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Episode 367: High Weirding (Part 1) (Patreon)

Published:
2024-04-04 13:48:38
Edited:
2024-04-11 14:52:32
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

We join Erik Davis, scholar of the weird and esoteric, in his home for a long conversation about California ideological supremacy, crazy trips, the history of LSD, and his forthcoming book Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid medium.

Erik Davis’s substack

Files

Comments

Ryan Fox

Thank you for posting so frequently ❤️

ohnoitsthefuzz

Yawn yawnyawn yawn yawnyawn yayayayawn yawnyawn jawjajawn

Blank

A synanon doc just dropped! Will we get a TA review?

Blank

Also loving that king crimson ass intro

cori

do fresno next please god

Michael S. Judge

I think it's certainly safe to argue, from its very beginnings but particularly since WW2 and the Shockley solid-state transistor revolution giving rise to Silicon Valley, that California is one of the key public-facing elements of the Spider Network

J98

You put on screwdriver didn't you

Jack

you guys gotta have Malcolm harris on to talk Palo Alto

Ian

I don’t wanna say that this is my favorite episode, but as a head and proponent of LSD (been a while since Iv dosed actually) this episode has me so excited and reliving so many amazing experiences that it might be my favorite episode! I need to get on lot cause I wanna dose again now!

Mark Owen

Searching for Ligeti

Ryan Coleman

I'm a mailman and listening to y'all makes my days delivering mail go so much better thank you

Tex

Hell yes. Two great tastes that taste great together. Was literally thinking of suggesting Erik Davis as a guest. His PKD class recently was A+

will michel

purely anecdotal but as a service worker, the worst customers (as in, the people who treat service workers the worst) are almost always the people who tell you within 5 seconds about how great microdosing is. drugs are pretty good at magnifying the parts of us that are already there, to ourselves and to others

Bluebell

I love when you guys do these California episodes. Keep em coming

will michel

obviously if it were me, i would hope the drugs i take are at least able to help me realize im regularly being shitty to my bartender. but if that’s not something you’re looking for guidance on, no amount of mushrooms in the world are gonna help you see that, is my point. all that’s left is just you talking my ear off about a vision you had. and “if i’m not in em and nobody’s having sex in em…i don’t care!”

Mark Owen

By the 80s you had Steve Miller album cover art blotter (unless I hallucinated that as I was slipping into the future)

Peanut Horse

17:03 when I see a beautiful woman

Brooks Ronspies

I like to think young chomsky sits in the middle seat on the plane

Shfifty_five

LSD is an interesting drug. It can be life affirming, life ruining, and even used for torture (MKULTRA). Trips are personal and involve self discovery but you're more disconnected from others experiences. There are realizations but chronic use disconnects. In the 60's it helped derail effective collective action and class consciousness. Hippies became anarchists, libertarians, or just liberals. I had good experiences, DMT moreso, but there's a darkness there.

Alex

I feel like people going out to just end up doing something like Ketamine is indicative of us wanting to both desperately wanting to connect with people but also simultaneously escape, check out, and find a "safe" space through dissociation.

Tyler Murray

Picturing brace and Liz standing up in a hotel room speaking into concert stage stand-up microphones to a one man audience of young Chomsky

Bella

Loved this ep! Definitely going to check out the book

T

Anyone who knows anything about california local political history - I’m trying to find more on the Bay Area power player Eugene Friend - anyone know anything about him?

Ranney Lochtefeld

Damn, all this talk of SF and LA but no love for San Diego? We've got the highest concentration of military installations AND shitty white rasta-pasta reggae bands of anywhere else in the world! (Facts)

Calder Marchman

1) this ep coincides nicely with reading “Season of the Witch” by David Talbot. The book can be kinda corny at points but it functions well as a kinda prequel to “Rainbow Stories” if you like dingy SF gutter histories 2) Yeti and the Worm sounds like a third-string morning FM shock jock duo

Oliver Crane

The book Heads by Jesse Jarnow has a lot of interesting stuff about the acid trade and its connection with the Dead touring schedule. Also some 👁️ suggestions about where the supply was coming from.

