Fringe Flashback! Erik Davis (High Weirdness and the Conspiracy Chapel Perilous) - Conspirinormal - Fringe Radio Network

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 4 (01:05):
This is spir Normal, all right, guys, welcome back to
Conspira Normal. It's your host, Adam, and of course Surfiel

(01:25):
is also standing by. We are separated in distance but
not in mind. So how's everything going, Surfhael.

Speaker 5 (01:34):
It's going pretty good. Just looking forward to the holidays here,
trying to have as much normalcy as possible.

Speaker 6 (01:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:41):
Absolutely, it's gonna be a it's gonna be an interesting
holiday season, that's for sure. But we've got the guest
on the line, Eric Davis, who has written an excellent
book called High Weirdness that we're going to talk about,
and we're going to talk about some other aspects of
his studies as well. Welcome to Conspira normal.

Speaker 6 (02:01):
Hey, happy to be here.

Speaker 4 (02:03):
Thanks for thanks for doing this. We're kind of the
skin of our teeth today on this, but we we
got it that we made it happen.

Speaker 6 (02:09):
So I'm the future man. Everything is skinny to tea.

Speaker 4 (02:14):
Yes, absolutely absolutely so. I think we're just we're we're
going to start off a little bit. I kind of
want to what we want to talk about is like
kind of your background and kind of like we're like,
I guess the culture really you that you kind of
came from and how that kind of inspired you to
write this book and to talk about the other subject

(02:36):
we're going to talk about tonight.

Speaker 6 (02:38):
Yeah, well thanks for asking that. It's actually been an interesting,
uh topic for me lately after I you know, High
Weirdness is based on my PhD dissertation that I got
it rice just just a few years ago, so kind
of a midlife return to graduate school. And when the

(02:59):
book came out, you know, I was really I was
pleased with it, and I've been you know, talking about
it and then since then I've been like, what am
I going to do? And one of the things I've
been doing is going like, you know, you know, that
classic thing is happening, where like, the older I am,
the more I've studied, the more I've thought about a
lot of stuff, the more I realized that I don't
really know anything. And then this is sort of intensified

(03:22):
by our current climate of you know, fake news and
massive information overload and this kind of ambient sense of
conspiracy and the profoundly unsettling nature of our reality. And
I was kind of like, what, what, what what can
I do here? And for me, one of the solutions
is just to actually just understand a little bit better

(03:45):
who I am, not so much my personal like psychological
issues or neurosis or whatever, but more like the place
I came from, because that's real, you know, like I
grew up where I grew up. I went to the
high school I went to, I went to the college
I went to. I did the things I did, and
those have all influenced my work, which is, you know,

(04:07):
whether you like it or not, unusual. So it's a
it's a it's an interesting way to kind of both
do a sort of personal reflection, but it also creates
a context to kind of understand uh, what I've been
doing for decades really, but you know, definitely what what
led into high weirdness. So, you know, I've been I've

(04:31):
been doing that on my sub stack called The Burning Shore.
It's kind of a mix of like personal essays and
then more you know, philosophical cultural theory things kind of
like high weirdness. But I'm kind of doing a blend.
So I've been thinking a lot about precisely this question.
And you know, I'm very much a Californian. You know,

(04:54):
I'm a fifth generation Californian. My forefathers were here before
the Gold Rush, in the Bay Air.

Speaker 7 (05:00):
You.

Speaker 6 (05:02):
Know, and I grew up very much immersed in a
certain kind of coastal southern California, post hippie permissive, you know,
kind of you know, it was like a university, a
lot of professors lived in the town, and you know,
it's very I guess you'd say privileged now, but but

(05:26):
you know, also still pretty gritty. A lot of surfers,
a lot of wandering stoner types, and partly just for
the entertainment value. Me and a lot of my friends
growing up in high school in the early eighties, we
just got into weird spiritual stuff. I mean, we were
kind of seekers, but we were also just kind of stoners,

(05:47):
and we appreciated the the sort of marvels of zen
or going to the Harry Krishna Temple or going to
the you know other you know, doing meditation chanting for
six hours or you know, psychedelic journeys or you know,
that kind of stuff. Was just sort of it was ambient,

(06:10):
and you know, I feel in retrospect that I felt
like I kind of like took it on, like I
sort of was absorbed it, almost stained with it. And
then you know, through the rest of my life, I've
I've been kind of like, well, what is that stuff
and like where does it come from? And how does
it work? And where does it go? And is it good?
Is it bad? And you know, so then I got

(06:34):
more of an intellectual, you know, training in university, and
then I did one of the I think, you know,
I don't know how you guys feel about it, but
sometimes it feels like I actually haven't really made that
many decisions in my life that what looks like a
really vexed decision at the time. In retrospect, you can

(06:56):
kind of see how it was already sort of set
up right, But I do I do believe that there
are moments in some in people's lives where there is
a kind of bifurcation point. It's like you're you're balancing
on the tip of a knife edge, and it's like
even the universe doesn't know which way you're going to go.
And I think my decision to not go to graduate
school after after college was one of those, and I

(07:21):
just went to I became a freelance writer, and that
kind of balanced out the intellectual side of my work
with like writing pop criticism and rock criticism and you know,
taking culture very seriously, too seriously, you know. And you know,
these days, every cultural criticism is everywhere and it's always free,

(07:43):
and back then you could actually get paid to do
it for a little while, you know. And I was
kind of the last wave in some ways of people
where it was it was a kind of more available
than it was than it is now as a sort
of career, if you will. But that was really great

(08:04):
because it let me pay attention to lots of stuff
and write short, quick, funny articles that also helped me
make me a better writer more you know, you know,
snazzy or you know, street Smart or whatever like that
has has more of that journalistic fabric to it, and

(08:25):
I could I could indulge my fascination with everything, you know.
So it was it was a wonderful thing to do.
And then in a lot of ways, my my writing
career has been kind of like weaving all these things together,
kind of my personal interests and spirituality and altered States
and the history of religion and the history of California
with both like more intellectual questions and and training, and

(08:49):
then like a journalist called essays approach uh to to
writing and really enjoying writing, like lately been enjoying writing again,
you know, kind of high weirdness is super dense. I
like the way it's written, but it's very dense, and
I'm trying to like play with that again. So I've
always been changing. I'm not a I'm not a con

(09:11):
I'm a I'm a publicist nightmare because none of my
books are really the same. They're not like a genre.
It's like there's a book about led Zeppelin and there's
like a coffee table book and it just it doesn't
really make a lot of sense.

Speaker 4 (09:24):
Oh yeah, I noticed that whenever I was like looking
up some of your other stuff and I was, like,
this guy's written a whole book about like led Zeppelin four. Yeah,
so I thought that was pretty interesting.

Speaker 5 (09:35):
Yeah, that thirty three and a third series is really cool.

Speaker 6 (09:39):
Yeah, it was. It was a great one to write for,
you know, it's uh, it was, I was. And I
had some because I think I'm numbers like I think
I'm set number seventeen. So pretty early on I had
a friend who did the first one and I thought, oh,
this is perfect. And I hadn't been writing that much
rock criticism at that point. That was like the middle
two thousands, and I did a lot of music writing

(10:02):
in the nineties, and it was it's really fun to
write about music and write about heavy metal. Like when
I in the nineties, like I was sort of like
a you know, smart ass rock critic, you know, like
I wrote for Spin and The Village Voice, and you know,
I did some stuff in Rolling Stone, did reviews for
Rolling Stone or whatever, but not a lot of people

(10:23):
like me wrote about metal. So that was just a
kind of field day for me to write like kind
of weirdly and intelligently about critically about metal. And so
when I when I was thinking about thirty three, I
was like, Oh, ye'd be so much fun just to
dive into rock writing again, and you know, and I

(10:44):
thought about what record to do, and then it was
just totally clear I had to do led Zeppelin. And
then I thought about what led Zeppelin record to do,
and that was hard because because it's four is not
my favorite, you know, my I depending on my mood,
I'm going to go led Zeppelin three, or I'm going
to go physical graffiti, yeah, you know. But then there's

(11:04):
parts of the House of the Holy that I just
completely loved, some of my favorite substent Houses the Holy.
But there's four with the Great Stairway to Heaven on it,
and it was clear that I was if there was
going to be a thirty three and a third book
on led Zeppelin, that was going to be definitive. I
had to write about that record, and I'm really happy
I did. I was the most fun I've ever had
writing it was. It was like three months of obsessive amusement.

Speaker 5 (11:30):
Awesome, Well, you were. You were also in a position
to witness a lot of things that happened in psychedelic
and alternative cultures as they really first began to interface
with technology and the Internet in the nineties, so you
got to be known as someone who wrote about that interface.

