these other areas of his psyche, which is what eventually got him interested in magic(k), as that system demands practitioners to study their intuitive natures. 

There are a number of instances where Wilson collated information on human psychology into this fourfold matrix, and he did so mainly because he observed other systems utilizing the fourfold structure, from Christianity’s four gospels to Buddhism’s fourfold path.

It was Wilson’s early study of General Semantics, and Frazer’s The Golden Bough, however, that I believe allowed him to think laterally in such an effortless way. His mind was trained early to find isomorphisms in comparative structures. He then clashed ideas together and synthesized as much as he could into he and Leary’s 8 Circuit Brain Model (8CBM). I have written more about all this in Chapel Perilous.

GK: This is actually a tricky question as Bob was pretty open with his readers. He pretty much seemed to write about everything that interested him. Let’s see… he told me when I interviewed him in 2003 that he liked hip-Hop music. Bob loved watching TV. Law & Order was one of his favorite shows. I think people who knew him knew how much Bob enjoyed television. In researching my book, I came across a great segment from a public access television show featuring Wilson and his friend Scott Apel where they are analyzing episodes of The Prisoner, the legendary TV show created by the equally legendary Patrick McGoohan. 

What else? He loved dogs. I did not write much about his dogs in Chapel Perilous, but Bob had a dog growing up in Brooklyn, and as soon as he and Arlen started their family in the late 1950s, he got dogs again. 

I remember, during a class I was taking at the Maybe Logic Academy, an interactive remote learning website that RAW and Lance Bauscher created in 2004, Bob wrote that he thought he may have had Asperger’s. I don’t think I mention that in the book because I wanted to steer clear from any sort of psychoanalyzing of him. Asperger’s is on the autism spectrum, and I fell down a small rabbit hole researching autism and artists while writing my book. I came across a book called Writers on the Spectrum by Julie Brown which makes an argument for how Hans Christian Anderson, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, and other great writers had autism and/or Asperger’s. So, Bob wondered that about himself. If you look into aspects of Asperger’s, one is an extreme attention to detail. Bob was able to use that in his writing, especially his fiction work, to create countless reasons to read the page again. But, who knows, maybe Bob was just a genius.

GK: I think the most enduring quality of RAW’s optimism was that he learned as a child to use optimism as a tool for existential survival. I think Bob embodied what Viktor Frankl, the Jewish Holocaust survivor and founder of Logotherapy, called ‘tragic optimism,’ meaning that over the course of his life, Bob was very familiar with pain, guilt, and death. These qualities comprise the foundation of tragic optimism, and Bob remained cheerful in spite of such things. If one can remain optimistic about life and one’s fellow human after enduring horrible and traumatic events, one has earned a noble wisdom of the heart. I think this resonates in most of Bob’s work. 

Some examples of this are his experiences as a child in South Brooklyn with polio. Later there was his response to almost committing suicide in his 20s, his response to his daughter Luna being murdered, and other difficult events throughout his life. He practiced this optimism in his 70s when he had post-polio and  his body was slowly failing. Bob’s optimism was all about activation, engagement, and stretching. It’s quite a yogic mindset, and he arrived there through his own wonderfully meandering path.

Bob grew up in a poor neighborhood on the southernmost shores of Brooklyn during the Great Depression. That early life alone would be enough to drive some young men into a life of crime. Through his experience of being relatively cured of polio by the Sister Kenny Method, he learned that there is always hope for achieving medicinal relief, even if others say there is no hope. 

In his 20s, he nearly jumped to his death from the Brooklyn Bridge in a drunken stupor after his girlfriend dumped him through a letter. But before he jumped from the bridge, he saw a plaque dedicated to the family who built the bridge; and he saw how long it took them and the sacrifice it took for them to do so. That awakened him and he realized that if he wanted to make something of lasting value like the Brooklyn Bridge then he had to be tougher on the outside while also being kinder to himself. Through the help of psychotherapy, and through orgone therapy – the therapy based on the ideas and practices of Wilhelm Reich – Bob healed himself from some of his childhood trauma. Again, he was learning early in his life that one can transcend depressed mental states.

Many years later, as I write in my book, Bob utilized such far-out things as magick, LSD, marijuana, the works of Friedrich Nietzsche (minus his Übermensch theory), and creative visualization to not only see far-out things but also to maintain a relaxed state of homeostasis as his world became increasingly stressful. There was no shortage of reasons Bob could have picked to become and remain a miserable person. But he recognized the value in optimism, literally, as a way to stay alive.

GK: It’s true that RAW was a techno-optimist. Some of his prognostications made about radically extending human lifespan within decades could be seen now as overly optimistic, but he allowed himself to be a visionary, meaning that he dedicated much ink to what could be if large segments of the population become enthusiastic about ideas like living forever. When it came to communication technologies, he was optimistic that once the Global South got online and everyday people from there shared their experiences with those in the Global North, then true world governance… not to be confused with government… could be achieved. 

