Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 423: Hamilton Morris

Episode Date: February 13, 2021

Hamilton Morris, creator of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia and a true luminary in the psychedelic universe, re-joins the DTFH! Click here to check out all 3 seasons of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia. Hamilton is also republishing Ken Nelson's classic psychedelic pamphlet, Bufo Alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert. Click here to get your copy! If you want to support Hamilton's amazing works please contribute to his Patreon! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: ExpressVPN - Visit expressVPN.com/duncan and get an extra 3 months FREE when you buy a 1 year package. Athletic Greens - Visit AthleticGreens.com/Duncan for a FREE 1 year supply of vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase! Babbel - Sign up for a 3-month subscription with promo code DUNCAN to get an extra 3 months FREE!

You've been making better decisions for your busy family for years and now little by little you're making decisions for yourself like snacking a little better, going a little further, sleeping a little deeper and we're here to make that journey easier and even more rewarding with Acme's new Sincerely Health Platform featuring nutrition plans, prescription reminders, and more. So sign up in the Acme mobile app to earn up to $25 in grocery rewards. Visit acmemarkets.com slash health for more details. Hamilton Morris, a true luminary in the psychedelic universe who has created an amazing series called Hamilton's Pharmacopia. For those of you familiar with it, you probably

are aware that he now has a third season which is available on Amazon and if you haven't had the good fortune to see it yet, you'll be thrilled to hear that it's as far as I'm considered the best season yet. He's so funny and so brilliant and so good at capturing different facets of psychedelic culture and also sort of shotgunning just random interesting facts throughout every single episode. And on top of that, the show has insane production quality. It's just a beautiful show. It's got amazing animation. It's got just they spend a lot of time on their setups and their lighting and all of it just combines to make it a beautiful gift to the planet and I'm not just saying that because he took an hour and a half out of what I'm sure is his very busy schedule

because on top of being a TV personality, a producer and a writer, he is also a working chemist which is incredible to think about the fact that he's a TV star who probably also knows how to make LSD. Does that make him the coolest person on earth? Definitely makes him one of them and he's here with us today. We're going to jump right into this episode but first, some quick business. A tremendous thank you to Express VPN, the great liberators of the internet for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. My loves, you might not be aware of this but there are many shows that you can't see. Express VPN actually lets you change your online location so you can control where you want sites to think you're located and it is weirdly empowering. I

don't know why it makes me feel so gleeful but it does. There's a real feeling like holy shit this is incredible. My Google is now in German. I just like it but even better you will have access to all kinds of shows that you normally can't watch. It works with any streaming service Hulu, BBC, iPlayer, YouTube and the best thing about Express VPN is it's easy and it works. There's no complicated install. You just install it, run it, choose where you want to be and you're there plus it's fast. You can stream in HD, no problem, no buffering or lag and it's compatible with all your devices. Phones, laptops, media, consoles, smart TV and more. Not only does it let you change your location it also encrypts your data and lets you surf the web safely

and anonymously. In these days that's important. Go to ExpressVPN.com slash Duncan to get an extra three months of Express VPN for free. That's expressvpn.com slash Duncan. Thanks Express VPN. And now an excerpt from The Way of the Bodhisattva by Shanti Deva. Drop into our hands. Tigers, lions, elephants and bears, snakes and every hostile foe. Those who guard the prisoners in hell, ghosts and ghouls and every evil wraith. By simple binding of this mind alone all these things are likewise bound. By simple taming of this mind alone all these things are likewise tamed. For all anxiety and fear and pain in boundless quantity their source and wellspring is the mind itself. That's Way of the Bodhisattva. It was translated by

the Dalai Lama and read by Wolston Fletcher. It's available on Audible. You should definitely listen to it not just because the narrator sounds like a character out of demon souls but also because it presents a variety of compelling arguments for the possibility that the you that you think you are is not you at all. And that's what I always loved about LSD. That's what I always loved about psychedelics was that moment where the identity is annihilated by the tsunami of the psychedelic and somewhere in that annihilation an entire new universe appears as though whatever the you you thought you were was actually some kind of blindfold that the universe was wearing. And the Way of the Bodhisattva has a lot of chapters that you might find useful. If you're

