True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 367: High Weirding (Part 1)
Aired: 2024-04-04
Duration: 01:10:38


=== Putting My Own Funk On It (03:24) ===

[00:00:00]  It had to be you.
[00:00:04]  Wait, are you getting this?
[00:00:09]  Oh, wait, you really don't know the words.
[00:00:10]  I don't know the word.
[00:00:11]  I just know that it had to be you.
[00:00:17]  I'm putting my own little funk on it right there.
[00:00:20]  A little spin.
[00:00:21]  I love the new microphone setup that we have right here.
[00:00:25]  Yeah, you're stanced up.
[00:00:26]  I am stanced up.
[00:00:27]  People can't see this right now.
[00:00:28]  We might have to start doing video podcasts.
[00:00:31]  Absolutely not.
[00:00:31]  No one needs to see it.
[00:00:32]  oh my god wait did i tell you about okay so you know when i worked in the clothing industry so my co-worker my buddy was telling me that he was at a trade show and he saw this like he was like going through whatever and there was like this new style of pants called stance and And I'm not kidding.
[00:00:57]  And you're going to love it.
[00:00:58]  You're going to fucking love this.
[00:00:59]  Tell me about the band.
[00:01:00]  And the idea was that the pant legs were uneven because one was longer than the other because stance is made for the way you lean.
[00:01:12]  Wow.
[00:01:13]  Because I do that.
[00:01:13]  So if you lean, you'd have an even pant hem.
[00:01:17]  Wait, I don't understand because my pants are, I'm wearing pants.
[00:01:19]  Do you really understand the mechanics of it?
[00:01:21]  Because basically.
[00:01:21]  You feel like your pants go up when you lean.
[00:01:23]  Well, sometimes you see those people with like the big ass, like one shoe's big because one leg's all kind of fucked up.
[00:01:29]  So maybe it's because of that.
[00:01:30]  It's like a contraposto.
[00:01:32]  Contraposto, yeah.
[00:01:34]  Which is a very, never mind.
[00:01:36]  I don't even want to tell people what that is.
[00:01:37]  I'm going to gatekeep that one.
[00:01:38]  I took my shirt off on the plane down here and both these people saw it.
[00:01:46]  Could you please give a charan?
[00:01:50]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:01:54]  Could you please give a charay?
[00:01:58]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:02:00]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:02:03]  It never cash.
[00:02:08]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:02:12]  It never cash.
[00:02:14]  Jeffrey.
[00:02:15]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:02:20]  That was really freaky when you started unbuttoning your shirt.
[00:02:23]  I did it.
[00:02:23]  I got it.
[00:02:25]  On my plane?
[00:02:26]  I took my entire shirt off.
[00:02:27]  Have you ever been with or been with people?
[00:02:31]  By the way, nothing underneath.
[00:02:32]  Have you ever sat next to people who take their shoes off during the flight?
[00:02:37]  Yeah, it's crazy.
[00:02:39]  It's crazy.
[00:02:39]  It's crazy.
[00:02:41]  And it's also, you know what I, it's crazy, but it's also carte blanche.
[00:02:45]  What?
[00:02:46]  They're giving me carte blanche.
[00:02:48]  To do what?
[00:02:49]  Whatever I, that's carte blanche, dude.
[00:02:51]  I can do whatever I want.
[00:02:52]  But do you stomp on them, Toast?
[00:02:54]  No, I don't do anything.
[00:02:56]  You know me.
[00:02:57]  I hold back.
[00:02:58]  But if you put the piggies out there, it can turn into a sucker.
[00:03:02]  Well, most people, thankfully, are sucked up, but I will say I've seen piggies out.
[00:03:09]  Oh, I've seen piggies out.
[00:03:10]  Piggies out, planes up.
[00:03:12]  And it's like, what are you fucking doing?
[00:03:14]  Listeners, raised in a barn.
[00:03:16]  If you are on a motherfucking barn people and you see bare feet wriggling around next to you, what you do is, oh, I dropped my phone.

=== California Crossroads (06:21) ===

[00:03:24]  Get down there.
[00:03:27]  Nibble.
[00:03:29]  That's disgusting.
[00:03:29]  Like a mouse.
[00:03:30]  Our poor listeners probably think this is another airplane episode.
[00:03:33]  We're a stupid, just goofy little funky episode.
[00:03:36]  But the reason we're talking about airplanes is because we've recently ridden in several airplanes.
[00:03:41]  Really quickly, my name is Liz.
[00:03:43]  My name is Brace, and we are, of course, here with Mr. Sunshine himself, producer Young Chomsky, and the podcast is called...
[00:03:51]  True Anon.
[00:03:52]  Hello. Hello.
[00:03:53]  I can't believe I can fucking pace while we do this.
[00:03:56]  You guys don't understand.
[00:03:57]  This is so sick.
[00:03:58]  I can't wait to get back to your straitjacket chair.
[00:04:02]  I am strapping using this mic when we get back.
[00:04:05]  Strap him up.
[00:04:07]  Tie him down.
[00:04:09]  This is so free.
[00:04:11]  Oh, my God.
[00:04:12]  That's not.
[00:04:14]  That's exactly what twerking does.
[00:04:15]  And I think you should show everyone you meet your fantastic ability to twerk.
[00:04:20]  I don't dance for females.
[00:04:21]  Except for you.
[00:04:22]  But we are on the road and we've been on the road.
[00:04:25]  Yeah, we're in California.
[00:04:28]  And it is actually, no cap, a beautiful dance.
[00:04:31]  It is gorgeous.
[00:04:32]  Actually, the weather, well, we had a little sunshine.
[00:04:35]  It's been a little lousy since we've been here most of the time.
[00:04:38]  But we have returned to the West Coast and spent a little time in San Francisco.
[00:04:43]  Right now, we are at the tail end of our time in LA.
[00:04:48]  And we decided to come out here to do a series of interviews, some which we've been talking about doing for a while, that are sort of thematically connected in maybe not some obvious ways and maybe not some not so obvious ways.
[00:05:04]  But I think that Liz and I, speaking for myself, but also speaking for you, are fascinated with both the idea, the reality, and the unspeakable horrific potential of California.
[00:05:19]  Yeah, I mean, you know, we talk about California a lot.
[00:05:23]  As everyone listening to the show knows, one, we started the podcast in California.
[00:05:26]  Hello.
[00:05:27]  But also, Brace and I are native Californians, grew up in the Bay Area, myself in San Francisco, belly of the beast.
[00:05:36]  And I remember like years and years ago, I don't know if we mentioned this on the game series.
[00:05:43]  I don't think so.
[00:05:44]  But years and years ago, you told me like, I want to solve California.
[00:05:48]  And I was like, damn, that's such a thing, Brace would say.
[00:05:51]  But also, you know, maybe we're on to something that there is a problem here to be solved.
[00:05:58]  Yeah, there's something about this place that is is both um, I don't know, it feels I I think in this interview coming up I mentioned it as a I shouldn't keep saying this but as a kind of proving ground.
[00:06:12]  Yeah, because it feels like all of these things that we see out in the world this in culture, in technology, in weaponry, in business in, in you know, various organs of the state, all get kind of tinkered with and idiated, like in this place.
[00:06:32]  And there's something about this place that feeds all of those industries.
[00:06:36]  Right, it feels like a kind of I don't want to say birthplace, but there's something.
[00:06:41]  There's something about California and specifically there's something about the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
[00:06:47]  Well, if you think of like a lot of states, most states have, like you know, one or two things that they're sort of like you know Texas, for instance, it's like the cowboy kind of thing, but like really it's like oil and gas right, and of course Joe Rogan's comedy mothership, but like you know dc, you have the government and then like the fence industry and like these things that are very like, clearly linked together.
[00:07:06]  But in California you have these things that are like, at first glance, I would say, maybe not so linked.
[00:07:12]  You know, you have you have northern California and like the the, the Wilderness, the Untamed Wilderness, and like the Russian River and all this uh, this sort of yeah weed, growing areas, and then you have like essentially, and you have San Francisco, in the Bay area, which is now, you know, this hub of technology, then you have La, which is all the, you know, the industries like the, the movie industry, and all this entertainment stuff music, and then you also have all these defense contractors down here and you have, you know, you have a lot of stuff that that went into the Atom Bomb, power plants,
[00:07:42]  power plants exactly and disasters, natural disasters yeah yeah, and I for some reason, like it's, California to me is always, I mean, it occupies, and people have written about this a bunch which I never really get tired of reading about it.
[00:07:54]  But California is kind of like where we had to stop at some point, and I think we talk about this in the upcoming interview I don't know if it's in this episode, the next one um, and we, you know, we had to stop expanding and then we sort of expanded inwards and there is like a great uh for me.
[00:08:11]  I have a huge fascination with California uh, and I think throughout these episodes, So we're kind of trying to understand some of that and figure out some of that and like, put some some paint on the invisible man here.
[00:08:28]  Yeah.
[00:08:28]  And I imagine this not as like a closed, but this is like an ongoing project.
[00:08:34]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:08:35]  You know, I mean, in some ways, the Cinnanon project was like part of this.
[00:08:39]  You know what I mean?
[00:08:40]  Yeah, definitely.
[00:08:41]  And that it was so much about your life in California, but also obviously Cinnanon and Charles Diedrich and the, you know, all of the different sort of intersecting movements that kind of gave rise to his fucking, I don't know, monomaniacal empire.
[00:08:58]  Yeah.
[00:08:59]  That then became a billion-dollar industry, much like so many, so many incredible cult leaders in California of all stripes.
[00:09:08]  But also, we have to think, guys, everyone can't stop talking about it.
[00:09:13]  The name on everybody's lips, soon to be Commandante, Premier, Gavin Newsome.
[00:09:19]  True.
[00:09:19]  You know him.
[00:09:20]  You love him.
[00:09:22]  We've known this man for our entire lives, and soon everyone is going to be a California convert if things go according to the plan that has been laid out to me as of many years ago.
[00:09:34]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:34]  Liz has been an integral part of Gavin Newsom's rise.
[00:09:37]  But I mean, I think a part of it is a little just like self-searching too.
[00:09:41]  Like, California is what made me.
[00:09:43]  I mean, California is what made you too.