B

Techgnosis rocks

Mark Owen

When Tron was Mello

jsobrie

Ah hell yeah, read high weirdness a little while ago stoked

jsobrie

ONE LEG SHORT ONE LEG LONG! ONE LEG SHORT ONE LEG LONG

Claire Simon

Fiyaaa fiyaa on da mountaaaiiin

Ian

For sure! LSD was the best thing Iv ever experienced. Before I thought that humans were a parasite and we would be the end of the world as we know it. Everyone has different experiences from it but since taking it I feel more empathetic towards my fellow humans and the human suffering. Maybe I did it just the right amount and the right amount of times. Just my experience and it’s very personal. I feel like I was a lib and it made me open up to the world that could be, but that’s just IMHO 🤷🏼‍♂️😊

Aaron Christmas

If someone ever takes their shoes off next to me on a flight, I am asking for permission to count their toes so I can get to sleep

Aurelie

True anon blotter merch please

MCL

Hey your last episode gave all of us Havana Syndrome

🫶🏽

my last trip at 18y/o i truly believed i learned all the intricacies and strategies of mahjong at Woh Hei Yuen park by simply placing the tiles in an asterisk 🌝

jabrd

The sacred AND the profane? Oh yeah baby that’s a Bataille

BB

thanks yung chomsky for playing that bit of fire on the mountain❤️💀

Gordon Schmidt

Yung Chomsky's getting bored with the old intro music, huh? I can't complain, his shit is always fire

J zub

Liz, don’t you dare blow up my favorite pizza place in the HV.

Dayton Johnson

Erik Davis is brilliant. Love his insights on both lsd and ket that help me digest my experiences a decade later.

Major Pisano

I met Marc at the museum when poncho lived in the attic.. my mom brought me there.. on 420 after seeing elvin Jones at yoshies , early 2000’s with my “step dad” who’s dead now (big Dave)..He told me about the raid and suction cups listening devices on the wall , showing the blotter art . Formative for my life trajectory.

Franz

Came here to suggest this

Michael Caplan

i did acid one time and had experience

Sean

absolutely, k in social spaces has always had this strange effect of suppressing my social yearning in favor of cycles of rumination. but then when you sober up, you kind of “pop” back into being a social creature again, which is a strange high in its own

Sean

fwiw, i feel like both ketamine and fentanyl both serve as “hospice drugs” for the different classes they serve. ketamine is a sedative for the anxious puppies of the professional class who need a release from their doomscrolling/climate anxiety/imposter syndrome , while fentanyl puts surplus populations to sleep.

chronye

rip elvin rip big dave

K8

Your drug episodes are so often the most compelling

meyer

i was really hoping brace would be in it lol edit to add and liz ofc but she is very Private

AfroCommie

Thank you Yung Chomsky for your recent variations of le theme song

isfet

I was left sort of unimpressed with Ketamine, but I have to say, some of my favorite lockdown memories involved doing keybumps and playing Super Hot VR for hours

Adub

I like how the author touched on the western sentiment of "the big moment that changes us" etc etc. Just as psychedelics are being endorsed by these "self-optimization" dorks in the white-collar/tech ghoul world, both of these concepts being tied to their use here is so inherently puritanical it drives me nuts. I hope they touch on this more, like they were with how the drugs of an era talk about a culture. I find it really unsettling seeing psyhcadellics and micro dosing being touted as work enhancement drugs in our increasingly hostile economic and social conditions in the west amplify. Drugs now are truly tied to two death cults, death of the self literally and death of the self for capital gains and output. Excited for Pt 2!!!!!

Tea for the Tillerman

You used to be able to buy whippets on Amazon in the early 2010s

eduard karpoev

I ODed on DXM a year & a half ago & have had nerve problems (heart & arm pain despite my heart looking good to doctors. )since then & DXM was originally made by the CIA. I want to try Acid at somepoint, my buddy offered me some right after my OD, but I was to tweaked out to try it because I thought it would kill me.

Louis Wilkins

If you abuse ketamine for long enough in sufficient quantities you can get ketamine bladder syndrome. Where the crystallised metabolites cut your urinary tract to ribbons and you perpetually pass the worst kidney stones in history. Enjoy.

PP Cool P

20 for 3 balloons at dead shows last summer

Chiral

Didn't know what to expect but all time great episode

Cumdog Millionaire

Idk I agree that ketamine is more common in the club/nightlife scene than before but 9 times out of ten when people are snorting in the corner it’s still coke from my experience

Stop the Spread

DMT fucking rules… I refuse any other psychedelics.

El Esdee

Brace, it’s 3/$20 for nitrous balloons. Still highway robbery, but we wooks aren’t going to argue with the policies set by the Philly nitrous mob. They roll strapped.

