June 15, 2025 • 47 mins
We're joined by Erik Davis to discuss his book High Weirdness - a history of psychedelics and counterculture as a triptych embodied with three prominent figures: Terrence McKenna, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Anton Wilson. From Blade Runner to the Illuminati to Magic Mushrooms these three laid down foundational blocks decades ago that underpin (or perhaps undermine?) our present.
Terrence McKenna
Philip K. Dick
Robert Anton Wilson
Pyrrho - ancient Greek skeptic
Our coverage of Operation Mindf*ck (part 1 and part 2)
Erik Davis links:
Burning Shore (Substack)
Techgnosis (huge web archive)
Techgnosis (Book - Affiliate Link)
High Weirdness (Affiliate Link) - the Audiobook read by the author is very good. -B.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.
Terrence McKenna
Philip K. Dick
Robert Anton Wilson
Pyrrho - ancient Greek skeptic
Our coverage of Operation Mindf*ck (part 1 and part 2)
Erik Davis links:
Burning Shore (Substack)
Techgnosis (huge web archive)
Techgnosis (Book - Affiliate Link)
High Weirdness (Affiliate Link) - the Audiobook read by the author is very good. -B.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
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Speaker 4 (00:37):
Psychedelics reflect on this because psychedelics stretch and pull and
melt and recast the illusion producing machinery of language. I mean,
I think that if you had to say, the one
thing that psychedelics do for everyone, whether they have a
(00:57):
good trip or a bad trip, because it's up to
them to interpret what they make of this, is it
shows you the relativity of your cultural viewpoint, just your
point of view.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
We are living in a computer programmed reality, and the
only clue we have to it is when some variable
is changed and some alteration in our reality occurs, we
would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the
present dejuvou.
Speaker 6 (01:31):
We believe what we see, and then we believe our
interpretation of it. We don't even know we're making an interpretation.
Most of the time we think this is reality and philosophy.
That's called naive realism. What I perceive is reality. And
philosophism have refuted naive realism every century for the last
(01:51):
twenty five hundred years, starting with Buddha and Plato, and
yet most people still act on the basis of naive realism.
Now the argument is, well, maybe my perceptions are inaccurate,
but somewhere there is accuracy. The scientists have it with
their instruments. That's how we can find out what's really real.
But relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what
(02:14):
you find out with instruments is true relative only to
the instrument you're using and where that instrument is located
in space time. It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever
seen before.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
A giant, hairy creature part apes Park Mass in Luckness,
a twenty four mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands
of Scotland.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
It's a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Monstertle Welcome to Monster Talk the science show about monsters.
I'm Blake Smith and.
Speaker 7 (03:11):
I'm Karen Stoltner.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Monster Talk has always been a show about reality. We
use the tools of science to tease out what's the
most likely explanation for weird experiences. We talk about critical
thinking and rational approaches. We lean into the scientific consensus.
We warn about the limits of perception. But there are
other ways of knowing and other kinds of experiences than
(03:34):
those grounded and rational. Our guest today is Eric Davis,
and he wrote a book called High Weirdness that explores
the counterculture and the psychedelic realms through a triptic portrait
of three very influential men and their modes of inquiry,
all of which were in the terms of the time.
Speaker 8 (03:53):
Far out man.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Terence McKenna was a psychoonaut who used plants and fungi
and lab synthesized chemicals to alter his perceptions. He laid
the groundwork for the modern fascination with microdosing on hallucinogens,
but there wasn't anything subdued about.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
His own approaches with this stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Like a sasquatch of altered states, he left big footprints.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Philip K.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Dick struggled with a variety of challenging experiences, perhaps from neurodivergence,
but definitely enhanced by a personal need for speed. His
fiction toys with reality in ways that I personally find,
for lack of a better word, trippy, and his protagonists
frequently find themselves either unmasked are themselves surrounded by the mask.
(04:38):
Reality has no terra firma in his fiction, and as
it turned out, neither in his lived experience. And then
there's Robert Anton Wilson. We've talked about him before. Check
the show notes for links to those episodes. But Wilson
confronted reality as something to be challenged with drugs and
magic and defiance. Part playful and part subversive, His games
(04:59):
bl into our culture in ways that don't echo so
much as thunder. Davis's book is a deep historic dive
into these three figures and how their personal effort to
unlock the doors of perception and experience made our world
a much, much weirder place.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Morebstertle.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
So, first of all, welcome to Monster Talk, Eric Davis.
I'm going to do a brief intro. You are the
this really brief. You're the author of High Weirdness, Drugs
Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the seventies, which came out
in twenty nineteen. And I read this book late last October,
and it was just a fascinating look at nineteen seventies
(05:42):
counterculture and around three particular figures, Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson,
and Philip K.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Dick.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Now, our listeners, if they're not familiar with counterculture, should
probably go back and listen to our episode that we
did with Adam go rightly discussing Operation and Mindful. But
this period of time is so interesting, and I just
love what you did with this book talking about these
three individuals and setting the sort of context of the
nineteen seventies counterculture and mostly from seventy to seventy five.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
That's about right.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah, that's pretty much pretty much it.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
I guess we'll just start with this.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
What conditions in the nineteen seventies made it such a
I don't know, a rich environment for these kind of
fringe psychedelic experiences. And maybe we should unpack the term
counterculture because I think I don't know about you, but
in my world it specifically means that period the very
late sixties and early nineteen seventies in California, And I
(06:42):
don't know why that stuck that way, because I think
counterculture is a term probably has a broader meaning.
Speaker 9 (06:48):
Yeah, well, it's one of those terms, you know, like
a lot of these things, that it has its own
history and its own contrabties. You're right that the term
itself was invented in California in the late nineteen sixties
to describe kind of a mixture of both the hippie
movement and the more radical political movement, which were you know,
(07:12):
mixed in a variety of ways, but also kind of
can be seen as somewhat separate developments, although happening within the.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Same youthful generation.
Speaker 9 (07:22):
And so the explicit idea of the counterculture, of course,
is that it's oppositional, you know, that it's defined against
what's going on, and so, you know, it came to
be used widely to talk about both the radical political
movement and the more psychedelic or freak underground and kind
(07:45):
of kept that term.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Going for a while.
Speaker 9 (07:47):
But in other ways it's not it's not so sufficient,
and in some ways it doesn't really help us to
talk about more recent developments. But in that period of time,
I think it's fair. And really what I'm interested in
is the fact that in the late sixties, lots of
people thought a real change was coming, like almost like
(08:09):
a messianic transformation of reality, and some people were taking
big doses of LSD and every thing was becoming magical
and it felt like everyone was going to turn on
and then everything was going to transform in the.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
New world was going to be born of.
Speaker 9 (08:25):
Love and light and connection and nature. And at the
same time, you had people who were more politically motivated,
who felt that the revolution was going to come, you know,
one way or another, there was going to be a fundamental,
structural transformation of society. And these two visions, you know,
(08:46):
again both conflicted and supported each other in different ways,
but neither of them came to be right. And the
early seventies is that period of the counterculture when everybody
kind of finally wakes up and figures that out.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
So here they are with.
Speaker 9 (09:03):
Their freaky lives and their non traditional practices and their
psychedelic drugs or their free love or their radical consciousness raising,
you know, practices, and then they're like, oh, wait, the
revolution is not going to happen. We're kind of in
the same mess. I mean, it's changed, but how has
(09:25):
it changed? So in a way, that's the environment that
I'm interested in. I'm interested in the place where people
no longer really know what's going on, but they're still
really far out and they're really pushing it, and they
don't believe conventional society, but they also don't believe that
there's some neat and tidy transformation that's just around the corner. Instead,
(09:49):
they're kind of thrown back onto their own resources as
they try to navigate these extraordinary experiences that are happening
not just through psychedelics, but through the kind of coupling
of psychedelics and you know, far out reading regit, new
ideas in religion, mysticism, new psychological paradigms, new ideas about
(10:12):
technology and media, which is a really important part of
my story. So there's a lot of ways in which
the world that emerges in the early nineteen seventies is
kind of our world.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
It's a world of.
Speaker 9 (10:26):
Technology, of media, consumer credit, of lifestyle consumerism, of many,
many different little subcultures, each pursuing their own kind of vision.
And so I'm really interested in people who are trying
to navigate that environment using these wild tools of far
(10:50):
out philosophy and psychedelic experience and sometimes spiritual practice.
Speaker 7 (10:57):
Far out it. I love that too, So Eric, from
your research, why do characters like Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson,
and Philip K. Dick's stand out as emblematic figures of
that moment in time?