=== California's Psychedelic Writer (09:35) ===

[00:09:46]  And I didn't, it's, you know, for good and for bad.
[00:09:49]  I'm just like fascinated by kind of what went into that because it is a state is unlike, I've been to most fucking states.
[00:09:56]  It is unlike any of them.
[00:09:58]  Yeah, it's a place that, yeah, definitely at least of any of its exports, of which there are many, we can definitely count on vibes as one of them.
[00:10:07]  Yeah.
[00:10:07]  One of the major ones.
[00:10:09]  So our first interview in this sort of loose series we got going on here is with Eric Davis.
[00:10:15]  Yeah.
[00:10:16]  Who has, I think, probably most famous for having written a book called High Weirdness, which we have both read.
[00:10:23]  Fantastic book.
[00:10:24]  Also one of the editors, I guess you could say, on Philip K. Dick's exegesis, which if you have read that, you will understand is a rather challenging book.
[00:10:35]  Yeah.
[00:10:35]  Also, you might be a little crazy in a cool way.
[00:10:37]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:38]  And we figured it would make the most sense to talk to him first.
[00:10:42]  And really, I think it sort of sets the tone for all of this because a lot of what he deals with is this sort of difficult to define weirdness that really, really had a special moment in California throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
[00:10:59]  His book specifically focuses on a certain sort of general time period throughout the 1970s.
[00:11:05]  But I think runs as a through line throughout this series.
[00:11:08]  Yeah.
[00:11:08]  And I got to say, just real quick, one of the coolest houses, I think.
[00:11:12]  Fantastic house.
[00:11:13]  Any of us have ever seen.
[00:11:14]  Yeah.
[00:11:15]  Yeah.
[00:11:17]  So I guess without further ado, that was a weird thing to say, but you know what?
[00:11:22]  Let's keep it in.
[00:11:23]  Here's Eric Davis.
[00:11:37]  Grace, will you tell your asset story?
[00:11:39]  Well, I've done acid.
[00:11:40]  The first time I ever did acid, I was in Ojai, California, which I think is fitting, visiting some friends, including, for music fans, the famous The Worm.
[00:11:52]  And I was given acid by these two kids that I kind of knew behind high school.
[00:11:56]  I was like 17.
[00:11:58]  And I took it, and the entire night we were searching for this guy named the Yeti.
[00:12:02]  And I'd never taken anything like acid before.
[00:12:04]  And we were walking through just like the hill.
[00:12:06]  Have you been?
[00:12:07]  You've been there, I'm sure.
[00:12:09]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:10]  And I was sweating, and I thought I had shit myself because my groin had never sweated so much.
[00:12:17]  And so I was constantly checking into my pants.
[00:12:20]  It's a great motion you're making.
[00:12:21]  Well, I have to show you.
[00:12:23]  And eventually we go like all throughout the little weird town of Ojai.
[00:12:31]  And there's like horses and weird vineyards and shit like that.
[00:12:34]  And then we eventually find the Yeti and no one can remember why we're looking for him.
[00:12:38]  And I come down immediately after that and have the worst night of my life.
[00:12:43]  But the last time I took acid was about 12 years ago with a bunch of Australian guys.
[00:12:51]  And in the course of our journey, we made it to what we called the Acid Museum, which I actually found out from your book is called the Museum of Illegal Images.
[00:13:00]  Institute.
[00:13:01]  Institute of Illegal Images.
[00:13:02]  You got to have an Institute.
[00:13:03]  Got to have an Institute.
[00:13:04]  And met Mark, in fact, what I didn't even know at the time, but a legend of the blotter art world, Mark McLeod.
[00:13:12]  And so when we got your book, it took me on a motherfucking trip because that was a, we walked all across the city.
[00:13:20]  We went to the Max and Rock and Roll.
[00:13:21]  We got kicked out for putting on some records maybe we shouldn't have put on, which I don't want to say now because people will get mad at me.
[00:13:27]  But that trip was the best trip of my entire life.
[00:13:32]  Absolutely.
[00:13:33]  And the last time I ever took acid, which I think is fitting.
[00:13:35]  And now, full circle, we are in one of the most hippie houses.
[00:13:39]  And I don't mean any disrespect by that, but no, there's some amazing artifacts.
[00:13:43]  An artifact-laden house in an undisclosed location near Hay Street with Eric Davis.
[00:13:49]  And we're talking about, in fact, his new book, Blotter, The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, heavily featuring Mark McLeod.
[00:13:57]  Mr. Mark McLeod.
[00:13:58]  Yeah, no, I love your acid tales.
[00:14:00]  First, I just got a, they really resonate with me growing up in Southern California.
[00:14:05]  Like for me, the ideal acid trip really still, and I mean, it's not, is A fruitless and funny quest that takes you through the landscape of wherever you are in some kind of spirit of adventure and failure and goofiness and with your friends.
[00:14:23]  That's kind of the, for me, like that's the, it's not really, you know, oh, I encountered this and I melt down the fabric of space-time.
[00:14:31]  You go, yeah, that happens at moments along your silly quest.
[00:14:36]  But the structure of the silly quest is a really wonderful, wonderful one.
[00:14:41]  Yeah, I mean, oftentimes this needs to feature a guy named Yeti.
[00:14:44]  Yeah, and the worm and the worm.
[00:14:47]  Yeah, but most of the time, like all the times I took acid, we were usually just trying to get a 12-pack of beer.
[00:14:52]  And like we'd have these sort of great and then immediately forgotten revelations on that journey.
[00:14:58]  But I mean, to me, ACID was just always a way to have fun with your friends.
[00:15:01]  Yeah.
[00:15:02]  No, no, I love that.
[00:15:03]  And I think Mark McLeod would agree.
[00:15:05]  I mean, Mark's a great character because I've known him for quite a long time, you know, a couple decades from just being around the sort of San Francisco scene and going to like psychedelic Illuminati events and conferences and, you know, stuff like that, mutual friends.
[00:15:21]  And he's been out about his museum since the 90s.
[00:15:26]  There have been articles about him and profiles.
[00:15:28]  If you go search online, you know, you find like dozen profiles from different local papers and SF Weekly pieces.
[00:15:35]  Yeah, and all this stuff.
[00:15:35]  And yet nobody was ever like, Mark, let's do a book.
[00:15:39]  Like it's, it was super like low-hanging fruit here, you know?
[00:15:43]  So you got to think about me, Mr. Psychedelic Writer.
[00:15:46]  I've been kind of writing about this and a lot of other stuff, but I've been part of that.
[00:15:50]  It's been part of my milieu since, you know, around 2000 in terms of like public stuff.
[00:15:56]  I mean, I've been, you know, interested in the scene my whole life since I was a teenager.
[00:16:01]  But, you know, like, I kind of came out.
[00:16:03]  I'm going to start giving talks.
[00:16:04]  I'm going to start writing about it.
[00:16:06]  Like at a time when nobody cared.
[00:16:08]  Nobody was interested.
[00:16:09]  Nobody thought it was cool.
[00:16:10]  It was hard to get pieces published.
[00:16:12]  I tried to write things for wired.
[00:16:13]  They say, fuck you.
[00:16:14]  I tried to write right over here.
[00:16:16]  No, no, we're not interested.
[00:16:17]  You're not going to write a book.
[00:16:18]  Whatever.
[00:16:18]  It was just not cool.
[00:16:20]  It was this weird little underground.
[00:16:22]  And now, of course, it's like the floodgates are open.
[00:16:25]  You know, everybody has their opinion.
[00:16:28]  Over and over again, I hear stories from people who are in the world who have been there for a long time of the same story, which is like they're like, let's say they're therapists.
[00:16:37]  And then they talk to some new, some guy they just met who's like, I just did ketamine for the second time.
[00:16:43]  I see the power and now I'm a psychedelic thought leader.
[00:16:47]  And then they go out there and all of us are sitting there going like, you got a lot of work to do, man.
[00:16:53]  I mean, there's a lot of ins and outs and some of them aren't so pleasant on this path.
[00:16:57]  And you got to kind of know that before you're like talking to other people.
[00:17:02]  And anyway, so now there's just all this stuff and there's so much, so many books and, you know, and a lot of people have been working on the history for a long time.
[00:17:11]  And so there's a lot of psychedelic literature out there.
[00:17:14]  And I was like, oh my God, nobody has done the blotter book.
[00:17:18]  And I know Mark McLeod and he'll just like open the gates.
[00:17:22]  And I'm like, ding, like, it was just so obvious.
[00:17:27]  And so much fun.
[00:17:28]  And it became like my pandemic project because we got this going just before pandemic.
[00:17:34]  And then it was like, okay, I'm going to spend, I spent a lot of the pandemic sitting on Mark McLeod's couch waiting for the smoke to disperse.
[00:17:42]  Yes.
[00:17:43]  He was like in the pod.
[00:17:44]  Yeah.
[00:17:45]  A dubious member of the pod.
[00:17:49]  Like, well, how are you doing, Mark?
[00:17:51]  Well, yeah, people come by, you know.
[00:17:53]  Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah.
[00:17:55]  Because he's got a lot of people coming through saying hi.
[00:17:58]  But just sitting there and, you know, hearing his stories and hearing him again and again and kind of crystallizing the main story and going through books and going through things.
[00:18:07]  And, you know, it was a really, it was a great experience.
[00:18:09]  But in a way, it was also very easy for me because it's like, if you were like, oh, let's design somebody who could write like a great book about LSD blotter.
[00:18:20]  They would like me.
[00:18:22]  They'd be like me.
[00:18:23]  They would like, you know, underground subculture history, media art and some technology, you know, knowledge, California background.
[00:18:32]  It all comes together.
[00:18:33]  You know, it all kind of, it's like, oh yeah, it's just sort of like, it's like a natural for me.
[00:18:36]  So I didn't really feel like it was sort of my project.
[00:18:40]  It wasn't like, ah, Eric Davis has come up with a new brilliant project.
[00:18:44]  It was more like I was the right guy to like manifest this thing that had to happen just through Mark's collection, through the story, through LSD.
[00:18:54]  So it was kind of like a, like just a long love letter to the scene and to the acid underground and the culture of it.
[00:19:02]  And just as a way to like, hey, I can articulate all this stuff and put some pieces together and mix it up with all these wonderful images, most of which were already had high-res scans.
[00:19:13]  So I didn't even have to do that much work to get the pieces together.
[00:19:16]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:19:17]  I mean, a lot of work went into it nonetheless.

