So this is the second in a little California Toofur series.

This is the first time in a while that the world is in California, and it's all about the politics of California and the politics of the Bay Area.

And this is more about the culture of it and the culture of its weirdness, and what emerges if you're willing to take that seriously.

Something about Northern California culture, in particular, is it is this very strange braiding of technology, and engineering, and capitalism, and mysticism, and openness, a radical kind of openness.

And all that is created, the technology industry, it is creating AI now, which is obviously going to be a major topic of this conversation with Eric Davis.

And to take California seriously, and to understand what makes it special, and what makes it frustrating, and why what happens here happens here, I think you have to take the weird, quite seriously.

And Eric Davis is a guy who takes a weird, quite seriously. He is a historian of California, and he's trained as a religious historian.

He's written books like Technosis and High Weirdness, and he's tried to make weirdness into interpretive framework, and to understand the role it plays in this place that he loves and chronicles.

And I found his work, it is very weird, but I find his work very, very helpful.

And trying to understand how to maintain an openness without losing a skepticism is a really important talent, a really important discipline, a really important practice.

But I think this is actually pretty helpful for understanding why so much strange and so much powerful technology comes out of such a small area of the globe, as always my email, as we're clenchot.com, at mytimes.com.

Eric Davis, welcome to the show.

It's great to be here. For a lot of your career, a lot of your older books, I understand this part of what you've been doing as being a theorist of California culture.

And then the last book, and I think threaded through a lot of your more recent work, is becoming a theorist of this idea of weird or weirdness.

And they seem very connected. So what is the word weird? What is the concept weird in your understanding?

And what makes California weird?

Yeah, that's a really good one. Yeah, one of the things I was doing with my decision to make the word weird mean more, which some people have already been doing for a while, but there's sort of a sense that it has something for us now that it didn't have before.

And one dimension of that is simply that there's more substance to it than we allow.

And one way of looking at that is that if you pay attention to how people use the term colloquially, what kinds of things they put in that category, you start to realize that it does a lot of work, but sort of off to the side.

It's a place you put things that are uncomfortable, awkward, strange, maybe a little gross kind of fascinating, spooky.

It covers a strange range of things. And I realized that there was a lot hidden there. So I said, well, let's actually kind of look at this word. Where does it come from? How does it evolve? What are the concepts associated with it?

And you go back to Shakespeare with the weird sisters, you find there's this whole marvelous sort of underground history of how the ideas of fate merge with ideas of the uncanny and the spooky and then increasingly the bizarre and the pulp and the perverse and the macabre.

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