True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 368: High Weirding (Part 2)
Aired: 2024-04-08
Duration: 57:17


=== 23, Loaded with Cash (03:43) ===

[00:00:00]  Picture this, Liz.
[00:00:03]  You're 23 years old.
[00:00:05]  You just graduated from MIT with a BA in CS.
[00:00:11]  Is that real?
[00:00:12]  Computer science?
[00:00:13]  I think you'd have a BS.
[00:00:14]  Yeah.
[00:00:14]  You have a BS in CS.
[00:00:17]  That kind of feels like I'm trying to do like a funky little thing there, but apparently that's what they call it.
[00:00:21]  I love how you're looking at me, but I know this is what they call it.
[00:00:23]  A BS in CS.
[00:00:25]  You graduated fresh.
[00:00:27]  You fly across the country, San Francisco.
[00:00:30]  I got a job interview here.
[00:00:32]  I got a job interview there.
[00:00:34]  I'm going to south of motherfucking market.
[00:00:36]  I'm talking, hello, Mr. Jack Dorsey.
[00:00:40]  Hire me here at Stripe.
[00:00:41]  Hello, Mr. Elon Musk.
[00:00:43]  Perhaps I can work at X, formerly known as Twitter.
[00:00:46]  You get the job.
[00:00:48]  You move to Cerebral Valley, otherwise known as Hayes Valley.
[00:00:53]  Wait, do they call it that?
[00:00:54]  They do be calling it that.
[00:00:55]  Because of AI.
[00:00:56]  They're trying to call it that.
[00:00:57]  Wait, what?
[00:00:58]  I didn't know that.
[00:00:58]  When did this happen?
[00:00:59]  Like last year.
[00:01:00]  Last year.
[00:01:01]  That's so bad.
[00:01:02]  I didn't want to tell you until now.
[00:01:03]  I didn't want to.
[00:01:04]  Wait, that's so good.
[00:01:06]  Did you hear that for me?
[00:01:07]  I just, well, look how you're reacting.
[00:01:09]  I didn't want to, you know, I didn't want to upset your, unbalance your humors.
[00:01:15]  Film Verita.
[00:01:16]  But now you live there.
[00:01:18]  Things are going great.
[00:01:20]  You're getting paid $800,000 a year.
[00:01:22]  You're working on CS style problems at work.
[00:01:27]  AI, the future.
[00:01:30]  I love it here in San Francisco.
[00:01:32]  DoorDash.
[00:01:34]  Uber Eats.
[00:01:35]  Caviar.
[00:01:38]  Uber, the regular.
[00:01:39]  Lyft.
[00:01:40]  These things are amazing.
[00:01:41]  Waymo.
[00:01:42]  Pause.
[00:01:44]  You're taking all these things.
[00:01:45]  You're really enjoying the city.
[00:01:47]  But one day you have to leave your house.
[00:01:50]  Perhaps you forgot some toilet paper and your shit's all fucked up.
[00:01:54]  Not.
[00:01:55]  Well, yeah.
[00:01:56]  Your shit's all fucked up.
[00:01:57]  Like, just your equilibrium.
[00:02:00]  So you got to go to Walgreens.
[00:02:03]  After spending 45 minutes pressing the buttons, they unlock the toilet paper on the toilet paper section.
[00:02:08]  It finally comes and you have, you're, you're going back to your house.
[00:02:13]  Ah, to be 23, loaded with money, my little Visa black card in my pocket.
[00:02:20]  You are descended upon by a ravenous pack of methamphetamine-fueled cannibals who devour you.
[00:02:27]  Stern to aft.
[00:02:30]  Not a bone left.
[00:02:31]  You completely disappear.
[00:02:34]  thus befalling the fate of all who move to San Francisco.
[00:02:39]  Please give us your name, Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:02:51]  Could you please give us your name?
[00:02:55]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:02:57]  Jeffrey Ep.
[00:03:01]  It never cash.
[00:03:05]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:03:09]  It never cash.
[00:03:12]  Jeffrey.
[00:03:13]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:03:17]  Thus befollowing the fate.
[00:03:18]  That doesn't even make sense.
[00:03:20]  Any other word?
[00:03:22]  Hello, my name is, well, my name is Waymo.
[00:03:26]  I am here to pick you up.
[00:03:27]  You know what?
[00:03:28]  I didn't see a single Waymo.
[00:03:29]  You didn't?
[00:03:30]  I did.
[00:03:31]  I saw so many.
[00:03:32]  You did?
[00:03:32]  Yeah.
[00:03:33]  Why didn't you hit the chat?
[00:03:35]  The Waymo chat.
[00:03:37]  The Waymo chat.
[00:03:39]  My old apartment, they used to test them around the block.

=== Driverless Taxi Tests (02:43) ===

[00:03:43]  And so if you'd go out at like 8 p.m., you'd see a lot of them lined up.
[00:03:47]  And this is the driverless, one of the driverless taxi things.
[00:03:52]  I put all of my money in.
[00:03:54]  I hate them.
[00:03:55]  Yeah.
[00:03:55]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:56]  So much.
[00:03:57]  Ungodly.
[00:03:59]  But no, I didn't see one.
[00:04:00]  I kept looking for one.
[00:04:01]  But then I was like, damn, how am I going to know it's one?
[00:04:03]  Because I don't, I'm sure the windows are tinted.
[00:04:06]  Yeah.
[00:04:06]  I got like spinning.
[00:04:07]  They do?
[00:04:08]  Yeah, and they say Waymo on the side.
[00:04:10]  Oh, well, that's helpful.
[00:04:11]  Yeah.
[00:04:11]  They have like little, they have little cameras.
[00:04:13]  Well, now you know I really didn't see one because then I would have seen that.
[00:04:16]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:16]  I saw a bunch.
[00:04:18]  I don't even know how you hail them.
[00:04:20]  I suppose they have an app or something for it, but they give me such bad willies that I prefer not to make eye contact.
[00:04:26]  But I do always flip them off, which I think is because I used to always flip off the Google Map cars that I. You know, the robot can't see it, right?
[00:04:33]  But something feels it.
[00:04:35]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:04:35]  You, you feel it.
[00:04:36]  I feel it, but it feels it on some deep cyber level.
[00:04:40]  Like, it knows that I see it and I hate it.
[00:04:44]  Well, everyone, that's Brace.
[00:04:45]  I'm Liz.
[00:04:47]  This is, of course, Young Chomsky.
[00:04:49]  There we go.
[00:04:50]  And this is Turnon.
[00:04:51]  Hello.
[00:04:52]  Being back in San Francisco was kind of funky, huh?
[00:04:54]  It was nice.
[00:04:55]  I had a really nice time.
[00:04:56]  Me too.
[00:04:57]  It was beautiful weather.
[00:05:00]  It was that one day.
[00:05:02]  But I don't know.
[00:05:03]  The air was clear.
[00:05:04]  It felt fresh.
[00:05:06]  The city was lovely.
[00:05:07]  The city was beautiful.
[00:05:09]  Yeah.
[00:05:09]  I got to say, they've made it sound like a war.