Speaker 6 (11:51):
Yeah, that was, you know, a lucky thing, you know.
I went. The sort of initiation of that was an
event called the Cyberthon. Oh my god, does that sounds
early nineteen nineties, doesn't it? But it was real. And
what the Cyberthon was. It was held in the Bay

(12:12):
Area in you know, San Francisco, south of San Francisco,
and it brought together very consciously technological innovators and psychedelic
people and sort of the whole Earth Catalog crew, you
know that Stuart Brand kind of current of sort of

(12:36):
smart hippie technology use and Jaron Lanier was there with
the VPL glove and talking about virtual reality, and Terrence
McKenna was there, and William Gibson was there talking about cyberpunk.
And it was just this weird milange you know, that
really felt and these were the early days of Mond
two thousand and all that and it was, you know,

(12:58):
before Wired magazine. It really was this kind of weird
moment which in retrospect you can be I don't want
to say cynical about but you can see how it
was just a very a brief blip on something that
was much more about you know, capital accumulation and technological
capture than it was about the resurrection of like sixties dreams.

(13:22):
But that tension has always been there. I mean, you
guys are called conspira normal. I mean there's always that
weird tension really inside California counterculture between like this sort
of exuberant you know, world creation and you know, celebration
of this kind of hedonic spiritual exploration, but taking place

(13:47):
within a system or a situation that's that's a lot
more shadowy in some ways, but at the time it
was just a it was a real marvel and so
that was a thread I got to kind of write
about and tune into, and you know, hang out with
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and cyberpunk guys and you know,
go to Burning Man back in the day and things

(14:09):
like that. So, yeah, the nineties were was a lot
of fun for me. I mean, the nineties were like
my sixties, the early nineties, you know, ninety yeah, like
ninety to ninety five, ninety six, ninety six, and then
I kind of change and sort of went in my
own way and I became you know, that's when I
wrote my first book, Technosis, which was the most difficult
thing to write. That was that was really really difficult

(14:32):
to get out there, and I didn't know if it
was even going to be meaningful to people. You know,
it's it's similarly dense to High Weirdness. Took a lot
longer to write. It was really really hard, and when
it came out it was just like whatever, you know.
I got a couple of reviews and stuff, but over

(14:52):
time it just developed a really cult, a real cult following,
and even now people read it and blows their minds, like,
somehow I was able to write a book about technology
over twenty years ago that people can read now and
be like, yeah, you know, like I don't know how
that happened.

Speaker 7 (15:10):
There's nothing about social media, there's nothing about iPhones, But
somehow there's something about the vibe or the angle on
the topic, the kind of irrational side of technology that
both the dark conspirable, conspiratorial side and the magical imaginative side, and.

Speaker 6 (15:29):
Just the way in which it infuses with our own
dreams really in good and bad ways. That all seems
I think pretty relevant to people today.

Speaker 4 (15:40):
Too, like the basic concepts were there even then.

Speaker 6 (15:45):
I think that those basic concepts all go way back.
I mean that's like one part of technosis is all
about electricity, you know, like you know, how sexy is
the telegraph Now not very sexy, But at the time
people freaked out about it, like the way they freaked
out about the Internet in the mid nineties. They you know,

(16:06):
there was like there's a famous liance in the book,
some congressman who probably was making money off of it too.
So you've got to remember there's always hype going on
as well. But some conngressmen goes, this new invention will
eliminate space and time, you know, because they were you
were able for the first time in history to send
a message effectively instantaneously between like Baltimore and New York City.

(16:30):
I mean, if you've never done that before, when you
first do that, it's just completely mind blowing. I mean
it's like it's you know, eighteen fifties. It's like or
in the eighteen forties, like people are you know, goofy
hats and funny facial hair and there's no cars or anything,
and then suddenly you can send a message like that
that blows people's minds and they see in that you

(16:52):
can see almost like there's a little pressure put on
history and you can glimpse all the possibilities and what
I what I think happens. And this is one of
the main things that's in technosis with new technologies, and
it's different today. I'll talk about that, but just in
some ways. It's different today, but for a long course

(17:14):
of the modern world, you know, the modern scientific world,
it's sixteenth century, seventeenth century, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, twentieth century,
new technologies would come along and it's like you could
you can almost use them like as like like portals
to see the future and project a future. And so

(17:36):
if you have a positive view of the future, you
can see, oh my god, we're gonna be able to
use this technology to bring people together and to create
universal learning. Like television was like that, Oh my god,
it's going to bring the world together. It's not. We're
gonna have peace, people are gonna be able to understand
each other. There's gonna have a new mechanism to educate people.

(17:57):
And those those dreams, some of them are hype, someone's
just selling something, but a lot of them are not
a lot of them are really people want the modern
project to be better than it is. They want peace
on some level. I mean not everybody, but a lot
of people. They want learning to be available to people,

(18:17):
not based on you know, being in the right group
or having money or whatever it is being in one country.
And so you see the dream come up again. It
came up with the telegraph, It comes up with radio,
comes up with television. Television right like which we associated
the boob tube. It's an idiot machine, right, you know,

(18:39):
at best it kind of knits together the world sort
of in some fragile, simulaceral kind of consensus. But people
really believe that. And of course it happened with the
Internet as well. And the nineties was that moment, the
early nineties was that moment you got to feel it,
You got to see you could feel presence of these possibilities.

(19:02):
Were they really there, like in a in a more realistic,
even somewhat cynical later view looking back, were those possibilities
there or was it always bs? You know, I've talked
to people from the nineties, We have interesting conversations about
precisely that, and I come to think that no, actually
those historical possibilities are there just as they are now.

(19:24):
I mean, we have the possibility to create i don't know,
through universal basic income and a certain kind of communistic
use of technologies to take us away from a certain
sort of individualism, and you know, or to take on
the issues of climate change with robust creative technologies. And
you know, those are our historical possibilities now, but you know,

(19:48):
our moment for so many reasons, we can't even see
those and when people tell us about them, at least
I don't know. I can't speak for you guys, but
when people start talking about, oh, we'll be a to
do this, I just instantly, oh, this is just a
pr scam, Like they're just making a move on some
sort of do goody you know, uh demographic like it's

(20:10):
really hard to feel very positive about things, but for
better or worse, naive and which it was, and also
idealistic and also creative and fun and indulgent and all
of that kind of stuff. The early nineties was an
interesting moment, especially if you also had a cyberpunk sensibility.
That's what was kind of weird about it in retrospect,

(20:33):
was that the cyberpunk you know, you know, like you
read William Gibson, if if you take those books as
definitive but not just him, you know, John Shirley and
and and Pat Cadigan and whatever. Those they're they're they're
they're dark, or they're twisting, they're they're heavy, you know,
they're like not, it's not a happy world. There's like corporations,

(20:54):
there's all this stuff that's sort of kind of like
our world.

Speaker 5 (20:57):
Now, well, there's there's still some hope in it. There's
still like the protagonists who are there's still room for
the rebels kind of like.

Speaker 6 (21:04):
It's true, Yeah, there's still that space. And I think
that I think part of the fatigue, depression, sort of listlessness, sadness,
whatever the lot of people are feeling now. I mean
partly it's COVID obviously, but partly as it's like this

(21:24):
sneaking suspicion that we don't even get that right, you know,
and that I think is really that's something really to
sit with. And it's interesting to ask that question historically
because it's the same thing about the nineties, you can say,
because you could almost sit historically and look back and

(21:45):
come up with two different narratives fundamentally different narratives that
I think both have their place and in one you go.
Histories are always open, these possibility, these are possible. It
could have gone this way, could have gone that way.
Who knows, maybe being an idealistic, acid gobbling hippie could

(22:08):
have been the right way to create an actually better
manifest world than the one that we wound up with,
and that we should look back at those struggles and dreams. Obviously,
you know this is true politics to because you know,
like more overt politics as well, because we can look
at you know, how do you deal with with terrorists
the weather underground? Is that a good idea or a

(22:31):
bad idea? Like I don't know, I don't know. Maybe
if they'd done it right, it would have like shocked
these people and then things would have responded and we
might have had a better world. But you know, you know,
it's you can't really tell. But there's another way of
looking at where like it's all you know, it's it's
harder to see how there was ever a lot of
room for maneuver because the forces arrayed against that kind

(22:54):
of rebel stuff, especially now where is sold back to
us and we don't even know what it means anymore.
It's it's uh, you know, it's it's it's it's it's
hard to sometimes hard to see. So I think it's
important to keep both both of those perspectives, both on
the past and in our current.

Speaker 5 (23:15):
Moment well and with some of the stuff we're gonna
explore later too. It makes me wonder. It seems like
you're kind of hinting that there's a relationship between this
kind of hopelessness and the lack of that space and
where a lot of these narratives have gone now into
a more spiritual dimension, more darker, you know, almost with

(23:40):
these gnostic tinges of the archons and things like that.
So so yeah, I can I can definitely see a
relationship there too.

Speaker 8 (23:48):
Uh.

Speaker 5 (23:48):
But uh, I want to kind of get into the
seventies a little bit. I know you you put out
this book last year, so you said you went through,
uh you know, the press circuits with it, and uh,
but your book High Weirdness, Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience
in the seventies, Me and Adam have been digging into,

(24:09):
thoroughly enjoying it. But before you really get into it,
how would you how do you define high weirdness for
this purpose, and what made the seventies particularly weird.

