Long John I think went off the air in about '79 or something, so there was a hiatus. That's why I think Art Bell thought there was a spot to be filled. He was doing exactly the same thing.

[The Theosophical Society] are ideologues in terms of the way they present the material. That's one of the reasons why, when they teach their courses, you only get a smidgen of stuff and you have to keep coming back every week. They won't do an overview. Because they're trying to bypass your conscious critical faculties by leaking the information slowly.

I think [Theosophical and Masonic books] wasn't that I was inspired so much. I was corroborated by them.

My father would conclude his dissertations by saying, "Of course, [Albert] Einstein never believed in gravity. It was a distortion of space." And so my father couldn't believe that an attraction at a distance was a reality.

I went to the Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont. And it was a place where you, like, learned to go to the store? And I was saying, Oh God, I want to learn something else. I wanted to learn to read and write better and do mathematics better. They were very much into Abstract Expressionism and that artsy stuff. And where most kids did what I call meaningless blobs, I could render perfectly.

[Buckminster Fuller] always liked to say that he got kicked out of Harvard three times. Mostly you only got kicked out once, but he kept coming back.

I could do Superman, the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, this kind of stuff [at school]. And kids would give me their lunch money to have these things.