George Leonard authored nine books, including Education and Ecstasy and The Ultimate Athlete, as well as scores of magazine articles. He served as senior editor at Look Magazine from 1953 to 1970, where he earned an unprecedented number of awards for education reporting, and was a contributing editor for Esquire. He held a third-degree black belt in the martial art of aikido, and was co-owner of an aikido school in Mill Valley, California.

He was interviewed in his home in Mill Valley by Peter Tjeerdsma and Sharon Hart in the late 90's.  They feel privleged to have met him and will always revere his memory and contribution to the evolution of human consciousness.

One of the themes that runs through your book Mastery highlights the impact of the media on consciousness, and how our society is being both manipulated and mirrored by the media. Would you share with us your opinions on the role of the media in our culture?

My basic thesis is that it is the media, especially television commercials, that really define value in our culture. In 1987, when I was working on the Esquire articles that were the seed for the book, I began studying commercials. If you look at a commercial, it is all about value, because it is asking you to spend money on what you most value at any given time. I watched television commercials for a week, and I didn't exactly find what particular things they were valuing, but I discovered something even more important, which is the essential rhythm of our culture. And I saw that this rhythm is idealized as a life that consists of an endless series of climactic moments - one thrill after another, with no practice needed. In situation comedies, everything works out in half an hour. In the crime shows, the appearance of the gleaming barrel of a handgun immediately gets your attention.

So it is this idea of the quick fix, of an endless series of climactic moments, which I truly think has corrupted our society. Now, I have seen a some correction recently - I think that these things tend to go in cycles. Mastery has actually done well, and the Esquire articles were heavily reprinted. One branch of AT&T made three thousand photocopies because they couldn't get anymore tearsheets. Whether this is just a slight inflection or a really long term correction I don't know, but people are seeing the truth of the matter, that the quick fix doesn't work. Now I have this outrageous dream - I would give up all royalties if the book Mastery could be given away to every high school student in America.

The media have replaced the traditional value-givers, the tribal elders, the extended family, the school-master, the family doctor. But something even more insidious has happened: community has withered away. Gossip, for example, is very valuable. We learned quite a bit about Stone Age cultures in the early parts of this century, before they were corrupted by exposure to civilization. When it was really possible to go see what these cultures were like, by extrapolation we could see the way we evolved into our present state. There may be 30 people in a hunting and gathering band, and they spend anywhere from 4 to 5 hours a day working. (Now, people may say that civilization gave us leisure, but we had a lot more leisure in a hunting and gathering band. With all our complicated tools and things, the more we have the more work there is to do.) How did they spend that extra time? Sitting around talking and gossiping. I call it the "prehistoric soap opera", and I say that not in a pejorative way.

The best thinking in anthropology now is that there just wasn't enough in signaling, hunting, and toolmaking to require this enormous, outrageous brain that we have, the most complex entity in the known universe - incredibly complex. A human's brain is four times larger than a chimpanzee's brain, three times larger than the early hominids. The main factor driving this tremendous growth was the need to deal with the subtle interactions of the soap opera; who's doing what to whom, with whom, family relationships, love relationships, the all-important "ordinary" things in life.

To be human is to be in community. We don't have much community now. By the end of the 80's many people didn't have anybody to gossip about, but they still needed to have a community; so who became their community? Celebrities. Madonna, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan. People are obsessed with these characters. It is all about celebrities, and this is very weird. The celebrities they're thinking about and gossiping about don't even know they exist. A totally one-way relationship. I really think that we are not human unless we are in community, and if our community is only the people we see in People Magazine and Entertainment Tonight, then we become less and less, we almost vanish as human beings. To me, that's one of the most significant effects of the media.

It seems that this celebrity culture is closely connected with the way advertising and ratings have come to drive most of our mass media. What was your experience of this in the magazine business? How did you find yourself and others responding to these pressures?