somebody like me and you have anger problems, if you're tormented by anger it's got an entire chapter on how to deal with that, on the antidote for anger which is patience and also just because I love horror movies and I love the Hellraiser movies it's got some amazingly vivid descriptions of the hell realms. And it mentions more than once the janitors of hell which is an interesting idea. Like I had no idea hell had janitors but I guess it would need somebody would have to be there to like clean up the blood and mop up the sizzling guts. Speaking of sizzling guts I would like to invite you to head over to patreon.com forward slash DTFH and a big thank you to all the people who have recently subscribed to the Patreon. Because I'm doing a kind of paternity

leave you have not experienced the full glory of the DTFH Patreon which you will begin to experience again next week. Starting Monday I'll be back to guiding our weekly group meditation journey into boredom and on Friday we'll resume our Friday family gatherings and then starting again in March will be our book club we have yet to pick that title. But if you want to jump into the DTFH community, if you want piles of glorious, fragrant, vivid, beautiful, powerful, slightly pungent content all you got to do is go to patreon.com forward slash DTFH not only will you have access to commercial free episodes of the DTFH but if you stick around long enough you will get exclusive merchandise a beautiful mug a sticker an incredible t-shirt go check us out it's at

patreon.com forward slash DTFH friends we've got a wonderful podcast for you today returning to the DTFH the host of Hamilton's Pharmacopia welcome Hamilton Morris Hamilton welcome back to the DTFH it's so great to hear your voice thanks for having me I always love talking with you and I really am grateful to you for the uh sending me all the episodes of season three of Hamilton's Pharmacopia now available on Amazon what was the service it was on prior to Amazon Hulu it's you know it's a hard show for people to find it's very frustrating for me the majority of the messages that I get are from people trying to figure out how to watch it um yeah it's and I can't help people in that way because I don't

even know it depends on where you are the easiest way if you're in the US is to just watch it on Amazon you can also buy it for I think two dollars an episode on YouTube and people have been uh have been like pirating it and putting it on YouTube which I think is great like I just want people to watch it the only issue is the people that pirate it do a terrible job and cut out pieces and like splice in soccer games and do things to get over whatever copyright bots so that all right just on the level of people not seeing the entire episode I really discourage people from watching those pirated ones uh but it's also on iTunes I hope it'll be on Hulu at some point I have no idea when no one will tell me um and it's on TV as well

for people that I don't have a TV but I guess if you have a TV it's uh available on vice TV and in some cable packages not to start off with a pretty mundane technical question but are you producing these yourself or who's who's who are you making these with yeah I mean I am the writer and director of the show and I make it with a small closely knit group of people who help with every facet of the editing and the photography and the sound mix and the color correction and things like that but it's it's made by a very small number of people um considering and and doing this over the pandemic as well was you know like a really bizarre filmmaking exercise but uh but yeah this is it is something I'm doing myself sometimes people

I think people are actually right now very confused by how things are made like yes like they are very detached from the act of creation and so they often attribute creative agency to corporations they're like yeah they're like why did vice make this or what like why did vice do this it's like vice is a logo vice doesn't exist why are you getting angry at a logo or why are you praising a logo like these are not like they're human beings that create these things and their names are in the credits but then on top of that I feel all these streaming services like Netflix and Amazon they actually cut the credits out of a lot of episodes now which I think exacerbates this problem of people not even being aware of the act of creation they don't

on some level even think about what it means to make something I just well listen I want to praise whatever logo or non-logo has you know been part of making this show because it is so good the animation is amazing the you know some people who maybe haven't seen Hamilton's Pharmacopia you might think that it's uh monolithic in subject matter it's that it's just about drugs or something it isn't it's it's like a shotgun scattering of fascinating facts and it's just so you you've done such a good job editing it it just looks so pretty so thanks for making it I love it yeah thank you and the reason I even bring up this credit thing which I understand may sound like a weird pedantic note to begin the conversation with is because yeah it was insanely difficult to make

and I I can't name all of the people that were involved but their names are in the credits and it was a real labor of love to do it I mean this was not a job for many of the people I had to work for or I chose to work for you know four months unpaid to get it done and it's because a lot of the people were just very passionate about the subject matter and getting these stories told a big thanks to athletic greens for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH do you have vitamin friends you know I'm talking about like the friends who take 9 000 different vitamins every single day one of my friends takes so many vitamins that once they actually threw up out the window of the car in the morning because they had not eaten food with their