[00:05:13]  I mean, obviously, I know that sounds fake, but like, you know, all these fucking Fox News things, it's like for the past year and a half, like, this is a war zone.
[00:05:21]  There's ravenous crackheads.
[00:05:23]  Well, we weren't in the Tenderline this time.
[00:05:24]  I know, but like, you know, it's not like we weren't far from like, you know, it's the inner city still.
[00:05:31]  And really, it was just, it seemed fine to me.
[00:05:34]  No, we didn't go to the tenderline.
[00:05:35]  I mean, when we were there last time in the general.
[00:05:37]  Yeah, the last time in the tenderloin, it got a little funky.
[00:05:39]  But, but, I don't know.
[00:05:41]  It just, I mean, but the thing is, it's always been the TL.
[00:05:45]  But yeah, it is.
[00:05:47]  I don't know.
[00:05:47]  It was strange to be back, too.
[00:05:49]  Yeah.
[00:05:50]  There's like a weird thing where I walk down the street and like I see people in vests and I get, I don't know, it's like, I think I do have that stupid like you're a fucking NPC thought in my head.
[00:06:02]  I was getting really wistful.
[00:06:03]  And then I was like, damn, maybe I really am a California girl.
[00:06:10]  Which I'm sure our listeners don't like to hear because they're always, I always see little comments, which I don't look at, but sometimes I do.
[00:06:17]  And I see little comments and they're like, oh, you, you coastal elites, you always talking about California.
[00:06:24]  You just say what, and it's like, yeah.

=== Philip's Psychedelic Veer (14:43) ===

[00:06:26]  Yeah.
[00:06:27]  That's where I grew up.
[00:06:28]  What else am I supposed to do?
[00:06:28]  California.
[00:06:29]  What am I supposed to pretend to be from Iowa?
[00:06:31]  Yeah, you want me to pretend, oh man, when I was a teenager in Kansas, I don't have anything to say.
[00:06:36]  I didn't go.
[00:06:36]  I wasn't there.
[00:06:37]  I once played a show in Lawrence, Kansas, and I walked into one room.
[00:06:40]  It was a house show.
[00:06:41]  I walked into one room and there was just a room full of dog shit all over the ground.
[00:06:45]  Why?
[00:06:45]  No disrespect to Lawrence, rest of the town was lovely, but that room was.
[00:06:48]  That doesn't seem like a Lawrence-specific problem.
[00:06:51]  I would count that multiple places.
[00:06:52]  No, just one other place, really.
[00:06:53]  In Lawrence?
[00:06:54]  No, no, no, throughout in the country.
[00:06:56]  But it speaks to the existence of possibly behind any door could just be a room completely covered in some kind of animal shit.
[00:07:06]  But it was nice.
[00:07:06]  The breeze feels nice in California.
[00:07:10]  So we have today, we kind of explained it last time, right?
[00:07:14]  Yeah, we're on a little trip.
[00:07:15]  We have 33 days.
[00:07:16]  Yeah, but with these episodes, we're on a little trip.
[00:07:20]  And this is the second part of our long interview with Eric Davis, who is so lovely and invited us to his home, which again, I'm just going to say, very fucking cool.
[00:07:30]  Great fucking records.
[00:07:31]  Great tea.
[00:07:33]  I had a great cup of tea.
[00:07:34]  Yeah, he had tea.
[00:07:35]  I think he had great fucking rugs, crazy instruments, artifacts.
[00:07:40]  Yeah.
[00:07:40]  It was exactly, I mean, for those of you who aren't familiar with his work, from listening to this interview, his house is exactly like you think it is.
[00:07:48]  It fucking rules.
[00:07:49]  It rules.
[00:07:50]  Stained glass windows, old style San Francisco.
[00:07:53]  Yeah.
[00:07:53]  Beautiful.
[00:07:54]  Yeah, like very, and I mean this not with these, the connotations that you're thinking, not the satanic connotations, but like cool, weird 1920s connotations, which is Alistair Crowley.
[00:08:06]  Like it had that like very like 1920s wood work, like very kind of, you know, very beautiful.
[00:08:14]  Anyway, if you haven't listened to the first part of the interview, what are you doing?
[00:08:18]  Stop this episode.
[00:08:19]  Go back to the previous one.
[00:08:20]  You got to listen to that so that you can listen to this one.
[00:08:22]  But if you have listened to it, lucky day.
[00:08:25]  Here's the second part.
[00:08:40]  I want to change tact slightly.
[00:08:43]  No problem.
[00:08:44]  Slightly, but more of like a veer than like a full tact change.
[00:08:48]  Because I want to talk about something that a drug that we haven't mentioned in detail yet, but also getting us into a slightly different topic, which is speed.
[00:08:57]  Because we talked about the drug of the 60s acid, the drug of the 80s, cocaine, the drug of the 90s, you know, DMT or these sort of rave drugs.
[00:09:04]  You know, I've, oh, God, that documentary of fucking what is that small-town ecstasy I saw as a child, which made me never want to do ecstasy ever.
[00:09:11]  Mine was MTV True Life, where they were like, look at all the holes in this girl's brain.
[00:09:15]  Oh, God.
[00:09:16]  If you've ever seen the, I've said this on the show before, small time ecstasy is the most frightening documentary.
[00:09:21]  Yeah, actually, I think about it, probably MDMA deserves to be the drug of the 90s.
[00:09:25]  I guess I was thinking more in the psychedelic vein about how DMT worked because of Terrence McKenna, but that's more of the esoteric side.
[00:09:31]  And 70s, there's a fine argument to be made for heroin being the drug of the 70s.
[00:09:35]  But really, let's be honest here, speed is the drug of the fucking 1970s.
[00:09:41]  The 50s.
[00:09:41]  Or the 50s.
[00:09:42]  Yeah.
[00:09:42]  Well, you can be a drug of multiple decades.
[00:09:44]  You know what?
[00:09:45]  And in some countries, no kidding at all.
[00:09:47]  Oh, they were.
[00:09:47]  They were speed.
[00:09:49]  And Philip K. Dick, you know, this great speed consumer and speed writer, where some of his greatest books are written on tons of speed who really cranked it for years and years and years and almost certainly screwed up his brain from doing so.
[00:10:05]  He comes out of that 50s ethos of like beat Nick's speed is cool, speed is production.
[00:10:12]  It's kind of got a more working class thing.
[00:10:15]  Yeah, so it's interesting.
[00:10:16]  And very speed also, which is interesting with Philip K. Dick, speed I also heavily associate with the fascists, with the Nazis.
[00:10:24]  You think of them as being these amphetamine and also methadone-fueled fucking like just like completely out-of-the-mind Eastern front psychedelics.
[00:10:32]  Oh, it's us.
[00:10:33]  I mean, Pacific Theater ran on methamphetamine on the Vietnam.
[00:10:38]  I mean, the first like part of that book, Dispatches, which is really one of the only good American books on Vietnam, is the first is one of the best lines about speed ever.
[00:10:50]  I just want to underscore that, that if any of you have never read a great fucked up rock and roll book about Vietnam and want to, Michael Hare's Dispatches is extraordinary.
