00:00 - Apple (Host)
There's a big fire over in Redmond and they shut down the airport. Oh shit.
00:04 - Aaron (Host)
There's a fire.
00:05 - Apple (Host)
Uh-huh, 400 or 500-acre fire. The airport shut down because of visibility.
00:12 - Aaron (Host)
Damn.
00:13 - Apple (Host)
I saw that earlier After we break. I was out there. I was like it smells a little smoky, like just a tinge. All right, here we go, at least we all have nice legs too, hey, yay have nice legs too. Hey, yay, recording in progress.
00:58 - Aaron (Host)
There we go, eric. How are you, sir? Pretty good there we go. Hey, look at you. We didn't even have to say you're muted or anything.
01:10 - Erik (Guest)
Got my headphones on, I think the lighting will take us through. It's going to get darker here, but let me know.
01:18 - Aaron (Host)
Oh, you look great, man. I'm Aaron.
01:21 - Erik (Guest)
Hey Aaron, How's it going? Good to see you.
01:23 - Aaron (Host)
It's going great.
01:25 - Mel (Host)
Good to see. Hey, Aaron, How's it going? Good to see you. It's going great. Good to see you too. My name is Mel Eric, super excited for this. Thanks for joining us.
01:30 - Erik (Guest)
Hi Mel.
01:31 - Apple (Host)
And then rounding out the team. I'm Apple. Thank you for joining us, eric.
01:35 - Erik (Guest)
Right on.
01:37 - Aaron (Host)
Eric, for everybody that's listening, would you introduce yourself and tell them why you're here?
01:43 - Erik (Guest)
Yeah, my name's Eric Davis. I'm mostly a writer. I do have a PhD and sometimes teach. My abiding interests have been alternative religion, subcultures, psychedelics, alternative religion, weird stuff, and I've been following the beat of the weird for decades as a freelance writer and essayist. And then I got my PhD, as I said, and wrote a book called High Weirdness, which was about drug experience and visionary experience in the 1970s in California, talking about Terrence McKenna, philip K Dick and some other strange characters. So I kind of walk that line and I think the reason we're here today is for my latest book, which is called Blotter, and it's the first history and sort of archive of LSD blotter art and street blotter. So I'm really happy to be talking about this book. It's like it was a dream come true to be able to do it and, yeah, so that's me for the moment that's a mouthful.
03:06 - Aaron (Host)
I was extremely impressed with your appearance on the Hireside Chats with Greg. What an amazing conversation the two of you had and that's what prompted me to reach out to you. And then, after we had corresponded I I ordered the book. I had no idea what I didn't know. First of all, it was gonna have like the entire history of blotter, right I? I thought maybe it would just be like know, a couple of short essays and some pictures. No, this is like the entire history of how this medium became a medium and all of it. First off, like what a weird. You said it already, you've been chasing the weird forever, but what a weird thing to get into the history of blotter. What, what even prompted?
04:11 - Erik (Guest)
you to. I'm gonna choose that. Yeah, it's. It's funny this. In this case it came out of a personal relationship.
04:15
Uh, you know, the all of the images you see in the book and a lot of the information uh, comes from the archive and the the brain, mark McLeod, who's this very interesting bon vivant, you know, former art professor, mfa, sculptor, photographer, punk rock denizen, punk rock denizen, old school freak who started collecting blotter in the early 1980s, recognizing that it was like a street medium, like that. It was its own kind of thing and amassed the largest collection over the decades but also ended up working in the industry In a, in a nutshell, he he put on a blotter art show in San Francisco in the late 1980s and he got a little little sign, you know, written in his book, saying hey, if you want to meet some of the artists, you know, give me a call. So he ended up kind of meeting people who were in the underground and he eventually ended up making blotter for the underground. So he did that for a while, had a couple of pretty hairy legal escapades. He was put on trial. That was pretty serious for a while but he managed to avoid it and, you know, continued collecting and supporting the scene and I've known him for years and he's pretty open about it. It's like he calls his collection the Institute of Illegal Images. It's just in his house in the Mission in San Francisco, but it's kind of an open door policy If you know someone, who knows someone, you can just call him up and he's really gregarious and likes to host people and so people have been writing these little kind of funny, weird, you know, just little like offbeat news articles since the 90s.
06:10
You know like, oh, let's go visit this guy in his weird archive or they make a little short documentary or something. And then at one point I was like Mark, how come no one's ever done a book? I mean, it's so obvious. And he had had various projects but they fell through. And so you know we were really good friends already, had a lot of respect for each other and you know I needed to have that with him for him to be able to kind of trust me, to just really take it on. So it's partly a fruit of just knowing weird people like Martin McLeod.
06:40
But in terms of my own like scholarship and interests, to be frank, it kind of felt like the universe like set me up like because there's kind of like nobody else could really quite do this the way that it came out, because I know about media criticism, I know about the history of the counterculture, I can talk about art and you know iconography. I like doing subcultural ethnography. You know I have a love of the thing and you know a love of LSD, and so it was just sort of the perfect project and it was a pandemic project. So I was able to go totally obsessive.
07:19
It was like I was hanging out with Mark, he was giving me information, I was going through archives, I was talking to people and I just got obsessed and I said, hey, I think I can actually kind of cover the whole story, you know, with lots of gaps, and I'm sure there's some errors in there, because it's no one's really written it before at all. So it was a real gas to like be able to write about something people hadn't really written about before. So it's like fresh territory and, like you say it's, it's like something that like, once you say it, you're like, oh yeah, that's really interesting. But even if you love water, you just don't think about it that way because it's just a, it's like a vehicle towards, towards your mouth right so it's the middle, it's like the middleman.
08:04
Yeah, so you're like what you know it doesn't like why would you keep it? So yeah, so that and that was. You know that's been part of the fun of it as well. It's kind of anomalous and I like that feeling.
08:15 - Aaron (Host)
Yeah.
08:16 - Erik (Guest)
A friendly anomaly.
08:18 - Aaron (Host)
It seems to me that you would almost have to have the pandemic be in full swing in order to do something like that, to be the level of obsessive you would have to be due to the clandestine nature of the thing itself. I can't imagine there's people that are keeping like written record of you know when the first blotter was made, or it's a lot of hearsay. How do you go about like?
08:50 - Erik (Guest)
you know that's a very interesting question. The way that I dealt with it in this case it was kind of simple, which is that most of the material more or less stems from just a couple sources. One is Mark McLeod. He has a great memory, he is fascinated with the field and he's been amassing this information, albeit in a kind of more in his head than on the page way, for decades. So he had the big picture and some of the you know, the major players, and then I could triangulate by talking to some other people or connecting it with other sources, and sometimes it's just Mark's version of the story and I'm sure there are other versions. And you know there's a joke in the book. It's the subtitle of the book is the untold story of an acid medium. But it's really just a setup for a comment I make in the book where I say look, it's really hard to do countercultural history. I'm sure there are things that are wrong in here. In a way this is just the untold story, untold once again.