Speaker 6 (24:21):
Well, you know what I was interested in is talking
about extraordinary experience, but not using religious language or even
particularly a cult language to talk about it. That means,
when things are happening that just go beyond the pale,

(24:41):
you can't chalk them up to your own just your
own mind. It's too weird for that. There's synchronicity is happening,
you're talking to disincarnate beings, there's too much information flooding you. Whatever,
some kind of extraordinary experience, which of course many people
were having in the sixties and continue to have in

(25:04):
the seventies with psychedelics. So psychedelics are really sort of
funny because they provide the occasion for extraordinary experiences, but
then it's not really clear what to do with them,
or what to even call them, or what category if
you can put them into a category. And so a

(25:25):
lot of people and this is very true of the sixties.
In fact, one of the things that defines the sixties
is the attempt to sacralize, to make sacred psychedelic experience.
This is not necessarily what psychedelics are. They're not necessarily
religious or spiritual pills or substances. But that's a lot

(25:51):
about what the hippie experiment was about. And at the
same time, it doesn't really quite fit religion as we
normally mean it. So I wanted to come up with
a way of talking about what that is, What is
it in your personal experience? And I'm not just talking
about psychedelics. I mean this could be true for paranormal things,

(26:12):
for precognitive dreams, for UFO encounters, for any range of
extraordinary experiences that are outside of the norm, that there's
some way of talking about them, of acknowledging they're part
of reality, or at least they're part of our reality,
not just my little mind projecting something. There's something more

(26:34):
going on about what this stuff is. So for me,
weird was the perfect way of talking about it, because
it's a term we use, we know it. It's not
a particularly attractive term. There's something a little menacing about it.
There's something a little adolescent about it. There's something also

(26:55):
kind of enchanted about it. And that all of those
elements together to me say something really important about a
domain that we might not otherwise think of in that way.
And so high weirdness is when that kind of weird
zone just kicks into overdrive. And what the book is
really looking at are the extraordinary experiences of these three

(27:18):
or four guys, because they're two of them are brothers
and they kind of have experiences alongside one another, and
the extraordinary books and ideas that they minted out of
these experiences. And it all takes place in the seventies,
so it inevitably also kind of engages the seventies as

(27:41):
the kind of second half of the sixties, the place
where the countercultural dreams of transformation are clearly not going
to happen, or at least they're not going to happen
in the way everyone thought they were, or on a
mass scale. Instead, people have to kind of go out
and sort of invent their new reality these whether they're
going into communes or developing, you know, new kinds of

(28:05):
social movements, or in the case of the people I'm
writing about Terrence McKenna, Dennis McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and
philk it takes a little different because he's he's not
a psychedelic person in other ways less identified with the counterculture,
but he does very much participate in this kind of
seventies turn towards something like spirituality, something like gnosticism, something

(28:31):
like the esoteric, but in a different key than in
the past, something more science fictional, more technological, more psychedelic,
and in a way more kind of I don't say desperate,
but there's something, there's a real drive, there's an intensity,
like a kind of let's break on through, Like we

(28:53):
weren't able to break on through quite in the sixties.
Now we got to do it with the actual fabric
of reality. And of course it doesn't quite have doesn't
work out exactly the way they thought, and that's classic
for all seekers. Anyone who's on a journey knows it
won't come out the way you think it will. And
so my book is really a way of looking at

(29:14):
these experiences, looking at the books these guys wrote, the
texts they wrote about their experiences, and just how the
weird manifests in people's lives and how it reflects and
resonates with these larger cultural forces. And that's where it's
important about the seventies, why I think the book is

(29:36):
more relevant than it might seem like, oh, another you
know history of people who had fun back when it
was easier to have fun or whatever. You know, like,
you know, there's a certain way in which, especially sixties
stuff is so recycled, and so we know all the

(29:57):
stories we've heard of my thoughts. Seventies much less. So
it's a your time. It's it's not as pretty, it's
it's more you know, there's more uh sport, it's drug ear,
it sleazier, all this. You know, there's a lot more
of the shadow side is visible. But it's also a
very creative time, very constructive time, you know, musically, I

(30:20):
think it's some ways more creative.

Speaker 4 (30:22):
I think there's this attitude about the seventies. There's like
the counterculture had kind of failed in a certain way,
and you kind of bring how there's like there's a
general malaise, but out of that malaise there's there's there's
also this kind of flowering that kind of goes away
from the counterculture somewhat.

Speaker 6 (30:39):
Yeah, that's that's sort of how I see it. I mean,
it's a it's a it's a complicated issue in some
ways because I mean some historians will push back. It's
it's the common story about the seventies is the males story.
It's like this was gonna happen, and it didn't happen,
and then it's just this big bummer. And it's interesting
because in American history, at least like mainstream let's say

(31:02):
mainstream American history, they're all good decades. Even World War
Two is for all its horror, and I mean it's
all horrible, but the Pacific Theater was particularly horrible. I
mean that was that was not a fun war to fight.
So but but still there's this sense of heroism, of
the pluck and the emergence of the United States as

(31:24):
a world power. So of course it's got a certain
oomph to it. And really there's just there's Even the thirties,
there's some kind you know, sow but we had the
works programs and you know, but like the seventies, nobody
looks at it and tries to spin it good. You know,
everybody's like, oh, yeah, that was that was the bummer.
That's the bummer decade. It's the smog.

Speaker 4 (31:45):
Have a We have a friend that has been a
frequent guest on this show, and he likes to say
that nineteen seventy four was the nadir of civilization, like
there is nothing good that happened in nineteen seventy four.

Speaker 6 (31:59):
O contrary, there's so many great records. But I appreciate it.
I still get it. So there's been some pushback on
that and even against my book, because I do adopt
that point to a degree. I think it's true too.
I think and and and partly just based on talking
to lots of people who live through those live through

(32:19):
that era, but I think, but I do kind of
wish I had emphasized a little bit more the creative
the range of creative responses. I mean, I talk about them,
but like you know, there's a lot of social movements again,
a lot of community construction, a lot of invention, a
lot of like, well it's not going to happen the
way he want to. We got to build it, you know,

(32:41):
let's do it. And you know, the communes are the
great kind of example of that. But there's a lot
of other projects that are social projects that are based
on new and all the people who are starting to
step out and be like, I'm not gonna be subservient anymore.
You know, Women's movement, gay movement, you know Native Americans,

(33:03):
you know what we now call latinx Chicano movements like
those are all part of that seventies moment a lot
of ways, because it's really civil rights into the black
panthers that sets the mode. Oh, that's how you begin
to liberate yourself from this oppressive white patriarchy of you know,
mid century America is you got to like get out there.

(33:25):
And then so you see a lot of that kind
of stuff too, not too mench environmentalism. So in a
lot of ways, though, I feel like our era.

Speaker 9 (33:32):
Now is.

Speaker 6 (33:35):
Really is kind of born in the seventies more than
the sixties. One of the reasons we're nostalgic about the
sixties is because it's somewhere else. But when you look
at the seventies, you're looking at us. You're looking at
environmental problems, terrorism, social conflict, you know, popular culture out

(33:57):
of control, drugs out of control. You know, it's a
weird time, and that's there we are, and so that
weirdness then reflects our weirdness now.

Speaker 4 (34:06):
I think in the sixties there was much more the
media really hit onto the counterculture and the hippies, and
that was more paid attention to, And by the time
you get to the seventies, the mainstream media really wasn't
paying any attention to that. So all these underground movements
were happening that weren't being like the community organizing and

(34:29):
these type of things that you describe. And by the way,
somewhere in this house, hidden somewhere is a whole Earth catalog.
I want you to know that.

Speaker 6 (34:39):
Yeah, no, that I think that that's a process that
begins in the seventies, and it gets more that way
in the late seventies, and even more that way in
the eighties. You know, because when you if people start,
you know, you know, quick quick history where you like
sink a whole decade down into a few images or

(35:01):
like a basic stories, like all the eighties was conservative.
Reagan was the president, Greed was in. It was all
about Wall Street. And you're like, okay, sure, but by
the way, all of that, all of those freaks kept freaking,
and then the kids who came after them kept freaking too.
And if you peer beneath the surface, if you pull

(35:25):
back the Wall Street carpet and you look beneath in
a place where nobody is looking, no one is looking
down there, like they don't what like what like hardcore
scene in like you know, Long Beach in nineteen eighty
nobody's looking at that, you know, or whatever. But then

(35:48):
all of those things start to develop so much creative energy,
and that really sort of sets in motion some of
the later cultural developments of the late eighties and in
the nineteen nineties. So it's it's actually really interesting that
the you know, and the more I learn about it,
the more it's like the counterculture doesn't go away. It stops,
it stops being like a counter culture, and it becomes

(36:10):
more like a whole symphony of subcultures, some of which
are still pretty oppositional, but a lot of them are
just happy to do their weird thing and be ignored.
It's actually it's for us today. We look back at
that and we go, oh my god, that must have
been so cool. Like you're just like you're you're a

(36:30):
punk band in Long Beach in nineteen seventy nine or whatever,
and you like, you put up some flyers and it's
a crappy bar and there's like your your friends and
a couple of people who come down from la and
we keep we look at that now we go, oh
my god, that's like heaven because it's all circulated and photographed.