I had 17 glorious years with Look magazine, and I think that for some of your younger readers I'll have to say what Look was. As of the 60's, especially from 1964 to 1970, Look was arguably the most prestigious and popular magazine in the country. We won three times more national awards than any other magazine in our field. It became embarrassing, we got so many national awards from 1965 on, including the very first National Magazine Award for our coverage of Civil Rights. When I came to Look in the early 50's we had about two-and-a-half million in circulation and Life had four million. By the mid 60's Life had doubled to eight million, but Look was eight-and-a-half million. We'd quadrupled. So I had experience in a very dynamic and successful magazine.

When I started to work for Look in 1953, magazines were far more influential, powerful and prestigious than television. Television was kind of a curiosity. It had a little black-and-white screen with a tiny picture - you had to have a magnifying glass in front of it to view it sometimes. The big general magazines, Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, and Colliers; that was where the real glamour and excitement was. And while I was with Look during that period of tremendous growth, the senior editors were involved in everything from the very inception. We went out and met the people, we worked with the photographers, the layout person, we followed it every inch of the way.

You hear people say, "All the papers are trying to do is to sell copies." But that statement sounds so far from my reality. At Look, the majority of the senior editors and the top editorial board really wanted to do good stories. I never thought about selling copies. It never entered my mind. Our first California issue was the biggest seller in the history of the magazine, way above Life. I was delighted of course, but then I went right on. And the next story I didn't think about it. I just wanted to get something out there, I wanted to create something. And the other people at Look did too. I think this might be anomalous, but I know people in television too, who really want to do good stuff.

But yes, the pressures have become greater and greater, and as technology has moved along, the focus has narrowed. When Look went under I had great faith something would come along to take its place, a magazine that is both passionate and compassionate, that loves the underdog and looks at all points of view, a magazine that really values the human individual, and really cares about people of all types. For example, when we did a sixteen page story called, "What is a Teacher?" the goal was to find a typical teacher, not the fanciest teacher. I spent three weeks sitting in a classroom in Illinois with Caroline Wilson and her second grade class. The feature was reprinted all over the world in every language including Russian. The NEA reprinted one-and-a-half million copies of it. It won all the national education writing awards. And it was about an ordinary person - about the dignity, the worth, and the fantastic potential of the people we call ordinary.

Which is the opposite of the whole celebrity thing...

The opposite! I despise celebrity stories. We did some, of course. People would say, I want to know the real Frank Sinatra, I want to know the real Marilyn Monroe. Listen: you don't want to know the real people. The best version of, say, Michael Jackson is when the camera is trained on him and the spotlight is on. That's the one you want to know. Many of them are arrested adolescents, and they are generally the most boring people in the world.

So, what do you think got us into these straits?

Just what I said: the breakdown of community and the simultaneous rise of the mass media of celebrity. I remember when People Magazine started, folks would say, "My god, this is a weird magazine." And now look at the popularity of it. Look at what has happened to Esquire. Esquire was a wonderful magazine, but it is now a celebrity magazine. Vanity Fair was always, for many years, a very classy celebrity magazine. The New Yorker is going that way. I look at Esquire now and it is boring. Who wants to read it? Celebrities are boring. But if you don't have a community, you've got to gossip about somebody, and our celebrities are it. We evolved as hunters and gatherers; our immune system, our nervous system, our brain, our bodies, kinesiology, everything evolved to live in hunting and gathering groups who spent most of their time talking and interacting in a very rich and full way. It can't be very rich and full if the people you're talking about don't even know you exist.

And we also spent much of our free time telling stories or singing, entertaining each other.

Telling stories, yes. As Borges has said, the world is basically impenetrable, it's a labyrinth. The only way we can make sense out of it is by weaving what he called "ficciones", fictions. That's how we know the world. I think the basic unit of information is not a bit or a byte, it is a story. You say "John", then you say "Mary", it means nothing, but if you say, "John loves Mary", or you say, "John is chasing Mary", you've got some kind of a story in it and then it means something.