09:58
And that's a Mark McCloud line that I just stole from him. I didn't credit him. I said I'm going to steal this, steal this from you, mark, because it's so funny. He's like, oh go ahead, dog. You know he's a character very generous, very generous guy, so in a way it's kind of lore. You know, like there's this idea of lore which isn't really science, it's not quite history, it's. It's something a little more mythologized. So some of it is history. It's based on, you know, newspaper records, interviews with people who were there.
10:27
One of the major sources actually is that the drug enforcement agency, the chemists who work for the drug enforcement agency and who work in police labs around the country, had their own newsletter that started in the 1960s called Microgram, and it was just for the people who were testing drugs, how to test drugs, new drugs on the market, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they just so happened to begin each issue with a kind of roundup of new drugs and interesting drug information that was coming in from the bus that around the country. And this was a a pretty carefully, you know, hidden document until uh, sasha shulgin, who is renowned for bringing mdma back from the the past and and and exploring and inventing a lot of psychedelic medicines. He gave a few copies of microgram to the people at Arrowhead, and Arrowhead is one of the, you know, biggest online repositories of drug information. It's been an independent project since the 1990s and it has a lot of that spirit of the open Internet and open information sourcing and they managed to like hound together a nearly complete collection of this stuff through the mid 1990s and so I just dove into that, which gave me a you know on the street kind of marker of like here are new formulations, now we're seeing perforations, now we're seeing the rise of this and that, and so there's also information in the kind of drug sociology world that helps map out some of the big pictures.
12:09
So I put it all together. So some of it's lore, some of it's personal accounts, some of it is from newspapers, some of it is from the DEA. So it's a mishmash of different historical things, you know. So it's a mishmash of different you know historical things. But if you're like someone like me who loves history and likes archives, you know it's like exciting to go into an archive, overwhelming sometimes, but also exciting. It was just a kind of perfect gas to be able to get, like you say, obsessive about it and go through it. But you know, there's a lot of calls where I'm like that's a good story. Or, you know, like the names of them too, like they, a lot of them, had different street names. People call them different things. There's no official name and a lot of them don't have names at all. So I was like Mark, what should we call this? He's like, ah, this. I'm like, ok, great.
12:58
So, because it's a mess. So. So there's not really, you know, like. Here's a good example or a comparison Rock posters Right, we all know the great. You got rock posters behind you. You know the great classic Hate Street, rick Griffin, stanley Mouse, the big five, all that. Well, at some point those things were totally ephemeral. You know, they would print them up, they'd put them on the uh, you know, around the town. Occasionally people would steal them and maybe take them back, put them on their wall.
13:31
They might vend a few, but basically it's an ephemeral form right and then somewhere along the way, someone's like hey, these are cool, let's collect them, let's start buying and selling them. Well, what you need to do is you need to create a whole apparatus so you can say, oh, this one came out at this thing and it had two different printings, and you can tell by the way that the thing is that it was the first printing and it's worth more, and you know. You need to build a whole kind of like collector apparatus to make it like a thing and blotter. Even though people collect blotter and they've been collecting it I mean not just mark, but in general since the like late 1990s um, there isn't one of those apparatuses you can't like. Point to someone's page, go, yeah, there's, there's five editions of the crazy clowns clowns five yeah, there are artists.
14:22
This that manufactures? No, we don't know it, because it comes out of the, the mythical underground. It just appears kind of spontaneously out of this illicit scene. So it's a much more fragile kind of weird object which is fun, um, but also not entirely. Uh, what would you say? You can't nail it down exactly no target.
14:44 - Aaron (Host)
the thing that that was is still really fascinating to me about the whole thing is I was a punk rock kid in the 80s, growing up in las vegas, right, and there's pages in the book that I had my grubby little hands on back in the 80s. I don't know how that's possible, because that means that like somewhere, someplace in the underground, somewhere, there was somebody stamping these pages that magically went out to everywhere, and I think that's the thing that most fascinated me about the book. I was like, oh shit, I've actually we both recognize goonie bird yeah, because we've been friends.
15:31 - Apple (Host)
Everybody loves the goonie bird yeah, we me and him have been friends 40 years now and we did a lot of that together and we used to get it was it was cheaper in las vegas, there wasn't as much around to buy a sheet, you know and then we could sell it to our friends and stuff. That's one of the first I told Aaron today. I was like first thing I did is went through the book and looked at all the pictures. I was excited to see what I recognized, you know, and then it also made me think People talk about it.
15:59 - Erik (Guest)
They're like it's like a you know photograph going through a photo album. Yeah, I remember him.
16:06 - Apple (Host)
Yeah and it creates a timeline and stuff too. And I know also, maybe it's like man, but we didn't have cameras and everything like we have now. It's like I wish I had pictures of all the sheets that we had bought over the years.
16:18 - Mel (Host)
It's also like, okay, the sheets have to finish at some point. How did we get photos and how are there still sheets around to have? Sure so especially in the classics.
16:33 - Erik (Guest)
Yeah, mark McLeod, it's 1982 or 83. He's like you know what this is like a popular medium that's just too cool to not collect, cause he's an artist and he's a collector, so he has the collector mind. So he started like just stashing it in his fridge and he'd eat it sometimes. But sometimes he'd stash it and then at some point he started putting them behind glass in frames, and that was where that enabled him not to eat it anymore, because it's behind the pane and then it's behind the pain and then it's on the wall and then you have enough of these things and you put a show together and then you go okay, this is a thing. So now I'm actually a collector, I'm going to go out and actively try to collect. So sometimes there would be street runs of acid and they would hold back some paper that was undipped and would distribute that. That kind of came later, but a lot of it would. People just put a few sheets here and there.
17:28
He's got great stories. Not all of them are in the book, some of them are of just you know, some guy like unearthed the guitar from his basement from the early 70s and he forgot that underneath that there was all these pages of like super rare, really early blotter. But because Mark was kind of the like, you know, the spider in the web, like he was, like the guy, it would all come to him. And after a while people realized that he was, you know well one, because he had some underground cred. People knew him on the underground. He worked, you know he was, he was a, he worked in the, in the gray market at best, um, so people kind of knew and respected him. And then they heard that he was a collector and so once he started working in the underground he was able to collect even more from all these other characters who might have, you know, put some away, this and that nostalgia oh, I forgot, we had this whole batch that we never dipped or whatever it was.
18:26
So he just was, you know, he was a tireless collector who also had a lot of stuff kind of come to him because of what he did and so. And then at some point, you know he's a good artist, he knows his stuff, he's got great crew working for him. They just did a really high resolution scans and a lot of the scans were already they were, they had already made him when I started the project, so we didn't even need to scan that much. We needed to scan a bunch of stuff again and some new things, but it wasn't like everything had to be photographed anew because he had already done it years ago. So it was fortuitous. And really there's other people who were doing this for sure, but he was kind of the main guy who kind of made the archive this for sure, but he was kind of the main guy who kind of made the archive.