(36:51):
This and then you got to put it on the Facebook,
and it's like this that was at an event doesn't
even matter if it's there. It's not even there anymore
because we have COVID. So there's there's something about that
that quote a true underground, which it was in the
sense that it wasn't as visible, it wasn't mediated in
the same way. That was still analog kind of mediation.

(37:12):
And we're in a very different different era.

Speaker 4 (37:15):
Yeah, I look at the seventies and like the early
to mid eighties is kind of like a golden age
to me, like music wise and culturally, but because I
was a child at the time. But it's like a
lot of other people didn't see it that way, you know,
at the time.

Speaker 6 (37:33):
Yeah, it's funny, how about those things they're they're they're
not remembered the same way, you know, And and in
a way that's all that too is kind of nice
because if you decide if you want to dig into it,
like I have a friend who's like a scholar of zines, Yeah,
are you know, they really start blowing up in the
late seventies, and then that that almost defined that well,

(37:55):
at least it defines the kind of writing, concept creation,
a print culture of the nineteen eighties. It's this kind
of zines, which is sort of like under like underground newspapers,
which were huge in the sixties and early seventies. They
kind of transmute into these more private, even more shadowy

(38:16):
forms of creativity that are just extraordinary. But they also
don't quote unquote go anywhere. So if you're not looking
for them, you don't care. But if you look at them,
you realize that, like, you know, this is true history
in general. If you start digging around, you're going to
find all of these sparks, all of these like just

(38:36):
jeweled moments that are both sort of prophetic and they're
they're they're it's not like idealistic, but they're just like
these these beautiful moments that in a way, even though
they've happened thirty years ago, if you don't get too
fetishistic about it, they still kind of charge you too,
or forty years ago or whatever. And that's actually for

(38:59):
me as part of the pleasure, the mixed pleasure of
being you know, I wouldn't say predominantly historical as a
writer and thinker, but I really consider I consider most
things in terms of their historical development. Even though history
is always just a story. There is something about that

(39:22):
actual material development of technologies and cultures and fashion objects
and media, and how all those things change over time,
especially in the twentieth century, in our twenty first century,
that helps I think orient can help orient one in
the confusion.

Speaker 5 (39:44):
So high weirdness is pretty much synonymous with high strangeness,
which is a term that gets thrown around a whole
lot different in people's paranormal encounters, often with other beings
and and strange the more unexplainable and weird end of

(40:05):
things like UFO encounters with things that don't make sense.
And one thing that these three individuals have in common
is that at some at some time, all of them
believed that they were in some kind of contact with
another intelligence, and they all had these strange experiences around

(40:28):
around that contact.

Speaker 6 (40:31):
Yeah, that's that's that's one of the interesting that's where
you can see that that phenomenon that I mentioned earlier,
where something that might have been in the past might
have been described in religious language, I saw God, I
saw God. You know. Suddenly it's it has a similar structure.

(40:54):
There's some higher we use the phrase higher intelligence, but
it's no longer clear what cosmology we're in. Are we
in a science fiction cosmology? Are we in a weird
fiction cosmology? Are we in some kind of esoteric you know, accult,

(41:15):
cobbilistic theosophical world with multiple levels? Are we psychotic? Like
maybe we're just inventing it all. Maybe it's our own
personal fiction. Like in the old days, when people had
authentic religious experiences, they weren't thinking that, you know, they

(41:35):
might have been actually doing it, you know whatever, you
see Jesus at the crossroad and you fall down on
your knees and you're converted. Well, you know, skeptically, we
might say, now, while that person was probably just you know,
having like a sort of you know, nervous breakdown and
then interpreting it according to a certain cultural story that
was around their society. That makes sense, that's a whole bread. Yeah, well,

(42:01):
but that's how the people experienced it are talking about it.
One of the things that happens with all three of
these guys is that even though they have these extraordinary experiences,
this is really important. It's an important part of the book,
and not just the book, just about thinking about what
kind of weird world we're in. So even though they
have these extraordinary experiences. They're all capable of going, wow,

(42:24):
well maybe I was totally psychotic, or wow, maybe that
was just a complete fiction that was dredged out of
my unconscious And at the same time they keep being
interested in these experiences, even inculcating them, even wanting to
bring them on. That is different. That's weirdness, that's what

(42:45):
I mean. That's different than someone in the nineteenth century
who has a vision of an angel, who either believes
it or maybe they think it's a demon in disguise.
I mean, there's always doubt, there's always like some possible
ability that the vision is not true. But the sort
of secularization of it that you see among the people

(43:07):
who are nonetheless having the visions, that is a That's
something that develops, but I think really flowers in the seventies.
It's there before, for sure, but it really flowers in
that period.

Speaker 5 (43:19):
I'd like to just go down the line with them
as far as if you can give a brief explanation
of like where of some of these experiments that the
McKenna brothers did, then we'll get into the workings of
Robert Anton Wilson and whatever happened to fill k Dick

(43:41):
with that pink beam.

Speaker 6 (43:43):
Yeah. I mean these are all like classic tales, you know.
I encourage anybody who likes weird stuff to read the
original texts about these things. But they're there for you know.
Each one has their own little period of time that
aren't too far apart from one another, which is interesting
when you think about it. Terrence and Dennis McKenna were

(44:05):
the youngest of the people I write about, and they
were down in the Colombian jungle looking for some obscure
kind of entheogen or psychedelic compound and instead discovered lots
of magic mushrooms growing in the field of the village

(44:25):
they were staying in. The local Indians weren't eating the mushrooms,
but they did, and as they were eating them, they
started to feel like they were connecting with not like
an other intelligence cych was right in front of their
eyeballs or something, but it was like their their thoughts
were being guided on and and sort of. As they

(44:45):
kept talking and thinking and bringing all of their interests
to bear, their interests in science fiction and physics, in
biology and ethnobotany, in fantasy, in counterculture, they started to
build up this idea of an experiment, and that this
experiment would somehow, and it gets really complicated in the details,

(45:09):
basically kind of end time and fulfill the grand sort
of alchemical stretch of history. In this moment at which
something transcendental would happen, we would be ushered into a
galactic civilization. History as we know it is over, you know,

(45:31):
full on kookietoon stuff. And so they went for it,
and it didn't happen the way they thought it might happen,
but something happened, and that's something was well, really weird.
And then in a way the rest of their lives
in different ways were impacted directly by that period of weirdness.

(45:54):
And so that's the famous experiment at Lacherrera.

Speaker 4 (46:00):
Wasn't there this idea to make like the Philosopher's Stone too,
Wasn't that an element of this?

Speaker 6 (46:05):
Yeah, the experiment on a more I didn't I kind
of glossed over this details. The idea was to actually
sort of transform well, you would create a kind of
standing wave hologram that was sort of a mind matter fusion.
That was then they used the language of the of
the Philosopher's Stone, meaning using traditional alchemical language, which Terrence

(46:30):
probably picked up from reading Carl Jung, and but they
thought about it in more science fictional terms. You know,
he thought about it as a kind of solid state object,
like like a like a you know, like a transistor,
except on a cosmic scale. And so he's drawing equally

(46:50):
from esotericism and science fiction and his own experiences. They
both are as they developed this idea of a kind
of object at the end of time, and Terrence would
continue to talk about the object at the end of
time throughout his life. We were talking about the nineties
earlier at the Cyberthon. Terrence McKennon was also at the Cyberthon,

(47:15):
and so from the very beginning his raps have always
been involved media and technology. In the late sixties he
was really Marshall mccluan, and some of his first writings
are really more about media than they are about psychedelics.
So he's known as the great like Mushroom Bard, but

(47:36):
in a lot of ways he's been playing the same
kind of science fictional game. It's just like what we
talked about before with the Telegraph, where something new happens
and in the newness you see a space for something
that is truly transformative and you just put all your
money on that, you put all your bets on that,

(47:57):
and most of the time, unfortunately in history, things don't
come out that way, and then you sort of have
to deal with the residue of that. But there's something
really admirable not of being cautious, not of holding back,
but of going like Terrence did. Wow, the political revolution
didn't seem to work, but DMT is so bizarre that

(48:17):
maybe we can actually change reality. And while that seems
completely farcical in some ways, in many lights, there's something also,
in my view, admirable about that, and it certainly set
him up to be a very interesting and entertaining figure who,
by the way, had a lot to do with giving
the nineteen nineties the subculture in the nineteen nineties its

(48:40):
particular flavor.

Speaker 5 (48:42):
Yeah. Absolutely, I mean I remember that his influence. I remember,
you know, people listening to his lectures, reading his books.
He had a big impact on when psychedelia really you know,
exploded on the Internet, and he really popularized DMT I
think more than anyone, and with that came that idea

(49:06):
of them the famous DMT elves. So there's like another
point of contact with some strange other.