[00:11:01]  Also, Errol Flynn's son being the disappeared in Cambodia, being one of the one of the sort of like characters flitting around that.
[00:11:08]  It's just, it's an amazing book.
[00:11:10]  But I've read that probably 15 times.
[00:11:14]  But yeah, I mean, Philip K. Dick, that is somebody who I want to talk about.
[00:11:18]  You are a dickhead.
[00:11:21]  A Dickian scholar.
[00:11:24]  That's what they're called.
[00:11:25]  Yeah, it's true.
[00:11:26]  See that?
[00:11:27]  Look, I'm not being.
[00:11:28]  We just accept it.
[00:11:29]  That's just you got to just accept the joke right off the bat.
[00:11:32]  You got to be called.
[00:11:33]  If you try to avoid it, you get it.
[00:11:35]  And if you only know Philip K. Dick from seeing some of the movies that are based on his way, Blade Runner or then you're missing out.
[00:11:42]  You're fucking missing out.
[00:11:43]  I have read almost his entire bibliography and he's an extraordinary writer, a speed writer that was mistaken for a psychedelic writer.
[00:11:54]  Absolutely.
[00:11:55]  But you were one of the people that helped put together the exegesis.
[00:12:01]  Yeah.
[00:12:01]  The how would you, I'm just going to try to describe it.
[00:12:06]  No, no, you'll do that.
[00:12:08]  So Philip Yetig was a very unusual person.
[00:12:11]  And one of the things that makes his work interesting to read is that he's trying to work out very personal problems, both cosmic and psychological and interpersonal, through these wild, absurd science fictions that are also very colorful and enjoyable and bizarre as kind of works of imagination.
[00:12:31]  So they combine both like very real human issues in a kind of dark, existential mid-century way with these like absurd thoughts about technology and the future and aliens and machines and all this kind of stuff.
[00:12:46]  And so it's a pretty good, it's a pretty good mix.
[00:12:49]  But he was not, I would, it's safe to say that he was not neurotypical.
[00:12:55]  No.
[00:12:55]  Like so on.
[00:12:56]  You're very delicate about that.
[00:12:57]  Yeah, and it's, it's, the part of the reason to be delicate is not that he wasn't fucking crazy in a lot of ways.
[00:13:03]  It's just that it's really hard to say, to diagnose him.
[00:13:08]  Yeah.
[00:13:08]  And he tried to diagnose himself the whole time, and he became part of the psychiatric therapy industry in a very prophetic way, like the way that he dealt with drugs and his own diagnoses from the time he was a kid.
[00:13:21]  Very much look forward to our like rampant therapy culture today.
[00:13:26]  So he was a very unusual mind and he had really weird experiences, most of them highly unpleasant.
[00:13:30]  Some of them seem to feature some kind of weird, mystic, otherworldly thing, which combined with his capacity to tell stories, arguably to bullshit, set the stage for these big visions that he had.
[00:13:47]  He had visions in the early 60s and the late 60s, but his biggest vision was in 1974.
[00:13:54]  And he had a series of downloads and dreams and voices in his head and synchronicities and all this kind of stuff, which from one angle looks just psychotic, from another angle looks like religious experience, at least as a 1970s science fiction writer would experience it.
[00:14:11]  And you kind of never can resolve which one it is, or it's probably both.
[00:14:15]  But in any case, he was inspired by this experience to try to figure out what had happened to him.
[00:14:20]  And so he kept this enormous personal diary called The Exegesis, where he would just rant and speculate and get into cosmology and get into super dark conspiracies that are absurd and just stuff that's crazy.
[00:14:39]  Like it's sort of like the ultimate, you know, like that crazy guy on the corner who's got, oh, you want to see my manuscript?
[00:14:45]  I've been writing about the history of the menu.
[00:14:47]  Actually, we're still living in the Roman Empire.
[00:14:49]  It's funny because I kind of collect books like that.
[00:14:53]  Yeah.
[00:14:53]  They're almost like, you know, private press records, how you'll find some record by a fucking nut, oftentimes religious from like the 50s or 60s.
[00:15:01]  It'll be really gold.
[00:15:02]  Those are a little more fun to collect because they're easier to listen to and absorb.
[00:15:06]  But I also sometimes collect, if I ever find a psycho book, I will always buy it.
[00:15:11]  And I have a kind of a mid-sized collection of them now.
[00:15:15]  And they read like the exegesis.
[00:15:18]  Yeah, for sure.
[00:15:19]  Although less from a like, you know, Philip K. Dick had these decades as a professional writer.
[00:15:23]  And, you know, he has a certain amount of genuine genius to him.
[00:15:26]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:15:27]  And so they're imbued with that.
[00:15:29]  But it's so funny that I remember I read the Emmanuel Carrera, how the fuck you pronounce that motherfucker's name.
[00:15:36]  The French guy's biography of Philip K. Dick, Luce biography.
[00:15:39]  Yeah, Luce Biography.
[00:15:42]  But and I was always fascinated by these visions.
[00:15:44]  And I always figured that was like some shit that he kind of put in there.
[00:15:48]  And then as I got older and read more about Dick, I was like, no, Philip K. Dick says he waffles sometimes, but he generally maintains he has these visions.
[00:15:56]  And they kind of cohere into like the exegesis is almost like the summation of all of these things because in Philip K. Dick's books, you can oftentimes see him grappling in his novels with stuff he was interested in in, you know, whether he's reading a lot of Young or like whether he is learning about autism or any of these things.
[00:16:13]  He'll put those into his books.
[00:16:15]  But the exegesis is like the summation of all of those, not only the ideas that he's been reading about, but these like struggles that he's had, these kind of like mental breakdowns or whatever experiences that he's had into this tome.
[00:16:27]  And I mean, I think one of the things he was never really able to, I mean, the Valles trilogy is him trying to put that into books in like a real form.
[00:16:37]  And Valles is, I would say, his most controversial work because people really love it or people fucking hate it.
[00:16:46]  But it's, I mean, how was, I just won't even want to ask, like, how was it sifting through all that shit?
[00:16:52]  Oh, well, I didn't, I, I mean, I sifted, but I didn't sift hard.
[00:16:56]  The Pamela Jackson, who was the main editor, was the one who basically read the whole thing.
[00:17:03]  And the thing is, is that the published exegesis that you see is about limited, right?
[00:17:08]  It's about a tenth of the whole thing.
[00:17:10]  Good.
[00:17:11]  Yeah.
[00:17:11]  No, he was crazy.
[00:17:12]  This book is, you could murder someone with this book.
[00:17:14]  Yeah, so it's a fatty.
[00:17:16]  Yeah, it's a fatty.
[00:17:17]  Maybe a little less than a tenth, but it's just a chunk.
[00:17:20]  And believe me, it's a chunk of a lot of the cream.
[00:17:24]  So if that's already kind of a crazy book, just imagine what the depths of that crap was.
[00:17:31]  And it's crap.
[00:17:33]  It's like hard to read and repetitive and crazy and like conspiratorial in an unfunny way because he clearly had a you know he had a gift for narrative, complex narratives.