19:07 - Aaron (Host)
I think the first first time that I was ever exposed to like collector level pages was zane keezy and and zane's website in the late 90s early aughts like it. He had this like plethora of stuff and you could order pages from him and I think we still have some.
19:31 - Mel (Host)
Yeah, around here somewhere I have a couple in my room.
19:34 - Aaron (Host)
That's really the first time I ever saw it and I and I was astounded, thinking first of all, the art is beautiful on a lot of these things, and why not keep that art around and preserve it instead of people just eating it and making it disappear like yeah is. Is there anything that you found out as you were writing the book that really surprised you?
20:00 - Erik (Guest)
Wow, there's so many things that I just didn't know about in terms of actually kind of surprising me. I mean, I'm always impressed to discover how high the doses were back in the day. One of the first kind of mechanized methods of laying out blotter was from the late 1960s, with a chemist and blotter maker named Eric Ghost, and he was some friends, and one of them may have actually worked for MIT, no-transcript, but each drop like a little drop on a tiny card that's like as big as a business card each drop was a thousand mics. Holy shit. So you were, you were expected to at least take your scissors out and carefully cut these tiny little dots into quarters to get 250 mic doses which is still holy.
21:20
You're still going way more right, yeah.
21:22
I mean that's an interesting thing too. That's really. Is that one of the funny things about writing about acid is that it's not like other drug markets. It has its own culture and in many ways its own distribution networks and its own manufacturers. So a lot of people who are making the acid that's all they do and they make acid, and some of them have been deep underground and continuous. Some labs have been there for a very long time. So there's this, and very few of the actual core labs have gotten busted over the years. There have been a couple of really famous busts, but a lot of it's not.
22:04
You know, it's a weird little market and then it gets distributed through this strange kind of parallel of other drug markets that doesn't really overlap. There's not a lot of organized crime. There's not a lot of like overlap with cocaine networks and other things like that. They're kind of separate in a lot of ways. I mean on a street level less so, but like at the higher level.
22:23
So it's just a funny world to kind of um, you know, try to try to, you know describe, or even kind of you know shape, and so it, the blotter, has kind of this wacky character because it doesn't. You know it's not really clear what it does, right, you know it's like. It's like. Do you need any? Do you need to have pictures on the no pieces of paper to sell them? No, in fact, some people prefer them to be blank, both some manufacturers and distributors and some consumers prefer blank blotters, so you don't need them. So it's all art or mediation or goofiness or playfulness or a brand or whatever, all these different ways of thinking about it. And one interesting thing though, about like the. This was I'd heard rumors of this but I didn't. But it really seems to be the case. At least it's a consistent part of the lore that in the late 1970s lore that in the late 1970s.
23:26
So one of the things that happens in the late 70s is that other formulations of lsd, usually in tablets, press pills, begin to decline and it's in the late 1970s that blotter emerges as the most the dominant medium. There's a lot of reasons for that. People speculate, but one thing that happened is that, as that's happening and as acid in a way throughout the 70s just gets spread farther and wider through subcultures and youth scenes and art scenes and everything, there was kind of a general agreement among the families, so multiple families with their own distribution networks to say let's lower the dose. So the standard dose of a single hit in the mid 1970s was about 250 mics, that same amount that we were talking about. Orange Sunshine was 300 mics. That was a little strong, but 250 was kind of a standard. And then in the late 70s they said no, we're going to bring it down to 100.
24:25
And it actually changed the mathematics that organized the number of rows and columns on a sheet, because you wanted to make it easy to handle, like. So you wanted it to work according to a gram. But you had to change the math because each hit is now less micrograms, right, so. So just the fact that this is an industry where, like, the competitors would get together and kind of do something that's really sane probably saved a lot of people's brain noodles.
24:54
You know that was a good move the kids in high school taking 100 if they wanted more, they just take more yes but that the standard unit was like more reasonable.
25:07
Uh, was it, you know, kind of a brilliant move. I also want to see something you said about being a punk rock kid and eating acid. That's one of the stories. I don't go into it too deeply but mark himself was a, was really in the punk scene in san francisco. He like helped edit, search and destroy. He was friends with v veil. He knew he was just part of the punk scene and the. You know the. The relationship between punk and hardcore and lsd is really complicated and there's kind of a generic memory, pop culture memories like oh, the punks, they didn't like the hippies, acid was hippie shit, they were into speed or whatever you know. And yet and that was true and my impression is actually that that some scenes local scenes, city-based scenes were not very psychedelic and others were totally psychedelic like super, very, very, very psychedelic Vegas was one of those.
26:04
I have a friend from Detroit. He's like no, no, no man. This was like that was part of what it was about. And there are other scenes that were more straight edge or they weren't into the hippie shit. So it's kind of it reminds us how different scenes had different characteristics back in the day. But the punk rock acid connection is really important to the story because, as you, as you noted, a lot of the blotter didn't really get going until the early 80s. So it's in those years punk rock, industrial music, goth music, new wave, for christ's sakes, you know, not hippie stuff, except for the grateful dead which they're continuing to do their thing, but in other ways there's all these other subcultures that people are taking acid and it was reflected in the imagery. So you got bob dobbs, you got these like mirth. You know mischievous clowns. You, you zippy the pinhead, like this is not.
26:58
You know peace and love hippie shit, it's more like weird, and so there's a weird punk, dada, snarky, funny sensibility in a lot of the blotters that reflects this really important non-hippie current of acid culture that we don't mostly think about because we just associate it with the 60s well, I you could.
27:21 - Aaron (Host)
You could look at bands like the Butthole Surfers or the Flaming.
27:24
Lips and those two bands to me are the perfect representation of the crossover of acid culture and punk rock. That's what you get when you cross those two things. But what I saw as a kid growing up then is when the scene itself started to explore psychedel psychedelics. The people inside the scene started to change, inevitably fascinating for the most part I mean not everybody, of course, but like the edges got a lot softer pretty damn fast, and I think it speaks to what you're talking about. As far as the distribution network goes, I have to believe that the I don't even know what you would call it like the vibratory field of being around that much Like if you're a distributor and you have quantity, there's a force with that.
28:28 - Erik (Guest)
That's, that's real, that that's no joke and that stuff it doesn't lend itself it's like being around diamonds yes, and it doesn't feel like been around like a pile of diamonds oh my god, it's like, that's like, that's some shit and it doesn't feel like been around like a pile of diamonds.
28:43 - Aaron (Host)
Oh, my God, it's like, that's like that's some shit and it doesn't lend itself to cocaine and whiskey. It just doesn't. That field kind of pushes that out, and the people that are taking the risk, time and using their talent to do that have obviously figured out that that thing is important to get out. So they've seen from the inside what it is. So I think that's why that adversarial nature doesn't exist as much at the, at the level you're talking about that.
29:18 - Erik (Guest)
that there's more cooperation at least that's my thought.
29:21 - Aaron (Host)
Yeah, I think they both go on, I that there's more cooperation At least that's my thought.