vitamins the point is if you're like me you don't have time to sort through a million endless pills what's going on you're not nurse ratchet you're not running some kind of vitamin psychiatric ward for yourself you just want to be healthy you're not running an apothecary in your own house what are you gonna do get a mortar and pestle next start wearing one of those stork masks this is the genius of athletic greens it's a superfood it contains 75 vitamins minerals and whole food sourced ingredients including a multi vitamin multi mineral probiotic a green superfood blend and much more and all works together to fill the nutritional gaps in your diet increase your energy and focus and aid with digestion and it supports a healthy immune system

all without the need to take multiple products and have that embarrassing vitamin display not only that but they have a wonderful vitamin d tincture and during the winter months vitamin d is something you must certainly need especially these days athletic greens right now athletic greens is doubling down on supporting your immune system during the winter months they're offering my dear audience a free one year supply of this vitamin d tincture and five free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit my link today simply visit athletic greens dot com forward slash dunk it and join health experts athletes and health conscious go-getters and podcasters around the world who make a daily commitment to their health every day

again simply visit athletic greens dot com forward slash dunking and get your free year supply of vitamin d and five free travel packs today thanks athletic greens you know i have a kind of sentimental feeling when it comes to shows with the subject matter of hamilton's pharmacopia specifically psychoactive substances which is that anytime a show revolving around that subject is against it i i mean instant hate of the thing because it's embarrassing to watch it feels like some kind of you know throw back to the war on drugs but when it's pro the subject matter um and it's made poorly then you get that effect of like well i mean they're whatever

stoners or acid heads or they're people who are psychonauts or whatever you want to call it and because of that their show sucks so anytime you get like a kind of the a great show meeting something that is not anti uh psychoactive substances i think it benefits everybody because it shows yeah you can i mean you're there's an the opening of the xenon gas episode you are inhaling you're inhaling a balloon of a gas that i'd only vaguely heard of and had no idea it was psychoactive incredible do you ever feel like you're putting yourself in danger doing this no and i think that's it that is sort of an interesting question is there's often at least in terms of the consumption of the psychoactive substances there's often this idea

that it's very dangerous there are very dangerous things that happen in the show but the consumption of the psychoactive drugs is not one of them i would say um you know they're they're maybe in the xenon clinic there were some things that were questionable i mean that's a whole long story i don't know like it's a bit of a tangent we can get into that but um but you know the the consumption itself is often something that's done very carefully because you know i think for so long people have associated drug use with self-destruction like they consider even people that enjoy drugs even people that are in favor of drugs that think that they should be legal that think they should be researched many of those people still on some level believe that the use of a psychoactive drug

is self-destructive and i think that one of the major things that i i try to communicate is it doesn't need to be that way and you can use these things in a way that is not only not destructive but constructive it actually will help you it will make you better than you were and and i think that that's uh an important lesson of course not all use is like that and it requires an enormous amount of discipline and research and care in order to achieve the best effect from these experiences but i think it's just important to keep that in mind that um this is not something that people need to be ashamed of or think is inherently bad for any reason i love psychoactive substances they have uh been a huge benefit in various parts of my life but hamilton i cannot

get the effect of growing up during the war on drugs out of my head there's always some underlying sense of doing something wrong of you know uh that this is somehow uh getting off the track of what a life should be and these are things that i passionately love can you do you have that in you at all yes or did you have oh i do absolutely i think and i don't think it's even just the war on drugs i think that it's also capitalism and also it's not an entirely unreasonable idea to have because we are taught that well not even just taught we live in a capitalist society for better or worse where productivity is prized above all else and anything that interferes with productivity is not good in our society regardless of how it makes you feel so right

you know my own i would say that the thing that i struggle with the most is cannabis i without question enjoy smoking it but i have never been able to fully overcome a sort of shame or guilt associated with using it and for that reason i use it infrequently because no matter how much i enjoy it no matter how beneficial or relaxing it is for me i still can't entirely shake this sense that it would be better if i were sober reading it would be better if i were studying it would be better if i were writing is this really oh is it truly permissible for me just to feel good and just relax and have a conversation or watch a movie yeah that's it i i think we're hopefully some of the last generations

to be poisoned in that way and i'm hoping that might by the time my kids are old enough to you know safely use any of these substances that the propaganda mechanism will have worn down and will have the data available to show that it's beneficial but yeah wow so i guess that's just something we're gonna have to deal with for the rest of our lives and it impacts the experience itself i mean people often think of the placebo effect is something that exists entirely independently from the pharmacological action of drugs but the sense of those drugs that we have impacts the experience so if you grow up in a culture that says using lsd is therapeutic and beneficial and may actually make you a better person you can be sure that that user will have a better lsd experience