Speaker 6 (49:16):
Yeah, absolutely, he did bring bring DMT into sort of
popular culture where it lives bizarrely now. I mean, that's
sort of an interesting thing about the history of drugs,
is that sometimes drugs don't don't penetrate the cultural imagination,

(49:36):
even if they're around. There was a lot of DMT
around in the nineteen sixties, but most people didn't like it,
and most people didn't talk about it or weren't that
into it, you know. But you know, Leary took it,
Alan Watts took it. A lot of people took it,
but most people they didn't. Penny it wasn't the story.
LSD was the story. Later mushrooms was the story, but

(49:59):
DMT was like, what do we do with this stuff?
It's so bizarre. But in a way, as culture accelerated
and as technology accelerated, in a way, DMT was the
kind of visionary counter cultural response to whatever was happening
technologically that led to the hype around virtual reality or

(50:21):
the sort of proto worldwide Web world of the Internet.
Before the World Wide Web happened, what was happening with
the Internet in the early nineteen nineties, DMT was kind
of in a way part of all that, and Terrence,
who was as interested in computers and media as he
was in psychoactives and biology, was one of the bridges

(50:45):
for that connection.

Speaker 5 (50:48):
And like the whole time wave zero thing and twenty twelve,
I mean, I don't think there would have been the
kind of hype leading up to twenty twelve if it
wasn't for Terrence.

Speaker 6 (51:00):
No, no, that there wouldn't have been. I mean that
was never my That was never the rap that I
was that interested in. But but you know, it had
its place, and it definitely had it had its influence.

Speaker 5 (51:13):
Uh, moving on to Robert Anton Wilson, who is definitely
a big influence on both me and Adam.

Speaker 3 (51:21):
Oh.

Speaker 5 (51:21):
You know, so he had very strange high weirdness encounters
as well, but he seems to be the person with
the most what he called radical agnosticism and his maybe logic,
and he seems to have really had a unique perspective

(51:44):
on high weirdness that also crossed over into like his
his thoughts on conspiracy and a lot of other things.
I think it's a real healthy way of of looking
at things that could really help help us today.

Speaker 6 (51:59):
Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny when I wrote this book.
When it came out, I thought I would mostly end
up talking about Philip K. Dick, who was, you know,
the main reason I started writing the book, and then
I decided to write it and include the McKenna's and
Robert Anton Wilson. But I ended up talking about him
the least. And the person I talked about the most

(52:21):
was rob Anton Wilson because, like just as you say,
both his approach to weirdness and conspiracy and his whole
relationship to sort of truth and multiple angles on truth
was so resonant for us today that I ended up

(52:44):
talking mostly about him in conversations or in interviews. And
he's also interesting because he has a narrative more clear
than the other guys, where basically, at some point he
lost the plot, Like at some point he's doing all
these crazy experimentation like don't do this at home, kids,

(53:07):
you know, don't take large doses of LSD and do
you know Crowley and ritual magic during the early nineteen seventies,
when you're living in Berkeley and you're surrounded by all
this weirdness, you know that's going to create some challenging
situations for you, And indeed it did for him including basically,
you know, going into a sort of whatever you want

(53:30):
to call it, you know, a paranoid religious, metaphysical, esoteric
conviction that he was in communication with these extraterrestrial intelligences
associated with serious and you know, that lasted for a
while and then he kind of got out of it,

(53:51):
and in getting out of it, he developed a certain
way of navigating the ambiguity, the suggestiveness, the menace, the
magic of conspiracy thinking in the broadest sense, not just
about like JFK or whatever, but just there's there's some

(54:12):
kind of plots or there's some deeper connection in reality
or something. And you know, a lot of esoteric and
occult thinking has a quality of conspiracy to it, or
gnostic thinking as well as as you mentioned earlier. So
he comes out of this experience with a certain style

(54:32):
of thinking that in some ways it's kind of a show.
It's sort of his shtick, you know, and it's his
you know, it's like this is his punk rock band
in the underground subculture zone of the late nineteen seventies.
Because he goes on to influence people in the late seventies,
particularly is throughout the nineteen eighties, you know, a lot

(54:54):
of underground influenced the Church of the SubGenius, the emergence
of chaos magic in the UK and the seventies and eighties.
You know, So he plays that important, if you know,
already kind of underground role, partly because he has this
stick a kind of like wise cracking a vuncular uh

(55:16):
smarty pants who you who you wouldn't mind just hanging
out with and chatting and you know, knows a lot
uh And but it but that whole kind of persona
comes out of this sort of trial by fire. And
I agree with you that there. I believe there's a
lot in Wilson's approach, both philosophically, and I mean that

(55:38):
in this specific sense of like, how do we think
in how do we think about epistemology? How do we
think about uh, skepticism? What does skepticism really mean? Let's
look at it historically, Like you can have like a
sort of you know, uh whatever, uh history of philosophy
discussion about skepticism that winds up at Robert Anton Wilson

(56:01):
with you know, for good reason. Uh. So there there
are some ideas there that are really interesting. But it's
also as much kind of attitude a sort of lifestyle,
not a lifestyle, but like a sort of way of
moving through life that I think has a lot of
appeal for people who see enough to not be able

(56:22):
to buy the mainstream story anymore, but don't want to
for very good reasons, go into a kind of reality
tunnel of of you know, oh, the Orion, you know,
the aliens from Orion, or manipulating the Pharma corpse and
they're taking over the you know whatever, like all the

(56:43):
sort of nest of of of conspiracy that is now
part of pop culture. It's part of news, it's part
of social reality. So and and that way, though not perfect,
I think Wilson is a is a real tonic, and
I hope to you know, I hope that my book

(57:03):
and other things that I've done can bring forward some
of that, some of that tonic.

Speaker 4 (57:09):
I will say that Wilson, you know, reading the Illuminatus trilogy,
I read that when I was in college, and when
I was listening to the audiobook of your of your book,
just hearing that brought back memories and I kind of
think about Wilson now, and I kind of think about,
like the way that my our attitude about conspiracy theories

(57:33):
and about like he was. He was somebody that just
did not he was interested in them. He took it seriously,
but he could also laugh about this stuff too. So
he was the first one that kind of exposed me
to those kind of ideas.

Speaker 6 (57:46):
You know, it's it's a real issue, and I'm just
going to dive right into it because partly I just
you know, I was just in the car for two
hours today and I listened to I just started listening
to this podcast. You may be familiar with it. It
was from a couple of years ago. I think he's
still doing them, Mike as judge, Death is around just

(58:09):
around the corner. Death is around the corner, Just around
the corner, and get it right, Yeah, death is just
around the corner. And it's a conspiracy podcast. But he's
way smarter than most of the conspiracy podcasts I've listened to.
I mean, he at every point when he talks about

(58:29):
something where I've like drawn the line like, okay, guys,
I'm willing to think about this, but that's just too
that's just too much. He's like doing draw on the
same line, you know, Like he was talking about mk Ultra,
the famous uh you know, sort of military intelligence program

(58:50):
to support and manipulate many different studies and doctors and
individuals to explore not just psychedelic drugs, but a variety
of mind control tactics. And a lot is made about
MK ULTRA in the kind of pop conspiracy world of
the Internet and goes into Project Monarch and mind control

(59:11):
and blah blah blah blah blah. And so I'm listening
to him and I'm like, oh, wait, how's he going
to deal with this? How's this guy going to do it?
Because he's doing pretty pretty good conspiracy stuff, And then
he comes to it and he just goes, you know,
I like all that stuff. Now, that's not it. Basically,
mk ULTRA was just a big failure wherein military intelligence

(59:36):
forces basically subjected people, either knowingly or unknowingly to a
wide variety of horrific situations out of an attempt to
produce something. And he's, you know, open to the possibility
that they may have sort of put the LSD in
the water for the nineteen sixties, so to speak. And

(59:56):
there's good, good reasons to think about that. How you
interpret it is a different question. But one of the
things I was thinking about is I listened to the
show which was about it was about the nineteen sixties.
It was about the development the early you know, proto
internet and the relationship of war to technology and the
post war era, and it gave a you know, it

(01:00:19):
was a grim view because you could kind of see
the way that the whole game since the Adam Baumber,
since World War Two has been this weird cybernetic control
mechanism that's been sort of absorbing and redistributing all of
the social energies that's been that have been produced by
more positive kind of uh, whether they're cultural movements or

(01:00:45):
political movements, and until we wind up in this you know,
increasingly challenging moment we're in. And then I was like, Okay,
what if he's right like basically like not the sort
of hardcore bizarro you know, Zeta reticularly alien kinds of

(01:01:07):
conspiracies or the really simplistic ones about Bill Gates or whatever.
I mean, they're very simplistic, and they're just not very
They're not supportable in most ways. They might be good allegories,
they might be good like myths that tell a truth
about things that the mainstream doesn't acknowledge. That I fully acknowledge.

(01:01:30):
But if it's a more realistic kind of conspiracy that
we're stuck, what's your attitude towards you?

Speaker 4 (01:01:39):
Do?

Speaker 6 (01:01:39):
You think about it all the time? You know? Are
we prisoners, you know, in some kind of thing where
where we're giving lots of little morsels of cheese to
keep us occupied? Can we live like that? And I
think that under the challenges of twenty twenty, obviously more

(01:01:59):
and more people have been looking into that void, right,
I mean, that's it's clearly that some people that there's
more people interested and susceptible to not very high quality
conspiracy theory, let's put it that way. Yeah, And and
you know, and like I'm fine with it. It's like
you guys, aren't you guys, aren't paranoid enough? You don't

(01:02:20):
you believe these other sites? Like what that's it's worse
than you think it is. You really want to go
down that path. It's it's a lot freakier than that.