Shiv

owie zowie

Shiv

this is a sign bc I have HAD that dang Blotter Museum on my Stuff In SF I Somehow Haven’t Seen list, thanks for the nudge. also image searched Erik so i can say hi if I see him bc i think we’re neighbors 👁️

Shiv

sadly i think my (dr approved)(redacted) do improve my cognition

Goldie

The Santa Muerte fetty death cult thing is one of the scariest theories I have ever heard in my life. Seriously needs it’s own episode on location in Sinaloa.

Goldie

Depends how good the ket is and the ROA. But yes, the fent/xylazine is meant to kill in tidal wave fashion the final survivors of the opiate years.

Pelican Grief

I bought hundreds of whippets on amazon during peak covid. Sucked down balloons while watching Zardoz and Inland Empire, it rocked.

Shiv

finally started Naomi Klein doppelgänger and she talks about what Liz is saying ~1:01 re: relating to ourselves via online “self-branding” and fragmented, refracted identity

Rene

God tier episode

Eric

Why do shrooms make me sad?

CE

Really great episode. Fentanyl as Lovecraftian alien lifeform reminds me of this novel Cyclonopedia: Complicity With Anonymous Materials which posits crude oil as a malevolent organism which began to bend all life on earth to its purposes using human industrial civilization as a kind of cybernetic operating system.

Horseloverfat

Damn all my interests converging

Dale Brennan

I was so into Ketamine between 1999 and 2003. Haven’t done it since but was super addicted to it then.

libra man

Cali pff, come down to Tampa Bay and help me solve Florida.

Bryson Martinez

I injected 2cI. Woooo drigs!!! Drigs is healthiya then a bag um apples!

Pelican Grief

Absolutely insane book. Can only read a few pages at time or else my brain starts to melt. Truly one of a kind.

Max

Brace lists all the big parts of California....only mentions the coasts. Coastal elitism at it again, ignoring California fly over country.

Pelican Grief

Last time I did ketamine me and my band mates played jenga for hours, which is effectively like training in goku's hyperbolic time chamber for wood block based party games.

Pelican Grief

I was thinking about this too. Drugs can give you the ability to chemically curate your complex social experiences. So someone introverted and riddled with social anxiety can go see a band they love whilst innoculating themselves against the feeling of being around other humans.

havva

big ups mr mailman

A White 1993 Camry

everyone knows the most brutal enforcers of the whippet mafia are the off duty cops

ray hafez

Was listening on Spotify but had to come here to say that the opening song is life-changingly good YC

chronye

fresno rips

zack

I don't want to love Esalen and new age stuff so much but I do :(

Aaaaaaaaaaaron1

I know you guys are kinda over CA and the bay area but I'm still here and i still love this stupid place and I love acid and talking about drug eras and I loved this episode.

mira

Norcal is one of the most beautiful places in the world

Julian Drummond

In 2018 I snorted part of a crushed up orange mdma tablet that was shaped like Donald Trump’s head.

mira

Fuego en la montaña

R. Karchnyak

Well, you sold me. I like books that drive you crazy. I waded through PKD’s Exegesis, about 20 years ago. I like the notion of him as a prophet of sort. A precursor to the paranoia of the internet age. Now that I’m older and less scattered in my thinking I should reread it.

Tryg

This book is really interesting, thank you for doing this interview. My journey to work is now weirder than usual x

Breakaway

Bishop & Lone Pine erasure

Max

Praxis baby!

Doc Adna

Beautiful intro music

waterbird

getting kicked out for playing skrewdriver at mrr hq. legendary

Philippe Duhart

You all forgot about the corporate agriculture in the Central Valley. Typical coastal elites.

Anon Ibid

Been waiting 366 episodes for a reference to the church of the subgenius

Austin Williams

Do you wanna smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch? I do not.

Rodi

Love love love the theme music adaptation!

Tim O'

That's a potent pair of movies to spend lockdown and/or whippets with

Tim O'

Finding Forester, Saving Silverman, Solving Florida

John

I’m listening to this on the way to my nightshift after microdosing 9ug of LSD !!

Seeking Treatment

I once hit a dmt pen in high school and went to the cybernetic alien realm. Sigh.

J

It was definitely skrewdriver that got Brace kicked out of maximum rocknroll lmao

Chris

nerd

Chris

i think a lot of people overthink drugs because we come from a puritan society/history. Ketamine is also fun, and people like having fun.