29:22 - Erik (Guest)
Yeah, I think they both go on. I mean, there's definitely competition and backstabbing and you know drug, drug, druggy business, but there's also this other, more playful, utopian kind of current that runs through it, or or or at least, as I said, like plate, playful and mischievous. I mean that's part of the other weird thing about, unusual thing about the acid distribution that that has an impact on the blotter is that in the 1980s and especially in the late 80s, in the early 90s, the distribution mechanism for lsd in america was grateful dead tour, so tour, I know it you know, and it wasn't just on the street level, like it wasn't just that you could go to the parking lot and you find someone and then all they could get by a sheet and bring it back to your high school or whatever, like that's of course going on.
30:15
Or, you know, do it that night or whatever. But on the upper level is that the higher level people would use the kind of goofy weirdness of Grateful Dead Tour as almost like a kind of shield labyrinth of mirrors to do really high level business. So you had people like dealing with crystal in the rooms and you know laying out tons of sheets and like. So it became kind of part and so it has some of that carnivalesque Grateful Dead tour, crazy playful, goofy weirdness going on. That kind of it kind of informs the whole, the whole, you know, economy of the thing, which is just part of the flavor that it's got just part of the, the flavor that it's got.
31:05 - Mel (Host)
I mean, this is just going to be your own opinion, but do you think that that could have happened without the grateful dead, that level of distribution and even interest, and that's a great question.
31:15 - Erik (Guest)
That is a great question, I would say, if there was not another band that was kind of functioning like the Grateful Dead and in the 1980s. I think it's pretty easy to imagine that there wouldn't have been Like if the Dead hadn't been there. It's not like there would have been a fish in 1982 popping up. It might just not have really have happened. There might be like the Allman Brothers or this or that, but it wasn't going to have that quality, and so I can imagine that actually it would have been a fundamentally different, certainly in the 80s and maybe through the early 90s, without the debt, because it really did become, you know, a kind of marriage of convenience and shared sensibility.
32:00
And of course, it was a weird, uh, confusing moment when jerry died, because it was like what's gonna happen now? And in a way it's not really accidental that you see the sort of emergence of larger festivals in the late 90s and you got like the further tour. You know there's a whole relationship between like where does the energy of the dead tour go? Yes, and how does it like create a larger jam bandy world that is capable of being a place for other things to continue to happen? Because it was. It was confusing for a lot of people. It caused a rupture it was.
32:40 - Aaron (Host)
It was. Yeah, it did put a wrinkle in things.
32:44 - Apple (Host)
It was confusing enough that we both took a long hiatus yeah, from from everything. Yeah 95. It was kind of like, oh, what do we do now? And it was a while, yeah, that just didn't again the grateful dead is.
32:56 - Mel (Host)
So I mean, they're so specific, you know, they're their own thing. And yeah, now there's, of course, tons and tons of grateful dead tribute bands and like there's fish and there's there's a culture behind touring with bands, but that I don't know that that was really as popular or as maybe full as when the grateful dead did it, and it seems as if there's a lot of economy and just a lot of different artistry and things that have were born out of that that really couldn't have been born out of anything else other than that or something so adjacent, you know that's interesting thought.
33:35 - Erik (Guest)
I think you could. You know, and this is just kind of guessing like I'd feel, like I'd want to talk to my friend, jesse Jarno, who wrote the wonderful book heads, which is a history of psychedelic America not not the famous name so much as the scenes, including the dead. Is that you, in a way, the like, the way that the dead, you know, helped produce like a taping culture, like this technical taping culture that didn't exist in any other, yeah, world, um, and you know, uh, you know, so they had that whole kind of, you know, economy that they, that their existence allowed the acid industry, and even blotter, to develop in a certain way that it wouldn't have otherwise, you know, would have been there, would have been available, but it, it flavored it, it twisted it in a in a certain way, I suspect yeah, because even like the like the um steely or tie-dye I mean maybe that I mean in the 60s that was popular, but it really seemed as if that it just it couldn't have lasted.
34:42 - Aaron (Host)
I should that's a better way of saying it the thing that we haven't brought up is the cia was very, at least from what I understand. Who knows if anything's true anymore? Um but the cia was actively involved in in assisting getting lsd trade going, isn't. Isn't that what you understand?
35:02 - Erik (Guest)
I would say that that's. I would say it's a. It's a complicated question, okay, um, you know that the cia you can find the greasy fingers of intelligence agencies running throughout the story, because part of what their modus operandi was, was to, or is to some degree is, uh, to fuck with shit so it's not like it's not like they're sitting there at the top corporate office of the cia and it's like a top-down pyramid where the decisions are made up top and they go let's distribute lsd to all the hippies.
35:41
That's not how it works. It's a much more distributed, anarchic organization where there's lots of little bands that are kind of doing their own thing and they kind of report to someone, but it's not really clear, but part of their job is to just go around and fuck with shit because they're the CIA, right, and they're gathering information and it's this whole kind of it's like a weird theater. So in that world, absolutely, things were, were going on, were they actively supplying their stories about? You know, where did the czech lsd that floods the scene come in in the late 60s? You know there's definitely stuff and you can go down those those um paths.
36:18
My personal feeling is that when I look at people who are trying to actually do it in a historically rigorous way, most of the evidence that I would want to see I don't really quite see. And I and I and there's a tendency to kind of create this big oh, the CIA is doing it and the whole psychedelic movement is a creation of the CIA and they're doing it to do this certain purposes, like that's not. That's not how history works, according in in my sense of it and I say that as somebody who's studied history like I just don't think it works that way. It's more.
36:49
History is much, messier ambiguous competing factors and within an organization, there's this left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and it's it's not that there's not you know evil. That's happening and certainly mk ultra was like seriously evil and they were, they were and presumably are doing some version of that. They kind of have to because their enemies might be doing it. So that's just part of the logic. Um, so yeah, so it's it gets. It gets weird, you know it gets weird when you start thinking about, uh, you know how, what all these really you know kind of relationships are, but you know I also think it's like the dead were just kind of doing what they could get away with yeah, no, I, I don't think there was.
37:32 - Aaron (Host)
Uh, as far as the dead were concerned, they were just. Jerry said it a lot of times.
37:37
They're just following the fun and just trying to keep keep things going but there's also rumors of them even being involved and all that stuff, but like oh yeah, no, but he'd be in group, sure yeah, um, but if, if that was the case and it was, you know some thing where they're like let's distribute lsd to the hippies and see what, if we can fuck them up. Well, you guys blew it because cat's out of the bag and that that experiment is fucked or is ongoing well done.
38:10 - Apple (Host)
Yeah, or it was the one cool dude in the cia that was like oh, I'm gonna have fun.
38:16 - Mel (Host)
Eric, what's your relationship to the Grateful Dead? Like your?