Speaker 9 (11:18):
The story of the project began with Philip K. Dick,
who remains a singular person. Everybody who wants to grapple
with our moment today, I think really deserves to read
some Philip K. Dick, because in some ways, more than
any other science fiction writer, he kind of predicted our
moment in its darkness. It's confusion, it's paranoid, it's bizarreness,
(11:39):
its weirdness, its anxieties. And it's not that he literally
predicted the technology, but more like the way it feels
to be alive these days, with confusions about where do
humans stop and machine start with a concern with entropy,
with madness, with drugs, and so my project really started
(12:03):
with that, and then after a while I was like,
I want to just write about him. I want to
write about some of these other people who had really
far experiences like he did, because Dick wasn't just a
science fiction writer. He also kind of lived in a
science fiction or maybe more appropriately, a mystical world. He
had these extraordinary experiences which from certain angles look like
(12:26):
religious experience, and from other angles look like psychosis, and
from other angles look like a science fiction imagination going
kicking into overdrive. And I'm particularly interested in these experiences
that don't in an obvious mold, and they were very
(12:47):
widespread in the seventies because, as I said, it was
kind of a confusing time. It was like nobody really
knew what the dominant story was anymore, whether it was
mystical or political, or psychological or ecological. So there's a
lot of people trying to kind of find their own
way through this mess. And the other two people that
(13:10):
I write about, Terence mckel and Robert Anton Wilson, were
but both much more psychedelic people than Philip K.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Dick. Philip K.
Speaker 9 (13:18):
Dick didn't really do psychedelics very much. I mean, he did,
and they influenced him like almost anybody who was alive
in that era, but those were not his drugs of choice,
and his experiences came a little bit more on the natch.
He was definitely not a neurotypical person, so he had
a lot of just he was just set odd, and
(13:40):
he had a lot of peculiar experiences. Partly because of that.
The other two fellows were more gung ho about their
psychedelic use. But like Dick, they were omnivorous intellectuals and
they were incredible writers. So one reason I choose these
three people is not only did they all have extraordinary
(14:02):
and extraordinarily weird experiences again, experiences that were mixtures of
religious and mystical and science fiction and psychosis and paranoia
and pop culture all mixed together in these extraordinary experiences
that sort of defied their normal ability to make sense
(14:24):
of the world. But they were all writers, and good
writers who wrote in different ways about their experiences. So
from a scholar point of view, not only do you
have these interesting people with their very interesting backgrounds, they
had these great texts, so you can actually look closely
(14:44):
at the text. And while text never gives you experience,
you can never understand what someone experienced by reading their book.
On the other hand, books or texts really can you
help us understand how people make sense of these experiences.
So I was very interested in, like how do these
(15:05):
guys who are living fringes of society, you know, really
outside characters, making it up as they go along.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
How do they make meaning out of these extraordinary experiences?
You know? What were their strategies?
Speaker 9 (15:21):
Of integration is a word we would say today in
the psychedelic world, as people, you know, try to integrate
their experiences therefore make sense of them, make them mean
something for their ordinary lives.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
So what do these guys do with these experiences?
Speaker 9 (15:36):
That was the core question I had, and that was
what my readings really kind of focus on. But in
the background, it's not just about these three guys, about
this problem that we kind of all have, which is
that obviously every one of us has the potential having
such extraordinary experiences, and many of us, most of us
(15:58):
have had at least a little bit of it, strange
dream synchronicities, or paranormal experiences or terrible nightmares or paranoid
you know, experiences, all sorts.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Of things that happen to us.
Speaker 9 (16:13):
And what do we do with them? How do we
make sense of them? Do we have to make sense
of them? What are the consequences of thinking about them
in different ways? So I think it's a very important issue,
particularly in such a psychedelic era that we're in now,
and not just some psychedelics.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
It's like we're in.
Speaker 9 (16:28):
An era where people the mainstream has discovered that there
are all these practices that get that produce extreme altered states.
It's like altered states have gone mainstream. I mean, it's
a term that again comes from the sixties, altered states
of consciousness. It's not a perfect term, but it's good.
(16:50):
You know, let's just talk about things without using religious language, mysticism,
religious experience. We can say, oh, it's an altered state,
but it's an altered state in which you encounter God,
or an altered state in which you become one with everything.
But now altered states are just pop culture. Like just
as an example, recently, in the last year or so,
(17:14):
there's been an explosion of interest in so called dark retreats.
And dark retreats are an established part of Tibetan Vadriana
or Tibetan Buddhist practice, but to some degree they've been
you know, they've been part of the human tool kit
of altered states for millennia. You can go back and
(17:36):
find things that sound it's basically just people going and
sitting in pure and perfect darkness for a long time.
So you're in a you know, you're in a sensory
deprivation situation, and you inevitably begin to hallucinate is one
word we might use. Go into a trance, encounter the unconconscious,
(17:58):
see the gods, whatever language you want to use. But
this is not pop. It's a basketball stars are going
into three day dark retreats and being interviewed about it
in sports magazines. So that's the weird world we're in
where people are like, you know, through drugs, through intense
meditation practices, through brain machines. And the brain machines are
(18:21):
only starting. Just given another couple of years and we'll
be able to put technology, you know, enter into technology
and have extraordinary altered states.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
But what do we do with them? So what we
have some crazy experience?
Speaker 3 (18:34):
What does it mean?
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Do we care? How do we care?
Speaker 9 (18:37):
So I'm really interested in that question. When you when
the more traditional religious answers no longer suffice, and in
a way, that's what I'm what makes it monstrous, you know,
I'm you know, thinking about what you guys are into,
because like the monster, there's something like mutant of it,
there's something like it doesn't quite fit the form, and
(19:00):
that monstrosity.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Is a little bit terrifying.
Speaker 9 (19:02):
It's a little bit repulsive, but it's also fascinating, and
it's also sacred, or it can be potentially sacred. And
so that mixture of things is very much what the
weird is about. Why I'm calling this this mixtured weirdness
is not to say it's not just sacred. It's also repulsive,
but it's not just freaky and scary.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
It's also delightful and fascinating. You know.
Speaker 9 (19:28):
It's a mixture of all of these different elements. And
I think in many ways that's where we are. We're
at a very very weird time. We're in a very
very in some ways monstrous time.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
You know.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
When I came to your book, it was really interesting
to me because I'm a I've read a lot of
Philip k Did growing up, you know, as a sci
fi writer, but some of his work, things like do
Android's Dream of Electric Cheap the not. You know, Blader
is a great movie, but it doesn't touch the book.
You know, there's the book itself is trippy to me,
(20:06):
Like a lot of Dick's writing is trippy to me,
and some where in the past couple of years I
made the mistake I like to read and hop around
between books.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
I picked up Cosmic.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Trigger and Vallus and was hopping back and forth between
those two books, and I felt like I was having
a gnostic meltdown, and I bet I'm a skeptical atheist,
and it's like, it was really trippy.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Man.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
So when I saw your book covered these three figures,
I was like, well, I don't know much about Terrence
McKenna other than I used to hear him on Art
Bell talking about everything that was going to go wrong
with Y two K. But I just it was an
extraordinary unpacking of a lot of things that I had
been too young to experience myself. But you know, I
knew these figures and contextualizing them was so useful to me.
(20:56):
So I really am recommending this book hard to anybody
who's even vayaguely interested in that period of history. But
as you say, it's not just that period of history.
These these questions, these are extraordinarily well, first of they're
extraordinary things these people experience, but that's also an extraordinarily
human thing to happen. And even if you're a skeptical person,
(21:16):
it would be hard to argue we don't have different
states of consciousness and that sometimes extraordinary things happen to people.
Speaker 9 (21:23):
Yeah, that's that's you know, for me, I wrote. I mean,
I think probably partly why you like the book is
that I very consciously wrote it, and that's part of
what the Weird does.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
I wrote it as a way for people.
Speaker 9 (21:33):
Who are skeptics, who don't who aren't believers, who maybe
aren't even particularly interested in metaphysics, spiritual ontologies or the
history of religion, that people like that can can still
come to wrestle with and see the way that these
(21:55):
these experiences can really shake people up, and that you
and if you don't believe in religion, something like religious
experiences happen. Now, they might happen for reasons that are
different than the explanations that believers give, but that's a
separate issue. That's about what language do we use to
(22:15):
describe these experiences. But the experiences them ourselves happen. And
if we take experience seriously or even semi seriously, and
most of us do, because as you know, all these
belief structures and traditional norms melt down we're not left
(22:35):
with much.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
You know, we have our we.
Speaker 9 (22:37):
Have our friends, you know, we have our immediate life circumstances,
our family, and we have our experiences. So I may
not know what you know, whether or not the world
is ultimately one great you know, mind good. But I
can kind of meditate enough that that sort of certain
(22:58):
experiences begin to be I'm available for me, and then
they impact how I live my life. So where even
though I don't think experience, an experiential approach to life
is sufficient, it's a big part of how a lot
of us, how a lot of us live. And even
people who are skeptical or materialists or whatever, you've got
(23:19):
to acknowledge that there's something like near death experiences that
are happening to some people, the like extraordinary synchronicities, there's
something like whatever. And you know, some skeptical answers to
these are pretty dismissive and they're interesting to grapple with.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
But most of the skeptics I know are are more like.