[00:17:44]  You know, he, one of the things about Dick's writing, these books that he wrote when he was tripping on speed in the early 60s in particular, they're complex.
[00:17:54]  They have multiple characters.
[00:17:55]  Lots of stuff happens.
[00:17:56]  Everything weaves together in this, or not everything, but a lot of things weave together.
[00:18:00]  I mean, things are dropped out.
[00:18:02]  But he would write those at one fell swoop.
[00:18:05]  Yes.
[00:18:05]  He would write a movie in two days and not edit.
[00:18:08]  Yes.
[00:18:09]  He did not go through and then, oh, this is a draft and I'm going to do another.
[00:18:12]  No, which means that he was keeping all those stories and threads and characters in his head as he was rolling along.
[00:18:18]  So he clearly is good at that.
[00:18:20]  So in the exegesis, you see him like doing that in a completely uninspired, very paranoid, very, very paranoid way.
[00:18:29]  And so there's lots of junk in the whole thing.
[00:18:32]  And what we got is the cream.
[00:18:34]  So Pamela went through it, but I did a number of things where I'd read a whole folder.
[00:18:39]  They were organized in a very disorganized way in these folders.
[00:18:43]  And some of them were really long, some of them were shorter.
[00:18:45]  But there were a few folders where I was tasked with get the jewels out of this thing.
[00:18:51]  And so I would read the whole thing and get inside of the mind frame of it.
[00:18:55]  And it was a strange process because you're kind of like, well, what's to say this is the jewel and not this is the jewel because it's all kind of above a piece.
[00:19:04]  But it was, you know, totally fascinating.
[00:19:06]  I'm really glad that we got it out, got it out there.
[00:19:09]  I think one of the things that people who maybe even haven't read a lot of Dick would think about him is that like he's very famously kind of prophetic in a lot of his books, where it's like, oh, and this is kind of how things actually turned out to be.
[00:19:23]  Whatever, you know, that's the classic case for Blade Runner or whatever you want to say.
[00:19:27]  But you have a great footnote that's always stuck with me in exegesis where you say like one of the things that, you know, I think, and this is true about larger like sci-fi, not even just Dick, is that no one really was able to predict the internet and the way in which we interact with the internet and conduct our lives on the internet.
[00:19:47]  But perhaps the exegesis is in a way where it's this sort of overwhelming, use the word download, but it is.
[00:19:53]  It's like an overwhelming download of data, of information that is like you're in it and it doesn't make sense.
[00:20:01]  You pull out of it and it doesn't make sense.
[00:20:03]  And you're trying to kind of like map your way through it and learn the language that it's using and its own kind of like, I mean, it has its own like dictionary that it needs because it's making reference to his own books.
[00:20:17]  It's rewriting his own books.
[00:20:18]  It's making references to his own life.
[00:20:20]  It's like it's a very loopy, weird text.
[00:20:23]  And it's, You know, there's a kind of, at least for me, like when I was trying to kind of get into it and read it, like there's a weird sort of like chicken or the egg thing happening where you're sort of like, is this so, is he overwhelmed by what he's getting?
[00:20:42]  Or as he's writing it, it's becoming more overwhelming as it's going.
[00:20:46]  Like there's a kind of like the momentum shifts a little bit.
[00:20:52]  And it reminds me, I mean, even, you know, with that footnote and other notes in there, it just, it reminds me so much of the kind of schizophrenic and overwhelmingly psychotic feeling one gets like experienced living on the internet, which we now kind of all do whether we want to or not.

=== Outside the Norm (16:19) ===

[00:21:09]  Yeah.
[00:21:10]  That it does feel prophetic in line with a lot of his other work.
[00:21:14]  Really good point.
[00:21:15]  Yeah, I think, I mean, the way that while Dick was prophetic about certain technologies, it's more that he was prophetic about what it feels like to be alive.
[00:21:26]  The change of subjectivity.
[00:21:27]  Yeah, the way that our subjectivity has shifted and our relationship to things that we don't trust or surveillance or, you know, any number of things, you know, or like there's like in one book, there's these little mechanical insects that are, that are, I think they're collecting on debt or they're advertising, something like that.
[00:21:50]  And they're swarming you and you have to kind of swat them.
[00:21:53]  So it's this funny thing that like is literally not a prophecy, but it completely anticipates the sense that we have as we navigate our like information worlds and we keep getting these distracting like notifications and reminders and ads that are popping up.
[00:22:09]  And it's like, you know, you just want to swat everything down so you can get to the task at hand.
[00:22:14]  Totally.
[00:22:14]  So a lot of information surfing is swatting stuff away.
[00:22:18]  And so it's like actually really a brilliant way of in a way prophesying that.
[00:22:22]  And then the experience of reading the exegesis has this kind of overwhelming quality.
[00:22:28]  But even more specifically is that one of his sort of dominant ideas there is there is this vallus, this vast, active, living intelligence system, which is clearly not a God.
[00:22:42]  It's clearly more like a system or like an information network, except the information is alive.
[00:22:49]  And what is it doing?
[00:22:50]  It's penetrating our world.
[00:22:52]  It's recoding our world as it penetrates it.
[00:22:56]  So it's like, well, that's what we've done.
[00:22:59]  We created an internet that lived inside of the network that we interfaced with desktop computers.
[00:23:05]  And then we invited that into these computers that follow us around the world.
[00:23:10]  And we invited it into all the sensors that are now being, you know, multiplied gazillionfold and penetrating everything.
[00:23:22]  All the technologies, your toaster, your car, the trees that are dying, the animals that are going extinct.
[00:23:31]  There are sensors everywhere that are tied to the internet.
[00:23:34]  So the internet has just kind of spread itself into our reality.
[00:23:40]  Like an eldritch fucking, like a god or a demon.
[00:23:43]  So that's where it's not just that it kind of feels like this sort of downloady cybernetic meta mind that's kind of swallowing everything up, but it almost kind of anticipates that.
[00:23:55]  And Dick's relationship to it is mostly positive because he sees it as a sacred force that's sort of saving us from the inevitable entropy and mess of physical reality.
[00:24:06]  But at the same time, you can see that he's also sometimes just goes, yeah, this is not, this is like freaky.
[00:24:13]  You know, it's taking over.
[00:24:15]  It's like, we're just, you know, puppets in this thing or whatever.
[00:24:18]  So yeah, I think it's a really important key.
[00:24:22]  Well, I mean, that's one thing that I've always, once I read Valice, I was like, oh, this is real.
[00:24:28]  Like, Valice is real.
[00:24:29]  And I think of the internet as like a, as a, a sort of, and I mean more than the internet.
[00:24:36]  I mean like what the cyberspace, whatever.
[00:24:40]  I gotta go back to call what you're describing it right now as this thing that is like this, this reality destroying metastasizing, eldritch kind of schizophrenia, granting god that like only brings.
[00:24:56]  And I was talking with you about this yesterday on the way to the airport, our producer, and I just like, it's this thing that just gives you, makes you crazy and makes people miserable.
[00:25:07]  And if you look at it, it really doesn't improve people's lives in a way that I think is worth the trade-offs even slightly, but it keeps growing and it keeps growing for its own sake.