=== LSD's Dominant Distribution Medium (03:53) ===

[00:19:21]  But in any case, it was a very satisfying project to do.
[00:19:24]  Well, let's talk about the blotter, like the actual, because for all our squares listening at home who don't understand.
[00:19:31]  There's thousands of police detective listeners who don't understand.
[00:19:35]  Like the blotter is one of the things that, I mean, among many other things, but it is one of the things that sort of crystallizes all of those unique properties of LSD, right?
[00:19:44]  All these things that make acid a very unique drug and a unique experience are kind of expressed through this thing called the blotter.
[00:19:53]  Sure, sure.
[00:19:54]  Well, I mean, it's, it's, so there's an interest, there's, there's some unique challenges to LSD.
[00:20:00]  I mean, not unique because there's other drugs that are like this, but it's very, very potent on a very, very small level.
[00:20:06]  Yes.
[00:20:07]  So that means it's very rare that people get high on LSD by just taking the crystal of the actual substance because it's so powerful, it's very easy to overdose.
[00:20:18]  Sure, you'll go crazy.
[00:20:19]  You'll kill it.
[00:20:20]  You kind of have to put it in something.
[00:20:22]  So like you put it and mix it in water.
[00:20:24]  And then once it's in water, you can put it in a dropper and put it on sugar cubes or put it on Pez or put it on bits of string or leather.
[00:20:33]  They put it on everything in the 60s because it was a good way to hide it.
[00:20:37]  Yeah, it's anything.
[00:20:39]  Anything.
[00:20:40]  Could you like put a bracelet on it?
[00:20:41]  No, you can't.
[00:20:42]  I imagine like a fringe leather jacket.
[00:20:44]  Exactly.
[00:20:45]  Like no one's going to get you.
[00:20:47]  Just go and drip.
[00:20:48]  Nibble on the edge here.
[00:20:50]  You're good to go.
[00:20:50]  You're good to go.
[00:20:51]  So at some point, people were like, oh, wait, we can just put this on paper.
[00:20:56]  Yes.
[00:20:56]  And originally, people actually did put it on blotting paper, which is very highly absorbent.
[00:21:01]  Soon they realized that that was actually not necessary and in some ways actually kind of annoying.
[00:21:06]  So they used other kinds of paper and really thin cardboard to actually hold the material, but it just kept being called blotter because it's a good name.
[00:21:16]  And the thing about blotter is that you can't put most drugs on it.
[00:21:20]  Like if you put MDMA on a blotter, it would be like two inches square because you need so much material.
[00:21:26]  But because acid is so powerful, so small, you can just put a little bit on there.
[00:21:31]  So that way you can have a tiny little square of paper that sufficiently deals a really significant dose.
[00:21:38]  So people started to trade and use that as a medium around the very end of the 60s, early 1970s, when acid was usually in tablets or in little gelatins.
[00:21:52]  But it didn't really start taking off as and people started putting images on them in maybe the early mid-70s.
[00:21:59]  It's a little hard to tell to use it as a print medium.
[00:22:03]  And that's what becomes.
[00:22:04]  becomes so bizarre is it's like wow actually it's kind of like an underground newspaper that you nibble you know it's like becomes a print surface for the underground to print images about all these different things that it thinks are cool or just cool designs or whatever yeah you know and we can talk about like what those mean but just one one thing that's i think real interesting in terms Of the larger kind of cultural arcs that we were talking about,
[00:22:28]  one of my favorite discoveries in doing this research is like it doesn't really take off until the late 1970s when it becomes starts becoming the dominant distribution medium.
[00:22:38]  The tablets go down, the gelatins are rare, the you know, people still use liquid, but very rarely sugar cubes.
[00:22:44]  It's like blotter.
[00:22:45]  And in the 80s, it's like the fluorescence of blotter, all sorts of designs, different crews, you know, cartoons, illustrated art, things made out of rice paper and folded into origami, like artsy stuff, like bespoke acid and stuff.
[00:23:02]  But it's the 80s.
[00:23:03]  And so here's the interesting thing to think about with blotter: is that like psychedelic culture as a popular idea goes from the 60s to the mid-70s.