38:21 - Erik (Guest)
personal one. Oh yeah, I mean, I saw them the first time, I think, in Ventura County Fairgrounds in 1984. So I went to. I was never like a full tour ahead, but I'd see them whenever I could, when I was around, wherever I was around. So I saw I don't know, I probably saw him 50, 60 times.
38:44 - Aaron (Host)
I wasn't a full two-year-old but I saw him like 50 times man.
38:48 - Erik (Guest)
Yeah, I get it Well over the day. You know, I had a good decade in front of me there and yeah. So no, I was definitely into it, you know. Yeah, I could talk about the Grateful Dead for a long time and about psychedelics and psychedelic religion and all that kind of stuff. I think it's really interesting. But you know, I'm looking at the stele on your wall there and that was a fun thing that I realized is that the 13-point bull is acid. Like I never quite figured that out. I just thought it was like whatever, like a cool symbol or da-da-da. But if you go back it's like why did Ousey call it white lightning? So he brews up a batch in early 1967 because it's going to be the human being in San Francisco. So they.
39:40
And one of the things about acid also that's interesting is that sometimes batches are whipped up for a particular event, like they, like a rock poster. It's like you got the little, oh, we're going to print them up and we're going to print these up and these are going to go into this thing. So owsley's doing that, makes a batch early 67. It's going to be the, and what's he going to call it? He's already got a. You know, he's got blue cheer, he's already got some other names mother's milk and he sees the rick griffin poster for the bn and the indian is holding these lightning bolts. He goes okay, white lightning.
40:26
And so the lightning bolt becomes this weird kind of like masonic symbol in a way for the acid. And so you see that get played out in a lot of the blotters. So there's like different kind of uses of the lightning ball and it just makes no sense. So whenever I see the stele now I have this different sense of it, which is that it's not as flat to me anymore. Now it looks it's a little more, it's got more depth because it's got like kind of a secret on the surface. And when you say you're like, okay, sure, it's a skull on acid, what's the big deal? But you're like, no, it's it, it's, it's a little more magical because of the way that that symbol kind of functions well and you can see it if you think about the multitude of psychedelic imprint that has been placed on that symbol over years.
41:19 - Aaron (Host)
There's power in that thing people putting, pouring their tripping mind into a symbol. I mean, that's isn't that how, like the mother languages work, like with sanskrit and hebrew, and that, like those shapes have intention and will poured into them over centuries?
41:39 - Erik (Guest)
and then those things yeah, that's why it's so cool that they they didn't overly attempt to control the, the image, at least for a long time, and so people could do modifications and parodies, satires you know, you've seen them stealing these with everything. Instead of the lightning bolt, you know, it's like a black panther from the black panther party, or it's like san francisco giants or whatever. Like you can twist it in all these different ways. So it's like it's the. The symbol has a lot of intensity and power, but it's also kind of like distributed and playful too, like it's not all just focused on that one. Oh, it's this symbol, we're controlling it. You can only use it in this way.
42:20 - Aaron (Host)
So it's it's part of the fun of the whole thing I kind of always saw it as a instead of a bolt, as a crack, and it's an open mind yeah, I've seen that too.
42:31 - Erik (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've had that thought too.
42:33 - Aaron (Host)
That's great um, you know, in sitting down to write a book about the history of blotter, you can't separate that from the drug itself, and you mentioned something earlier that I'm really curious about that. I don't know the answer to why did we switch from pills to blotter?
42:58 - Erik (Guest)
Yeah, that's an interesting one, I think you know there's different attempts to account for it. One of the popular ones is that there's less weight with blotter than there is with pills, and so the carrier weight laws are less draconian. It's a good story, but it doesn't really line up with the dates, because those carrier weight laws come in a little bit later than blotters already succeeded. So I think it has to do with the convenience factor. You don't need a pill press machine. You can actually kind of you just need your silkscreen. Oh, I got a silkscreen machine. Or you go, you have a friend who works at the copy shop and you just go and use the offset printer and you know, like it, the, the gear is less kind of dodgy. And I also just think that there's something fun about the medium that people were like yeah, this is kind of fun.
44:00
It's like putting out a comic book or you know making stamps, like it's just, it's just a little more fun and it's just really easy to get around the world too. You know, like you know, I talked to somebody, a blotter maker, um, in in the in amsterdam, who made a lot of really well-known pieces in the kind of late, late 80s, but mostly in the 1990s, beautiful pieces, very different kind of quality, very European in a way, and he talked about they just sent them all over the world. He had a person who knew how to bind books and he, they would, just you know, make a gap in the cardboard of a cover of a book and, just you know, put in 10 sheets, boom, all over the world, world, you know.
44:42 - Mel (Host)
So it's like uh, uh sorry, eric, that thumbs down wasn't for you and then did it again.
44:48 - Erik (Guest)
You said, that's so weird, I know, they're just it's.
44:52 - Apple (Host)
It's the, the imps, yes, the gremlins on the on the back of that question too, I'm curious because it made me think about it in the mid 80s, all sudden too, and it seemed like it came from a different source. When we started getting we got window pane and stuff for a little bit it was like there were smaller sheets and it was the gel which in las vegas in the summertime, the gel we ended up getting like a little too much than we meant to take by handling it and it getting gooey, but it wasn't around for long. Do you know anything about that? And it seemed like different stuff.
45:35 - Erik (Guest)
Yeah, that format starts in the early 70s and we know the crew that did it. Like one of them you know there's a book about him he actually became a Zen monk later on. It's a fascinating story. And so, yeah, they were. They wanted to make really high quality LSD and they wanted to put it in a distinctive format and they figured out you could do this kind of gelatin form and there were multiple people who did gel.
46:00
You know gel forms and you know there were pyramids who did gel. You know gel forms and you know there were pyramids and micro dots which are kind of related in terms of the material, a little bit different feel to the, to the kind of squares of window paint, and then they would just come in periodically, like I remember the batch that came through in the early 1980s and it was just there for a spell and not there anymore and I'm not really sure if that reflected like ongoing production or people were sitting on a load of it or how you know kind of how that worked and people are doing it today too. I mean there's a lot of like classic formats that people are kind of interested in today. So like there's a lot of, there's a lot of gelatins, um, in different forms. Uh, that are are out there yeah, that's another medium.
46:43 - Aaron (Host)
I've seen some running around. I can't remember his name Roshi, damn it, I'm blanking on his name.
46:58 - Erik (Guest)
He took an entire like crystal himself, and this is the guy that became a Zen Buddhist monkhist monk.
47:08 - Aaron (Host)
Later on down the line, dennis kelly, dennis kelly, that's it, and that's the family that started the gel.
47:14 - Erik (Guest)
Yeah, whoa yeah, I didn't know that dennis kept. Yeah, dennis kelly was part of the original crew and I think they were. They were around north beach and I think it's in the very end of the original crew and I think they were. They were around north beach and I think it's in the very end of the 60s, very early of the 70s and they were partly because part of the problem was that people dissociated the the press pills by the early 70s with kind of bunk like there's a lot of bad acid, you know. Oh, it had strychnine in it or it was made shitty or whatever.