Speaker 9 (23:40):
Yeah, we don't really know, we don't know what's going on,
but there's no reason to, like, you know, hand over
your brain to this particular belief system. That's the kind
of skepticism. I prefer I think of it as Fortian,
you know.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Near and dear term to us here.
Speaker 9 (23:55):
Yeah, a lot, that's I think the appropriate, you know.
Sometimes That's why I mean, I like the word skeptic.
I you know, you know, puro Hero of Mine from
ancient Greece is kind of the first skeptic, one of
my favorite philosophers. But the words skeptic is a little
bit hard on the sort of snarky materialists, gotcha kind
(24:19):
of side of things. And I don't I think those
guys are are on the way. I think they they
kind of lost.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
You know, we were there, I think when we started
this show, and you know, a lot of our shows
started out with you know, is Bigfoot real?
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Is the nessy reel that sort of thing, And we.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Always tried to like find ways to plug in as
much real science as we could. But as the show's
going on, it's like, well, Okay, if these things aren't real,
people still believe in them and people still experience them,
which is not even the same thing. Right, So people
can go out in the woods and have a Bigfoot experience,
they can't put Bigfoot in a cage. The fact that
(24:59):
Bigfoot's not real doesn't mean it's not important, I guess,
and not real materially, not real as a physical animal
or a biological animal, but so much more. I think
we've unpacked so much more coming through this. And one
of the things is heavily covered in your book, which
is we've realized that, or at least I've realized that
(25:20):
a lot of people's experiences.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
In the wild are really heavily.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Informed by the materials that they read and consume, which
is not to say that they're imagining it, but everything
they're seeing is framed through their filters of Now I
know what a bigfoot looks like because I've seen the
Paterson Gimlin film, so when I see something in the woods,
I know it matches. And that idea about how our
experienced reality can be shaped by fiction comes up again
(25:48):
and again in your book, and I thought maybe we
could talk a little bit about that, the idea like
whether there is.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
A consensus reality or not.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
What does it mean when all these psychedelic people are
kind of coming to the same point.
Speaker 9 (26:01):
That's uh, yeah, that is a very interesting question. You know,
there there's a there's clearly a looping effect that's go,
that's going on in human consciousness and culture and how
much of it, how how wide it is, how dominant
is is up to discussion.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
But there's some.
Speaker 9 (26:24):
Way in which our ideas, the stories we've been exposed to, uh,
you know, maybe things learned when we're children, you know,
go on to shape our experience, and that you can
build expectation among people and that those expectations will then
(26:45):
transform their experience to some degree.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
I know.
Speaker 9 (26:51):
You know, a scholar is the thinker. You're probably aware
of Jeff Kreipel.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
Yeah, we've had him on the show.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 9 (26:57):
One of the things that Kripel talks about is he's
very interested in completely out of the blue experiences because
as a scholar, he recognizes that if you talk to
people who are going on a meditation retreat and they're
practicing with Audrianna visualization and then some extraordinary three dimensional
(27:20):
vision of Tibetan gods happens to them in a way
that's not interesting because you're like, yeah, but that's what
they were asking for, that's what they were telling their
brain to do. And from a skeptical perspective, every night
we have these sumpt well not every extraordinary, but once
in a while, we have all had extraordinary dreams that
(27:40):
are so detailed and complicated and narratively rich, and you're like,
my brain did that?
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Like what I can't do that? You know, I can't.
I can't close my eyes and do that. So there's
there's some level.
Speaker 9 (27:52):
In which you know, are we can invent a reality
and that's incredibly rich and real and the idea that
we're we're going for that, and we're putting in time
and effort and practice and that over time it begins
to become more real.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
That's a very interesting process. It's something to and I
still don't think.
Speaker 9 (28:11):
People are really adequately dealing with that and the consequences
of it. But in a way that means that the
really interesting problems are the ones or experiences are the
ones where nobody's looking for where they're just secular Joe
going to the gym one day and they see an
alien and they never even.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Cared about UFOs or whatever.
Speaker 9 (28:33):
That's where things get really really weird Capitol w weird.
And Jeff is really adamant about that, like he's just
not that interested in people who are kind of cultivating
this ability to tune into.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Or psychedelics or things.
Speaker 9 (28:49):
It's more like people have these things happen to them
on the match, or people who have experiences that are
far outside of their own culture. You know, like they're Christians,
they grow up Christian and they of a vision of
Collie or something. You're like, where did that come from?
Or they see Bigfoot and you're like, they don't believe
even Bigfoot. They think Bigfoot is bs. So that's that's
(29:12):
an interesting problem. So it's always important when we start
talking about the way that ideas and fictions and narratives
kind of partly construct our experience that it's not one
hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
You know, we can't discount.
Speaker 9 (29:26):
The truly weird, which is like the unexpected and the
surprising and the transformative from our equations. That said, it's
really clear that there is some kind of looping effect
where the stories we tell about the world and ourselves
loop around and shape our own perceptions and experience, and
(29:48):
so much so that you can actually play with it.
Have a very good example of this, that is, you know,
abuts the realm of the monster, which is which is ufology.
The UFO has been an actively programmed and propagated narrative
(30:08):
fiction since the forties, and some of the tail tellers
were believers.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Some of the tail tellers.
Speaker 9 (30:18):
Were the military, were the intelligence agencies.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
And we know that.
Speaker 9 (30:24):
We know that the UFO over the decades came to
function as a kind of screen narrative that forces inside
the military would use intentionally to obfuscate other things they
were doing and to play games, probably with belief systems.
How do you manipulate a perceptual belief? And at the
same time you have this industry of people who keep
(30:47):
telling the same story over and over again. Oh my god,
we have a new revelation disclosures just around the corner.
Hold on a second, we're just about to see it.
We're just about to know what the government it's always known.
Oh sorry, it didn't really happen, Okay, And then you
wait another year or two, and then you get another
UFO flap, and you know, so you with One of
(31:10):
the great things about the whole UFO world is that
you can really see what happens when active makers in
a modern world use media, use narrative, use popular psychology,
use technology, use information, use disinformation in order to like
enrich in this whole zone within which thousands of people
(31:36):
have real experiences of being abducted, of seeing chips and
colors and beams of light and slippages and time and
all sorts of weird stuff happens that both accords and
then the more you look at it slightly doesn't quite
accord with a lot of these dominant narratives. But it's
a it's a very rich weird zone where it's almost
(31:59):
like the loops go a little bit out of control,
or they're no longer contained within typical frameworks of consensus reality.
But for that very reason, you know, manifest in a
much more rich kind of in symptomatic way. But you
could really tell a story of the last seventy five
(32:21):
years of UFOs.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Excuse me, UAPs.
Speaker 9 (32:27):
We're just looking at the way that the narratives get
recycled and reframed by all these different actors, and in
fact people do that.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Yeah, we've talked to I don't think we have talked
to Diane Pasolka's work. It certainly leans into that idea
that there's an emerging religion there, and I don't think
she's wrong, but I don't think it's really new either.
I mean, if you look back into the history of
this stuff, it goes back. It's always had a religious component.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 7 (32:55):
Eric, if we can get back to the figures in
the book, could you talk a little bit about the
sorts of vehicles that the three men used to get
to their respective gnosis, So psychedelics and magic and in
the case of Dick, his mental breaks.
Speaker 9 (33:11):
Yeah, sure, I mean, I think that part of what
I'm doing there is Well, one thing is that one
of a major problem with the psychedelic world and psychedelic
discourse in psychoic history is it's because people who are
interested in psychedelics often become completely obsessed with psychedelics and
(33:35):
they end up talking about them to the exclusion of
other things. So you might have people go, well, historically,
psychedelics were one of a group of tools that shamans
would use to go into altered states.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
The other experiences would be you know.
Speaker 9 (33:51):
Fasting, dancing all night, dark retreats, you know, hang themselves
up by hooks, you know, all sorts of things. But
really the interesting stuff is the psychedelics, and then they
just leave that aside and they go and talk about psychedelics,
even though traditionally, in terms of like pre modern reality,
(34:13):
indigenous reality, there are very few cultures that we know
used what we would call psychedelics. I mean, there was
a lot of places that you know, use psychoactive things.
We're not really sure what that felt like to them,
but like it's not like thousands and thousands of culture
magic mushrooms can tell we actually know about very few.
(34:36):
So but psychologic people tend to really overemphasize. They just
get obsessed with the compounds and the substances and the
history of it, and they kind of forget about the
other things so much so that they many of them
actually believe that all religion is ultimately just psychedelic experience
that's transformed and gets away from its source, which I,
(34:57):
you know, category, I think it's ridiculous as a religious
you know, historian of religion to some degree. So one
of the reasons I was talking about things the way
I did is that while Terence McKenna was a huge
psychedelic fan and loved d MT and loved you know,
ayahuasca and mushrooms and everything, and Robert Anton Wilson as
(35:21):
well was a big fan, particularly of LSD, but he
tried everything. But it's more how these things mixed with
other aspects that really became important for them, and particularly
in the case of Robert Anton Wilson, where he was
doing a lot of psycho spiritual experiments and ceremonial magic.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
So's he's kind.