=== Blotter's Fluorescent Rise (06:19) ===

[00:23:15]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:23:15]  The 80s is not a psychedelic decade.
[00:23:18]  It's the cocaine decade.
[00:23:19]  We're learning about crack.
[00:23:21]  Exactly.
[00:23:21]  But the thing is, is that acid doesn't disappear.
[00:23:25]  It just goes really underground into all these subcultures, industrial subcultures, churches sub-genius, some punk scenes.
[00:23:33]  As I've been saying, yeah, still some punk scenes.
[00:23:35]  There's some pagans.
[00:23:35]  There's all sorts of magic users.
[00:23:38]  But so blotter is the image of acid when acid actually goes underground.
[00:23:44]  Interesting.
[00:23:44]  I mean, like from the cultural imagination, other than dead shows.
[00:23:48]  Right.
[00:23:48]  Oh, yeah, because that was still, that was the key.
[00:23:50]  Oh, yeah.
[00:23:50]  Well, that was key because the dead weren't just keeping the flag or, you know, the spirit alive.
[00:23:56]  Patronage Network, basically.
[00:23:58]  Exactly, that a lot of both low-level and high-level acid business occurred in the sort of force field of the Grateful Dead.
[00:24:08]  So as people, as the band toured, any place they were in, there was this whole carnival and a big, you know, parking lot scene and crazy people in hotel rooms.
[00:24:19]  And that was an ideal situation for like higher level, like big amounts of material to pass and for sheets to get laid out, as well as like low-level dealing.
[00:24:29]  So the dead were like absolutely intrinsic to the LSD business.
[00:24:35]  Well, yeah, I mean, you can kind of think of like these traveling dead and then I guess later traveling fish shows as like these kind of carnivals with a sometimes high level and always low level criminal element attached.
[00:24:46]  And the law enforcement, both inside and outside, that comes with that.
[00:24:53]  I mean, it's really like the dead subculture is not one that I have a lot of first-hand experience with.
[00:24:59]  Me neither.
[00:25:00]  Other than like paper stickers.
[00:25:03]  Yeah.
[00:25:04]  I've known people who have had a lot of experience with that.
[00:25:06]  But I did want to see the Whippet Mafia annihilate an individual.
[00:25:11]  This is not outside of a dead show, I don't think.
[00:25:13]  I think it was a fish show outside, basically outside of City Hall.
[00:25:16]  Sure.
[00:25:17]  I saw a guy get jumped and whooped worse than I've ever seen anybody witness this happen to in real life by the Whippet mafia.
[00:25:24]  Did he do anything?
[00:25:27]  I asked some shuffling wooks nearby what this poor man had done to receive this group meeting.
[00:25:33]  They said he was selling whippets.
[00:25:35]  Oh, he was selling.
[00:25:36]  Oh, he was selling.
[00:25:37]  He was on the jumping round.
[00:25:39]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:25:40]  Well, there's definitely protections.
[00:25:42]  Every time in recent decades I've seen established Whippet dealing in a post-concert situation, it was always clearly a racket.
[00:25:52]  A racket.
[00:25:52]  Oh, no, they go in and they'll bury tanks in concert grounds weeks before and stuff like that.
[00:25:58]  Because they'll do like $10 a pop.
[00:26:00]  Sometimes I think it's $20 now.
[00:26:02]  It's $20 a pop for one Whippet.
[00:26:04]  I want you to, that's Biden's America, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:26:07]  $20 used to be able to buy you a whole box of Whippets and City Smoke.
[00:26:12]  But it's interesting that I didn't really know that about the 80s, but that makes sense.
[00:26:17]  I mean, because the hippie, the 80s were so much a reaction against like, although also a mirror of sort of the excesses of the 60s and 70s, that like they became everything, everyone tried to be very bourgeois and like together.
[00:26:31]  And like cocaine was the drug.
[00:26:34]  And so you really don't think of acid as having this big cultural impact.
[00:26:38]  But I suppose, especially in art, I think it does because a lot of that 60s style, 70s style, like underground art kind of becomes mainstreamed, especially by the 90s.
[00:26:47]  And also like early cybernetics stuff that was happening in the late 80s, early 90s, like acid is pretty crucial.
[00:26:53]  I mean, not that I have to tell you that, but like ACID is pretty crucial to all of that kind of experimentation.
[00:26:58]  Yeah, I think by the early 90s, it all becomes much more visible, partly with the tech, partly with rave, post-rave, rise of ambient music, chill out music.
[00:27:08]  There's more of visible kind of like hippie memes again, like the scene just locally in San Francisco.
[00:27:14]  You have these like ravers coming out of the UK going, hey, let's go to San Francisco and make a scene happen.
[00:27:19]  But out here, it just gets mixed in with the local psychedelic paganism.
[00:27:23]  So the shows become like outdoor, full moon, you know, all night long, kind of ritualistic, you know, with like incense.
[00:27:33]  And, you know, that just all of that kind of hippie mysteriosa kind of gets kicked in again.
[00:27:38]  But in the 80s, it's goes, it really kind of goes underground.
[00:27:40]  And some of it goes into like edge culture, like stuff that's more like gnarly, like books and sort of conspiracy theory and, you know, people who are into Manson.
[00:27:53]  You know, just like there's sort of a way where like the psychedelics are kind of like, it's like the dark, fragmentary, fucked up side of psychedelia becomes kind of valuable as part of a way of creating a scene that's just rejecting everything else.
[00:28:08]  Yeah, I guess in the 80s is also when a lot of people sort of like embraced this oftentimes over-the-top evil.
[00:28:15]  But like, you know, there was a whole satanic panic thing.
[00:28:17]  But then there was also a lot of people, a lot of people who played into that from the side of the Satanists, you know, like purposely playing this stuff up.
[00:28:26]  And like, and sometimes, some of them being genuinely evil people, but like who it was, it was all sort of draw.
[00:28:33]  That was a big, I don't know what you would call it, wellspring that a lot of people from all sides were drawing on.
[00:28:40]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:40]  No, there was kind of a, you know, there was a not a nihilism in the cultural avant-garde at that point.
[00:28:46]  Yeah.
[00:28:47]  And there's a, there's a kind of approach to, you know, acid can feed that too, like a sort of absurdist, you know, zippy the pinhead, it's all just ridiculous kind of approach to things, which is, you know, kind of kind of awesome.
[00:29:02]  So it's, it's a really fun way to track all these things and then how stuff happens in the 90s.
[00:29:07]  And so you have all these visual images.
[00:29:09]  I mean, they're like rave flyers in a way because they're it's ephemeral art.
[00:29:13]  It's never meant to be kept.
[00:29:16]  And it's just that Mark McLeod started to collect it in the early 80s and other people did too.
[00:29:21]  But he has by far in a way the largest collection.
[00:29:24]  So it's just this sort of, you know, like all ephemera where you can see things about the culture that you can't see and things that are designed to be remembered and to appreciate it.