47:39
And so there there was a lot of adulterants in some of the pills. Some of the pills weren't very good. So there was a general sense the pills were kind of low quality and at the time coming out with a different kind of format where the whole branding was like this is clear, it's clean, clear, light window paint, so it's got a different format. So they went kind of high end but it worked. So they were very successful and it was also part of when people did blotter. It was also like seen sometimes as being higher quality because it wasn't just the normal pills. Later on people would start to go, yeah, but you're handling it with your hands and it kind of breaks it down. It's not the ideal format, probably, but handled, you know, it's as good as anything probably you know, then then that's where it kind of came along to it.
48:30 - Apple (Host)
That was that early 90s when we got, when we got the connection, who was a very strange person that lived down in la from that to got our first like you know, the food coloring bottle of liquid and it was like, oh, it was like the holy grail when he came back from LA I have liquid well, I mean, that way you know what you're getting.
48:53 - Aaron (Host)
And yeah, for the most part, you know I.
48:55 - Erik (Guest)
But I'm glad you mentioned food coloring because that's one of the great stories of acid media lore. And it's not lore because I mean it definitely happened. Tim Scully confirms it, owsley talks about it. So Owsley made a batch of crystal and he divided up the same batch and he used different food coloring on the piles, made a bunch of press bills. They hit the street, street and in some time, whatever, weeks, a couple months, whatever, they get different reps Like the green ones make you really peaceful, the red ones are super spiritual, like they begin to get different associations and people think they kind of function differently. But it's the same crystal. And that raises this really interesting question because remember, right Set and setting people, the mind frame, the expectations you have, the narratives, the hopes, the fears and the environment you're in are actively contributing to the nature of your experience. Well, that's true, the format that the drug comes in is part of that environment.
50:09
You know, if I take a big old pink pill, that's different than a little square with, like bart simpson's slingshot on it versus you know, pure water in a, in a, in a, an eyedropper that I just put in my hand, like those are different environments that have different kind of implications, but it's hard to say exactly what they are, you know. So blotter is also funny that way. It's like does it make a difference? Does it make a difference if you take a UFO piece? Maybe you're opening up the portal to the UFO, you're going to have more likely to have a close encounter with your experience, maybe I don't know. Yeah, who's to say, it'd be hard to test it, but it makes a certain sense, given set and setting, given the role that the mind plays in telling a story. So the food coloring experiment is a really good, uh, example of the placebo, of the dimension, of, of psychedelics, of lsd and that's really cool too.
51:12 - Apple (Host)
Like the scene created these out of it. Like like green could have been at a dead show and the blues? That's really cool too. Like the scene created these out of it. Like like green could have been at a dead show and the blue could.
51:19 - Mel (Host)
That's a trip well and like what about like color therapy is, you know, taking a green one as and then a blue one. You in your own mind, or just the. The vibratory color has an effect, like you said, of of that set and setting. So you take a blue one and you're like, oh my God, you know, I'm going to outer space, yeah, whatever.
51:42 - Apple (Host)
And like the orange sunshine. That just has a moniker about it. It always has.
51:47 - Erik (Guest)
Well, there's such a great brand, but I mean just to take a moment and just appreciate what a great brand name that is.
51:53 - Apple (Host)
I mean it's just the best.
51:56 - Erik (Guest)
It's like bubblegum and endless summer and it's just so much bound up in that one.
52:05 - Aaron (Host)
Yeah, how did you enjoy it at Fair Apple?
52:09 - Apple (Host)
I don't know Was that?
52:09 - Aaron (Host)
orange sunshine.
52:11 - Mel (Host)
Okay, I knew it was something owsley, eric, I'm just curious like how did you you know you clearly are a scholar phd how did you get interested in this stuff, like it seems kind of opposite I never.
52:30 - Erik (Guest)
I never stopped being interested in it. You never stopped. So I went through my whole like I was all you know like being a deadhead acid head teenager in Southern California was a very important part of my life that in some ways I never grew up from, like as I went forward and then, you know, got a degree and then became a freelance writer. I was just always still kind of like ref kind of into that domain. So I wrote about psychedelic culture in the 90s. I wrote about taking drugs. You know I when, when it wasn't cool, like now it's the coolest thing. Now it's so cool it's boring but like it was not cool.
53:06
It was not cool to be like hi, I'm a, I'm a, you know I'm a journalist and I'm gonna talk about drugs's like whoa dude watch that shit.
53:15
Take it easy, buddy. So I was always interested in it and, you know, interested in a lot of different kind of stuff. So you know it stayed with me. So when, like, I finally decided to do a PhD, I went to a. My degree is in religious studies but I went to a department that had a open enough idea about what religion was that I could write about psychedelics and weird underground stuff in California in the 70s and have it count Like a lot of places I'd go and they'd say, no man, it's got to be a real religion, like Catholicism or you know, santeria or whatever.
53:55
Even Santeria would be kind of weird. Like you can't just like write about drugs. But I went to a place that I was supported in being able to do that because I really wanted to do a project. It's not even just about drugs, it's really just about what do we do when we have, like experiences that are so far beyond the norm we don't know where to put them and if we try to make too much meaning out of them, we'll probably go crazy or go down a rabbit hole. But at the same time it's like you've been changed and you don't really know what to do with that, and so I I write about that problem with, like Terrence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K Dick, who wasn't a psychedelic person he only took psychedelics a few times, but he was kind of naturally trippy in his brain and he had these really far-out experiences. So it's not just about drugs, it's also just about what do we do with these really extreme, weird experiences?
54:48 - Apple (Host)
Yeah, I want to explore One of the first things. First, I was going to say thank you for your involvement in it. When Aaron said he was going to reach out to you, I immediately you know we start to look. So I was like this is one of the guys that was involved in the glitch in the matrix. That then that's another avenue of just exploring the world and that that's a fascinating that. I love the animation, like everything about that. I I immediately was like, okay, I'm, I found I found it streaming, was like, okay, I need to watch this again.
55:17 - Erik (Guest)
It's been a little bit of time and that is amazing well yeah yeah, no, I mean, I've been interested in technology too and you know, in a way drugs are kind of like internal technologies in a weird way, especially something like lsd.
55:30
It's very media, it's very tech, it's very modern. You know it's a modern drug. It's it's a modern drug. It's not from the jungle, it's not from the mountains of Oaxaca, it's from a chemical lab in the middle of Europe. So it's got a different sort of set of spirits associated with it that have, in a way, more to do with our modern world.
55:51
That's partly why the question of the spooks is so absolutely central to lsd. It's like to the lsd world to enter into the walk through the door into the lsd world. Your walk, you, you're agreeing to wrestle with spooks. It's part of the picture, you can't avoid it, it's part of the thing. However, you end up landing, whereas you can go and like, go down. You know I'm going to do an ayahuasca path and I'm going to go down to peru and I'm studying with a master and I'm, you know, doing the whole thing. Now you might, you know, go through all sorts of crazy wild places and paranoias and all kind of stuff.