than someone who calls it acid conceptualizes the experience as frying their brain calls the experience frying thinks that it's a poison of some kind i mean even even if you're having the best experience of your life if that's in the background you can't fully enjoy it in the same way that i can't you know i could eat the most delicious meal from mcdonald's in the world but i am still thinking about it as a like unethical poisonous material regardless of what it actually is you know i haven't you know done deep personal research into the nutritional value of fast food but my intuitive sense of it is that it's bad and should be avoided and so regardless i could you know maybe someone could sneak an extra healthy ethically raised piece of meat into my mcdonald's

hamburger with like a carefully baked bun but i would still feel ashamed eating it because of this sense that it is bad and should be avoided yep i can't do it i i can't pull off i can't have a happy meal like no matter what's happening i'm always disgusted with myself if i'm eating mcdonald's matter how good it tastes bonjour ça va in case you don't speak perfect french that's me saying hello how are you doing using the words that i've learned from babel the number one selling language learning app i've always wanted to learn another language and i love paris i love the catacombs i love the cemeteries i love the wine i love the food i love it and as soon as this pandemic is over

i'm going there with my family and i want to reveal to them out of the blue that i can speak french they don't know i'm studying french but babel has made the whole process addictively fun and easy with bite-sized lessons that you'll actually use in the real world babel's 15 minute lessons make it the perfect way to learn a new language on the go i just take my lessons at my computer in my studio unlike the infamous language classes you took in high school babel designs their courses with practical real-world conversations in mind things you'll get to use in everyday life other language learning apps use ai for their lesson plans but babel lessons were created by over a hundred language experts their teaching method has been scientifically

proven to be effective with babel you can choose from 14 different languages including spanish french italian and german plus babel's speech recognition technology helps you to improve your pronunciation and accent start your new language learning journey today with babel it's awesome if you're interested in learning a new language it's very addictive it's very fun and i would i give them a massive recommendation not just because they're sponsoring this episode it actually works right now when you purchase a three-month babel subscription you'll get an additional three months for free that's six months for the price of three just go to babel.com use promo code duncan that's b a bb el.com code duncan for an extra three months free babel language for life

come to paris with me let's learn french thank you babel so i was thinking about what the questions i have for you now that you're three seasons in to this incredible show uh and i know that you're a person who is is constantly researching and like you get literally into the atomic depths of these substances in the way they affect our consciousness and i've been loosely following some of the research that's happening currently regarding implanting memories in creatures and the the implications of that to me are wonderful on one level in the sense of learning and expediting certain kinds of training or god it goes on and on uh but on another level it's the first time i've really sort of had an inner

shutter like a eldest huxley sense of like oh my god is is this the next wave of psychedelics uh that we're gonna have memories implanted and removed meaning that this entire war on drugs problem theoretically could somehow be pharmaceutically softened or altered anyway the the question is if you and i'm sorry i know this is a terrible thing to ask people especially in these days of technological acceleration but do you have any uh prognostications regarding what types of psychedelics might be in our future yes um the the final episode of my show aired last night and it profiled a brilliant pharmacologist named brian roth are you have you heard his name before i have not he's a really interesting guy and he's one of these scientists who has done a lot of work that

if you didn't know better you'd think it was science fiction um he was crucial in developing a technology called dread d r e a d d that stands for designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs and his idea was you know in traditional pharmacology one of the most important goals is to develop drugs that are selective for one receptor and only one receptor because when you look at a drug like ibogaine or dmt or mescaline or many of the drugs that people are aware of they often are promiscuous in their binding they have activity at a variety of different receptors and it makes it hard to study the causal relationship pharmacologically because if a drug is acting on several different receptors how do you know what receptor is responsible for what

physiological neurological effect so if you can come up with a drug that is exclusively binding to one receptor it's a very useful pharmacological tool but it's hard i mean there are people that spend their entire careers trying to develop a drug that exclusively binds to the serotonin 2a receptor the serotonin 2b receptor or so on and so forth what what are those receptors responsible for um one is considered the primary site of psychedelic action that's the serotonin 2a receptor the 2b receptor is considered an undesirable target of some drugs that causes uh excessive growth of heart valves actually so but anyway so this guy brian roth his idea was okay what if we sidestep this entire issue and instead of trying to develop high selectivity drugs we