=== Ephemeral Experiences (15:36) ===

[00:29:34]  It's like things that are designed to be consumed and to disappear have different stories to tell.
[00:29:41]  Absolutely.
[00:29:42]  So it's the funny commodities.
[00:29:46]  Because like that's that's that's the sort of maybe not unique, but as far as I can tell, unique nature of this stuff is that every time I've been given a acid, I've only done acid off of blotters, but every time I've been given an acid blotter, I've taken it.
[00:30:00]  And, you know, it hasn't been something that I, and they all had something on them, but, you know, it dissolves in my mouth, on my tongue.
[00:30:08]  And then I, you know, I ride the fucking glass elevator at that fucking, up and down on Powell Street and listen to King Crimson and one working headphone off my Walkman for hours.
[00:30:21]  But it's a medium that, or it's an art medium that dissolves.
[00:30:26]  It is meant to be like a transitory thing.
[00:30:30]  It's just like, it's like a car or something that you annihilate once you get to your destination.
[00:30:35]  Yeah.
[00:30:35]  Yeah, I know.
[00:30:36]  So it has a real interesting relationship to time.
[00:30:39]  I mean, one way to think about them is they're like, they're kind of like tickets or like promises.
[00:30:45]  And that part of the reason some people think, well, why do you put why?
[00:30:48]  Because the big question is like, why put images on them?
[00:30:51]  It just takes time and money.
[00:30:53]  Like, you don't need them.
[00:30:54]  And plenty of LSD is distributed on blank blotter paper.
[00:31:00]  I got like a lot of the blotter we got in high school was just white.
[00:31:03]  You know, it was just blank.
[00:31:05]  You know, and it's like, so why, why put an image on there?
[00:31:09]  And it's actually a very interesting question because all the answers are kind of like only half true.
[00:31:14]  Like, oh, it's a brand.
[00:31:15]  And you're like, well, it doesn't really work that way.
[00:31:17]  It kind of does, kind of doesn't.
[00:31:18]  Oh, it's to show that it's like a promise.
[00:31:24]  Like, oh, well, this piece of paper actually has an image on it.
[00:31:27]  That must really have acid in it.
[00:31:28]  Or the other one that's blank.
[00:31:30]  Come on, I could just do that.
[00:31:31]  And you're like, yeah, that's true.
[00:31:32]  But it also makes it much more visible to the police.
[00:31:37]  So it's like, if you just have blank pages, it's pretty easy to read that stuff.
[00:31:40]  So it's actually kind of mysterious.
[00:31:43]  And I came to the conclusion that it's, how to say this, superfluous.
[00:31:49]  It doesn't need to be there.
[00:31:51]  It's not economically necessary.
[00:31:54]  So it's almost just like a pure expression.
[00:31:57]  Like, we just think it's cooler, or we like to stand out, or we like to have something funny.
[00:32:04]  And even, you know, from a point of view of sales, like, oh, I've got some, you know, it gets hot.
[00:32:09]  Like, oh, the flying saucers are hot.
[00:32:10]  And then like, I make up my own flying saucers and I have flying saucers.
[00:32:14]  There's definitely lots of economics involved in it for sure.
[00:32:18]  But there's also just something kind of like excessive and sort of ridiculous about it, which to me is really important because the thing about the acid trade also that I learned from doing more of this research is like it's really different than other drug networks.
[00:32:33]  It's pretty relatively isolated, meaning it's pretty much just the acid world.
[00:32:38]  It doesn't like become part of conglomerates that are also selling Coke.
[00:32:43]  Like the cartels.
[00:32:44]  It's not like the cartels.
[00:32:45]  I mean, they've tried a few times to kind of nudge in it.
[00:32:48]  It's just a very hermetic world.
[00:32:50]  And you really need to know your shit to cook.
[00:32:53]  So you actually have these families and more or less the same families have been making more or less of all the acid for a long time.
[00:33:02]  You know, with exceptions, but often people will like go in, make one batch, and then they're done because they don't want to get caught because you can really, you know, you can really fry for cooking.
[00:33:12]  But there's a point made early on in the book that is really important.
[00:33:16]  And I let the DEA make the point because it's like if they say it, it's got to be true.
[00:33:21]  I mean, like, if they like, it's what I think too, but if they, even they agree with it, which is that the trade is not motivated just by economics.
[00:33:31]  Yes, people made fortunes off of it for sure.
[00:33:35]  But the people who keep doing it and the families who keep doing it, they also have some idealism in there.
[00:33:41]  They really do believe in LSD.
[00:33:43]  Maybe 30 years ago, they believed it was going to change the world.
[00:33:47]  And now they're like, I just believe it's a good thing for people to have.
[00:33:50]  But there's a kind of idealism in it that makes it more than just an economic process.
[00:33:57]  Yeah, the quote from the DEA in here describes it almost as like an ideological, which I would say yes, but also very much a semi-religious, mystical thing, because that has always come kind of part and parcel with acid.
[00:34:12]  And that is always what's kind of, I think, makes a lot of people both attracted to and uneasy with LSD and its like prevalence in the 1960s and 70s.
[00:34:23]  Because obviously, if you look back at the history of LSD, the two things that you can kind of get from it is: A, it caused a lot of people to have these very far-out experiences.
[00:34:33]  And then, B, you know, there was the CIA and various other agencies embrace of it as a way to like both torture and whatever, brainwash people.
[00:34:43]  But there's this quality to it that has this, like, like you couldn't do that to somebody with heroin.
[00:34:48]  They did try that at Lexington, where they would, you know, they would either give someone a bunch of heroin or take away heroin for a certain amount of times and sort of do these experiments on them.
[00:34:57]  But you can't do these things in the same way.
[00:34:59]  It doesn't fundamentally change like what you're seeing in reality, where LSD does.
[00:35:04]  And so, LSD and mushrooms and psychedelics in general, but really LSD has this like mystic, weird quality to it that other drugs just simply don't have.
[00:35:15]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:35:16]  I mean, that's that's certainly true.
[00:35:17]  And that's why they got attracted to it as a possible brainwashing or mind control device.
[00:35:23]  Although it's important to always remember that, like, unless you really follow the deep conspiracies, they realize it just what they couldn't, it wasn't very effective.
[00:35:33]  They couldn't control it.
[00:35:34]  Like, they knew it had a lot of power.
[00:35:36]  And then it can potentially do X and potentially do Y, but it was too hard to control, at least at the level that they wanted to use it at.
[00:35:45]  So there's a reason that, at least on the surface, it didn't seem to go and then become like a regular tool of like crowd control.
[00:35:52]  Well, you can annihilate someone's mind with LSD, but it's rather difficult to be like, go open that door in 10 days with LSD.
[00:35:59]  Exactly.
[00:36:00]  And even the annihilation, you got to work pretty hard at.
[00:36:03]  But yeah, it's definitely a different.
[00:36:05]  And that sacred dimension is very interesting to think about.
[00:36:10]  You know, today, you know, by way of contrast, there's some psychedelics that are seen in very sacred ways, such as like ayahuasca, for example, where most people are doing ayahuasca.
[00:36:22]  They're doing it in a semi-religious context.
[00:36:25]  There's a shaman, there's ancient wisdom, there's a lot of language about healing.
[00:36:29]  People take it very seriously.
[00:36:31]  There's not a lot of levity around the process.
[00:36:34]  You know, it's seen as this kind of sacred healing kind of energy.
[00:36:38]  Acid was always much more of a mix of the approaches.
[00:36:42]  And the way that I tend to think about it is that the way in which it's kind of sacred is the way in which it's really the sacred and the profane at the same time.
[00:36:52]  Like it goes back between both the registers.
[00:36:55]  And you really see that with the blotter.
[00:36:57]  Like you look at the blotter art and some of it is sacred.
[00:37:01]  You know, you have gods and Ganesha and Hearts and crosses and doves, and you know, sort of like that kind of light imagery.
[00:37:14]  And then you have Beavis and Butthead, Zippy the motherfucker.
[00:37:18]  Zippy the penhead.
[00:37:19]  The really crass Mickey Mouse.
[00:37:21]  Super cracky.
[00:37:22]  Humor sex's face melting.
[00:37:24]  You know, and like stuff that's very just kind of gnarly and sketchy.
[00:37:27]  This one's just Gorbachev.
[00:37:28]  You know, just the way that like underground comics were like super gnarly.
[00:37:32]  Yeah.
[00:37:32]  You know, and like an underground, like you pick up Zap number three, like, I think it's like 69 or 68 or 69.
[00:37:40]  And there's like a Rick Griffin panel that's based on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.
[00:37:45]  And it's kind of funny.
[00:37:46]  It's still got a cartoony quality, but it's clearly sacred.
[00:37:49]  He's like looking at esoteric literature and drawing these esoteric diagrams of like the structure of the cosmos and da-da-da.
[00:37:57]  And then the next page is like an R-crumb strip with like these two like hairy hippies who abduct a 13-year-old girl on the hate street and like shoot her up with speed.
[00:38:06]  You know, it's like super nasty and gnarly.
[00:38:08]  And you're like, okay, what is this?
[00:38:09]  Like, how do all these things fit together?
[00:38:12]  And so there's kind of this like sacred and profane tension that goes through acid culture that to my mind, that's its own vibe.
[00:38:20]  And people can have these extraordinary experiences that, you know, illuminate them to the deep nature of the cosmos.
[00:38:28]  But there's also kind of a trickster or humorous quality in the picture as well that gives it its particular flavor.
[00:38:36]  I think you and I will almost certainly disagree on this, but I've thought about this for a long time.
[00:38:40]  And maybe, you know, I just didn't, wasn't nuts.
[00:38:43]  I was never much of a psychonaut.
[00:38:45]  I preferred more terrestrial drugs.
[00:38:50]  But I liked ACE.
[00:38:52]  I enjoyed acid quite a bit when I did it.
[00:38:55]  But I've always thought there's only really two revelations that people are getting from ACID.
[00:39:01]  Because I grew up reading all these fucking 60s comics and I was a punk guy or whatever.
[00:39:10]  And then more just general rock and roll.
[00:39:12]  But I knew sort of the legends around ASID and LSD.
[00:39:15]  And I'd read all these people talking about how it opened my mind to these extreme frontiers.
[00:39:20]  Although none of those people seem particularly very wise to me in, you know, like in that comment has been made.
[00:39:26]  Exactly.
[00:39:28]  But all the revelations that I ever had on ACID were: A, I'm but a speck of dust in a crazy big universe.
[00:39:38]  And then B, we're all connected.
[00:39:40]  And to me, it always seemed like ACID would open a door and it gives you the illusion that you can walk through that door and achieve some kind of like, you know, of your Zen or higher state of being, nirvana.
[00:39:56]  But that to me always seemed like the trickster part of ACID when there's actually, I was like, oh, there's actually nothing through that door.
[00:40:02]  I can have this revelation that we're all connected, we're all together.
[00:40:06]  And then when I'm not on acid anymore, okay, I have that revelation.
[00:40:08]  Still got to go to fucking work tomorrow.
[00:40:10]  I'm still going to be an asshole if someone spills a cup of coffee on me on the train.
[00:40:13]  Like, you know, it's, it never, I think like, to me, I never really understood like what was supposed to be like the spiritual, lasting spiritual truth I was supposed to get out of this or what the what the effect of even the minor revelations were supposed to be on me in the long term.
[00:40:31]  Well, I think the effect of the minor revelations are going to depend on the person.
[00:40:35]  Yeah.
[00:40:35]  You know, you can, you can say similar things even about spiritual practice.
[00:40:39]  Like, oh, it looks like it's going to turn you, you know, meditation is going to turn you into some kind, loving, peaceful, wise person.
[00:40:47]  And that doesn't happen a lot of the time.
[00:40:49]  Even the experiences you have, and I can say this as a meditator that are really profound, like there's a difference between having an experience and then how that experience affects you going forward, which kind of means you got to be doing other stuff.
[00:41:02]  And so I think a lot of people who are like interested in the spirituality of this, who like I take seriously, it's because they're also involved in like becoming a better person to your friends and family, meditating, doing your own therapy if you need it, or going to do particular things that are coming up or having a body practice.
[00:41:22]  Like it's part of a, more like a part of a complete balanced breakfast.
[00:41:26]  And the idea that just an experience is going to change you is a very American, idealistic, mostly untrue idea.
[00:41:35]  Like, you know, some people have extraordinary experiences, sometimes on acid, that really does change them.
[00:41:41]  They really see something different or they let something go or they see through the self and the ego in a way that frees them up, even if they still sometimes are an asshole and people spill coffee on them.
[00:41:54]  There's still something that's sort of freed up.
[00:41:56]  But that's rare.
[00:41:57]  It's more the case that people kind of have an experience.
[00:42:00]  And that's part of the profane cycle, is that you can go have an extraordinary sacred experience, but kind of the way you assimilate it and the way it ends up playing out in your life is actually more like a, you know, like a Ferris wheel ride or something like that.
[00:42:15]  Like it's just sort of like a ride that has these things in it.
[00:42:18]  So it's sort of up to you to let that keep going.
[00:42:23]  And that's why there's, you know, there's something kind of superficial about a lot of like psychedelic spiritual culture is it's just kind of a lot of people who are just kind of getting into a certain like vibe.
[00:42:34]  And it doesn't, and then it just becomes like another subcultural stance that's no more or less awake than, you know, a more snarly punk rock style.
[00:42:43]  It's not like one is more like tuned into the nature of reality or something.
[00:42:49]  And so it's kind of hard to tell the difference.
[00:42:52]  I mean, for me, I think another feature is to sort of, that are some more of the difficult experiences that you can see is that like I'm completely manufactured.
[00:43:04]  Like my ego and all of its desires and all of my behaviors are actually right now completely not in my control.
[00:43:10]  And in fact, I almost feel like I'm being puppeted by reality in a way that can be very disconcerting, but can also actually do some real good as you go, like the morning after, you go like, I'm not really quite me in the way that I thought I was.
[00:43:25]  So how do I take responsibility for that?
[00:43:27]  Most people don't want to take responsibility for it.
[00:43:29]  They just want to party more or tell themselves delusions, like, you know, sacred delusions, just to kind of, you know, make things look prettier.
[00:43:39]  But some of us, you know, and whether it takes the form of a commitment to a sacred path or just a commitment to just staying intelligent and awake, paying attention, whatever, I think they're equal.
[00:43:51]  You know, so I think there's something about the most profound aspects of acid are not either sacred, that like in a way you miss something.
[00:44:00]  Keesy said that.
[00:44:01]  He said, he had a great line.
[00:44:03]  It can be worse to take it as a sacrament, which is, I thought, very brilliant.
[00:44:08]  Because the pranksters definitely had a sort of sacred or spiritual approach to acid, but it was dependent on never articulating what it was.
[00:44:18]  Like it was the minute you started going, oh, this is really profound, it was like you get laughed out of the room.
[00:44:24]  But it wasn't just because they wanted to just be clowns.
[00:44:27]  It was that by being clowns, they created the room for the magic to happen, which you almost can't name.
[00:44:34]  So there's also these kind of different dimensions of it.
[00:44:38]  But I tend to think of it as sort of neither in a way, you know.
[00:44:42]  Well, I think that like for people now, I mean, you mentioned ayahuasca.
[00:44:46]  I think the same thing about acid is that what people know about it from mainstream culture or whatever is either some sort of like imaginary Bakostum version from the 60s or whatever it is, or this like gooped up, you know, very like California, wealthy wellness sort of minded culture mixed with Silicon Valley optimization.