The personal story has broken down in this culture, and community has broken down with it. And into that vacuum has moved this enormous celebrity industry. It has very little to recommend it, I really don't know exactly what it does that is positive for the human spirit. We can talk about spirituality, about higher value, but then you could value - well, who is the hottest personality right now? - you could value somebody like Sharon Stone more than you do your next door neighbor. You can know Sharon very well, but Sharon Stone doesn't know you. That's the point. But then the stories are getting worse and worse too. Now, to a great extent, they're mostly just looking for scandal.

It doesn't do much for the development of the individual, or humanity as a whole...

Right. The creative capacity of the human brain is, for all practical purposes, infinite. I could argue this persuasively. Unless you're seriously damaged, you're practically infinite in creative capacity. And what we're doing is taking a tiny little slice out of humanity, that particular kind of glimmer you see in the celebrity magazines, the celebrity TV shows, the movies.

Our media is always telling us that these people are so perfect, but there's always something wrong with us.

And you can be fixed immediately, with no practice. Just buy this product, just take this drug, just read this "how-to book". Which is crippling, it is crippling - a nation goes to ruin without valuing some long-term practice. The two Guardian Angels every culture needs - Vision and Practice. We're losing both, but we can't give up. I don't think we've really looked at the possible consequences of what the celebrity media are doing to us. There is a tremendous amount of study and insight that could come out of this. What happens when we get all our kicks from people that don't even know us? I really think the idea of just not existing, vanishing, is the basic metaphor.

Looking at the pattern of how all of this has unfolded, its roots go back to the advent of the first real mass media, radio. And after W.W.II, the first single-family tract homes became widely available. Then Television in the 50's started to come in, and there was this whole progression of the breakdown of community into mother, father and 2 1/2 children. What can individuals working in the media do to help rebuild community?

Well, first of all we've got to recognize what is happening, and acknowledge it ourselves, and this awareness needs to be widespread. The work you're doing with ATMA is fantastic. And we need more stories on "ordinary" people. This can help create and enhance community, to have pictures of people who are just like us. In 1960 I did an article, "The Changing American Family ", and I found a family down on the San Francisco Peninsula living in one of those tract houses. And we stayed with them for a long time, we got to know them, and those pictures are so human. They're faces we can relate to. The media should be doing more stories on the majesty of ordinary people.

At one time, Dan Rather was giving a commentary on KCBS radio, and he was basically saying, "You think I enjoy reporting the same thing every day, day in and day out? It's a ratings-driven business. I have to report what the audience responds to. So if you don't like what you see on the news, change what you watch, and they'll change what they produce."

I agree, we've got to go to the public too, it is not just media people. And let's go back to the ideas in Mastery , because it all ties in together: We need a medium of publication, of communication, that is willing to do the work for its own sake, with idealistic management that is willing to not worry so much about the ratings. I'm convinced that the best things I ever did, the work that got national awards and had the biggest readership appeared when I was not going for readership at all.

If you really want to think about a bizarre phrase that we've just accepted without comment: "Fast temporary relief". I mean everything is fast temporary relief. We've got to wake up to the fact that we're being taken. There is that little jolt, and then of course you get another, but it is not satisfying, it is not fulfilling. The quick fix does not work. That's my real message. Right now we are like drugged people, we've got to go on some kind of 12-step program or something. I draw a very close comparison to the fact that with 5% of the world's population, we have had over 50% of the illegal drug use in the world. Why is that? Is it because we're the richest country in the world? No. Are we the poorest? No. What are we? We're the most driven by the quick fix.

This life of endless climaxes - the curve I describe in Mastery - this doesn't exist anywhere in nature for very long. I ask young people, "Now how can you keep this going for a while in your life?" They think for a while: "Drugs." I say "What kind of drugs?" They say, "the uppers." Once you get on this kind of curve, you can crash if you try to keep it up.