Speaker 9 (35:46):
Of moving into ritual and sort of psycho spiritual practices
that are designed to kind of transform your your ideas
of yourself and your ideas of reality. And then he's
mixing them with the incredible amplification powers of psychedelics and LSD.
(36:07):
So he's, you know, doing ritual on acid.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
And more than.
Speaker 9 (36:12):
That, he's bringing this kind of skeptical temperament that you were.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Talking about earlier to bear.
Speaker 9 (36:20):
So it's not like he's like, I believe that acid
is revealing the true structure of reality. Instead, he's like,
what is belief? What is our experience? How does our
experience come about because of our beliefs? What if we
change these beliefs?
Speaker 2 (36:35):
What if we screw around with these beliefs? And so
it's much more experimental in a way.
Speaker 9 (36:42):
And then the problem is what do you do when
you're doing an experiment, which is also how Terrence McKenna
saw his greatest, most famous drug trip. This experiment a
lot or was an experiment, not a ritual, not a prayer,
not a even a mystical leap, but an experiment with
(37:07):
the sense of science, of provisional investigation, doing what the
results are. So it's a very different kind of kind
of attitude. You know, in a way, Terrence a ritual
practitioner so much, although there was a ritualistic element to
(37:28):
what they did, but he was just an extraordinary reader.
And so you know, you fill your head full of
weird books, weird stories, and you have a great memory
like he did, and a great gift of gab like
you have a you're very comfortable in the far fringes
of language that that itself is going to be extra
(37:48):
transformative on top of the psychedelic experience. And with Dick,
it's it's even more interesting. You're like, you're like, yeah,
some people just have this stuff happen and we don't
know why. We don't you know, they're they're there's some
mixture in him that's also him kind of just telling stories,
making stuff up.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
What's an interesting story to tell? And he would run
with the football once he was telling a story, he'd lie,
he'd bullshit. So we don't really know what happened to him.
Speaker 9 (38:16):
But it was so, it was such it made such
an impact on his text that it's hard to believe that,
you know, it's just making it up.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
He's making some of it up. He changed his stories.
Speaker 9 (38:27):
And in a way, that's part of the interesting thing
that I was talking about. It's like, Okay, you have
your experience, your experience, and it's extraordinary, But what happens
with the story you're telling, and then the story changes
and maybe you return to it later and you revise it.
You go, no, no, no, I didn't really understand it,
you know, And people do this all the time. We've
had religious experiences, mystical experiences, meditative experiences. They change their
(38:50):
minds about what happened to them. So there's no real
ground in that way. You don't get like the full download.
Even when you have you see God, you might come
out of me like I think I saw God.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
I don't know what happened. I mean, my brain was weird.
You know.
Speaker 9 (39:05):
There's no answer to to finding that, like fire Kernel,
at least as far as I uh so, all of
them were kind of using different different approaches, different mixtures,
different sees. But there's something very similar about the zones
(39:27):
they got to, uh yeah, some patterns the same planet.
You know, they're both they're into serious they they talk
about these gnostic things. They talk about science fiction, about
computer minds, and so in the end, I'm also like this,
they're kind of prophetic. They're kind of like looking forward
towards some sort of informational posthuman sort of sacred sort
(39:50):
of pop culture profane breakdown or meltdown or transformation that
in a lot of ways were just closer to now.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Yeah, just as just the three individual characters, they're so interesting,
even if you don't necessarily agree with what conclusions they
come to or how they got there, that you can't deny.
They're fascinating people. The book is just amazing. I really
loved it and I highly recommend it.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
Now. I wish we had I really wish we had
more time.
Speaker 7 (40:23):
Eric says, we could talk to you for hours. These
topics are really interesting, and we're going to have to
invite you back on the show sometimes so that we
can delve into some of these other areas. I'm going
to have to later on look into dark retreats. I've
never actually heard of those, and we've talked about things
like prisoner's cinema and various kind of paranormal light phenomena.
So I'm really interested in that. But we need to
(40:45):
wind things up. So I just wanted to ask you
a final question, our signature question, and that is what's
your favorite monster?
Speaker 2 (40:53):
You know? I did this one.
Speaker 9 (40:54):
Took me a while to think about it, and I
wanted to be you know, when you say favorite, there's
like emotion, it's the most interesting, you know, and and
like you got it's got to get down in there.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
And and also then for me, it's also about being.
Speaker 9 (41:11):
A kid because I was a big universal horror fan
when I was like eight, nine years old, and I
used to do make put makeup on and I was
super into lawn Cheney and everything. Like I knew all
this early early horror. So when I think back of
like those characters that really, you know, I just have
to say Frankenstein, you know, because in a way, I'm
(41:34):
very interested in the modern world and the way that
ancient traditions get re articulated and transformed and mutated and
perverted in the modern world. That's kind of what highwareness is.
I'm very interested in our the last you know, one
hundred and two hundred years, which is a screwed up time,
but it's it's the one that I keep coming back to,
(41:55):
especially when it slams into.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Tradition. So you know, Mary Shelley's book, it's like.
Speaker 9 (42:02):
It's a it's it's a it's a monster for us,
for the industrial era, for the Romantic and post the
Romantic world. And it's still a fascinating figure still and
we're still kind of, you know, just just beginning to
explore the kind of you know, truly bizarre forms of
(42:23):
biology and life that are going to be invented, you know,
partly invented by our technologies. And you know, the screen
portrayal the book itself is amazing, uh you know, in
a way like he's sort of like the proto. You
can't get to the Android without going through Frankenstein, including
a kind of his historical sense of Frankenstein, which is
(42:46):
so pre you know, pre digital, pre computer so and
and you know, I just like I'll never you know,
that scene in The Bride Frankenstein where he goes into
the blind Man's and you know that he's here's the
music and the guy can't see that he's a monster,
and there and he's lonely, and they're both lonely, and
(43:07):
they're hanging out and he's smoking and they're drinking, and he's.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
Friend friend you know.
Speaker 9 (43:14):
It's like it's so sweet and it's so basic and human.
So the humanness of Frankenstein, and it's it's a quality
of humans.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
It's not like I want him to be a human.
Speaker 9 (43:25):
The monsters should remain monsters, but the element of the
human humanity that is manifested there is kind of like
the best thing about human beings, just hanging out with
friends and partying and being friends, you know, and having
a good time.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Like that's about as good as it gets.
Speaker 9 (43:42):
So there's just something about him that's particularly sweet as
well as kind of fearful.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
Oh yeah, he's a monster you can have a heart
for for sure.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (43:54):
It's a very thought out answer, Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
Fantastic. I'm excited about the Geomundo Toro uh movie trailer
for it.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Oh yeah, yeah, So that's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Well where can folks go if they want to keep
up with the latest on Eric Davis?
Speaker 9 (44:11):
I have a substack called Burning Shore. It's not it's
not super super frequent, which maybe be a plus or
minus depending on your your hunger. Uh so Burning Shore
dot com. And I also have a website with a
huge amount of archival material. I've been doing this stuff
for decades, writing, podcasting, interviews, pod you know, all sorts
(44:35):
of stuff, and that's Technosis dot com.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
T E, C, H, G N O S.
Speaker 9 (44:41):
I s at first book and it's still in print
and kind of started off all this stuff. So those
are two great places to keep up with what I'm
what I'm about fantastic.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
Thank you so much for spending time with it.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
We'll put links to all that stuff in the show notes.
Mons you've been listening to Monster Doc, the se as
show about monsters. I'm Blake Smith.
Speaker 7 (45:03):
And I'm Karen Stolzner.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
You just heard an interview with Eric Davis about his
book High Weirdness. If you're at all interested in this
historic period of counterculture, psychedelics, and magic, the book is
a must read.
Speaker 3 (45:16):
Check the show notes for links. We hope you enjoyed
this episode of Monster Talk.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Our goal here is to bring you the best in
monster related content with a focus on scientific skepticism and
critical thinking.
Speaker 3 (45:30):
If you enjoy our show and.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
Want to support our mission, start out by visiting monster
talk dot.
Speaker 8 (45:35):
Org forward slash Support. That's monster talk dot org forward
slash Support. There you'll find links to our Patreon page,
as well as a donate button if you'd like to
just make a one time contribution. A great way to
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Speaker 1 (45:57):
Much, so don't feel compelled to buy new ones, and
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You can support and raise the profile of the show
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(46:20):
remember to share episodes you really like with your friends
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theme music's by Pete Stealing Monkeys. I feel like I'd
be letting you all down if I didn't add one
more voice from an important thought leader who's well grounded
(46:41):
in this material.