develop high selectivity receptors receptors in a brain that exclusively are activated by one drug and only one drug and we reverse engineer the basically reverse engineer the brain for the drug instead of the drug for the brain whoa yeah and that and this is not and this is something he has actually done that scientists are currently using i it's not an entire brain of neurons it's one receptor but this is the the idea so there are these amazing things that are being done and then he's he's taken that a step further where if you know the molecular structure of a receptor you know every amino acid residue and how it is three-dimensionally arranged you can then based on the charge of those residues and their shape you can

and using ai generate artificial drugs and bind those artificial drugs to the artificial receptor so you're doing basic pharmacology research but it's entirely in silico there's no actual proteins and there's no actual drugs you're just docking virtual drugs onto a virtual receptor but because you don't have to go to the trouble of synthesizing a drug or isolating a receptor protein you can look at the pharmacology of 10 million drugs a day so using this technology he has and he hasn't published it for two a yet but he claims to have developed entirely new scaffolds for psychedelics that is you know traditionally the psychedelics are fallen to a couple of structural classes urgolines tryptomines phenethylamines but

hypothetically they could have totally different structures that haven't been discovered yet so he's using computers to discover new drugs on a virtual receptor and uh and you know that's that's one of these things it's just you know what is that going to do in the future who knows but it's very exciting and i think we are on the precipice of a lot of great discoveries this matches one of nick bostrom's predictions for how a superintelligence might come to the planet which is some interaction with an ai and um some kind of uh genetic shift in like the human nervous system to increase amplify whatever type of intelligence you want to amplify so that is wild to think about but just to jump back for a second you said in silico as in it's it's

okay so that's that means just it's just happening in a computer it's uh it's like the what they're doing with protein folding right now but with psychoactive chemicals yeah whoa that is wild this is this this is one of the much like i mean even though every you know people are talking about a ai is being the future there just can never be enough emphasis on how it how it's going to transform culture but the addition of ai interacting with the genetic engineering of the human brain do you mean so you're saying there's the possibility of having a open brain surgery or how would you change your own brain in in a way that it would become receptive or a receptor to these artificial chemicals nobody has done that yet but i think hypothetically you would probably inject a virus

into the brain that would cause a transcriptional change that would cause the uh the receptors to produce these new designer proteins so what you're talking about there is also like a nightmare bioweapon which is a virus that causes a change in the human brain that pairs with a chemical weapon that induces states of consciousness i mean yes there there are certainly potentially nefarious uses for this technology assuming that it could even work that way i mean that's that's a problem with a lot of these things like the uh you know implantation of memories in a snail or um dread technology being used as a weapon or things like that uh is that often it's just hard it's much harder to do these things than people realize you know on one hand you have the nickbostrums

of the world that are talking about super intelligence and then on the other hand you have an iphone in 2021 that can't autocorrect i am to i apostrophe n right but you know we you know but just thinking in terms of uh uh like steam engines to the bullet trains in japan you know and the span of time between them is uh you know based on universal time not that long at all but in human time what is it's like almost a lifetime between those two uh transformations into technology but still this thing even if it is 50 30 years into the future it's we're talking about a kind of apocalypse i mean sometimes i think about the amount of um the amount of time that gets put into anyone getting good at anything and how the

compression of that time is going to create uh genius like we've never seen before mixed in with a kind of terrible hubris you know it the there's some humiliation that has to happen in any path towards learning something it it fucks with your ego enough that hopefully by the time you get good at anything you have some humility but remove that gap of time via some pharmacological technology and suddenly we're gonna have a planet filled with these hyper talented beings that never have encountered the learning curve i i don't mean to get too like weird and into the and i don't know why i'm getting so negative with you hamilton but do you know what i mean that these all i'm saying is uh when we think about on the horizon of history uh what's coming our way

it is so bizarre to imagine that we are potentially 10 years 15 years away from consuming a substance that transforms the way that we see uh we see ourselves by implanting memories that are healthy memories or even analyzing past memories and correcting them enough that they no longer that we're not beating ourselves up anymore do you ever like worry about that the that there is some potential for a dystopian pharmacological future for our species i mean i think we're we're already in a dystopian pharmacological future i so i think um you know i think that there's a lot of room for improvement where we currently are you know there's some enormous percentage of the american population taking ssri antidepressants i think it's something

like 15 percent of american women something close to that seems like it's a lot more in new york it's in new york it seems like it's a solid third of women that i meet take ssri's and i of course understand that for some people it's beneficial i'm not gonna sit say that no one should use ssri's i don't think that but i think that very few people that use ssri's are extremely happy about it you know i i don't it's very rare for me to meet someone who says yeah i take prozac and i love it it's fantastic i'm so happy that prozac entered my life i am so grateful for prozac i want to take it forever it's been the best thing that ever happened to me it's usually a kind of begrudging well it's better than the way i was before it's a necessary evil um and you know i think that