56:30
But it's got a different flavor because from the get-go, acid belonged to the system first. So it belonged to corporations, psychiatrists, intelligence agency. You know that's. You know the people who are. You know that's the people who are like, what are we going to do with this stuff? And some of them were good people, some of them were not good people, but that's.
56:57
And then it kind of leaks out of that and goes broad and into psychology and hipsters and bohemians and people in Hollywood. And then it goes in the 60s and it becomes this mass kind of thing and so it carries its own set of vibes to it and and some of that that I think is actually really positive and interesting and some of it adds a kind of coloring to the drug. Like I, I've talked to younger people who are like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not interested in lsd, it's, it's too, it's too cia. You know, I'd rather do organic, you I want to do mushrooms or whatever. And I'm like well, I kind of see why you would think that I mean whatever. So it has its own kind of story because it's sort of more like a technology or a new media that gets developed inside the West, inside capitalism, inside media culture, and that's why it makes sense that it has kind of its own media, like none of the other drugs get that no, you know you know the acid gets media where it's like there's a clown on it.
58:06
Why is there a clown on my drug?
58:08 - Aaron (Host)
I don't know I felt like it.
58:11 - Mel (Host)
Well, the last thing I just wanted to ask about is alembic, and is that kind of like your way of like bleeding the two together, or your, your seva, or your help, or like I'm wondering where, like how did that?
58:28 - Erik (Guest)
that's a really good question. Yeah, so the alembic is is a kind of we still haven't come out with a great way of describing it, because it's a eclectic operation, but let's call it a sort of a center of meditation and visionary culture. Meditation, movement and visionary culture, motivation, lots of movement stuff, but also a lot of attention to psychedelic wisdom and um, especially currents and ideas that we think will help the situation. I mean, you mentioned seva and you know one of the things that's happening right now is the world's insane. Everyone's going crazy. There's drugs everywhere. Everyone's going for it like it's not, like it's like.
59:13
Yeah I can do technology, ai and tons of you know whatever ayahuasca and and the you know breath work and it's just you know, everything is just going off, yeah, so it's very, very confusing for people and so what?
59:28 - Apple (Host)
we're trying to do yeah, it's exciting.
59:31 - Erik (Guest)
it's an exciting, weird, confusing, and so what we're trying to do is create some sense-making in that space and give people tools that help them kind of navigate and also to chill out or balance and not get loopy, because psychedelics, it's very easy to start, believe in your own narrative, fall into a narrative, fall into an idea that you're special, um magical thinking, coincidences start taking over your life and you know the thing about coincidences or synchronicities. You guys gotta remember. Like a couple, synchronicities are awesome, usually funny, life affirming there's a deeper plan, I feel like that, but you start getting them like that. That's psychosis. You do not want synchronicities coming like that.
01:00:22 - Mel (Host)
Oh my gosh, I never even thought of it like that.
01:00:25 - Erik (Guest)
No, that's like, but that you know. So it's a it's like a little bit of an edgy situation we're in. So I think it's also real important for those of us who are, you know, in the space of creating media and creating ideas to, like you know, take on the weird possibilities but also be extra careful of like kind of keeping your feet on the ground and remembering there's always that morning after, and the morning after is just as enlightening as the peak the night before. It's like they're both part of the picture and it's about a practice over time, whereas a lot of, I think, younger people especially, they see the peak and they're like that's it, I want to go back there. Or like now I realize I'm the one and I see, and here's how it's all working, and they go online, they go on Instagram and then they have followers and it's like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, like, that's not.
01:01:20
You know, there's a lot of that, so it's it's a very weird time, and so the Alembic is our attempt in a real place, you know, in a physical place, where people have to go. We have some stuff online and we have a YouTube stream and things like that, but we're not really putting our energy there right now. It's really like can we create, get people out of their little holes back into spaces with each other and work on practices and approaches and ideas and community that can sort of provide a little bit more grounding for people in a context to be able to let them navigate what's pretty confusing, you know. I mean especially, I think, for younger people.
01:01:54 - Aaron (Host)
For everybody. Yeah, it's well.
01:01:58 - Erik (Guest)
But when we're older we're like, yeah, we can, but we can kind of ride. Yeah, it's true.
01:02:02 - Mel (Host)
We got our.
01:02:02 - Erik (Guest)
We got our inheritance and we're kind of riding it and way back there there's some of it is this kind of like grounded analog. You know, you're, you were in Vegas. Vegas wasn't LA, it wasn't Detroit, it was Vegas. It was in a place and you had the culture and the local people and you figured out how to. You had to do this to get to know these people and you lucked out over here and that whole kind of world and like people now there's no, that doesn't really exist. So it's all signals and messages and big. You know patterns of information and you know polarization and mean warfare and it's just so ungrounding. So I kind of feel like grizzled old analog dogs, like the four of us. You know we have a it's not like we have an edge. We're just as confused. In some ways we're even more handicapped because we're like what what are you talking about?
01:02:58
yes, but uh, but there's also kind of a sense of continuity that sometimes you can, you can access.
01:03:05 - Mel (Host)
That I think other other people find challenging yeah, I mean thanks for that question, though I appreciate it yeah, I, because I was reading the write-up on it, um, and first of, it's beautiful. I love what you wrote about it on on the website, but it's, it seems like it's needed, but like, what exactly is it and why? And that's kind of what I was.
01:03:28 - Erik (Guest)
It was a great question. I have a feeling if we could answer that in one sentence it would be too limiting.
01:03:37 - Mel (Host)
Oh, a hundred percent, a hundred percent.
01:03:41 - Erik (Guest)
Sometimes we call it a mind-body center, which is like an old kind of 70s 80s term, and we're all like, yeah, that's not right. It's hard to name it because we don't really have things like that. It's definitely not a religion.
01:03:55 - Aaron (Host)
Why don't you just call it a lighthouse there?
01:03:57 - Apple (Host)
you go.
01:03:57 - Mel (Host)
It's a place to come and hang out. Yeah, exactly, it's a lighthouse.
01:04:00 - Aaron (Host)
We don't want you to crash on the rocks, man, just come hang out over here.
01:04:04 - Mel (Host)
It's a grounding pad.
01:04:05 - Aaron (Host)
I really never thought I would see the day when people would be saying oh, yeah, I microdose lsd to be more productive at my corporate job. That to me is like bizarre bizarro world personified outward a million times, and that that kind of shit is confusing to me because but you know, but it's.
01:04:34 - Erik (Guest)
But it's there too, though, like if you go back and you go, okay, where where's the grateful dead coming from and where are the, where's the, the acid tests and the in the, in the merry pranksters coming from?