Speaker 5 (01:02:32):
You don't know that there's this multiplicity of conspiracies and
that conspiracy narratives are probably increasingly used by other conspiracies.

Speaker 6 (01:02:45):
Exactly, you know, And then then you're stuck, And so
then what do you do and then and what do
you do means both how do you think about the world,
how do you think about politics, but also just how
do you get through your day? How do you how
are you with your dog and the people in your neighborhood,
and you know, all of these things can become impacted
by it. And there's so many people now who are

(01:03:06):
just responding to this in just really unfortunate ways. But
we don't have the training, you know. It's almost like
that's like I did a piece on the Burning Shore
on my Substack publication recently that got a lot of
got a lot of response. They did a couple on conspiracy,
and the one I just did was called the Practice

(01:03:28):
of Paranoia, And what I was saying was that, like
if you read sixties material, underground newspapers, the electricool aid
acid test, you know, books by ram Das, they'll they'll
use the word paranoil a lot, and they don't mean
it in a strictly pathological sense. They mean it as
just like part of being an ordinary person in a

(01:03:53):
stressful modern world is to be paranoid sometimes, and it's
sort of like, yeah, yeah, you gotta deal with it,
you gotta take responsibility for it. You got to work
with it. It's just there. And somewhere along the way
we lost that. And so I think that people are
really naive about how the sort of mechanisms of paranoia,

(01:04:14):
regardless of the truth or not truth of the story
that's being told, but the sense of like the sort
of dynamics of it, and if you're not aware of it,
and if you don't own it, even own own the dread,
own the fear, own the confusion, you know, which is
not easy to do. But if you don't start to

(01:04:35):
learn how to do this and then you go and
try to find out what's really happening with COVID, that's
a recipe for disaster, and it's a disaster that is
part of our current moment, and it's something that you know. Again,
though Wilson was in a different era and he's not
a perfect figure by any means, there's something about his

(01:04:59):
a is quality of humor and his willingness to suspend,
even dehark scenarios that are probably true. And it's not
that you suddenly say, oh, that they're not true, it's
that you don't let that thought of its truth completely
dominate you in a way it's like it's a it's

(01:05:22):
a sort of this is what freedom looks like in
a post war, highly technological, highly controlled, but also highly
chaotic world. It doesn't look like freedom like I'm off
on you know, I go out into the wilderness and
I build a cabin and I do everything that I
know how to build everything, and that kind of freedom,

(01:05:42):
you know, some people can still pull it off, but
that's not really where we're at. Our freedom is more
vexed and more in the moment, and in a way,
more about our own mindstreams, not just in a personal way,
but in a kind of cultural sense. Uh. And I
think that he gives really good hints of how to

(01:06:04):
go into those spaces and recognize that there's stuff we
don't understand what's going on, that there are major players
who are playing extremely heavy games taking advantage of our
current chaos and of the virus and all manner of things,
and there's multiple agents and they're they're fighting it out
through us, and we can't we can bet, we don't

(01:06:26):
even we don't have a scorecard. And you don't want
to just put your head in the sand. But you
also there's a certain limit on what you're you can
learn little parts of the story and you can, you know,
if that's what you want to do, and be a
journalist about that and get get the word out. Great.
But that's different than this kind of pop culture entertainment, paranoid,

(01:06:49):
social media driven sticky muck, which is is it's not
even it's like it's like what they had to take,
like everything's not quite as good as it used to be.
Heavy metals not as good as it used to be.
You know whatever, you know, go down, go down the list.
It's not true. Actually, beer is much better than it
used to be. There's there's a number of things that

(01:07:09):
we yeah, we do enjoy in this era. But but
conspiracy theory is not as good as it used to be.
I mean, it was fun in the nineteen nineties. Man or.

Speaker 4 (01:07:19):
It's true. It's true. It's it's it's absolutely true. And
you talk about I mean, I guess we're here. I
guess we're we're talking about this, which is this has
been a theme on this show lately that we have
that we have talked about trying to really get people
to kind of understand what we mean by the by
like old school conspiracy theory as opposed to what's going

(01:07:40):
on now, But we need a new name.

Speaker 6 (01:07:43):
What I mean, it's.

Speaker 4 (01:07:44):
Yeah, I mean, it's like it's it's a totally it's
a totally different thing. It's a totally different concept. But
you talk about this in the section about Robert Anton Wilson,
and I mean this is perfect for what is going
on right now. Is when he comes out of the
Chapel pair list, It's like you have to two choices.
You can either become completely paranoid or you can approach

(01:08:07):
everything as a radical agnostic. And more and more I
see myself as the latter.

Speaker 6 (01:08:14):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I'm I'm I'm in the same boat,
and and and for me being my version of it,
which you know a lot of people in these waters, uh,
you know probably are ultimately a little bored by. Is
is that? Uh you know, I have I still have

(01:08:35):
a lot of respect for journalism or critical thinking, or
academic history or you know, scientific discussion. You know, like
I'm I'm not like willing to kind of totally pull
the rug out from under all of these mechanisms. I mean,

(01:08:55):
on some level, I think you have to do that.
But then once you're once you're blasted open, you go Okay, well,
what what can we kind of sort of work with here?

Speaker 5 (01:09:05):
Yeah, And so.

Speaker 6 (01:09:06):
It's not agnosticism where you where you say, the guy
on the corner who's talking about the aliens and the
fifth dimension is has the same weight as the whatever
PhD neuroscientists to talk. He tells you something about how

(01:09:27):
you know whatever goes on, And it's not like that
guy's got it either, but there's it's like it's a
it's a variable field. Yeah. Uh, that's that's sort of
the way the way I kind of moved through it.

Speaker 4 (01:09:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:09:41):
I mean, the thing that I wanted to highlight is
that I kind of believe that you've got to know
the rules before you can break them. And the same
thing goes with like, so many people are getting into
this alternative information environment who don't even I know, the
official narratives yet to even question them in the first place.

(01:10:06):
So it's like they're only being exposed to the alternative information.
And that's really weird.

Speaker 6 (01:10:15):
No, it is, and it's it's also for me, it's
also a little sometimes it's a little sad or poignant.
And what I mean by that, why I use that
emotional language, is that for a lot of people who
are again like getting into this low grade conspiracy theory

(01:10:37):
that is taking advantage of the way that they don't
know the rules in the first place. Is that a
lot of what makes it appealing is not just like
as a lot of critics say, oh, it's it simplifies
the complexity of reality, which I think is true. I
think that the scariest thing is that reality is out
of control and nobody's in charge, and that's terrifying. And

(01:10:59):
so it's or to believe in malevolent forces. But it's
also that there's there's in that in the in those narratives,
there's still room for a kind of collective sense of
hope that the rest of us have a hard time
focusing exactly. I mean maybe certain ways personally or in

(01:11:22):
our lives or whatever. But they want to believe these
alternative narrows because then they're part of a movement of
a group that's bosing. And then you're you have not
just that you have importance, but that you're actually on
the right side. You are a good person, and you're
working for the good by by forwarding that email or

(01:11:43):
whatever it is. And so that's where it just gets
kind of sad because it's not like I went, oh,
come on, come over here, where it's we're more cynical
and confused. You know, it's not a very pretty environment.
And yet I'm I'm you know, I believe not that
we can ever nailed down truth with the capital T,
but the work of truth in the old school Enlightenment sense,

(01:12:07):
or in the journalistic sense, in the sense that we
try to explain and understand history and understand how physics works,
and understand how social institutions work, and understand how politics
and political economy work. And we really try to do it,
and it's confusing, and we know we're not getting the
whole story, and it's just a mess, and it probably

(01:12:27):
will always be that way, but you just keep working on.
To me, that's being good. But there's this other kind
of good that's much more appealing, and you see, and
I think that's part of what makes it so sticky,
what what makes it spread, is not just that it's

(01:12:48):
taking advantage of people not knowing what's going on, or
you know, freaking them out or terrifying them. It's almost,
in some ways the opposite. It gives them a way
to feel good about who they are.

Speaker 5 (01:13:01):
Yeah. We We have a friend Aaron Gulias who's written
a few books and as a producer of the Saucer
Life podcast, and he recently gave a talk about these
conspiracy narratives with positive outcomes and so, and they almost
kind of have this like millennial feeling to us.

Speaker 6 (01:13:20):
They do. No, I think that's more of it than
we I think, depending on where we are trying to understand,
let's just talk about Q just because it's sort of
the easiest way of focusing it. I think that if
you're if you're coming from the from journalism, you know,
kind of liberals or whatever, that kind of world, or
or even if you're coming from a kind of conspiracy

(01:13:42):
theory underground, like like me, it took me a while
to see that not just among certain believers, but actually
in the material itself that is the creative to whatever's
coming out. There are millennialist cult ideas that are more

(01:14:05):
electric than I kind of first thought. Like I first thought, Oh,
it's just about the deep state and fighting back against
the evil, and they give they make Trump be the
savior and blah blah blah, and it's like, no, it's
deeper than that. It's deeper than that. And there's something
about like a kind of it's like people are so
sick of the incredibly compromised quote unquote deal that we

(01:14:30):
get from modernity, like, come along with us by our game.
We'll give you drugs that will extend your life, will
we'll give you good media along with whatever. And there's
this like almost like a physical revulsion and so a
desire to say, no, I'm reject all that. But there's
this other thing that's gonna happen. There's this change that's coming.