[00:25:20]  And it keeps growing for, first of all, another god, Mammon, but also, but for this.
[00:25:26]  like technology, for technology's sake.
[00:25:28]  And it's funny because, like you know, it's one of those classic science fiction tropes of, like you know, technological progress, but like progressing towards what?
[00:25:37]  And I, I don't think that there's a, a single sane human being alive right now who could say that we're going towards something good with all this uh, and and I don't think that there's anybody with any real sense, Sense that would say that people are happier than prior to the advent of the internet or the mass adoption rather, of the Internet.
[00:25:53]  But it does seem like Dick Dick did such a good job in some of his books.
[00:25:58]  Like you say, with the, you know, he wasn't exactly predicting real bugs advertising to us.
[00:26:02]  But like, you know, even in the book of the Android stream of electric sheep, which became the movie Blade Runner, but has very little to do plot-wise with it.
[00:26:10]  One of the things that always stuck out for me, and I think he does this in a few of his books, he often repeats, you know, themes are these fake animals that everybody has because climate change has rendered most animals extinct.
[00:26:22]  And there was this competitive, you know, it's like, oh, I have this like this artificial llama at my house.
[00:26:28]  You know, you only have this husky.
[00:26:31]  But it also speaks to the great loneliness.
[00:26:33]  Dick was a fantastic writer of loneliness because he often was very lonely himself.
[00:26:38]  And so many of his books have loneliness running through it as a theme.
[00:26:41]  And I think to me, that is one of the main things that he really brings in the prophetic way of these new, sort of extraordinary, terrifying ways to feel lonely that you would only have in the future.
[00:26:54]  Yeah, yeah, that's very key.
[00:26:56]  I think that one of the things that, you know, it's very clear that there's an whatever, an epidemic of loneliness.
[00:27:03]  Yeah.
[00:27:03]  But I feel like we're not doing a good enough job of like, like, we see loneliness as like a problem that we need to fix, or in the past, it was easier to avoid because of these circumstances.
[00:27:17]  How do we fix it?
[00:27:18]  As opposed to going, which is what I believe, that loneliness is part of at least a modern mind, maybe in, you know, in an ancient context where there's just a small tribe and you grow up and you spend your whole life inside that family framework or whatever.
[00:27:37]  Maybe it doesn't feel that way.
[00:27:39]  I can't speak to that.
[00:27:40]  But in the modern world, loneliness is part of the picture.
[00:27:43]  And we need to embrace it or work with it as such rather than just see it as a problem.
[00:27:51]  Or if it is a problem, it's our problem.
[00:27:54]  And we're going to have to deal with it partly by going through it, not just by papering it over or pretending it's not there or that it shouldn't be there because it is there.
[00:28:04]  And part of it has to do with the nature of consciousness.
[00:28:06]  I think as soon as we start to get into the awareness that reality is kind of constructed, it's constructed by culture.
[00:28:14]  It's constructed in our nervous system, our brains.
[00:28:18]  There's a little bit of like spooky solitude implied in that because it's like, well, what connects everybody?
[00:28:25]  And that was a great theme for Dick is like, what connects what do you call the idios cosmos, the individual's world, and the koinos cosmos or the collective world.
[00:28:35]  And in a lot of ways, that's what we're wrestling with now is we all sense that there's all these forces that are undermining the collective world, whether it's like social media or fake news or soon to come AI or the social media that's standing between us individually.
[00:28:52]  There's this sense of like the fragility of the collective world that would formerly cover over or even make sense of our loneliness.
[00:29:01]  And so the loneliness factor is now super intensified.
[00:29:07]  And yeah, and I think that's part of the reason.
[00:29:09]  And so reading somebody who is also going through it and looking at it can actually be weirdly kind of healing in a way because you're like, okay, yep, like this is what's happening.
[00:29:20]  Let's go into this, even if it can be really, you know, harrowing.
[00:29:26]  That mirrors something that I was thinking about in terms of everything feeling weirder and increasingly weird as the years go on, I'll say, which is that like, you know, you were saying, you were talking about how, you know, our lives are increasingly data-fied or informationalized.
[00:29:46]  Like everything is becoming data points, much like how Dick kind of imagined with Vallis, but that as we kind of organize and or like insist on trying to organize everything more and more methodically and how we're, thanks to great leaps in technology, we're able to do that much quicker and, you know, a much larger scale very rapidly, that when things don't fit those, that organization,
[00:30:15]  when they don't fit the kind of map that we've created and we assume that reality should take, that things then, the things that outside of that map are increasingly weirder.
[00:30:25]  They're even more magnified as being stranger or outside of that organization.
[00:30:30]  And so like things, I'm just thinking of like events or, I don't know, parts of our world that would maybe otherwise be like, you know, just maybe feel a little bit like contingency is starting to feel more and more dangerous, like increasingly more dangerous as we sort of force or try to force our lives to fit into more and more of a like regimented informational system.
[00:30:59]  Does that make any sense?
[00:31:01]  Yeah, I think I see what you're saying, that there's these contingent possibilities and also, you know, cultural experiences that are more weird or outside or beyond.
[00:31:14]  They have more salience now because most of our lives seem to be more organized and controlled.
[00:31:19]  Then I would say two things about that.
[00:31:21]  One is that it also makes them more valuable.
[00:31:24]  Right.
[00:31:24]  Literally, like they have value because they seem to suggest that there's something, a larger context than the one that's just purely circulating in this quantified, controlled way.
[00:31:38]  There's something about them that rejects the ability to.
[00:31:40]  Right, and I think that that's part of the reason that psychedelics are popular now.
[00:31:44]  So, one of the reasons is that people sense, rightly, that there's a value there because they don't quite play the normal game.
[00:31:53]  Even if a lot of the psychedelic industry is trying to quantify and capture that power by turning it into healing and making it a medical thing, part of the deeper sense of people's attraction to it, while they're like just ordinary people who would never associate with the counterculture or with criminality, whatever, are like, I really feel drawn towards ayahuasca or towards ketamine therapy or whatever, is because they sense that there's something there that is more than, let's say,
[00:32:20]  the way that our media consciousness is organized through Netflix and algorithms and narratives.
[00:32:27]  Like all these narratives now are like kind of organized in this way that we can sense.
[00:32:33]  And it is partly done with algorithms or whatever.
[00:32:36]  And in a way, it's like you're not going to get anything that valuable out of Netflix.
[00:32:42]  Doesn't matter how fun, how cool, how relevant, you know, informative, whatever.
[00:32:47]  There's a sense that like the ceiling is low.
[00:32:50]  You got to go outside of that to get something that might actually be different.
[00:32:56]  And so people with their trips, they get to go on their own trip.
[00:33:00]  Like nobody's had this trip before.
[00:33:02]  I'm not just watching a movie.
[00:33:04]  I'm not just believing in a set of religious beliefs.
[00:33:08]  I'm going on my own unique experience.
[00:33:11]  And that uniqueness, as well as the sense that it's speaking for a greater outside, makes it valuable.