What I'm saying is that there's a very close connection between that high drug use and our being the quick fix society. We need some kind of remedial program, to get back on that mastery curve. The path of mastery is the path that has the most satisfaction.

There are some promising signs.

Yes, we've got to keep at it.

There is a book that relates to this: James Burke's The Axemaker's Gift. His thesis is that we're in a state now where our reliance on technology has taken us to the point where there's really no way out except reliance on more technology. And the only thing he sees that has a chance of turning this all around is the kind of individual communications that the Internet makes possible.

Electronic community...

Communities of thought and principle that cross the boundaries of geography and race. However, for people to really connect, we need gatherings where there's actual physical presence. If it is purely electronic

Yeah, we're disappearing, isn't that what it is? I mean, if you never see the person and you never touch them you can't really know them. In my book The Silent Pulse, I talk about entrainment. William Condon, in Boston, has shown that whenever I'm talking to you, if you move at all - as you're moving your elbow right now, nodding your head, anything - it is precisely synchronized down to 1/48 of a second with not only the syllables but the sub-syllables, the phonemes, of my speech. That seems to be an absolutely crucial element in human communication. Condon has also found that newborn babies, when they make one of these little jerky motions, it's precisely synchronized with the mother's speech. We're not born in the world alone. We touch. Where do we get that in a chat room?

George Lucas has an education center out at his ranch, and is trying to simulate the educational technology of 2010, or 2020. The last time I was out there, I said to him, "Now, promise me that you will have not just high-tech, but high-touch - you'll have playgrounds, you'll have physical activities." And he said, "No question about it, we're going to have that." I'm not saying that technology is intrinsically bad. The problem is that we're putting it into a culture where people are already isolated, and maybe a chat room is better than nothing, but we've got to get beyond that. It's got to have the quality of the human spirit. We don't want to die in our technology.

Many people are becoming more and more afraid to go out and engage in their communities, they're afraid to touch other people in any deep way. We at ATMA feel that the media can help to overcome that kind of fear-based behaviour in our culture.

Yes, it is a tremendous enterprise and it could go in many different directions. Again, I would like to talk about the "Two Lost Angels". Any cultural revival has to have both Vision and Practice, and we have neither right now.

Now, a "vision" is not the same as a "goal". A goal is limiting because it points to something out there in the future, and all you think about is getting there, and what happens in between doesn't matter. A true vision will incorporate the value of practice into it, and every step along the way is a good thing. And the vision I want to put forward is the vision of human potential that I started talking about in 1965, the infinite potential of every single human being.

It's a terrible tragedy that the human potential is being lost in individuals, but the fact is that this can be offset through the amazing effectiveness of practice. Since the publication of Mastery, studies have been coming out that tend to corroborate the ideas in the book. The key variable in what we call expert performance is not talent or some god-given gift. Talent is important, of course, but by far the major variable is practice. Long-term deliberate practice. That's why I want to get that book out to every school kid, to let them know that there's joy in practice. And sports celebrities can even serve as examples: the greatest athletes, by and large, are the ones who not only practice the most, but who love to practice. In commercials over the last few years they'll actually show a guy really practicing.

"Just do it?"

Unfortunately, I have 13 triple-A feet, and the only running shoe I can get that will fit me is Nike, but I'm still looking. There are the horrible working conditions in Nike's Asian factories, and then there's also that slogan they put on the T-shirts, "Silver medal is first loser". Unless you are the gold medallist you are nothing. "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." Think about that phrase. You know, it means that sportsmanship is nothing, honesty is nothing, cheating is nothing, bad health is nothing, killing yourself is nothing, hurting other people is nothing. Because winning is the only thing. "Don't tell me how you sell the ad, I don't want to know, just sell the ad, just sell it. I don't care how you get across the goal line, the only thing that matters is getting across the goal line."

By that way of thinking, only achieving a goal matters. Most of life gets lost "in between", since there are actually very few of those moments. So we've got to recapture the "in between".

But really, there is no "in between", it's every moment of life that counts!