(01:14:53):
There's a transformation of the body or a transformation of
the earth, And I'm like, oh wow, this is like really,
it's really potent. It's really like a real religion in
that sense to some degree, or at least for some people.

Speaker 5 (01:15:08):
Well that's something you've really been highlighting, is the increasing
like spiritual dimension to all to conspiracy theory. And it's
it's almost, you know, it's resembling these weirder elements of gnosticism.
And you talk about how collectively as a society, you know,

(01:15:29):
being a lot more glued to these devices and the
media and getting all these people getting exposed to these
narratives that society as a whole is kind of going
through the chapel perilous that Wilson talks about, but we
don't have a way to navigate it. But I just
I really see things like that as just becoming increasingly

(01:15:51):
more spiritual. And you know, now the demonization of you know,
people's political parties that they don't like, it's not just
you know, uh, the usual. It's like, no, they they're
in contact with the demonic forces.

Speaker 6 (01:16:10):
Yeah, no, it's true. It's it's true on both sides.
It really is. It's that you know, I mean the
phrase in religious history to describe it as is manicheism,
where you draw a strict, strict line between two forces
and one's good and one's bad. And it's a weird
thing because it didn't you know, obviously it didn't always exist.

(01:16:31):
You know. It's like, there's ways to think about the
world where it's a plurality and you know, and the
strength of democracy and it's also its vulnerability. But I
still don't see a better game in town. Uh is
you know, it's a it's it's a messy pluralism. But
for that to work, there have to be certain, you know,

(01:16:53):
a certain willingness to tolerate ambiguity or confusion or not
knowing people are coming from or difference, and that that
the space of that kind of way of being, at
least in the media, is disappearing. I mean sometimes I
feel like we're being hoodwinked. I mean, of course we're

(01:17:16):
being hoodwinked in any ways, but in the sense that
that maybe people like just everyday people everybody, not just
the ones who do this or the ones who you
know light fires are the one who you know buy
eighteen forty sevens or whatever.

Speaker 8 (01:17:35):
But like that that that we're not quite as split
as we think that if we're actually physically sharing, if
I show up in the town, maybe I can.

Speaker 6 (01:17:46):
Have a reasonable conversation with the guy in the diner.
But increasingly it looks like that's just not you know,
it's less and less likely. It's true on some level
that deep down we probably have a more or like
ingrained sense that well, we all get through it. You
you believe what you believe, We're going to struggle, you know, struggle,
but you know, I see where you're coming from. Like,

(01:18:07):
on some basic level that were like that, But the
media environment has so transformed consciousness and identity and information
and world building, and that I think that part of
what we're seeing is that and then that being weaponized

(01:18:28):
by the more nefarious forces that gain from social dysfunction
and political dysfunction. And that's where you get into the
archan stuff.

Speaker 5 (01:18:38):
Well, and the great, uh, great irony of a lot
of this is that Wilson and the other Discordians might
have kind of created a blueprint that is being used
now to engage in this this kind of information war.
So they're the Discordians had all this, all these things

(01:18:59):
going on, like what they called Operation mind Fuck, where
they're inserting things into the media, trying to create myths,
and uh, you know, now it seems like that is
something like that is in full swing, but it's in
a lot less coming from a lot darker place obviously.

Speaker 6 (01:19:19):
Yeah, No, it's it's totally true. I mean, and I
think that that's true not just about Wilson and the
Discordian thing, but about the counterculture in general. I mean,
who is the counterculture right now? Who's enjoying being countercultural
right now? It's it's much more on the right, Yeah,
you don't have you don't have enjoyment on the on

(01:19:43):
the left, you have whatever you want to call it,
like a call for justice. I'll put it that way,
and I mean it. I mean that in both a
positive and then increasingly a somewhat restricted sense because of
the way in which those calls have become uh dominant

(01:20:03):
over a certain tone that doesn't have a lot of
room for anything like a Discordian sense of play or
paradox or confusion or uh humor. And so it's it's
a it's a longer swing than even just these particular
tactics of of media mind fuckery. It's it really has

(01:20:27):
to do with the whole kind of countercultural spirit. And
you know, it's that and and for me, that's that
is somewhat dispiriting because I really in a way identify
with that current and there's not a lot of room
for it anywhere, uh now. And and and you know,
in a way, it's kind of like that sort of chaos.

(01:20:48):
It's a lot like democracy in the following sense. One
of the interesting things about democracy, and you can this
is really clear when you talk to like scholars of democracy,
of his historians A darnc It's like, Okay, democracy can
only work if everybody playing the game accepts a number
of tacit principles that are not explicitly articulated in the

(01:21:14):
rules of the democratic game. There's all of these sort
of unspoken but just sort of rules of decorum, you know,
kind of like the rule of the concession speech. You know,
just think about just think about al Gore. Al Gore,
no way that he and the American people, including myself

(01:21:37):
got shafted. I mean, that was it. Historians in the
future will not you know that whatever he got shafted,
and there he is, nonetheless making that speech. Why does
he do that? Is that in the rules of democracy. No,

(01:21:58):
that's in the tacit value that surround those rules and
that allow it to continue. But what we have seen
under Trump is the incressive, impressively quick dismantling and you know,
monkey wrenching and violent destruction of that rule set that

(01:22:23):
are not that rule set of those values that surround
the rules. And so that's why we're like, what where
are we what are we doing? And the chaos tactics
of the Discordians is very similar in the sense that
the actual techniques of spreading chaos, of inventing fictions of

(01:22:44):
mind fuckery are you know, clearly pretty drastic, they can
go south. But if they're embedded in a set of
values that are life affirming, erotic, humorous, uh, loving of
people of different celebratory, that doesn't mean they're not going
to have their enemies. I'm not I'm not painting a

(01:23:04):
rosy view. I'm not saying it's all like, you know,
unicorns and rainbows. But overall, those values have an effect
on the way in which those those tools and tactics
get played out. And now you know, at least in
some domains, the value set is really dark. It's really

(01:23:28):
it's really discord for discord sake. And you see that
on the left too, though, I mean there's there's a
discord for discord sake on the left too, And yeah,
that's that's it's it's a it's a different world, and
yet there's weird resonances, you know, And that's that's kind
of what what my book ended up coming out of.

Speaker 5 (01:23:50):
You referred to world building, and that makes me think
about science fiction, which plays a big role in all
three of these guys, and then earlier fantasy, and of
course Lovecraft and a science writer. He had a and

(01:24:12):
he also had contact with the other contact with in
the seventies and kind of found and craft, kind of
craft his own kind of version of version of gnosticism.

Speaker 9 (01:24:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:24:24):
Yeah, I mean he's another you know, amazing figure who
had these kind of extraordinary experiences. I mean he's different
in the sense that he's less less Promethean uh than
the other guys I wrote it write about. He's not
trying to like tear down the walls of heaven. He's
he's really more of like a traditional religious seeker in
some ways. But he's also probably more well, to put

(01:24:48):
a simple term on it, uh nutty than the other guys.
And I mean that in the sense that he was
non neurotypical from from from his youth, so he was
never uh quite uh you know he was he was
always doing his own thing and suffering his own sufferings,

(01:25:09):
which were considerable throughout his life just on the mental
level alone. So he had yeah, he had a real
rough ride. But then you know what an imagination extraordinary
stuff and uh yeah. So his his line into those
kinds of visionary experiences is is somewhat different than these
other guys. But there is that connection about science fiction

(01:25:31):
where you're trying to imagine technology, imagine uh, shifts in reality,
but ones that aren't just completely supernatural.

Speaker 8 (01:25:42):
Uh.

Speaker 6 (01:25:42):
You know, a certain a certain way of of of
world building, you know that. I mean, that's one thing
that defines both fantasy and and science fiction of course,
is world building. You gotta you get to construct with
your imagination this kind of alternative world to share some
of our rules and doesn't have as other ones that
we don't have. And there's something about religion there, I mean,

(01:26:06):
religion is kind of like that in some ways. So
Dick is a fascinating figure because he is religious in
that way and in a way that neither the McKennis
nor Wilson were at all. I mean they were not
religious people in that way, but Dick was, and both
in the sense that he would describe himself as a

(01:26:28):
Christian or an Episcopalian and insist on it, but also
that his world building had more of a cosmological implication
to it. He was doing metaphysics when he was building
his world, and he also had this extraordinary experience around
the same time as Robert Anton. Wilson occasionally even had

(01:26:51):
some similar imagery three ied beings from serious and stuff
like that, like things that make you kind of go,
what's going on here? There's some meta myth that's lurking
behind all of these guys, and what is that meta myth?
Is it a construct itself? Is it another one of
these things like you mentioned, where the you know, conspiracy
narratives start to get used by people to do other things.