[00:33:17]  But at the same time, this world of quantification wants to capture it and absorb it and take away that possibility because psychedelics have the possibility.
[00:33:28]  I'm not saying the likelihood, but I'm saying that they have that possibility of actually changing how we relate to one another, actually changing how social groups come together.
[00:33:37]  I mean, they do have a kind of revolutionary deconstructive potential in them.
[00:33:43]  It's just not usually likely to play out in a modern society that has all these other countervailing forces.
[00:33:50]  And I think we're seeing that right now, that there is genuine novelty in there.
[00:33:56]  Like Elon Musk's brain, when it's on ketamine and has kooky ketamine ideas about the future or technology or AI or what or Mars or whatever, it might not actually work as a conventional concept, but at least it's a space of novelty that's creating new possibilities.
[00:34:17]  And in many ways, we are at this development level, this level of technological development, the sense that there's no one in control, the sense that everybody's no longer constrained by either the ethics or the perceptions that kind of help keep things a little bit at bay in the past.
[00:34:41]  Now it's just a free-for-all.
[00:34:43]  The tech money is going for Mars.
[00:34:46]  And everyone's just racing.
[00:34:48]  They're going for the edge.
[00:34:49]  So it's like, yeah, Nick Land, that becomes center when before it was unassimilable.
[00:34:56]  In the 1990s, that shit was unassimilable by the mainstream.
[00:35:00]  It couldn't read it.
[00:35:01]  You couldn't even explain it.
[00:35:02]  You'd be like, what are you talking about?
[00:35:04]  Well, we can now understand it because the edge is more in the center.
[00:35:09]  And that means on the one hand, that it becomes more banal and weirdness becomes banal.
[00:35:14]  And to me, that's the key polarity with weirdness.
[00:35:17]  Sure.
[00:35:17]  Weirdness and banality.
[00:35:19]  Weirdness and it kind of like loops around.
[00:35:20]  Like the banal gets so banal that it gets weird again.
[00:35:23]  Or weirdness is so like fetishized and absorbed that it gets banal.
[00:35:28]  So with Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, there is like this movement of weird fiction that's kind of edgy and strange.
[00:35:36]  And now it's a genre and you can go and you find the weird fiction collections and you can predict much more of what's happening.
[00:35:43]  And so it actually kind of loses the weird.
[00:35:46]  So you have to go hunting for it elsewhere.
[00:35:48]  And sometimes it's hiding in the banal.
[00:35:50]  Like Lynch is very good at this.
[00:35:53]  Like David Lynch is a master of the weird.
[00:35:56]  I mean, the master of the weird in our contemporary moment.
[00:36:00]  Like so singular, so brilliant.
[00:36:02]  But a lot of it sits right next to the banal, right next to the piece of pie and the coffee.
[00:36:07]  And, you know, it's all.
[00:36:09]  So that is a very interesting kind of zone.
[00:36:12]  And so we're kind of in this race where like weirdness comes in as a sort of salvific thing.
[00:36:17]  It's like something outside of the norm, something that might potentially be new.
[00:36:22]  And yet it gets routinized so well.
[00:36:26]  Almost the way that AI can just crank out weird fucking shit.
[00:36:30]  And you're like, okay, is this weird?
[00:36:33]  Or is it just banal?
[00:36:36]  You know, it's just really good at cranking out weird shit.
[00:36:38]  Or is it both at the same time?
[00:36:40]  Right.
[00:36:41]  And so, I mean, I think a lot of this stuff is, I mean, it's quite, it's quite pressing right now.
[00:36:46]  But I personally, I was like always looking for the weird and hunting for the weird and speaking for the weird back when it was weirder because it was not socially acceptable.
[00:36:55]  And weirdness is also a very much about social position.
[00:37:00]  Like more than the uncanny, weirdness has been like people are weird.
[00:37:05]  Like queer people used to be considered weirdos or perverts.
[00:37:10]  Weird was part of like this social way of understanding things.
[00:37:15]  So if you're a weirdo, you're kind of alienated.
[00:37:19]  But weirdness now, it's not really like that.
[00:37:23]  We're all sort of weird.
[00:37:24]  We're not weird.
[00:37:24]  We all watch strange people.
[00:37:25]  But people try to be weird.
[00:37:27]  And to a degree, that's always a problem.

=== Move Fast, Break Logic (04:15) ===

[00:37:29]  The market craves novelty.
[00:37:31]  Right.
[00:37:31]  And so it, like you said, it absorbs these things to regurgitate and then make them banal in order to commodify.
[00:37:40]  So for me, you got to kind of hunt both sides of the equation.
[00:37:47]  You're not going to get it pure.
[00:37:48]  It's funny because we were talking about this, like all that stuff.
[00:37:52]  I mean, it's crazy to be like, oh, there's like a Lovecraft TV shows on HBO.
[00:37:58]  It's a huge subgenre of horror fiction now.
[00:38:01]  Yeah.
[00:38:03]  But stuff that was very, or, you know, Nick Land and accelerationism in whatever fake form it takes for these tech guys or whatever it is, or not fake form, but you know, just actually, if it was fake, it would be a little less unsettling.
[00:38:17]  No, it's extremely unsettling.
[00:38:19]  Mark Andreason reads it well.
[00:38:21]  Like he gets it.
[00:38:22]  He sees what Land is describing.
[00:38:25]  Yeah.
[00:38:26]  And it's like, yeah, that's the road I'm on.
[00:38:29]  You know, that's the one we're going to, that's all of my resources.
[00:38:32]  And that's the thing that you, one way of understanding the wealth disparity now is like some of that wealth that's concentrated on the high level, it needs that scale in order to make moves on the cosmic future board that some of these individuals are able to see.
[00:38:51]  Like the, you know, developing your own rocket company is perfect example of what I'm talking about.
[00:38:56]  Like that takes huge amounts of money and resources.
[00:39:00]  But now we know that individuals, wealthy individuals, you know, can play that game.
[00:39:06]  So a lot of like the guys below them and gals are like going, okay, that's what we need to do.
[00:39:14]  We need to continue to extract value from the middle and below in order to concentrate so that we can play on this planetary scale.
[00:39:30]  And leave all that other stuff aside.
[00:39:34]  And so the rest of us are trying like, can we just have a little trickle down here would be helpful.
[00:39:39]  Let's keep the people going.
[00:39:41]  And you're like, it doesn't matter because it's like another kind of logic has taken over because they see so much change on the horizon that it's like, okay, it's going to be very turbulent and very unpredictable and very chaotic, which means it's a good place to make plays.
[00:40:00]  Right.
[00:40:00]  Like one of the key.
[00:40:01]  You make a lot of money during volatility.
[00:40:03]  Yeah.
[00:40:03]  And one of the key logics of like new digital money and capital development is this like, is the idea of disruption.
[00:40:14]  You disrupt an existing system to create the kind of chaos, chaotic novelty that then you can rebuild or move in fast, exploit it, and then make a new platform.
[00:40:28]  Right and profit off it.
[00:40:29]  You know, or the move fast and break things idea.