Speaker 5 (46:42):
Yeah, well you know that's just like.
Speaker 4 (46:46):
Your opinion.
Speaker 9 (46:47):
Man, this has been a monster House presentation.
Monster House Presents Quick Bookkeeping.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Note.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
We've been getting reports that some of our ads have
been about sensitive topics that some of you quite dislike.
We're trying to see if we can get any granular
control over that, but the way podcasting advertising works is
very limited in that regard. Unless you hear us doing
a live ad read these ads are inserted by an algorithm,
don't necessarily reflect a personal product.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Endorsement by your hosts.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
We'll try to improve the quality of the ads, but
we're quite limited in what we can do.
Speaker 4 (00:37):
Psychedelics reflect on this because psychedelics stretch and pull and
melt and recast the illusion producing machinery of language. I mean,
I think that if you had to say, the one
thing that psychedelics do for everyone, whether they have a
(00:57):
good trip or a bad trip, because it's up to
them to interpret what they make of this, is it
shows you the relativity of your cultural viewpoint, just your
point of view.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
We are living in a computer programmed reality, and the
only clue we have to it is when some variable
is changed and some alteration in our reality occurs, we
would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the
present dejuvou.
Speaker 6 (01:31):
We believe what we see, and then we believe our
interpretation of it. We don't even know we're making an interpretation.
Most of the time we think this is reality and philosophy.
That's called naive realism. What I perceive is reality. And
philosophism have refuted naive realism every century for the last
(01:51):
twenty five hundred years, starting with Buddha and Plato, and
yet most people still act on the basis of naive realism.
Now the argument is, well, maybe my perceptions are inaccurate,
but somewhere there is accuracy. The scientists have it with
their instruments. That's how we can find out what's really real.
But relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what
(02:14):
you find out with instruments is true relative only to
the instrument you're using and where that instrument is located
in space time. It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever
seen before.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
A giant, hairy creature part apes Park Mass in Luckness,
a twenty four mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands
of Scotland.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
It's a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Monstertle Welcome to Monster Talk the science show about monsters.
I'm Blake Smith and.
Speaker 7 (03:11):
I'm Karen Stoltner.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Monster Talk has always been a show about reality. We
use the tools of science to tease out what's the
most likely explanation for weird experiences. We talk about critical
thinking and rational approaches. We lean into the scientific consensus.
We warn about the limits of perception. But there are
other ways of knowing and other kinds of experiences than
(03:34):
those grounded and rational. Our guest today is Eric Davis,
and he wrote a book called High Weirdness that explores
the counterculture and the psychedelic realms through a triptic portrait
of three very influential men and their modes of inquiry,
all of which were in the terms of the time.
Speaker 8 (03:53):
Far out man.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Terence McKenna was a psychoonaut who used plants and fungi
and lab synthesized chemicals to alter his perceptions. He laid
the groundwork for the modern fascination with microdosing on hallucinogens,
but there wasn't anything subdued about.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
His own approaches with this stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Like a sasquatch of altered states, he left big footprints.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Philip K.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Dick struggled with a variety of challenging experiences, perhaps from neurodivergence,
but definitely enhanced by a personal need for speed. His
fiction toys with reality in ways that I personally find,
for lack of a better word, trippy, and his protagonists
frequently find themselves either unmasked are themselves surrounded by the mask.
(04:38):
Reality has no terra firma in his fiction, and as
it turned out, neither in his lived experience. And then
there's Robert Anton Wilson. We've talked about him before. Check
the show notes for links to those episodes. But Wilson
confronted reality as something to be challenged with drugs and
magic and defiance. Part playful and part subversive, His games
(04:59):
bl into our culture in ways that don't echo so
much as thunder. Davis's book is a deep historic dive
into these three figures and how their personal effort to
unlock the doors of perception and experience made our world
a much, much weirder place.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Morebstertle.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
So, first of all, welcome to Monster Talk, Eric Davis.
I'm going to do a brief intro. You are the
this really brief. You're the author of High Weirdness, Drugs
Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the seventies, which came out
in twenty nineteen. And I read this book late last October,
and it was just a fascinating look at nineteen seventies
(05:42):
counterculture and around three particular figures, Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson,
and Philip K.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Dick.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Now, our listeners, if they're not familiar with counterculture, should
probably go back and listen to our episode that we
did with Adam go rightly discussing Operation and Mindful. But
this period of time is so interesting, and I just
love what you did with this book talking about these
three individuals and setting the sort of context of the
nineteen seventies counterculture and mostly from seventy to seventy five.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
That's about right.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah, that's pretty much pretty much it.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
I guess we'll just start with this.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
What conditions in the nineteen seventies made it such a
I don't know, a rich environment for these kind of
fringe psychedelic experiences. And maybe we should unpack the term
counterculture because I think I don't know about you, but
in my world it specifically means that period the very
late sixties and early nineteen seventies in California, And I
(06:42):
don't know why that stuck that way, because I think
counterculture is a term probably has a broader meaning.
Speaker 9 (06:48):
Yeah, well, it's one of those terms, you know, like
a lot of these things, that it has its own
history and its own contrabties. You're right that the term
itself was invented in California in the late nineteen sixties
to describe kind of a mixture of both the hippie
movement and the more radical political movement, which were you know,
(07:12):
mixed in a variety of ways, but also kind of
can be seen as somewhat separate developments, although happening within the.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Same youthful generation.
Speaker 9 (07:22):
And so the explicit idea of the counterculture, of course,
is that it's oppositional, you know, that it's defined against
what's going on, and so, you know, it came to
be used widely to talk about both the radical political
movement and the more psychedelic or freak underground and kind
(07:45):
of kept that term.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Going for a while.
Speaker 9 (07:47):
But in other ways it's not it's not so sufficient,
and in some ways it doesn't really help us to
talk about more recent developments. But in that period of time,
I think it's fair. And really what I'm interested in
is the fact that in the late sixties, lots of
people thought a real change was coming, like almost like
(08:09):
a messianic transformation of reality, and some people were taking
big doses of LSD and every thing was becoming magical
and it felt like everyone was going to turn on
and then everything was going to transform in the.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
New world was going to be born of.
Speaker 9 (08:25):
Love and light and connection and nature. And at the
same time, you had people who were more politically motivated,
who felt that the revolution was going to come, you know,
one way or another, there was going to be a fundamental,
structural transformation of society. And these two visions, you know,
(08:46):
again both conflicted and supported each other in different ways,
but neither of them came to be right. And the
early seventies is that period of the counterculture when everybody
kind of finally wakes up and figures that out.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
So here they are with.
Speaker 9 (09:03):
Their freaky lives and their non traditional practices and their
psychedelic drugs or their free love or their radical consciousness raising,
you know, practices, and then they're like, oh, wait, the
revolution is not going to happen. We're kind of in
the same mess. I mean, it's changed, but how has
(09:25):
it changed? So in a way, that's the environment that
I'm interested in. I'm interested in the place where people
no longer really know what's going on, but they're still
really far out and they're really pushing it, and they
don't believe conventional society, but they also don't believe that
there's some neat and tidy transformation that's just around the corner. Instead,
(09:49):
they're kind of thrown back onto their own resources as
they try to navigate these extraordinary experiences that are happening
not just through psychedelics, but through the kind of coupling
of psychedelics and you know, far out reading regit, new
ideas in religion, mysticism, new psychological paradigms, new ideas about
(10:12):
technology and media, which is a really important part of
my story. So there's a lot of ways in which
the world that emerges in the early nineteen seventies is
kind of our world.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
It's a world of.
Speaker 9 (10:26):
Technology, of media, consumer credit, of lifestyle consumerism, of many,
many different little subcultures, each pursuing their own kind of vision.
And so I'm really interested in people who are trying
to navigate that environment using these wild tools of far
(10:50):
out philosophy and psychedelic experience and sometimes spiritual practice.
Speaker 7 (10:57):
Far out it. I love that too, So Eric, from
your research, why do characters like Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson,
and Philip K. Dick's stand out as emblematic figures of
that moment in time?
Speaker 9 (11:18):
The story of the project began with Philip K. Dick,
who remains a singular person. Everybody who wants to grapple
with our moment today, I think really deserves to read
some Philip K. Dick, because in some ways, more than
any other science fiction writer, he kind of predicted our
moment in its darkness. It's confusion, it's paranoid, it's bizarreness,
(11:39):
its weirdness, its anxieties. And it's not that he literally
predicted the technology, but more like the way it feels
to be alive these days, with confusions about where do
humans stop and machine start with a concern with entropy,
with madness, with drugs, and so my project really started
(12:03):
with that, and then after a while I was like,
I want to just write about him. I want to
write about some of these other people who had really
far experiences like he did, because Dick wasn't just a
science fiction writer. He also kind of lived in a
science fiction or maybe more appropriately, a mystical world. He
had these extraordinary experiences which from certain angles look like
(12:26):
religious experience, and from other angles look like psychosis, and
from other angles look like a science fiction imagination going
kicking into overdrive. And I'm particularly interested in these experiences
that don't in an obvious mold, and they were very
(12:47):
widespread in the seventies because, as I said, it was
kind of a confusing time. It was like nobody really
knew what the dominant story was anymore, whether it was
mystical or political, or psychological or ecological. So there's a
lot of people trying to kind of find their own
way through this mess. And the other two people that
(13:10):
I write about, Terence mckel and Robert Anton Wilson, were
but both much more psychedelic people than Philip K.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Dick. Philip K.