Sacklunch420

I get so hype when there’s a new remix of the theme song

Chumbucket

The first time I did acid I got detained

J

The alien drug comparison reminded me of Soy Sauce from John Dies at the End lol

Logan

I'm really sorry

MD

Guest reminds me of Appleseed from King of the Hill

Samwell Ganges

That book series is incredible just getting around to finishing the last one

Samwell Ganges

Having done a fair amount of it what an awful time that must have been. I hope you're well Chumbucket

Samwell Ganges

The minute I took LSD and every consequent time afterwards, despite enjoying myself I immediately understood that "oh this is some CIA spook-sauce"

Samwell Ganges

That chill up your spine on the come up. Man I miss those days but I sure as fuck ain't going back. Gotta be clear of mind for all this shit going on and it makes so much sense in retrospect that it was somatic chloroform rag to keep the hippie movement focused on individualism and stuck in dreamland.

Blank

Wait so Liz mentions her and brace not driving in this ep but I was just listening to ep 311 and Liz describes buying car insurance and getting a device from car insurers to put inside her car to gauge her driving. MORE EVIDENCE FOR MULTI-LIZ THEORY

T

honestly I thought the california weirdness was overblown until I visited for the first time a month or so ago. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a place where every encounter is a coin toss about whether or not I’m going to get told about some kook’s MLM energy drink company he started, and how gluten is evil for you, or how the tech companies need to come to san diego more, or about someone’s experience on a sex party yacht

saaffie

I was on a flight back from Egypt and a French guy across the aisle mid-flight had taken his shirt off. I awoke to a glowing blue light of his laptop glowing off his chest and chest hair. Honestly the grossest thing.

BIG VIBES

i listened to this 3 times and still don’t know what was said

Alexandria

People talk about Florida just like this a lot and as a Florida Girl it's not not true

Watermane

guys, what would be the best way to leak a possible phone number of interest to Brace? for potential gonzo interview, like the ones he did before

Alexandria

Seminole Heights forever

Demented Avenger

I listen to the episode and find, at last, you guys are appreciating the greatest form of popular music ever: progressive rock. Three lullabies in an ancient tongue …

Dogface Reilly

There is an audio version of the Pkd exegesis. Imagine the poor bastard who had to read that thing aloud

Chumbucket

Oh I’m don’t worry relatively fine that happened when I was 17 I’m 29 now. I was lucky in that the cop found it necessary to bring me to the ER instead of the pen. There a lot more reasons why that trip was bad that I would not explain in public (maybe the tip line). The worse part was nurses ripping off my cloths and mortifying myself in front of a bunch of people I was mildly acquainted with. Weirdly enough I did acid multiple times after that experience.

Rory

We want the CCRU/Nick Land ep

PP Cool P

Psychedelic drugs are not hallucinogenic, that’s outdated ‘dare’ propaganda. Psychedelic does not describe the chemical make up of a drug. I would agree with the author that k is indeed psychedelic, even if it has significant differences from the classic lsd/psilocybin/mescaline psychedelic trips.

Christian Kiddle

I was given a large amount of ketamine after shattering my wrist. I went fully into a hole and it was like being torn apart and put back together. It was both positive and negative and I do want that kind of experience again, but at the same time I don't understand wanting to go to a party, lose all motor function, and then wake up puking after being totally incommunicable...

SHD

“All sorts of grandmas across the land!”

ResilientBastard

Ketamine under the supervision of a therapist, on top of my regular therapist, helped get me out of a very persistent and dangerous depression. Maybe it was the conservative dosage but it also didn’t have me check out, but more gain some novel perspective on problems and pain of been dealing with. I can’t imagine doing it or wanting to do it in a social situation or for recreation. And it’s disturbing to me that people are encouraged to use it therapeutically without supervision.

Snacks

My med school dean got ECT and per her it saved her life. It can be remarkably effective for catatonia.

Snacks

Central Valley gives big “Midwest dealership owner” energy I found. Everyone is living on Meth and massive amounts of personal debt.

Nick

I see empty whippets carts everywhere. Scared of their Mafia

JV

k holes like that where you end up having your sensory reality fully replaced by a total hallucination only happen at higher doses. people who take it responsibly at parties / clubs are basically doing a small bump every so often, which has a similar effect to just feeling a woozy, lightly trippy kind of euphoric drunk. tolerance also builds up fast and lasts a very long time, so someone who does it more regularly could quickly get to the point where doing a big line at a party doesn't have them so out of it. generally it's an incredibly versatile drug in the sense of the range of subjective experiences you can get from it

JV

ketamine talk at the end hit hard. i went from kind of starting to spiral with it in the run up to covid to then getting fully addicted for a couple years during lockdown. probably the most fascinating drug but definitely not something that you should get habitual with at all if you're a sad introvert who tends to have poor impulse control...