we can do better i think we can do a lot better and i have hope for that in terms of dystopian futures of implanted memories i don't know you know it's it's very easy to look at the headlines of these articles and then and not look at what's actually being done and what's actually being done it's like you know they're doing some it's not a memory in the sense that you or i think of a memory it's some like extremely minimal impulse and a snail that uh that is very different from what we would call memory that's not to say that it's impossible it probably is possible and probably will occur at some point i imagine not in either of our lifetimes but uh but when it happens i hope that we are mature enough to use these things constructively

what are your thoughts regarding uh ketamine in the treatment of depression as compared to the ssri well yeah i mean related to what i was just saying you know there's a little bit of a crisis in psychiatry in that there have been so many years where we haven't had a dramatically new treatment for depression and i think the fda started to liberalize its criteria a little bit because actually the clinical data for ketamine were not all that impressive compared to placebo it wasn't it wasn't the at least in terms of the clinical trials that were done it was not a miracle cure for depression and really the only way that they were able to get it approved was by making it a fast-tracked breakthrough therapy for treatment resistant depression

which is justifiably considered a life-threatening disease like cancer and so there are special designations available for diseases that are life-threatening where they can liberalize the criteria slightly to allow new therapies to be introduced to the market for conditions that could really benefit from them and ketamine is a complicated one yeah the i haven't been following every new piece of clinical data that emerges but uh but it's it seems like it anecdotally does help a lot of people um i certainly also know people who haven't been helped and have been uh i think have been harmed by it and it's a i think that because it's a psychedelic it might require a different strategy than is typically used for antidepressants and one that

is not really part of our current medical framework because we're so used to this idea of an antidepressant is a drug that you take every day or in the case of ketamine i think typically every week or every second week and we're and we associate one off use of a psychoactive drug with non-medical recreational use but i do wonder if that type of strategy makes the most sense for ketamine i think it's funny the way that like so-called abuse or non-medical use is converging with medical orthodoxy where you know uh four years ago if you'd told a medical doctor i snort ketamine to treat my depression they would say you know that's irresponsible that's not the way that you use ketamine it's not okay to snort it you uh it's not a recognized antidepressant

now johnson and johnson sells a nasal spray of ketamine to treat depression um but you know in my own use of ketamine as an antidepressant which i haven't done in years but in 2018 i was i was very depressed and um used it three times that year and i think that the way that i used it was actually very beneficial which wasn't to use it as a daily antidepressant or a weekly antidepressant but to use it as a kind of one-off tool to break out of a ingrained thought pattern that was disrupting my functioning if you had to describe the k-hole how how would you talk about it what is that place ha ha uh i mean it's it's not it's not easy to describe and it's not easy to remember and it's not something that is analogous to anything in normal consciousness it's not analogous to a

dream it's maybe somewhat close to a waking sort of lucid type dream sometimes but even then it's hard to say it's it's a it seems like a very random um and it's a very random rearrangement of your consciousness that has elements that feel like what i imagine schizophrenia feels like um where there's a sort of grandiose sense of privileged understanding of the mechanism of the universe that other people don't appreciate yeah um or a privileged understanding of genetics and inheritance and genealogy and all these kinds of you start thinking about you know connecting wires of your life and your lineage and society in these very abstract weird ways that um if you describe them to another person it would sound like a sort of typical schizophrenic delusion um

and that i don't i don't know if that is the beneficial aspect of it i think what is really interesting about ketamine is that i think that when you're depressed and you've been depressed for a while you can get locked into a certain type of thinking that is pessimistic basically and one that has a very limited view of the world where you think this is this is who i am i'm this guy this is what i do this is what i'm good at this is what i'm bad at and i don't do these other things and i don't have any hope of doing those other things because this is who i am and and and what today was like is what tomorrow will be like and the day after and that's just my lot and when you take ketamine it can give you a delusional sense of possibility the aperture of possibility expands

dramatically and suddenly all of the restrictions that you once thought existed disintegrate and you can feel that okay oh i want to be a politician i guess i guess i'll be a politician then oh i i should write a novel tomorrow i guess i'll i'll be a movie star i'll be a medical doctor i'll be whatever and and if you're depressed that sounds delusional be a politician how on earth could i be a politician that makes no sense but then in that state you think why not well every politician had to begin with the thought i can be a politician so the first step of becoming a politician is to think that you can be a politician and so i actually think that that you know delusional or potentially delusional self-image can be very therapeutic for people that have a