Speaker 9 (13:18):
Dick didn't really do psychedelics very much. I mean, he did,
and they influenced him like almost anybody who was alive
in that era, but those were not his drugs of choice,
and his experiences came a little bit more on the natch.
He was definitely not a neurotypical person, so he had
a lot of just he was just set odd, and
(13:40):
he had a lot of peculiar experiences. Partly because of that.
The other two fellows were more gung ho about their
psychedelic use. But like Dick, they were omnivorous intellectuals and
they were incredible writers. So one reason I choose these
three people is not only did they all have extraordinary
(14:02):
and extraordinarily weird experiences again, experiences that were mixtures of
religious and mystical and science fiction and psychosis and paranoia
and pop culture all mixed together in these extraordinary experiences
that sort of defied their normal ability to make sense
(14:24):
of the world. But they were all writers, and good
writers who wrote in different ways about their experiences. So
from a scholar point of view, not only do you
have these interesting people with their very interesting backgrounds, they
had these great texts, so you can actually look closely
(14:44):
at the text. And while text never gives you experience,
you can never understand what someone experienced by reading their book.
On the other hand, books or texts really can you
help us understand how people make sense of these experiences.
So I was very interested in, like how do these
(15:05):
guys who are living fringes of society, you know, really
outside characters, making it up as they go along.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
How do they make meaning out of these extraordinary experiences?
You know? What were their strategies?
Speaker 9 (15:21):
Of integration is a word we would say today in
the psychedelic world, as people, you know, try to integrate
their experiences therefore make sense of them, make them mean
something for their ordinary lives.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
So what do these guys do with these experiences?
Speaker 9 (15:36):
That was the core question I had, and that was
what my readings really kind of focus on. But in
the background, it's not just about these three guys, about
this problem that we kind of all have, which is
that obviously every one of us has the potential having
such extraordinary experiences, and many of us, most of us
(15:58):
have had at least a little bit of it, strange
dream synchronicities, or paranormal experiences or terrible nightmares or paranoid
you know, experiences, all sorts.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Of things that happen to us.
Speaker 9 (16:13):
And what do we do with them? How do we
make sense of them? Do we have to make sense
of them? What are the consequences of thinking about them
in different ways? So I think it's a very important issue,
particularly in such a psychedelic era that we're in now,
and not just some psychedelics.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
It's like we're in.
Speaker 9 (16:28):
An era where people the mainstream has discovered that there
are all these practices that get that produce extreme altered states.
It's like altered states have gone mainstream. I mean, it's
a term that again comes from the sixties, altered states
of consciousness. It's not a perfect term, but it's good.
(16:50):
You know, let's just talk about things without using religious language, mysticism,
religious experience. We can say, oh, it's an altered state,
but it's an altered state in which you encounter God,
or an altered state in which you become one with everything.
But now altered states are just pop culture. Like just
as an example, recently, in the last year or so,
(17:14):
there's been an explosion of interest in so called dark retreats.
And dark retreats are an established part of Tibetan Vadriana
or Tibetan Buddhist practice, but to some degree they've been
you know, they've been part of the human tool kit
of altered states for millennia. You can go back and
(17:36):
find things that sound it's basically just people going and
sitting in pure and perfect darkness for a long time.
So you're in a you know, you're in a sensory
deprivation situation, and you inevitably begin to hallucinate is one
word we might use. Go into a trance, encounter the unconconscious,
(17:58):
see the gods, whatever language you want to use. But
this is not pop. It's a basketball stars are going
into three day dark retreats and being interviewed about it
in sports magazines. So that's the weird world we're in
where people are like, you know, through drugs, through intense
meditation practices, through brain machines. And the brain machines are
(18:21):
only starting. Just given another couple of years and we'll
be able to put technology, you know, enter into technology
and have extraordinary altered states.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
But what do we do with them? So what we
have some crazy experience?
Speaker 3 (18:34):
What does it mean?
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Do we care? How do we care?
Speaker 9 (18:37):
So I'm really interested in that question. When you when
the more traditional religious answers no longer suffice, and in
a way, that's what I'm what makes it monstrous, you know,
I'm you know, thinking about what you guys are into,
because like the monster, there's something like mutant of it,
there's something like it doesn't quite fit the form, and
(19:00):
that monstrosity.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Is a little bit terrifying.
Speaker 9 (19:02):
It's a little bit repulsive, but it's also fascinating, and
it's also sacred, or it can be potentially sacred. And
so that mixture of things is very much what the
weird is about. Why I'm calling this this mixtured weirdness
is not to say it's not just sacred. It's also repulsive,
but it's not just freaky and scary.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
It's also delightful and fascinating. You know.
Speaker 9 (19:28):
It's a mixture of all of these different elements. And
I think in many ways that's where we are. We're
at a very very weird time. We're in a very
very in some ways monstrous time.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
You know.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
When I came to your book, it was really interesting
to me because I'm a I've read a lot of
Philip k Did growing up, you know, as a sci
fi writer, but some of his work, things like do
Android's Dream of Electric Cheap the not. You know, Blader
is a great movie, but it doesn't touch the book.
You know, there's the book itself is trippy to me,
(20:06):
Like a lot of Dick's writing is trippy to me,
and some where in the past couple of years I
made the mistake I like to read and hop around
between books.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
I picked up Cosmic.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Trigger and Vallus and was hopping back and forth between
those two books, and I felt like I was having
a gnostic meltdown, and I bet I'm a skeptical atheist,
and it's like, it was really trippy.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Man.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
So when I saw your book covered these three figures,
I was like, well, I don't know much about Terrence
McKenna other than I used to hear him on Art
Bell talking about everything that was going to go wrong
with Y two K. But I just it was an
extraordinary unpacking of a lot of things that I had
been too young to experience myself. But you know, I
knew these figures and contextualizing them was so useful to me.
(20:56):
So I really am recommending this book hard to anybody
who's even vayaguely interested in that period of history. But
as you say, it's not just that period of history.
These these questions, these are extraordinarily well, first of they're
extraordinary things these people experience, but that's also an extraordinarily
human thing to happen. And even if you're a skeptical person,
(21:16):
it would be hard to argue we don't have different
states of consciousness and that sometimes extraordinary things happen to people.
Speaker 9 (21:23):
Yeah, that's that's you know, for me, I wrote. I mean,
I think probably partly why you like the book is
that I very consciously wrote it, and that's part of
what the Weird does.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
I wrote it as a way for people.
Speaker 9 (21:33):
Who are skeptics, who don't who aren't believers, who maybe
aren't even particularly interested in metaphysics, spiritual ontologies or the
history of religion, that people like that can can still
come to wrestle with and see the way that these
(21:55):
these experiences can really shake people up, and that you
and if you don't believe in religion, something like religious
experiences happen. Now, they might happen for reasons that are
different than the explanations that believers give, but that's a
separate issue. That's about what language do we use to
(22:15):
describe these experiences. But the experiences them ourselves happen. And
if we take experience seriously or even semi seriously, and
most of us do, because as you know, all these
belief structures and traditional norms melt down we're not left
(22:35):
with much.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
You know, we have our we.
Speaker 9 (22:37):
Have our friends, you know, we have our immediate life circumstances,
our family, and we have our experiences. So I may
not know what you know, whether or not the world
is ultimately one great you know, mind good. But I
can kind of meditate enough that that sort of certain
(22:58):
experiences begin to be I'm available for me, and then
they impact how I live my life. So where even
though I don't think experience, an experiential approach to life
is sufficient, it's a big part of how a lot
of us, how a lot of us live. And even
people who are skeptical or materialists or whatever, you've got
(23:19):
to acknowledge that there's something like near death experiences that
are happening to some people, the like extraordinary synchronicities, there's
something like whatever. And you know, some skeptical answers to
these are pretty dismissive and they're interesting to grapple with.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
But most of the skeptics I know are are more like.
Speaker 9 (23:40):
Yeah, we don't really know, we don't know what's going on,
but there's no reason to, like, you know, hand over
your brain to this particular belief system. That's the kind
of skepticism. I prefer I think of it as Fortian,
you know.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Near and dear term to us here.
Speaker 9 (23:55):
Yeah, a lot, that's I think the appropriate, you know.
Sometimes That's why I mean, I like the word skeptic.