=== Quantifying Spirituality? (05:47) ===

[00:45:11]  Yeah, definitely micro dosing, yeah.
[00:45:13]  Yeah, micro dosing or a kind of, or, you know, like an RFK Jr. kind of like, you know, very like entrepreneurial almost, like using it as a tool for.
[00:45:27]  Wellness.
[00:45:28]  Yeah, but almost like excavating the self in order to become more productive, right?
[00:45:35]  And I think that like it's, you know, thinking about, you know, how did we get to that point, basically?
[00:45:42]  Yeah, no, there's a really, I think this might help.
[00:45:45]  For one thing, it's important to remember that with acid, that's an old story.
[00:45:49]  Yeah.
[00:45:50]  So a lot of the research that was happening in the 1950s and the 1960s before it became scheduled was not only looking at its potential healing properties, like particularly treating with alcoholics, which probably has the most robust positive outcomes.
[00:46:05]  There's a lot of criticism of all these studies now in terms of how they were managed.
[00:46:11]  Right.
[00:46:11]  But still, they were seeming to find some really positive things, particularly with alcoholics.
[00:46:17]  So there was already the sense of healing, but also people were looking at cognitive enhancement.
[00:46:21]  They were like, let's get, you know, musicians and architects and physicists to come in and trip and see if they can do something more because it kind of feels like you're sort of smarter in some way.
[00:46:31]  Yes.
[00:46:33]  Whether that's like a total illusion or not, I'm not sure.
[00:46:36]  A lot of people think they're smarter on Adderall too.
[00:46:38]  And I would say a lot of times that's an illusion.
[00:46:40]  Although, well, I know the records show that actually amphetamine, it does enhance cognition.
[00:46:46]  I hate to say productivity, maybe, but a lot of times what comes out is a bunch of fucking gyms.
[00:46:50]  I hate to say that.
[00:46:51]  As somebody who possesses to this day all their notebooks that they wrote in, and they certainly wrote in a lot when they were on amphetamine or methamphetamine for a long time, there are things in there that I'm like, damn, that's crazy that I thought of that.
[00:47:04]  However, not worth the price of it.
[00:47:05]  Not worth the price.
[00:47:06]  Certainly not.
[00:47:07]  Not even so profound as to be worth the price of a mission.
[00:47:12]  Yeah, that's a good one.
[00:47:13]  That's a good one.
[00:47:13]  Anyway, but back to this question of like, how did we get here with the cult of efficiency being bound up with psychedelic wildness?
[00:47:20]  In a way, it seems like the most contradictory thing in the world.
[00:47:23]  So here's a way to think about it.
[00:47:24]  Like what drugs let you do is to sort of change yourself or change yourself in the short term in a way that you might be able to alter it in the future.
[00:47:36]  So you're high, you have an insight, we're all connected.
[00:47:40]  Maybe you see some behavior pattern you have, you feel guilty about it, it becomes a demon, it freaks the shit out of you, whatever.
[00:47:46]  And then in the morning, you're like, oh, what do I do with that?
[00:47:49]  Do I just say, okay, that was fun?
[00:47:51]  I'm like, well, actually, that was that thing that was kind of intense.
[00:47:54]  And maybe the next time it comes up, you're actually able to be different about it because you've, so you start this loop going where you try techniques like meditation or like psychedelics.
[00:48:06]  You see things in new ways and then you try to integrate those as you go forward and maybe slowly learn, slowly shift the self, or sometimes rapidly have a kind of insight or whatever.
[00:48:16]  So that's in a way, in a way, that's what spiritual practice is in an authentic way.
[00:48:21]  It's not like, I'm going to be sacred.
[00:48:24]  I'm going to follow the rules.
[00:48:25]  It's more like I'm going to turn this mucky, fucked up self into something a little bit kinder, a little bit wiser, a little bit more sensitive to the world and the human condition and the cosmos outside of me.
[00:48:39]  And so that becomes this kind of practice.
[00:48:42]  In a way that same model of self, of changing the self over time.
[00:48:47]  That's exactly what all the efficiency people do, or the wellness people.
[00:48:53]  It's just that their pro their, their criteria and their priorities are different.
[00:48:59]  They're not totally different.
[00:49:01]  You're still like i'm going to, you know, add the fit bit, because then I can get information that loops me and helps me learn how my body best responds to da.
[00:49:11]  But as you quantify things, then it be.
[00:49:14]  Once you quantify things, then you can be efficient with them.
[00:49:17]  And so the paradox is that, in a way, the most, most of the most important values you can get out of this kind of spiritual practice or spiritual sort of self-hacking is are not quantifiable.
[00:49:31]  They're qualities emotions, states of mind humor poetry, this kind of stuff.
[00:49:38]  But if you start to quantify and then you think about your psychological issues as problems to be solved rather than as kind of muck you have to sort of work through, or even work with, or trend or live with, or transform or whatever, then it just becomes easier and easier to simply be a cog in this kind of efficiency culture.
[00:50:01]  Yeah, and you know, it's funny like I meet people who are into that stuff and I, I know in like fucking, like three seconds, that they're that, those kind of people.
[00:50:09]  They have a certain kind of shine, there's a bearing, there's a certain kind of like slick, kind of processed, like like a.
[00:50:16]  They're fully optimized, they're like there's a smoothie, like everything's been smoothified and they're like the smoothie's ready to go over time, you know, and you're like wow, this is really.
[00:50:25]  And you know, and for me it's all about these gnarly shadows and like poems and weird confrontations with spirits and like all this stuff that doesn't quantify.
[00:50:37]  Yeah, and yet I understand, now that these compounds have, why they have become part of that circuit.
[00:50:44]  Um, and in the wellness world, it's like, you know, you got to remember they haven't come up with an even passively good uh, you know a shrink drug since the early 80s, which is never very good.