[00:40:32]  So that logic, it's not the only logic out there, but it's a major logic out there, which is like, like it was, it would be bad enough just to have to deal with AI, even if we're all being conservative.
[00:40:44]  But it's like we're not just all being conservative.
[00:40:46]  Lots of forces are like, yeah, this is going to be the time to make the move.
[00:40:50]  So everybody's ready with their big move.
[00:40:54]  It's not like, you know, like in a game or in a war, we're like, okay, we're going to, we're going to skirmish for a while.
[00:40:59]  We got it.
[00:40:59]  We got our big guns.
[00:41:00]  We're not going to play those out.
[00:41:02]  We got it ways before we get to our big guns.
[00:41:05]  Everyone's like getting their big guns ready.
[00:41:07]  It's like, okay, this is going to be kooky.
[00:41:11]  The weirdness will increase in that sense.
[00:41:13]  It will.
[00:41:13]  I mean, I think it's important too that like this stuff that is now basically mainstream, like what you're talking about, even like, you know, move fast, break things, right?
[00:41:22]  Being this ethos of whenever that, you know, whenever that came out of Silicon Valley in, you know, the late 90s or whatever, early 2000s, like early 2000s, like that these kind of ideas that are now kind of the, I don't know, principles, business principles of American capitalism, American development, whatever we want to call it, like are coming from California.

=== California Ideology's Legacy (14:33) ===

[00:41:45]  Like that has been like such a big, I mean, you know, a lot of people have done a lot of work on California etiology, all that stuff, but it's something more.
[00:41:53]  Like California, and I'm curious, like your thoughts being here for so long in the Bay Area, like, you know, California has been since, I think, I would say, like, since the post-war years, like, I mean, and even before then,
[00:42:09]  but the kind of like American industry proving ground, you know, whether it's like tinkering in Bell or building fucking rockets and shit at Lockheed or like Mickey Mouse, you know, fantasy world and all of Hollywood, all of it, all of it like comes from a very like within a small radius of each other, which is important to note, and like from this place.
[00:42:34]  And that there's like something here that gets exported not just to the rest of America, but like through that to the rest of the world.
[00:42:41]  Like more and more when I travel throughout Europe, South America, wherever it is, like everything looks a lot like San Francisco, which is really weird to me.
[00:42:52]  You know what I mean?
[00:42:53]  Like as a person who grew up in San Francisco, whether it's just like the soft cultural power coming out of California gets hardened by the technology that's also being perfected here.
[00:43:04]  And like that's something that I can't really wrap my head around as someone who like loves this place and feels very romantic about it and yet has such a distaste for a lot of the shit that is being done in its name, I guess.
[00:43:19]  Yeah, yeah, no, I mean it's a whole topic.
[00:43:23]  Why that was the case historically?
[00:43:25]  Why did it happen here?
[00:43:26]  And then on another level, what do you do when you're someone, and I share your sentiments very much, as someone who grew up here, my family's here, I'm a fifth generation Californian.
[00:43:37]  I know a lot about the history of California.
[00:43:39]  It's obviously fucked up history in a lot of ways.
[00:43:42]  But it also did nurse a lot of potential new social movements, creative, you know, tons of creativity, tons of ideas of different ways of running the future, you know, communes, whatever, all sorts of novelty that could have gone in a much healthier direction.
[00:43:59]  The ecological consciousness, like there's a lot of the doggy diner, of course.
[00:44:04]  You know, there's a lot of, you know, really positive developments that were kind of part of the mix with other stuff that was more awful and screwed up throughout the history of it.
[00:44:15]  But now there's a kind of sense of like the balance shifted and it's sort of hardened into a kind of, I don't know, like a dystopian force on a global scale in a lot of ways, through the technology, but also through aerospace and finance.
[00:44:37]  There's a lot of things to talk about.
[00:44:39]  But one, you could tell a myth about it.
[00:44:42]  You know, you could have a whole historical conversation about why California had all this blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:44:47]  But more mythically, I think it is just as helpful is that it's kind of the last place.
[00:44:55]  Yeah.
[00:44:56]  It's like, I mean, at least from a Western perspective, and this is a Western story, you know, the West comes out of Europe and it spreads around the globe and does its colonial adventures and gets eventually by this stage sort of pushed back.
[00:45:11]  So it's got the international global network, but it's like kind of constrained in other ways, except in America, where it just flew like, oh, yeah, we're going to take off.
[00:45:20]  We're just going to run.
[00:45:21]  And America goes west and, you know, kills all the Indians and takes everybody's land and it runs into the Pacific, the largest ocean on the planet, the largest material symbol of the unknown, of the depths, of the non-human, the thing you can't build your house on.
[00:45:40]  And it runs into it and what happens?
[00:45:44]  It keeps going, but it has to go in different directions.
[00:45:49]  It can't just keep going in terms of developing land, although it does develop real estate value in an extraordinary way.
[00:45:58]  But it also was like, well, let's take that frontier energy and go into technology and go into venture capital and go into Hollywood mind manipulation, control, fun, satisfaction, entertainment culture.
[00:46:21]  And then let's go beyond the human.
[00:46:23]  So it's kind of where the post-human gets minted as a figure of pop culture, as a figure of like subculture, like all a lot of the subculture stuff we're talking about.
[00:46:35]  It happens here.
[00:46:36]  It gets developed here before it goes other places.
[00:46:39]  You know, lots of exceptions, but that's also kind of true, particularly in a pop way.
[00:46:45]  And so you're sort of engineering all of the elements that stage kind of our post-human moment.
[00:46:52]  And I believe things could have gone differently, for sure.
[00:46:56]  Another way of thinking about it in terms of the countercultural influence that was clarified by this guy named Scott Malcolmson who wrote a book called Splinternet about the history of the internet.
[00:47:09]  And he talks about how initially it comes out of the thing you had mentioned before, which is one of the things about California is that it was one of the most rapidly industrialized states in the country.
[00:47:22]  And it also, they figured out early on how to develop relationships between business, the government, and universities in order to create the ideal environment to develop innovation.
[00:47:35]  So it's an innovation machine, which was much intensified in World War II.
[00:47:39]  And a lot of the whole ecology of venture capital and the way Silicon Valley works in a financial way is developed out of the experience of World War II, where everyone was like, wow, one thing we can say about World War II is sure pushed a lot of innovation.
[00:47:56]  I mean, like all of us.
[00:47:58]  So how do we simulate the conditions of wartime in peace?
[00:48:04]  And some of that has to do with the way capital flows and intensification and competition gets organized and relationships between government and military money and the university and private industry.
[00:48:19]  Like those all get sort of refined here in a particular way.
[00:48:23]  So you have all that stuff happening.
[00:48:25]  But then just partly for accents of geography or destiny, then California's counterculture became incredibly influential in the internet because you have all these nerds who are too smart to be contained by the old ideology and were free thinkers.
[00:48:46]  They didn't want to be bankers.
[00:48:47]  They were experimentalists.
[00:48:48]  They didn't want to be bankers.
[00:48:49]  They didn't want any of that stuff.
[00:48:51]  They're the ones who are smart enough to kind of build the network and associated technology.