Wilson grew up in a house where there was no phone – only newspapers, magazines, and books for entertainment. Then his family got a radio. Soon after that, he started going to movie theaters. His engagement with communications media continued until, years later, Bob was leading a pioneering remote learning website called The Maybe Logic Academy. He saw firsthand how communication technology can bring everyday people together. He believed that humanity would keep creating better forms of communication tech that will help achieve a more just, peaceful, and equitable planet outside of the reach of governments and corporations.

When it comes to his personal uses of technology, Bob was more of an ideas-man. I came across a number of stories about his clumsy ways with modern tech. He and Arlen’s daughter Alex recounted how Bob never learned to drive a car because of his polio. The first and only time he tried to drive, he crashed the car hood-first directly into the only light pole on a vast empty stretch of road. Or there’s the story from his friend Scott Apel about a night when Bob stayed in Apel’s guest room. The next day, when Scott asked Bob how he had slept, Bob replied that he slept very well except he couldn’t figure out how to turn off the lights in the room. So instead, he figured out how to sleep with the lights on. This left Scott perplexed because he knew that it was a simple procedure to turn off the lights in his guest room.  So here was, in Scott’s estimation, the smartest man on the planet unable to figure how a light switch works. There’s another great story like this in my book, but I’ll leave that for the reader to discover.  Overall, Bob was shockingly bad with the technology that he loved so dearly.

GK: Working within the parameters that you just set, while also acknowledging that it’s absolutely impossible for anyone to know the thoughts of a dead man, I will base my answer more on extrapolations of what Bob’s did say, while further acknowledging that the world has changed drastically over the last 17 years and he could have changed too. I mean Dennis Hopper and Eldridge Cleaver both died as Republicans, so ya never know.

One thing is clear, and I illustrate this in the last chapter of my book. It’s the chapter that opens with RAW appearing at the now legendary Disinfo.com conference at Hammerstein Ballroom in 2000. At that stage of his life, Bob truly was RAW, in the best sense of the word. There are so many stories about old folks becoming more conservative in their golden years, but Bob went the opposite direction. Like I write in the book, Bob was laying it down that night. He said that the reason many countries hate America is because we are bombing them. If we stopped bombing them, they would stop hating us. In that talk, he also said that there are two tiers of justice in America, those for the rich and those for the rest of us. Both these things are, of course, true, but Bob was stating such things with a more direct fiery tone than in previous years.

When I interviewed him in 2003, he told me that in the ’60s he called himself “an atheist, an anarchist, and a witch.” Then in the ’70s, he said he “softened it” to calling himself “a libertarian, a pantheist, and a neopagan.” Later, he started calling himself “a decentralist, a pragmatist, and proponent of Maybe Logic.”

Bob stated in an interview from the early ’90s – and he may have mentioned this in Cosmic Trigger Vol. 2 – that he saw the usefulness of third parties in political systems, based on his time living in Europe in the 1980s. He was in favor of strong third and fourth and fifth parties in the American political system, beyond Democrats and Republicans. I don’t know if he voted in 1988, because was still in Ireland during the summer of that year. However, he stated in a later interview in 2001 that he let a friend convince him to vote for Bill Clinton in 1992. However, Clinton was running against George Bush, who was the former director of the CIA, so Bob was not into an “ex” CIA man becoming President of the United States.

I am unsure whether he voted for Clinton in 1996 or whether he voted for Ralph Nader, but Nader and the Green Party were the third party that Bob had once wished for in America. Nader made the decision to run outside the political duopoly because he saw them both as unable to properly address the real needs of the American public. 

By 2000, Bob was drawing voters’ attention to the donors of the political candidates, and he was calling the presidential nominees, George W. Bush and Al Gore, the “two lying bastards”. The donors, argued Bob in one of his last books TSOG: The Thing that Ate the Constitution, were the ones the POTUS is really looking out for. 

In the interview series Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything, which was published in 2001, he said that he believed America was an Oligarchy. He also said in that interview that he saw hope for humanity with more people getting online from the Global South. Lastly, Bob was very clear on the impact of colonialization from his study of the imperialism Ireland faced from England for hundreds of years. Wilson did the historical research and saw the impact of the British Empire’s legacy of violence. 

I could see RAW being an outspoken critic of the neocolonialist system that exists, where American oil companies and the American government have colonized oil-producing countries since World War 2. RAW may have followed that logic all the way through and applied it to the current situation.

He may have supported Bernie in 2016. I think that’s actually a no-brainer. But also, he may have just said “fuck it” and stopped voting in general. This is why it is difficult guessing what he may or may not have done. 
 