=== Ketamine In Social Circles (15:13) ===

[00:50:58]  No we've, we've done an episode on that too.
[00:51:01]  That stuff is ridiculous, you know, but that's like the best they could get.
[00:51:05]  And so Now finally, there's something new.
[00:51:07]  And if you look, and this is another super key thing.
[00:51:10]  If you look at the history of 20th century psychiatric medicine, you find a pattern.
[00:51:15]  The pattern is that there's a new technique or drug that is discovered.
[00:51:21]  Everybody gets super excited about it.
[00:51:24]  Thank God we finally solved the problem of mental illness.
[00:51:28]  And it looks like the studies show that things are really rocking for a couple years.
[00:51:35]  And whether those studies are just bullshit or whether, as some like historians argue, there's actually kind of like a space that opens up where everybody's like agreeing that these things really work well and it just can't sustain it against the overall tend towards pathology in the human subject.
[00:51:54]  So what am I talking about?
[00:51:55]  I'm talking about like thorazine.
[00:51:57]  I'm talking about electroshock therapy.
[00:52:00]  You know, I'm talking about lobotomy.
[00:52:02]  You can go back to leeches.
[00:52:04]  You know, those work.
[00:52:06]  Those work.
[00:52:08]  They'd be actually leeches.
[00:52:09]  Leeches are coming back.
[00:52:11]  No, leeches are coming back.
[00:52:12]  No, yeah, there will be these sort of like these, we found the cure for why people are to for people's nutsness.
[00:52:18]  Yeah.
[00:52:21]  And some, you know, sometimes electroshock therapy in some certain uses apparently has some efficacy.
[00:52:27]  Oh yeah.
[00:52:27]  And people still they use it.
[00:52:28]  People still get electroshocked.
[00:52:30]  I've known people who've been electroshocked.
[00:52:31]  Me too.
[00:52:33]  But it's like they will be sort of put forth as this cure-all drug.
[00:52:37]  And you see this, especially, I remember I was, I was Jim Morrison style riding down the highway down in sunny LA.
[00:52:46]  Of course, not driving because as listeners will know, but maybe you don't, neither Liz nor I can drive.
[00:52:52]  But the, but the 71 bus takes you anywhere you need to go.
[00:52:57]  I remember I was like, there's, I saw all of these billboards for fucking ketamine.
[00:53:01]  And I was like, ketamine is everywhere.
[00:53:03]  And then I met all these people who were like, I'm in ketamine therapy.
[00:53:06]  I'm doing ketamine therapy.
[00:53:08]  Like Elon Musk.
[00:53:09]  Elon.
[00:53:09]  Well, I think that has maybe gone past the therapeutic.
[00:53:12]  No, I know.
[00:53:12]  It's just funny for him to come out and try to be a proselytizer.
[00:53:16]  Oh my God.
[00:53:18]  It is a great, we are in a fantastic era for lying about how many drugs and why you do them.
[00:53:22]  Yeah.
[00:53:22]  Because now you can see where they're putting it.
[00:53:24]  Especially if you want to get out of like insider trading places or SEC crime.
[00:53:28]  But I was shocked by how prevalent all of a sudden these ketamine clinics had become.
[00:53:34]  Oh my God.
[00:53:35]  And it gave me obviously a very bad feeling.
[00:53:37]  I've only done ketamine once because ketamine was not very popular among the people that I hung out with.
[00:53:43]  In fact, I would say outside of rave culture and that stuff, maybe in Europeans, whatever they're up to, was not very popular in general in the drug scene in America.
[00:53:51]  And now it was everywhere.
[00:53:52]  Not only was it everywhere in terms of clinics and really fly-by-night looking places, all those like chintzy COVID like testing sites became ketamine therapy places overnight, but it was also at, I would see people doing a little key bump and, you know, curious fellow that I am, would go up to him and say, hey, what are you doing?
[00:54:13]  And people weren't doing cocaine at the bar or these parties anymore.
[00:54:16]  People were doing ketamine.
[00:54:18]  And that really took me back.
[00:54:20]  Yeah.
[00:54:20]  No, no, it's, I mean, there's a lot to say about ketamine.
[00:54:23]  Yeah.
[00:54:24]  You know, again, like flashing back to my like early aware participation in kind of, you know, sort of anthropological drug culture, you were, you're right that in the States at least, ketamine was rarely used.
[00:54:38]  It was used by certain kind of psychonauts.
[00:54:40]  A certain kind of person tended to like it, you know, and they're often intelligent, often introverted, sort of into like kind of fantasy worlds or whatever.
[00:54:50]  And in addition to being, you know, so it was an interesting drug as like a cosmic consciousness drug.
[00:54:56]  It's very, can be very powerful as a fun social drug.
[00:55:01]  It can be very entertaining in terms of the way that it sort of warps consensus reality and you can be with your friends and kind of have this amusing sort of like, oh, we're all in the leaky, the leaky boat of reality, you know, sort of stumbling along.
[00:55:14]  So it had some features that people enjoyed, but everybody knew, at least in my world, who were pretty intelligent, they were drug nerds, so they actually did their research, that everybody knew that it was potentially extremely addictive.
[00:55:29]  Yeah.
[00:55:30]  Like, no joke, addictive.
[00:55:31]  I mean, I knew somebody who would shoot up at a party.
[00:55:36]  Yes.
[00:55:37]  He was in the corner.
[00:55:38]  And if you talk to him, his arms or his thigh or whatever, doesn't mean it's intramuscular, you know, whatever.
[00:55:44]  Yeah, I am.
[00:55:44]  So he, and the thing, one of the things about, and I became kind of fascinated with this, it's like, whoa, it's an addictive psychedelic.
[00:55:52]  That's so weird because all the other ones are like, am I going to do that again for a while?
[00:55:56]  And that one of the features that people talk about, this is in a Carl Jensen book, I think he was a psychiatrist who wrote about ketamine in the early 80s and like almost everybody wrote about ketamine, also became quite habituated to it.
[00:56:12]  And he talked about the way that a lot of people would actually, you go back to the same story.
[00:56:18]  So it's like, I go through my hour and I like meet the aliens and they have a plan for me and how I can save the world.
[00:56:24]  And then you go back and it's the same guys.
[00:56:26]  And they're like, yeah, we're going to pick that up, but we left off before.
[00:56:29]  No way.
[00:56:29]  So it becomes like this very enveloping meaning narrative as well as just the kind of physiology, the physiological pleasure of kind of, you know, disassociate, dissociation and settling in the body.
[00:56:42]  But I believe that, you know, eras have drugs and that we should think about that.
[00:56:47]  Like the 60s was LSD, no doubt.
[00:56:49]  Now, people were doing DMT, but it was not the drug of the era.
[00:56:54]  It was more the drug of the 90s.
[00:56:56]  That was a DMT era, at least psychedelic in terms of psychedelics.
[00:57:00]  Cocaine is clearly the 80s era.
[00:57:02]  We are the ketamine era.
[00:57:04]  Yes.
[00:57:05]  And it's not just that it happened to be something that was already scheduled and so, or not scheduled, so that it could be prescribed by doctors and there was already a mechanism and it was already used off-label.
[00:57:18]  And so it was easy for this burgeoning psychedelic therapy industry to use ketamine because it was available.
[00:57:26]  That's part of the reason for sure.
[00:57:28]  And, you know, like you said, it was kind of an obscure, sort of an arcane drug.
[00:57:31]  And then it becomes like center stage.
[00:57:34]  But it's not just that.
[00:57:36]  I believe that it's also on that deeper, every era has their drug thing.
[00:57:40]  It's about dissociation.
[00:57:42]  And that's why those people at those parties are doing that and not cocaine.
[00:57:46]  Like cocaine, for all of its mediocrity, and while I have extraordinary respect for the coca leaf and must always praise the original context of cocaine use or coca use.
[00:57:58]  And while cocaine can be fun and delicious, it's mostly kind of silly and lame and does not serve the ego well.
[00:58:06]  And you take a shit at the bar.
[00:58:07]  You know, it's just, it's just kind of ridiculous.
[00:58:10]  But at least it's sort of pro-social.
[00:58:14]  Not too much.
[00:58:14]  But ketamine is just retreating back in the day.
[00:58:17]  Right.
[00:58:18]  So you have these social environments and then everyone's kind of retreating.
[00:58:22]  And one of the little lights really went off on me when I discovered that, and maybe it's still the case, I assume so, maybe not.
[00:58:30]  But, you know, as of five, eight years ago, ketamine was a huge drug of abuse in China.
[00:58:37]  So you have all these like Chinese work, all these people like, and then that was the one, that's what they wanted.
[00:58:43]  They wanted ketamine.
[00:58:45]  And so there's a checkout quality of ketamine that feels great because it can feel like you're really, oh, I'm relieved of these stresses and I can be with myself.
[00:58:56]  And that can be really powerful.
[00:58:58]  I have no doubt that in the hands of a good therapist, ketamine can be really effective.
[00:59:02]  But that's the thing about the secret, the dirty secret about therapy is it doesn't matter.
[00:59:08]  It could be Lacanian psychoanalysis.
[00:59:11]  It could be CBT.
[00:59:13]  It could be drug-driven sort of, like where you're just trying to find the right kind of mix if the deliverer or talk therapy, if the deliverer is good with a good therapist.
[00:59:27]  It all can be effective for some people.
[00:59:30]  So ketamine, I have no doubt, especially when it's used in conjunction with therapy or at super low doses.
[00:59:37]  So you get a kind of open, what they call psycholytic doses with like a little bit of psychedelic in the bloodstream, and then you can kind of open up and still talk.
[00:59:44]  I'm sure it can be really valuable in a lot of situations.
[00:59:47]  But that's not why we're seeing what we're seeing.
[00:59:51]  Well, that's like, you know, Mark Fisher always had a great point about when Xanax started becoming a club drug.
[00:59:58]  And he was like, why are you going to the club and taking antidepressants?
[01:00:02]  Like, or like, you know, this.
[01:00:04]  Yeah, benzos.
[01:00:05]  Like, what are you taking?
[01:00:06]  Like, one, not pro-social.
[01:00:08]  Like, you literally just like black out completely.
[01:00:11]  And two, like, what is it that you're searching for there?
[01:00:15]  but that you're also going outside.
[01:00:18]  Like you're not just doing it at home by yourself.
[01:00:20]  You're going to the club to be social, to be around people, and then you're choosing to retreat.
[01:00:25]  Yeah.
[01:00:26]  I mean, I think there can be a spot where there is some crossover, like I had mentioned before about ketamine, small amounts, bumps of ketamine in a social situation, particularly one that's kind of complicated, where it can be actually an amusing humorous exercise.
[01:00:43]  No, sure.
[01:00:44]  I'm just saying, like, what's driving people?
[01:00:46]  But most people, there's a desire to check out.
[01:00:49]  It's too much out there, man.
[01:00:51]  It's confusing.
[01:00:51]  There's shows and stuff who are like drooling zombies who are completely checked out.
[01:00:55]  It's like, well, you could be, why are you here?
[01:00:57]  Yeah.
[01:00:58]  I also think that there, I mean, this is going to sound kind of, you know, whatever people get mad at me for this, but I do think that like a lot of the content that we consume from the phones, from our phones, has a dissociative quality to it already.
[01:01:13]  And that we are constantly engaging with a dissociated form of ourself through these kind of internet profiles or whatever we're seeing kind of whatever we're posting that is actually just a projection that we're kind of projecting back to ourselves of ourselves, right?
[01:01:30]  And so we're constantly experiencing a very like fragmented identity that we are very consciously carving or not, you know, all these things.
[01:01:38]  And that there's a kind of drive to then replicate or like re-experience this like fragmented self because when you're not there and you're not on the phone, you actually are kind of not.
[01:01:50]  Do you know what I'm saying?
[01:01:51]  Yeah.
[01:01:51]  That there is like a kind of more and more, the way that we kind of interact socially is becoming more and more dissociated.
[01:02:00]  Yeah, so it's kind of a familiar.
[01:02:02]  Yeah, it's kind of almost a familiar place to go to.
[01:02:05]  Yeah.
[01:02:06]  In that way.
[01:02:06]  Well, I think that what you said, we actually have talked about this before on the show, is that like I think there is a, it's very clear that ketamine is a drug in the moment.
[01:02:14]  I think that has to do with what we're saying right here, right?
[01:02:17]  Like with mirroring so much of the other way that we interact with each other.
[01:02:20]  Cocaine, the drug of the 80s, you know, we had Van Halen, fast cars, you know, like we're going to, we're going to, there's this, it's like a nihilism, but it's a sunny nihilism.
[01:02:30]  It's like, you know, we're rocking through the 80s.
[01:02:34]  Morning in America again, right?
[01:02:35]  It's morning in America, yeah.
[01:02:36]  And then, you know, when I, I'm 34, and so the big drug was OxyContin, right?
[01:02:44]  And then everyone got into heroin, but now that has been replaced almost entirely with fentanyl.
[01:02:50]  Like you can't get heroin in the heroin cities anymore.
[01:02:52]  It's all fentanyl.
[01:02:53]  And then that, of course, it's a lot of it has leaked into the cocaine supply because there'll be basically powder.
[01:03:02]  Everything is.
[01:03:03]  But it's, I think, also has to do with COVID and that period of isolation.
[01:03:10]  And also just the way that during that period, so much of social interaction changed with emergent technologies and the mass adoption of technologies that had maybe been around but had been less prevalent.
[01:03:21]  And I think just like ketamine is now, it makes sense to be the drug that people use.
[01:03:26]  I think maybe ketamine is the drug of the moment, but that fentanyl is coming in.
[01:03:31]  And there's so many things to say about that.
[01:03:33]  I mean, we don't have to talk about too much, but one, obviously, any opiate has some of the same dissociated withdrawal kind of functions.
[01:03:41]  But what's almost just as interesting with fentanyl is not just seeing it as like the latest, greatest, most gnarly opiate, but it's the way that it's functioning almost like a metavirus in the sense that all the previous opiates did not start leaking into the supply of other drugs.
[01:04:03]  So it's almost like you could almost tell like a Lovecraftian story that fentanyl is like this weird alien trying to get into trying to get its tentacles into everything.
[01:04:15]  And so it just sort of naturally spills over its genre as an opiate into cocaine, into ketamine.
[01:04:25]  And then you get these people.
[01:04:26]  So it's like, why is that happening?
[01:04:28]  And there's like a different logic with fentanyl.
[01:04:33]  And it sounds like, and I don't know what I'm talking about.
[01:04:35]  I haven't done the research, but it sounds like kicking it is a different kettle of fish.
[01:04:41]  That's what I understand.
[01:04:42]  I mean, fentanyl was vanishingly rare.
[01:04:44]  I only got it.
[01:04:45]  It was like an Arrowid legendary kind of like you'd hear stories about people dying from trying to smoke the gel from the patches.
[01:04:52]  Well, it's literally a hospice drug.
[01:04:54]  I mean, that's the other thing that's very interesting is that end of life.
[01:04:57]  People alive for the end of life.
[01:04:59]  The only way you could get fentanyl back then was to steal it from your grandma's fucking, who's dying of cancer, her medicine cabinet.
[01:05:06]  I mean, it was that was, it was a rare drug.
[01:05:08]  But the high is much shorter.
[01:05:10]  It's, you know, purely a synthetic opioid.
[01:05:13]  Interesting.
[01:05:15]  It's not like, it's a different high.
[01:05:17]  It doesn't have legs.
[01:05:18]  Yeah.
[01:05:19]  And the dosage is so precise that, I mean, the dosage of heroin can be very precise as well, but you have a little bit more margin of error.
[01:05:27]  Do not take this as medical advice to anyone listening.
[01:05:29]  I'm just saying, from my experience, you had a little bit of margin of error.
[01:05:32]  But with fentanyl, I mean, it is so, once that hit the scene, people I knew that had not been forced to get sober, gotten themselves sober, started to start dying.
[01:05:41]  And people experience junkies started dying.
[01:05:44]  Yeah.
[01:05:45]  I mean, I think your point about it being this kind of like, I mean, Lovecraftian sort of thing coming and like colonizing or eating or, I don't know, like an oil slick kind of just taking over, taking over and then taking on the shape of everything that it devours.
[01:06:01]  Replacing heroin, which is crazy.
[01:06:03]  They replaced heroin.
[01:06:05]  And that ever happened.
[01:06:06]  And crucially being a drug for the management of the end of life.
[01:06:10]  Yes.