(01:27:12):
Is there are like a cosmic conspiracy narrative in the
early seventies that in California that all these guys got
woven into. Well, there are certainly people who will tell
you that, and they'll point you toward things that make
you ponder, for sure. But you know, at the same time,
you have someone like Dick where I mean, he's clearly

(01:27:32):
undergoing extraordinary experiences, many many extraordinary experiences, and I can't
believe they're all just sort of you know, as he's
sometimes suspected beamed at him through from some kind of
weird satellite or something. And yeah, so in a way
he's sort of the Hey kind of balances out the
other stories, partly because he has that kind of religious

(01:27:55):
drive in a way and definitely more more of a
Christian sensibility to him. But still, you know, a total weirdo.

Speaker 4 (01:28:05):
Eric, I did have a question for you just to
ask about just kind of one of the things that
I've heard you talk about on other shows, and that
something that Sphiel and I have talked about kind of
more privately. It's kind of like the the kind of
just where we're at right now, the social media and
all this and kind of the wanted to hit on

(01:28:27):
the kind of the lack of consensus reality.

Speaker 6 (01:28:33):
Yeah, I mean, I don't you know, in a way
I would just kind of invoke what we had described
earlier in terms of tactics of survival. I don't know,
you know, I don't know what to do about that.
I mean, I'm just gonna admit I don't have any
I don't have any clue. You know. I've read people

(01:28:55):
try to say, oh, well, if people should do this,
and you're like, yeah, but that's not going to happen,
or that's what this situation is almost designed to not
let let happen. And you know, it's interesting. I was wondering, like,
what does it feel like in you know, they're everywhere
around the world there's trouble. You know, in the UK

(01:29:18):
they have Brexit, which is a similar kind of polarization,
but you know, in Scotland you know, maybe less so.
So you know, I think sometimes it's important to remember
that the way we're experiencing it in the United States
is not the way it's happening everywhere. That we have

(01:29:40):
a particular quality of polarization that's embedded in our political
system and that has been weaponized by people on both sides,
amplified by the media, and now we've created this structure.
And that's what I think of when you talk about

(01:30:01):
the lack of consensus. We don't we can't even get
to the drawing board on some basic democratic norms, and
I don't know where that's gonna go. I mean, it
just might be this, but maybe more intense or less
intense for a while, you know. Overall, Ultimately, I don't

(01:30:21):
think the Republicans can hold that kind of power over decades,
but it might take a while, you know. I guess
It's a little different than the kind of more general
question about how do we surf a universe a cosmos
where there's so many different ways to get your reality

(01:30:42):
fed back to you. There's so many different reality tunnels
and whole huge, robust platforms that will sustain and attract
you to their particular formulation that kind of worldview in
a way almost requires a kind of psychedelic response of

(01:31:03):
I'm in a world I can't understand. I'm going to
try to keep it together with by paying attention, having
good humor, being in touch with the forces of love,
with the the energies of the earth, you know. But
in terms of some kind of mechanism or a solution
or I you know, right right now, it's I think

(01:31:26):
it's more important to sit with the to get used
to the profound discomfort that that creates. And maybe as
we start to recognize the new rules of the world
or the new norms of the world we're in, that
opportunities and shifts will happen, because things always happen in

(01:31:50):
history that nobody can predict. I don't think it's under
someone's it's it's not all being written by one hand.
And so sometimes you just have to bide your time.

Speaker 4 (01:32:02):
I tell you, Eric, this has been this has been
an awesome discussion. I've really been glad to have uh,
to have spoken to you about all this tonight. A
lot of this that you have talked about is really
echoes a lot of the things that we have talked
about and think so great.

Speaker 6 (01:32:20):
Well, I'm glad. I'm glad it was fun for you.
It was fun for me.

Speaker 4 (01:32:24):
Uh, where can people find the books?

Speaker 1 (01:32:27):
You know?

Speaker 6 (01:32:27):
Whatever? Books are so uh, they're they're not particularly obscure.
I think they're mostly I think almost everything is in print.
My I have a website called Technosis, which is the
name of my first book, T E. C. H. G
N O S I S dot com, and I have
tons of material and they're too much material. It's hard
to you know, find what you're looking for. But lots

(01:32:48):
of my writing is there, and information on all the books,
and as well as almost a decade worth of my
podcast Expanding Mine, where I talk about these kinds of
things in hour long episodes, and so there's tons of
interesting people that I've interviewed and you can access a
lot of that stuff there. So yeah, more more, too much.

Speaker 5 (01:33:11):
Awesome. Well, thanks a lot for coming on, Eric, and
this should be out in about two weeks. We'll let
you know.

Speaker 6 (01:33:18):
Great, Well, it was great talking to you, guys. You
have a good evening.

Speaker 4 (01:33:21):
We're going to close this section out and we'll be
back on Conspira Normal. All right, welcome back to Conspira Normal, guys.
That was say, I thought really excellent discussion with Eric

(01:33:45):
Davis on this book High Weirdness and other subjects as well.
Any impressions about that surfio.

Speaker 5 (01:33:54):
Well, it was just really that, you know, those three
people that High Weirdness is ast around, are so influential,
and particularly Robert Anton Wilson was really influential to me.
So it was cool to take a real deep dive
on it in the book and all of his influences,
and like he was saying, this isn't just like another

(01:34:16):
hero worship book about these countercultural figures. It's really in
depth and puts their material in different perspectives and really
goes through all their influences, how they ended up being
they were, and some of their strangest experiences in the

(01:34:38):
background of the nineteen seventies and these three people you
can continue to see just ripples throughout the decades, you know,
where they just continue to influence so much and created
such a template in so many different areas. It's pretty fascinating.

Speaker 4 (01:34:58):
Yeah, Yeah, it's an interesting it's a it's a very
very interesting book covers these three guys from quite a
few different angles and really digs deep into some of
the philosophy behind it as well, So, uh, definitely check
it out.

Speaker 5 (01:35:14):
I really wanted to talk with him about the in
his ideas of COVID being this weird mass initiation into
high strange type of phenomenon, and uh that that stuff
that he's been talking about since all this began has

(01:35:35):
been really fascinating.

Speaker 4 (01:35:37):
Yeah, because the I I guess the idea is is
that people are people are more stuck at home, and
they got they had more time to kind of dig
into all this kind of conspiracy stuff and and so
that it becomes like you said, it was more like
an initiation.

Speaker 5 (01:35:56):
In a way, and like all of society is in
perilous you know.

Speaker 4 (01:36:01):
Yeah, yeah, essentially, that's that's very, very very true.

Speaker 5 (01:36:06):
Well, I just think that Robert Anton Wilson has the
closest thing to prescription or an answer to this crazy
information environment. You know, those ideas of maybe logic and
radical agnosticism, I think are much healthier alternative than the

(01:36:30):
way that so many people are getting are clinging obsessively
to their own narratives.

Speaker 4 (01:36:40):
Yeah, we're definitely seeing that in the conspiracy culture right now,
for sure. I Mean, it's it can tend to get
a little bit out of control, so much so that
it's kind of has become kind of a detriment in
a lot of ways, especially now with what we're dealing with.

(01:37:01):
All right, So that's it, guys for this episode. I
want to thank Eric Davis for coming on and we
we'll be back next week with Believe Lard Scranton is
going to be our guest, first time I've had him
on since I think twenty fifteen, So make sure you

(01:37:23):
guys tune in for that, just real quick. Patreon, we
are still on there, and Sophia can tell you how
to access that.

Speaker 5 (01:37:33):
You can go to Patreon dot com, slash.

Speaker 4 (01:37:35):
Conspira normal yes, yes, and I think we may have
we may have some shirts coming as well, so that
might be a good thing if you are a Patreon
Those are going to be exclusive. So all the rest
good stuff, guys. Conspirator Moal podcasts on YouTube. Give us
a subscribe there that always helps. Excellent five star reviews

(01:37:59):
on i Tunes help as well, and you guys know
all the usual stuff that podcasters always say. So we'll
think without further ado, we're gonna call it all right, guys,
tune in next week on.

Speaker 9 (01:38:39):
If you would like to help the show, Please consider
becoming a Patreon at www dot patreon dot com, slash
conspaira normal or leave a one time donation at conspaenormal
dot com, and please check out our YouTube channel, can
spare a normal podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:39:08):
Hi everybody, it's me Cinderella Acts. You are listening to
the Fringe Radio Network. I know I was gonna tell them, Hey,
do you have the app?

Speaker 3 (01:39:20):
It's the best way to listen to.

Speaker 2 (01:39:22):
The Fringe Radio Network. It's safe and you don't have
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you or trace you, and it sounds beautiful.

Speaker 3 (01:39:32):
I know I was gonna tell him, how.

Speaker 2 (01:39:34):
Do you get the app?

Speaker 3 (01:39:36):
Just go to fringeradionetwork dot com right at the top
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Speaker 2 (01:39:42):
I know, slippers, we gotta keep cleaning these chimneys.

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Fringe Flashback! Erik Davis (High Weirdness and the Conspiracy Chapel Perilous) - Conspirinormal

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Fringe Flashback! Erik Davis (High Weirdness and the Conspiracy Chapel Perilous) - Conspirinormal