Ben Roazen

Fire on the Mountain needle drop, nitrous mafia mentioned, this and Part 2 are instant desert island TrueAnon for me. Please talk to Malcolm Harris next and/or soon!

Zack Burke

King Crimson fuckin rocks, man.

Mark Ames

Acid was a staple in a big part of the underground subculture in the 80s -- Butthole Surfers, Husker Du, Meat Puppets, Scratch Acid, Flipper, Dinosaur Jr etc. Folks from that subculture mixed in a lot with the hippie Dead scene mostly to score acid. The hippies were never comfortable with these 80s subculture customers, they saw that whole Alternative Tentacles/Touch & Go/SST scene as aggressively nihilistic and daredeviling self-harm (and contemptuous of the Dead acid world), which it was. I think that's what your guest was referring to.

Emma

Came here to say this! I appreciated hearing Davis push back on the narrative that k is fundamentally antisocial. As he says, doing little bumps in a slightly complicated social setting can be incredibly fun and a very connected experience. Loved the ep but unfortunately Americans and American drug culture have not really figured out ketamine yet, from a UK perspective the analysis of it's popularity and what that means misses the mark pretty hard.

Laurel

“Smoothie is the texture of our time”.

Al

This was a great episode

Hank

Ditto on the end part. I've been thinking about why so many people get themselves into kholes in a club (alongside my own affinity for the stuff) and the points were spot on, people just want to check out and stop perceiving the outside world. The experience of a khole is amazing but you scantly remember what you saw, with anything profound lost in the murky, scatterbrained nature of dissociatives at high doses. It's at that point where habitual escape to an inward world is so comfortable, so desirable to a point where it's almost Freudian.

K

W/ Liz using the c-word (cybernetics)…. I am Once Again Asking for a cybernetics episode, in any wave or form but given the Californian angle of the pod I feel like stewart brand/whole earth catalog is a good target but they could also do the 90s Warwick wave e.g. nick land. Crazy ass ideology to talk ab. I know I know true anon is not a history pod cast but they have been cooking with their 20th century histories

K

🙏🙏🙏🙏

Michael Caplan

have you tried to read intelligence and spirit?

Michael Caplan

cybernetics is honestly one of the hardest topics to grasp given that it originates from MIT math heads building weapons, you basically have to digress into Claude Shannon and information theory, you probably need to dive into the metaphysics of electrical engineering, then it expands and metastasizes into an ideology in Rand corp. military planning, and then seeps into the subculture/theory worlds.

whalecum2020_official

one of my fave episodes from yall, more subculture discussions please!!! 🙏

ChelseOrElse

Fantastic episode, looking forward to pt. 2

Matteus _JGH

Dang looks one of the main OpenAI investors, Vinod Kholsa listens to TrueAnon (let’s be real all Billionairios secretly do to keep tabs on their inevitable demise). He just called TikTok ‘programmable fentanyl’ [robot_voice] CYBERNETIC SYNCHRONICITY DETECTED: ERROR ERROR 🚨

Agent Grange

I understand the conceptual vision of fentany as a Lovecraftian force spilling its way into different segments of drug culture, but I don't think we need to overly mystify it when we know that a substantial amount of lacing is done by police gangs trying to straight up kill the homeless.

Gary

Imagine being able to cut your product by 50, 60 sometimes 80% just by adding a small amount of dirt cheap fent. That’s why it’s in everything now. Capitalism is still the largest death cult.

PP Cool P

Thanks for the info, but I’m not going to let taxonomists tell me whether or not ketamine is psychedelic. Muddy waters indeed.

Anna

Nitrous mafia mentioned

Lars

Thank you so much for this episode. Truly appreciated.

Lars

I'm glad you found a way out of depression. I kholed myself in a hotel w/ my ex once a few years back. Not intentionally, but I'm an idiot and always want more in the moment. But I will say, I spent a long time in a thought loop that forced me to look at what the genesis of my words were. I kept repeating "Oh, you *really* love me?" With sad eyes and child-like voice. I couldnt stop, and my ex did her best to comfort me and hug me and affirm that I was loved. I think about that night often. I dunno if I'm better for it, but it made me reflect on my childhood & very real abandonment issues.

Nick

What # is the Prozac episode Brace mentioned around 49 min mark?