=== Fentanyl's Lovecraftian Death Cult (03:14) ===

[01:06:12]  You know, from my understanding, people do not come out and they're like, man, I really want to try fentanyl.
[01:06:16]  It's like, no, they get hooked on fentanyl.
[01:06:19]  They were trying to get something else.
[01:06:21]  You know what I mean?
[01:06:23]  And that's how it gets, like, you're not like, I'm experimenting and I'm trying to, you know, I've never done heroin, so I want to do heroin.
[01:06:28]  I've never done fentanyl and I want to do fentanyl.
[01:06:30]  Like, that is very rare.
[01:06:32]  Yeah, I did that.
[01:06:33]  But now, no way would you.
[01:06:36]  No.
[01:06:36]  No, no, I mean, no, well, the time I got fentanyl, it was like a guy, the guy who was my dealer was like, I have this stuff.
[01:06:42]  He said it was China White.
[01:06:43]  It was not China White.
[01:06:45]  And I did it.
[01:06:46]  I fell asleep in the Sears downtown Oakland bathroom for four hours and I woke up feeling like shit.
[01:06:52]  And so it was like that.
[01:06:53]  And that was enough for me.
[01:06:54]  I was like, oh, this is not actually good.
[01:06:56]  And it is interesting that like the drug du jour that people, you don't even really see people defend it in this.
[01:07:02]  There's no romanticism around this.
[01:07:04]  There's no romanticism.
[01:07:05]  There's no romanticism.
[01:07:06]  There's no poetry.
[01:07:07]  Yeah, there's absolutely there's poetry in heroin, not just in the cultural associations, but in the experience.
[01:07:12]  There's a kind of whatever.
[01:07:14]  There's an evocative, very emotional, you know, very rich space for certain, you know, certain acts.
[01:07:21]  Pleasure spires of Kublai Khan.
[01:07:22]  Yeah.
[01:07:23]  But also a lot of art and music made from, you know what I mean?
[01:07:26]  Like there's not that.
[01:07:28]  Fentanyl is like a death cult.
[01:07:30]  Yeah.
[01:07:30]  Yeah.
[01:07:30]  And it does seem that the, it's actually good to raise that question of the death cult because it does have that quality and it reminds me of a really significant phenomenon that most people aren't kind of paying attention to or clued into on the level of like religion, right?
[01:07:47]  Like so popular religion, what's happening in popular religion in the Americas, let's say, not just the United States.
[01:07:53]  It happens in the United States, but it's more broadly, especially in Mexico, but also throughout the Americas, is the rise of the cult of Santa Muerta, of this goddess of death.
[01:08:04]  And it's a new god, you know, meaning that she didn't exist in 1950.
[01:08:10]  I love that.
[01:08:11]  She's based on images like images of the Grim Reaper and other sort of figures of death, but it's a kind of new god that comes together in a couple of decades at the end of the 20th century and is just huge, huge.
[01:08:26]  And she's huge among criminals like Cartel, big time, like those guys who like murder and torture people.
[01:08:36]  Sometimes you find Santa Muerta as part of the murders and the cops.
[01:08:41]  The cops are into Santa Muerta and all sorts of grandmas all throughout the land.
[01:08:47]  And, you know, it's mostly in Hispanic communities, but not entirely.
[01:08:51]  And it's huge.
[01:08:52]  And so when I saw it, I was like, there's something else going on here.
[01:08:57]  And it's almost like the problem of death and the kind of proximity of it is just closer to us now or something.
[01:09:05]  And it just, it's like, it makes sense as like an organization of our like imagination to like key into it.
[01:09:14]  And maybe that death cult part of the fentanyl thing is part of that.
[01:09:19]  It's like a drug of so much despair, even more, a drug of even more despair than what we had before.
[01:09:25]  Or it becomes more visible.

=== Bye-Bye Truan (01:11) ===

[01:09:26]  Or like you say, there's no poetry in it anymore.
[01:09:29]  It's just like a pure.
[01:09:31]  Like pure death Well, my name is Brace I'm Liz.
[01:09:48]  We're, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:09:50]  And we will see you next time for part two of our interview with Eric Davis.
[01:09:54]  And this has been Truan.
[01:09:57]  Bye-bye.
[01:10:02]  Could you please give us your name?
[01:10:06]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:10:10]  Could you please give us your name?
[01:10:15]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:10:17]  Jeffrey Epic.
[01:10:20]  It never cash.
[01:10:24]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:10:28]  It never cash.
[01:10:31]  Jeffrey Epule.
[01:10:32]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:10:37]  It never cash.