overly restrictive view of themselves and what is possible because you do need you do need that moment of thinking i can do this in order to do something and so even if it is delusional that's the first step in expanding yourself when this becomes problematic is when you do it all the time because i think as a one-off thing every now and then it can be tremendously beneficial to expand the scope of possibility of yourself but if you're doing it all the time then you can just end up having a totally distorted self-image that is not therapeutic or beneficial in any way and that i think is is the is the both the therapeutic psychological component of ketamine and what makes it dangerous yeah it you know i it's so interesting to hear you say this because

i never considered that facet of it which is it's not like the cocaine confidence it's something entirely different it and for me artistically it was one of the most inspiring psychoactive substances i've ever encountered and it informed a lot of the show i made called the midnight gospel but i got addicted to it i had to fly i couldn't i got habituated to it ended up having to flush it down the toilet i you know it stopped working you know to me that that's the the main problem exactly what you're saying which is you know that it's you can't just live a life of thinking that you're enlightened or inspired you need to go through revision you know you need to go through the the work part too but that's interesting to hear you say that you know i the the delusional

part that this is and we've had this conversation before and i love how rational you are and and we need it and i love how logical you are and also i love how uh you know you you know how to create these things or you're an actual chemist uh which is which is incredible but i was just reading some you know i don't know a blog or something regarding people who are researching psychoactive chemicals currently and that if they if they announce that they've been using them then their research is kind of not looked upon in the same light or even worse if these people are using the chemicals that they're studying and having these experiences that are you know when i think of ketamine i think of buddhism i think of the dissolution of the identity and some kind of

experience of the gap between thoughts or something you know that's as far as i've gotten with it or a bardo state but i'm allowed to do that because i'm a podcaster i wonder if you could talk a little bit about any brushes you've had with what people would call the mystical and how your mind integrates that into into into your life yeah i mean i i think people often get confused when i say that i'm a materialist or that i don't believe in or that i'm not spiritual and i'm not saying that i don't have amazing experiences that i cannot describe i'm not saying that i live in some kind of you know sterile reality that is uh free of any astonishment it's all i'm saying is that i don't feel the need to invoke the supernatural to explain things i'm also not saying that i feel

those things are at this time sufficiently explained by science it's really just my way of saying of trying to communicate that sometimes there is no explanation and and i would prefer not to use the supernatural to explain things that way um but there are all kinds of you know back to the ketamine example i mean i remember um the last time i used it maybe three three years ago i believe um i had this sort of immersive vision of myself at the telluride mushroom festival and it was this very boring memory it was it was you know it's strange to simultaneously uh have this you know basically an out of body experience where you're dropped into a memory that you thought you'd forgotten that is so immersive it feels like reality but that is also

a boring memory not it's not a memory of you know some kind of extremely important moment in your life it's totally mundane or so it seemed and i came out of it and i thought wow that was so mundane just a memory of myself walking down a road in telluride colorado after going mushroom hunting why would i even think of that and then the more i thought about it it started to sort of unfold and the importance of it started to become apparent emotionally and i thought how is that even possible how is it possible that by antagonizing this protein in my brain i relive a memory so boring that even i don't recognize its significance at the time that i'm experiencing it or re-experiencing it and then subsequently i'm able to recognize that it

carried some kind of implicit message that was valuable to me like you know these are very strange experiences it's very strange and uh and how you know how how like for you know if i use DMT one thing that's totally remarkable to me is how good the things that i think are like they are so good that i am puzzled by how good they are like you know the importance of love the importance of kindness the importance of generosity the importance of gratitude where why why on earth would diamethyl tryptamine binding to this subtype of serotonin receptor cause me to suddenly feel these extremely positive values of all things you know you could think it could just as easily be that i like salty foods or you know that like i need a new couch or like whatever

but instead it's like love your family one day they'll be gone you know like how does that happen i don't know science has not explained it i don't think spirituality explains it either i think it's unknown and i would i would love to to learn even the smallest morsel of how that comes to be well you know i'm i've gotten so into meditation lately and i've gotten so into buddhism lately that the best spiritual explanation i have for it and forgive me any anyone listening who disagrees or is a buddhist or i'm totally wrong because yeah i'm just going jogging in the woods and listening to like audible buddhist books but there's an idea in buddhism that humans are fundamentally good that's a controversial idea but that's the idea that that sort of the that