I you know, you know, puro Hero of Mine from
ancient Greece is kind of the first skeptic, one of
my favorite philosophers. But the words skeptic is a little
bit hard on the sort of snarky materialists, gotcha kind
(24:19):
of side of things. And I don't I think those
guys are are on the way. I think they they
kind of lost.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
You know, we were there, I think when we started
this show, and you know, a lot of our shows
started out with you know, is Bigfoot real?
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Is the nessy reel that sort of thing, And we.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Always tried to like find ways to plug in as
much real science as we could. But as the show's
going on, it's like, well, Okay, if these things aren't real,
people still believe in them and people still experience them,
which is not even the same thing. Right, So people
can go out in the woods and have a Bigfoot experience,
they can't put Bigfoot in a cage. The fact that
(24:59):
Bigfoot's not real doesn't mean it's not important, I guess,
and not real materially, not real as a physical animal
or a biological animal, but so much more. I think
we've unpacked so much more coming through this. And one
of the things is heavily covered in your book, which
is we've realized that, or at least I've realized that
(25:20):
a lot of people's experiences.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
In the wild are really heavily.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Informed by the materials that they read and consume, which
is not to say that they're imagining it, but everything
they're seeing is framed through their filters of Now I
know what a bigfoot looks like because I've seen the
Paterson Gimlin film, so when I see something in the woods,
I know it matches. And that idea about how our
experienced reality can be shaped by fiction comes up again
(25:48):
and again in your book, and I thought maybe we
could talk a little bit about that, the idea like
whether there is.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
A consensus reality or not.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
What does it mean when all these psychedelic people are
kind of coming to the same point.
Speaker 9 (26:01):
That's uh, yeah, that is a very interesting question. You know,
there there's a there's clearly a looping effect that's go,
that's going on in human consciousness and culture and how
much of it, how how wide it is, how dominant
is is up to discussion.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
But there's some.
Speaker 9 (26:24):
Way in which our ideas, the stories we've been exposed to, uh,
you know, maybe things learned when we're children, you know,
go on to shape our experience, and that you can
build expectation among people and that those expectations will then
(26:45):
transform their experience to some degree.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
I know.
Speaker 9 (26:51):
You know, a scholar is the thinker. You're probably aware
of Jeff Kreipel.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
Yeah, we've had him on the show.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 9 (26:57):
One of the things that Kripel talks about is he's
very interested in completely out of the blue experiences because
as a scholar, he recognizes that if you talk to
people who are going on a meditation retreat and they're
practicing with Audrianna visualization and then some extraordinary three dimensional
(27:20):
vision of Tibetan gods happens to them in a way
that's not interesting because you're like, yeah, but that's what
they were asking for, that's what they were telling their
brain to do. And from a skeptical perspective, every night
we have these sumpt well not every extraordinary, but once
in a while, we have all had extraordinary dreams that
(27:40):
are so detailed and complicated and narratively rich, and you're like,
my brain did that?
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Like what I can't do that? You know, I can't.
I can't close my eyes and do that. So there's
there's some level.
Speaker 9 (27:52):
In which you know, are we can invent a reality
and that's incredibly rich and real and the idea that
we're we're going for that, and we're putting in time
and effort and practice and that over time it begins
to become more real.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
That's a very interesting process. It's something to and I
still don't think.
Speaker 9 (28:11):
People are really adequately dealing with that and the consequences
of it. But in a way that means that the
really interesting problems are the ones or experiences are the
ones where nobody's looking for where they're just secular Joe
going to the gym one day and they see an
alien and they never even.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Cared about UFOs or whatever.
Speaker 9 (28:33):
That's where things get really really weird Capitol w weird.
And Jeff is really adamant about that, like he's just
not that interested in people who are kind of cultivating
this ability to tune into.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Or psychedelics or things.
Speaker 9 (28:49):
It's more like people have these things happen to them
on the match, or people who have experiences that are
far outside of their own culture. You know, like they're Christians,
they grow up Christian and they of a vision of
Collie or something. You're like, where did that come from?
Or they see Bigfoot and you're like, they don't believe
even Bigfoot. They think Bigfoot is bs. So that's that's
(29:12):
an interesting problem. So it's always important when we start
talking about the way that ideas and fictions and narratives
kind of partly construct our experience that it's not one
hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
You know, we can't discount.
Speaker 9 (29:26):
The truly weird, which is like the unexpected and the
surprising and the transformative from our equations. That said, it's
really clear that there is some kind of looping effect
where the stories we tell about the world and ourselves
loop around and shape our own perceptions and experience, and
(29:48):
so much so that you can actually play with it.
Have a very good example of this, that is, you know,
abuts the realm of the monster, which is which is ufology.
The UFO has been an actively programmed and propagated narrative
(30:08):
fiction since the forties, and some of the tail tellers
were believers.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Some of the tail tellers.
Speaker 9 (30:18):
Were the military, were the intelligence agencies.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
And we know that.
Speaker 9 (30:24):
We know that the UFO over the decades came to
function as a kind of screen narrative that forces inside
the military would use intentionally to obfuscate other things they
were doing and to play games, probably with belief systems.
How do you manipulate a perceptual belief? And at the
same time you have this industry of people who keep
(30:47):
telling the same story over and over again. Oh my god,
we have a new revelation disclosures just around the corner.
Hold on a second, we're just about to see it.
We're just about to know what the government it's always known.
Oh sorry, it didn't really happen, Okay, And then you
wait another year or two, and then you get another
UFO flap, and you know, so you with One of
(31:10):
the great things about the whole UFO world is that
you can really see what happens when active makers in
a modern world use media, use narrative, use popular psychology,
use technology, use information, use disinformation in order to like
enrich in this whole zone within which thousands of people
(31:36):
have real experiences of being abducted, of seeing chips and
colors and beams of light and slippages and time and
all sorts of weird stuff happens that both accords and
then the more you look at it slightly doesn't quite
accord with a lot of these dominant narratives. But it's
a it's a very rich weird zone where it's almost
(31:59):
like the loops go a little bit out of control,
or they're no longer contained within typical frameworks of consensus reality.
But for that very reason, you know, manifest in a
much more rich kind of in symptomatic way. But you
could really tell a story of the last seventy five
(32:21):
years of UFOs.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Excuse me, UAPs.
Speaker 9 (32:27):
We're just looking at the way that the narratives get
recycled and reframed by all these different actors, and in
fact people do that.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Yeah, we've talked to I don't think we have talked
to Diane Pasolka's work. It certainly leans into that idea
that there's an emerging religion there, and I don't think
she's wrong, but I don't think it's really new either.
I mean, if you look back into the history of
this stuff, it goes back. It's always had a religious component.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 7 (32:55):
Eric, if we can get back to the figures in
the book, could you talk a little bit about the
sorts of vehicles that the three men used to get
to their respective gnosis, So psychedelics and magic and in
the case of Dick, his mental breaks.
Speaker 9 (33:11):
Yeah, sure, I mean, I think that part of what
I'm doing there is Well, one thing is that one
of a major problem with the psychedelic world and psychedelic
discourse in psychoic history is it's because people who are
interested in psychedelics often become completely obsessed with psychedelics and
(33:35):
they end up talking about them to the exclusion of
other things. So you might have people go, well, historically,
psychedelics were one of a group of tools that shamans
would use to go into altered states.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
The other experiences would be you know.
Speaker 9 (33:51):
Fasting, dancing all night, dark retreats, you know, hang themselves
up by hooks, you know, all sorts of things. But
really the interesting stuff is the psychedelics, and then they
just leave that aside and they go and talk about psychedelics,
even though traditionally, in terms of like pre modern reality,
(34:13):
indigenous reality, there are very few cultures that we know
used what we would call psychedelics. I mean, there was
a lot of places that you know, use psychoactive things.
We're not really sure what that felt like to them,
but like it's not like thousands and thousands of culture
magic mushrooms can tell we actually know about very few.
(34:36):
So but psychologic people tend to really overemphasize. They just
get obsessed with the compounds and the substances and the
history of it, and they kind of forget about the
other things so much so that they many of them
actually believe that all religion is ultimately just psychedelic experience
that's transformed and gets away from its source, which I,
(34:57):
you know, category, I think it's ridiculous as a religious
you know, historian of religion to some degree. So one
of the reasons I was talking about things the way
I did is that while Terence McKenna was a huge
psychedelic fan and loved d MT and loved you know,
ayahuasca and mushrooms and everything, and Robert Anton Wilson as
(35:21):
well was a big fan, particularly of LSD, but he
tried everything. But it's more how these things mixed with
other aspects that really became important for them, and particularly
in the case of Robert Anton Wilson, where he was
doing a lot of psycho spiritual experiments and ceremonial magic.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
So's he's kind.
Speaker 9 (35:46):
Of moving into ritual and sort of psycho spiritual practices
that are designed to kind of transform your your ideas
of yourself and your ideas of reality. And then he's
mixing them with the incredible amplification powers of psychedelics and LSD.