As far as MAGA and Trump goes, there’s footage on YouTube of Bob’s calling Trump “fucking crazy,” so he saw what time it was with ‘the Donald’. I can’t imagine he would think too highly of MAGA.

I think that Bob would have provided information about who the major financial donors of Trump’s campaign were, and he would urge his readers to look at that, and to keep in mind his position that U.S. Presidents put the needs of their donors over the needs of their voters. I think RAW would raise more questions than provide answers. Same goes for Kamala and Biden: who are their major donors?

Lastly, when I interviewed Bob in 2003, he told me that he’d prefer it if U.S. politicians were trained in science more than in the law. So as far as the 2024 election went, there was only one Presidential candidate in the race with that qualification: Dr. Jill Stein. Stein was an actual physician before becoming involved in politics, and she is an on-the-ground activist, like Bob was. And she is in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza. I think Bob would respect her for all those reasons. Would he have voted for her and not Kamala? Who knows? Again, he’s dead and he would be pissed off to no end if we somehow contacted him on the other side just to ask him about U.S. politics. He may start haunting us just for doing so!

GK: As far as Bob and Artificial Intelligence goes, I think it’s far easier to guess what he’d think. He’d be into it. He’d be absolutely fascinated, I think. He’d probably be interested in the development of Artificial General Intelligence, and the work of Dr. Ben Goertzel, especially Goertzel’s notion of the importance of programming AI in such a way that it will value humanity. If we teach AI only how to murder people en masse, how’s that gonna play out?

He probably would be an experimenter with ChatGPT and ask it all sorts of interesting questions just to see what it says. It’s funny though: in all of Bob’s writings, I never really came across a direct reference to AI, even though his work appeals to people who are very much into the study of Artificial Intelligence. The notion of using a human-made “intelligence” that gets exponentially more intelligent, until, as Goertzel talks about, it’s AGI becoming an ASI, an Artificial Super Intelligence… I think Bob would be interested in all this through the lens of Tim Leary’s S.M.I².L.E. scenario. What will help humans behave and act more intelligently with one another and themselves?

Wilson gave a great interview with WBAI, the listener sponsored non-commercial radio station in New York City, in the mid-1960s about the promising potential cybernetics had for decentralizing power and control while promoting greater autonomy in individuals working in conjunction with one another. In that respect, I think he’d support the Decentralized AI Society and others promoting these uses of the technology.

Lastly, even though RAW never wrote about specific AI programs, like the ELIZA AI program you mentioned in your interview with Jeremy Braddock, one can make the argument that FUCKUP, which stands for First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic Ultra-micro-Programmer, from Illuminatus! is an AGI, and it becomes an ASI when it falls in love and merges with Leviathan.

GK: I do not know if there was a change in my thinking about RAW from writing this book. But authoring the book was itself an extremely deep education in the humanities for me. From studying the life of a man and his world – his ideas – I could not help but be constantly confronted with the human experience. I feel like I know this person now at a level I didn’t before. However, I also feel like Bob Wilson is even more of a mystery to me than ever before. Bob, in his writing, makes it clear that knowledge-of-self is an initiation that never ends. He remained open to surprising himself and, as such, was extraordinarily complex. He reminds readers of the mysteries that lie within oneself. 

I would also say that learning about his elderly years was educational. He never had a lot of money, and I am not sure what sort of healthcare he had then, but he had a support network that was huge. Hearing about all the people who hung out with him towards the end, it truly was a Sangha, a sacred community of love and support that surrounded him as he aged. I think society as a whole can learn from that.

Hmmm. Maybe one thing that stays with me was how much he spoke out and went to protests throughout his whole life. Bob didn’t just write about everyone living in harmony. He was engaged in activist protest. He put his body on the line, which is admirable. Also, learning about his constantly moving with a whole family and with pets… and how he managed to produce constant copy while living like that. One needs an intensely strong power of concentration to do this. Also, when I think about how much acid he took and how much weed he smoked, that level of laser-like focus is remarkable. While he and his family traveled, he had to carry loads of papers, his typewriter, and his books. 

I bounced around Los Angeles for over three years like this, only at a much higher velocity, with boxes of books and files needed for Chapel Perilous. To be able to move like this and hop right into writing requires Herculean amounts of mental muscle. Bob did it though. He was disciplined in his craft. He was disciplined in general. He gave himself so many exercises and meditations to do over the years, and learning more about all that was amazing and inspiring. So I gained a deeper appreciation for his level of concentration. Also, he never became bitter or full of resentment from the harsh tragedies that crashed into his life. He walked the talk and was able to utilize magic(k), psychology, drugs, and art to remain a joyful person till the day he died. And that’s a lesson I will never forget.