01:04:47
They're coming from palo alto, they're coming from the peninsula, right in california in the mid-19. Well, that same world includes, like Stanford Research Institute, it includes these other kind of institutes of people, including this fellow named Myron Stolaroff, who's a cool guy, worked for Ampex, worked in Silicon Valley as an executive, was interested in LSD, and what some of these people were interested in back in the 60s was like, hey, can this help people do their jobs better? Can this help architects imagine, but not in a like it gets me through the day or I'm able to be a better you know employee. It's more like the big picture, like, can acid help you actually design, you know, a complex system of architectural system, actually design you know a complex system of architectural system? Or can it help you come up with new molecular forms or help you design better computer chips, or, you know, can it basically enhance that kind of innovation, can acid fuel innovation? And that idea is already in Silicon Valley in the 1960s, at the same time that the counterculture is exploding.
01:05:58 - Aaron (Host)
So it was far from only the counterculture and I think that speaks back to what he was saying a while ago is that the molecule itself comes from inside the machine.
01:06:09 - Mel (Host)
Yeah.
01:06:10 - Erik (Guest)
So it lends itself to that it has its, it's a very it's a. It's a trickster.
01:06:17 - Mel (Host)
Eric, you are an excellent teacher.
01:06:21 - Aaron (Host)
Yeah, man.
01:06:21 - Mel (Host)
You are a super fun person to talk to and I just appreciate all the research that you've done into like topics that I've loved my whole life, but again they're not like out in the front Now. You said it earlier Now it's annoying and boring, almost like we've talked about that ad nauseum, about like remember when it was fun to smoke weed, you know. But now, but like I just want to like say thank you, like honestly that I really feel like you are doing a huge boon to the culture, not just counterculture, but to our culture, because we're part of that culture. So and it's grown so it's kind of not counter anymore.
01:07:03 - Erik (Guest)
So I just want to thank you for that. Well, I really appreciate you saying that. That. I really that's. That's meaningful to me. Thank you for for saying that it's kind and I appreciate it. Yeah, it's been. It's been a lot of fun too. It's been. Uh, you know, I've been doing it for a long time and it's so. It's funny at this, at this eric, where everything is so different, um, you know, to to share, to share some of this stuff. Uh, it's important.
01:07:27 - Apple (Host)
Yeah, I think I think I can speak for the three of us too. We're just scratching the surface of Eric.
01:07:34 - Aaron (Host)
Oh yeah, we would love Amy.
01:07:37 - Apple (Host)
it would be cool to check back in with you every once in a while, whenever you have something else going on or just to hang out and talk.
01:07:44 - Mel (Host)
I would love to talk to you. I would love to specifically talk about religion too. That's another thing, that we've all been very interested in and we didn't even talk.
01:07:52 - Erik (Guest)
talk about that because we wanted to maintain the blotter but that would be super cool to be able to pick your brain on that. Yeah, no, it's been really fun chatting, so I appreciate it. It's been great. Thank you, eric, hey for everybody listening.
01:08:06 - Aaron (Host)
If you want to get eric's book, um, I am going to put a link to that in the show notes and a link to Alembic as well.
01:08:17 - Erik (Guest)
Also, I have a sub stack. It's not very frequent, it's a couple times a month. It's called Burning Shore and you know. So I've written about the dead a couple times on there. A bunch of stuff, kind of psychedelic culture, stuff from a California perspective, and so that's burningshorecom. Okay. So it's a good way to keep up with what I'm doing too right on thanks, man.
01:08:42 - Aaron (Host)
We appreciate your time, brother.
01:08:43 - Mel (Host)
Thank you all right, thanks a lot thank you, have a good night you too bye.
01:08:50 - Aaron (Host)
Oh see, I knew, I just knew it. I knew it when it when I heard him on Greg's show that it was going to be dope.
01:08:58 - Apple (Host)
Yeah, yeah, very instantly.
01:09:00 - Mel (Host)
Listen, our booker is pretty incredible.
01:09:02 - Apple (Host)
Okay, we just scratched the surface of Blotter and stuff. There's so many other books he's written and things he's done.
01:09:10 - Aaron (Host)
I want to talk to him about Robert Anton Wilson for like seven hours.
01:09:14 - Apple (Host)
And Aleister Crowley.
01:09:16 - Aaron (Host)
Hey you want to come hang out at the no simple roadhouse. Eric, you have an invitation, yeah open, open invitation.
01:09:21 - Apple (Host)
We'll make you dinner yeah, we love to host yeah, um yeah, go, go check out this book it is, it is, uh, it is called blotter.
01:09:34 - Mel (Host)
The untold story of of an Acid Medium by. Eric Davis with a K.
01:09:39 - Aaron (Host)
Eric, but the story is now told.
01:09:41 - Mel (Host)
Yeah, it's told, but kind of In a lore, mystical kind of a way with as much truth as we can find.
01:09:49 - Aaron (Host)
I'm going to say something controversial right now, and two of you are going to give me shit for it.
01:09:54 - Erik (Guest)
But I'm going to say it anyway.
01:09:56 - Aaron (Host)
That was my favorite interview that we've done in a while. Not that the other ones sucked and I didn't like them. Is that controversial? We?
01:10:03 - Apple (Host)
decided the other day, we're allowed to have opinions.
01:10:06 - Erik (Guest)
We're allowed to have opinions on.
01:10:07 - Apple (Host)
No Supplemental Role you said it you can't give me shit for that.
01:10:12 - Mel (Host)
Why would we give you shit?
01:10:18 - Apple (Host)
I meant that, dude, you're dumb. Why would you say that everybody? We've got so much cool other people staring at you, bug-eyed, with another episode of no simple road.
01:10:26 - Aaron (Host)
Well, wait a minute, or maybe not, let's just say it nice rocky oh no this um what I, what I was gonna say is.
01:10:34 - Mel (Host)
This was super important to all of us because we've been in the quote unquote counterculture for most of our marriage, most of your life, and to be able to speak not only candidly but intelligently and with facts and also just also your memory about what happened, what's happening, that's it's really helpful, like it's internally helpful mentally internally helpful well, and and to sometimes talking to phds and that ilk can be a little overwhelming or intimidating, and that was the antithesis of either of those things.
01:11:20 - Apple (Host)
No, from the first sentence, he spoke immediately felt comfortable. Yeah, like oh.
01:11:26 - Mel (Host)
I'm sure he can roll the other way too. Oh yeah, I should have rolled the other way on some stuff, yeah.
01:11:31 - Aaron (Host)
But we're not doing that over here, okay.
01:11:35 - Apple (Host)
We'll be back on Monday.
01:11:35 - Aaron (Host)
We'll be back on another episode with him and until that time, at such, when our voices come through your ear pods or whatever they're coming out of, could you take care of each other, smile at a stranger and safety. Third, hydrate and make sure that you test all of your stuff before you put it in your body test before you ingest, before you put it in your body Test before you ingest.
01:11:57 - Mel (Host)
If you enjoyed this episode, send Eric some love. Email him. Let him know that you enjoyed this, because it's always nice to tell people that you appreciate him.
01:12:07 - Apple (Host)
This is true, and check out everything Eric has done. Eric has done a lot. All right, there it is we love you all Peace.