(36:07):
So he's, you know, doing ritual on acid.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
And more than.
Speaker 9 (36:12):
That, he's bringing this kind of skeptical temperament that you were.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Talking about earlier to bear.
Speaker 9 (36:20):
So it's not like he's like, I believe that acid
is revealing the true structure of reality. Instead, he's like,
what is belief? What is our experience? How does our
experience come about because of our beliefs? What if we
change these beliefs?
Speaker 2 (36:35):
What if we screw around with these beliefs? And so
it's much more experimental in a way.
Speaker 9 (36:42):
And then the problem is what do you do when
you're doing an experiment, which is also how Terrence McKenna
saw his greatest, most famous drug trip. This experiment a
lot or was an experiment, not a ritual, not a prayer,
not a even a mystical leap, but an experiment with
(37:07):
the sense of science, of provisional investigation, doing what the
results are. So it's a very different kind of kind
of attitude. You know, in a way, Terrence a ritual
practitioner so much, although there was a ritualistic element to
(37:28):
what they did, but he was just an extraordinary reader.
And so you know, you fill your head full of
weird books, weird stories, and you have a great memory
like he did, and a great gift of gab like
you have a you're very comfortable in the far fringes
of language that that itself is going to be extra
(37:48):
transformative on top of the psychedelic experience. And with Dick,
it's it's even more interesting. You're like, you're like, yeah,
some people just have this stuff happen and we don't
know why. We don't you know, they're they're there's some
mixture in him that's also him kind of just telling stories,
making stuff up.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
What's an interesting story to tell? And he would run
with the football once he was telling a story, he'd lie,
he'd bullshit. So we don't really know what happened to him.
Speaker 9 (38:16):
But it was so, it was such it made such
an impact on his text that it's hard to believe that,
you know, it's just making it up.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
He's making some of it up. He changed his stories.
Speaker 9 (38:27):
And in a way, that's part of the interesting thing
that I was talking about. It's like, Okay, you have
your experience, your experience, and it's extraordinary, But what happens
with the story you're telling, and then the story changes
and maybe you return to it later and you revise it.
You go, no, no, no, I didn't really understand it,
you know, And people do this all the time. We've
had religious experiences, mystical experiences, meditative experiences. They change their
(38:50):
minds about what happened to them. So there's no real
ground in that way. You don't get like the full download.
Even when you have you see God, you might come
out of me like I think I saw God.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
I don't know what happened. I mean, my brain was weird.
You know.
Speaker 9 (39:05):
There's no answer to to finding that, like fire Kernel,
at least as far as I uh so, all of
them were kind of using different different approaches, different mixtures,
different sees. But there's something very similar about the zones
(39:27):
they got to, uh yeah, some patterns the same planet.
You know, they're both they're into serious they they talk
about these gnostic things. They talk about science fiction, about
computer minds, and so in the end, I'm also like this,
they're kind of prophetic. They're kind of like looking forward
towards some sort of informational posthuman sort of sacred sort
(39:50):
of pop culture profane breakdown or meltdown or transformation that
in a lot of ways were just closer to now.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Yeah, just as just the three individual characters, they're so interesting,
even if you don't necessarily agree with what conclusions they
come to or how they got there, that you can't deny.
They're fascinating people. The book is just amazing. I really
loved it and I highly recommend it.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
Now. I wish we had I really wish we had
more time.
Speaker 7 (40:23):
Eric says, we could talk to you for hours. These
topics are really interesting, and we're going to have to
invite you back on the show sometimes so that we
can delve into some of these other areas. I'm going
to have to later on look into dark retreats. I've
never actually heard of those, and we've talked about things
like prisoner's cinema and various kind of paranormal light phenomena.
So I'm really interested in that. But we need to
(40:45):
wind things up. So I just wanted to ask you
a final question, our signature question, and that is what's
your favorite monster?
Speaker 2 (40:53):
You know? I did this one.
Speaker 9 (40:54):
Took me a while to think about it, and I
wanted to be you know, when you say favorite, there's
like emotion, it's the most interesting, you know, and and
like you got it's got to get down in there.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
And and also then for me, it's also about being.
Speaker 9 (41:11):
A kid because I was a big universal horror fan
when I was like eight, nine years old, and I
used to do make put makeup on and I was
super into lawn Cheney and everything. Like I knew all
this early early horror. So when I think back of
like those characters that really, you know, I just have
to say Frankenstein, you know, because in a way, I'm
(41:34):
very interested in the modern world and the way that
ancient traditions get re articulated and transformed and mutated and
perverted in the modern world. That's kind of what highwareness is.
I'm very interested in our the last you know, one
hundred and two hundred years, which is a screwed up time,
but it's it's the one that I keep coming back to,
(41:55):
especially when it slams into.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Tradition. So you know, Mary Shelley's book, it's like.
Speaker 9 (42:02):
It's a it's it's a it's a monster for us,
for the industrial era, for the Romantic and post the
Romantic world. And it's still a fascinating figure still and
we're still kind of, you know, just just beginning to
explore the kind of you know, truly bizarre forms of
(42:23):
biology and life that are going to be invented, you know,
partly invented by our technologies. And you know, the screen
portrayal the book itself is amazing, uh you know, in
a way like he's sort of like the proto. You
can't get to the Android without going through Frankenstein, including
a kind of his historical sense of Frankenstein, which is
(42:46):
so pre you know, pre digital, pre computer so and
and you know, I just like I'll never you know,
that scene in The Bride Frankenstein where he goes into
the blind Man's and you know that he's here's the
music and the guy can't see that he's a monster,
and there and he's lonely, and they're both lonely, and
(43:07):
they're hanging out and he's smoking and they're drinking, and he's.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
Friend friend you know.
Speaker 9 (43:14):
It's like it's so sweet and it's so basic and human.
So the humanness of Frankenstein, and it's it's a quality
of humans.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
It's not like I want him to be a human.
Speaker 9 (43:25):
The monsters should remain monsters, but the element of the
human humanity that is manifested there is kind of like
the best thing about human beings, just hanging out with
friends and partying and being friends, you know, and having
a good time.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Like that's about as good as it gets.
Speaker 9 (43:42):
So there's just something about him that's particularly sweet as
well as kind of fearful.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
Oh yeah, he's a monster you can have a heart
for for sure.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (43:54):
It's a very thought out answer, Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
Fantastic. I'm excited about the Geomundo Toro uh movie trailer
for it.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Oh yeah, yeah, So that's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Well where can folks go if they want to keep
up with the latest on Eric Davis?
Speaker 9 (44:11):
I have a substack called Burning Shore. It's not it's
not super super frequent, which maybe be a plus or
minus depending on your your hunger. Uh so Burning Shore
dot com. And I also have a website with a
huge amount of archival material. I've been doing this stuff
for decades, writing, podcasting, interviews, pod you know, all sorts
(44:35):
of stuff, and that's Technosis dot com.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
T E, C, H, G N O S.
Speaker 9 (44:41):
I s at first book and it's still in print
and kind of started off all this stuff. So those
are two great places to keep up with what I'm
what I'm about fantastic.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
Thank you so much for spending time with it.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
We'll put links to all that stuff in the show notes.
Mons you've been listening to Monster Doc, the se as
show about monsters. I'm Blake Smith.
Speaker 7 (45:03):
And I'm Karen Stolzner.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
You just heard an interview with Eric Davis about his
book High Weirdness. If you're at all interested in this
historic period of counterculture, psychedelics, and magic, the book is
a must read.
Speaker 3 (45:16):
Check the show notes for links. We hope you enjoyed
this episode of Monster Talk.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Our goal here is to bring you the best in
monster related content with a focus on scientific skepticism and
critical thinking.
Speaker 3 (45:30):
If you enjoy our show and.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
Want to support our mission, start out by visiting monster
talk dot.
Speaker 8 (45:35):
Org forward slash Support. That's monster talk dot org forward
slash Support. There you'll find links to our Patreon page,
as well as a donate button if you'd like to
just make a one time contribution. A great way to
support the show is to buy books from our Amazon
wish list. These are books that directly help with our
monster research. We love used books very.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
Much, so don't feel compelled to buy new ones, and
we're also very fond of kindle editions because of their
easily searched content and without spending any money at all.
You can support and raise the profile of the show
by leaving a positive review at iTunes or wherever you
get your podcasts. Positive reviews help keep us visible in iTunes,
which is a great way to help us find you listeners. Finally,
(46:20):
remember to share episodes you really like with your friends
and family. You can help make Monster Talk the nightlight
that keeps monsters away from someone you love. Monster Talk
theme music's by Pete Stealing Monkeys. I feel like I'd
be letting you all down if I didn't add one
more voice from an important thought leader who's well grounded
(46:41):
in this material.
Speaker 5 (46:42):
Yeah, well you know that's just like.
Speaker 4 (46:46):
Your opinion.
Speaker 9 (46:47):
Man, this has been a monster House presentation.
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