[00:48:56]  So you have decades where the individuals in a lot of these places have that sensibility, which is, as the California ideology points out, partly hippie and partly libertarian, but a kind of libertarianism that I personally can mostly get behind, although I think its results end up being really pernicious in our world today.
[00:49:18]  But it makes sense to me.
[00:49:19]  But that can only last for so long.
[00:49:22]  And a lot of what we're living in now is the retrenchment of the internet as a potential non-military, non-state-driven space of global interaction, which still kind of exists because the protocol is so strong.
[00:49:39]  But really the major story we have now is that nation states are taking it back more and more.
[00:49:46]  And in a few iterations, our experience of this already super inshittified internet will be even more balkanized because state actors are going to take more and more control of it as global geopolitics shifts into a multipolar world.
[00:50:03]  And everyone's like, we're not going to let these guys determine the structure of the internet.
[00:50:08]  So in a way, it's going to look, I think, in reverse mirror like there was this sort of period of time of openness when some of these more, to my mind, helpful California values were able to influence the development of the network and the early development of Apple computer.
[00:50:23]  And so cynics, like a lot of Europeans, are super cynical about California and the California ideology.
[00:50:29]  And they'll look at this and they'll just go, the whole thing was corrupt from the get-go.
[00:50:34]  It was all bullshit.
[00:50:35]  It was all naive.
[00:50:36]  It was all just service of cruel capitalism.
[00:50:40]  I don't think that's true.
[00:50:41]  I think there was a lot of different forces that were going on in the 60s and 70s and 80s that could have gone in different directions.
[00:50:49]  And, you know, there's a lot of reasons why we went the way we did.
[00:50:53]  And those ideas are still worth wrestling with.
[00:50:56]  But I think they've now calcified into kind of like California as this like post-human prison novelty machine.
[00:51:08]  Nazi hippies from the future.
[00:51:11]  That's how I think of it.
[00:51:12]  That's a good way.
[00:51:14]  I mean, it kind of is, right?
[00:51:15]  You know, and so it's really hard because then some of the values that I think are really key for this moment, Like particularly ecological values and how we think our way through this, through the climate crisis, which is really the big, that's really the big deal behind all this other stuff, because that's coming down the pike and there's nothing humans can do about that.
[00:51:33]  And that actually a lot of solutions are found in a kind of California mindframe where, on the one hand, you have this kind of appreciation for ecological systems and the return to nature and a sort of like pagan celebration of these natural forces, mixed with a lot of technical sophistication and cybernetics and ideas of like how could we actually use these tools to really help deal with the situation, both for us and both and for the for the for nature?
[00:52:03]  But that's not like, that's like a side of it that gets really down emphasized, and it's this ferocious libertarian uh, you know uh post-human, accelerationist model that that gets, that has so much of the energy.
[00:52:21]  Well, we'll have to.
[00:52:22]  This will all come to a head when president Gavin Newsom takes the oath of office.
[00:52:27]  People think like that's the thing, is it's crazy, it was crazy, is we got to wrap up here in a sec?
[00:52:31]  But I it's it's uh, it's funny to me that California had always had this such, this reputation as like, the innovator state and also the hippie state, the like, you know, the peace and love like oh California, don't bring your California values here.
[00:52:44]  I'm sorry, motherfucker.
[00:52:47]  Nixon was a Californian.
[00:52:49]  Well, he came from his.
[00:52:51]  He, it's his political rise in California.
[00:52:53]  Ronald Reagan was a Californian like these.
[00:52:56]  The California had contains multitudes.
[00:52:59]  It is bigger.
[00:53:00]  If you were in Europe, Tucker Carlson, baby Tucker Carlson, California boy, I mean, we have it is.
[00:53:06]  It is a state that contains every kind of person and the worst, and sometimes the best, but often the worst of all of them it is.
[00:53:13]  It is.
[00:53:14]  There is something that like, there's something, there's something weird here.
[00:53:18]  I mean this is why I really appreciate the book, because this is a weird fucking state.
[00:53:23]  It is like everything.
[00:53:25]  I don't know how to describe it enough.
[00:53:27]  I've been a lot of places, i've been.
[00:53:28]  I've been i'm not gonna say i've been all over the world, because that is certainly not true, but i've been to some parts of the world.
[00:53:33]  I've been to most states and everywhere is weird in all their respects, some states weirder than others.
[00:53:39]  Uh, California is fucking.
[00:53:41]  If there's one word that describes it, is fucking weird, Weird.
[00:53:44]  And people, you can describe that, describe that, positive or negative things, whatever.
[00:53:49]  Both are true.
[00:53:50]  But it is a weird motherfucking place.
[00:53:54]  San Francisco, not only no exception, but very emblematic of that.
[00:53:58]  Yeah.
[00:53:59]  No, I agree with you.
[00:54:00]  It's a place of extremes, of mutant prophecies and cons and strange sacred forces and weird new machines and a kind of blindness that's associated with a sort of positivity, the sort of positive thinking thing that can really take you all sorts of weird places married to a real darkness.
[00:54:25]  I mean, there's a sort of very weird edge to it that's not always so liberating.
[00:54:33]  I mean, it's been interesting for me as a Californian who's been thinking about California and enjoying it and exploring it my whole life that it's kind of paced my own aging.
[00:54:44]  You know, when you get older, not necessarily, but a lot of people start to see things in a different light.
[00:54:50]  You know, things that looked one way become a little bit more nuanced, often a little more shadowy, a little more complicated.
[00:54:57]  And in a way, my own feelings about the state have just grown more and more complicated as I see all the different ways that it's played out.
[00:55:08]  And I still associate with it and identify with it to a certain degree, including the kind of hippie-ish elements that I still practice, you know, relationships with nature and meditation and psychedelics to a degree and a certain kind of informal, interdisciplinary intellectual quality that's very West Coast as opposed to, and I was trained, you know, I went to university on the East Coast.
[00:55:31]  I live in New York, so I have a sense of what that life is like mentally, culturally.
[00:55:38]  And it's different out here, and I really relate with that informality.
[00:55:41]  But in a way, some of the positive features of California culture made it less able to withstand the kind of ferocious force of late-stage capitalism that we're all kind of like, what's going to keep this back?
[00:55:59]  And, um, so yeah, so we're, it's a, it's a conundrum state.

=== California's Capitalist Conundrum (00:58) ===

[00:56:18]  Ladies and gentlemen, that was Eric Davis.
[00:56:21]  His sub stack is linked in the bio, but he's also written a number of books, which we will link to as well.
[00:56:27]  And with that being said, my name is Brace.
[00:56:29]  I'm Liz.
[00:56:30]  We're, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky, and this has been TrueNON.
[00:56:35]  We'll see you next time.
[00:56:36]  Bye-bye.
[00:56:41]  Could you please give us your name?
[00:56:45]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:56:49]  Could you please give us your name?
[00:56:53]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:56:55]  Jeffrey Epwood.
[00:56:59]  It never casts.
[00:57:03]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:57:07]  It never casts.
[00:57:10]  Jeffrey Epwood.
[00:57:11]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:57:15]  It never cash.