everything else everything a human does that involves hurting other people is of just an ignorance of what we really are which is sort of an interconnected matrix of energy that doesn't have any uh lasting or um integral self and uh somehow the the there's a reality that that's just you know for lack of a better word and is a lazy thing to call it just good i'm sure there's some Tibetan word that would make more sense so the answer could be if we're looking at it from a spiritual lens that these substances are kind of you know wiping off the windshield or something enough that the what you actually are starts coming out and that you know maybe gets sort of animated or you know configured based on the substance itself but it's the reason that's the

message these things seem to keep giving us isn't necessarily that it's the substance that has encoded in it compassion but that we're fundamentally compassionate that's just my current thinking on it but who knows yeah no i agree i agree that the substance does not contain information it's not the substance um and i would hope that you're right that we're fundamentally compassionate i mean that would that would really be good if that's what's behind it all inside each of us yeah i mean yes that that is well it's good but then also it's i think the the beautiful thing about i mean it is good but the the beautiful thing about like i'm reading i'm getting into these super obscure buddhist scriptures and they're wild man they're wild

but it's so on anilatory on one level you know so much of like a human suffering and i think this answers the ketamine depression question to some degree it's like so much of us our suffering is just what you were saying we're all wound up in our self and our bodies you know or it's and it's a bummer when you get to a certain age your body starts hurting you look weirder and weirder every year and so at least i do not maybe not you actually you look great man but like you know what i mean so a disassociative it like sort of temporarily takes off this thing or at least loosens it a little bit that we call our identity which if you really think about it it's really interesting that you know whatever that thing is is really just what we tend to pull out of the environment

and notice you know and so maybe there's just in just in suddenly no longer pulling out the same constant you know aspects of reality that we've become habituated to pulling out you know maybe there's just some relief in suddenly seeing the world just as it is you know or a warped version of the world there's freedom in it yeah yeah and i think that that you know i don't know that this has ever been studied or even looked at very carefully but a very large number of people that i know who are transgender have also used a lot of ketamine and they have felt that ketamine was something that like helped them loosen the boundaries of their gender self-image and i think that that's another example of what i was talking about is you know

maybe maybe you're unhappy and every single day the reason that you're unhappy is you think oh it's because i'm a man or whatever and then you take ketamine and you realize oh i'm not anything i can be whatever i can be i can be a medical doctor and i can be a woman and i could be 50 other things if i want to i mean you know john lily toward the end i think it was it was sort of he was kind of an early adopter um but i'm under the impression that toward the end of yeah breast implants yeah yeah i i yes i i mean definitely that's i think one of the you know evolutionary qualities of of that particular drug and the reason that like when people take it uh some people dislike it because it has this sort of sci-fi quality to it you know it has a weird technological

aspect to it and that some people you know people like this sort of warm glow of mushrooms but sometimes with ketamine you go really go into the void and yeah i i think something in that melting down of the self it's not just yeah it's not just like suddenly you realize like holy shit there's no reason i can't become a a poet or a doctor or learn to fly an airplane or you know what it's also you realize like why am i so fixated on my gender being the thing you know why am i so fixated on inequality of myself you know being like who i am and that that makes it a very controversial substance in that regard but you know i want not i want to swing around for a moment just because uh and i'm sorry if this makes you feel uncomfortable but you are like in the psychedelic

universe you're a rock star man and i was like one of my favorite things that you do on twitter i love your social media presence but sometimes you'll like show someone's tattoo of like DMT or whatever they think it's DMT and you're like actually and then you'll say you'll say what it is it's some either like completely benign something or like aspirin or something like that but and i love that i love the way you interact with people in the psychedelic world but not to be scandalous i wonder if you could maybe tell a story of some weird interactions you must have had with people out there who are you know tweaking out and have decided that you're jesus oh i mean i have them on a daily basis i have them too frequently in fact and it's because

over the last couple months my show has been airing i'm getting you know 100 messages a day and there's a lot of really strange people out there as you know um and you know i've i've gotten the the full the full spectrum of of people you know someone telling me that they their girlfriend is pregnant with the second coming of jesus and what can they do how can i help spread awareness so that the world knows you know you get that sort of thing you get people to think they are jesus of course um you have um people that are convinced that various psychoactive substances are having some kind of like transhumanist ultra positive effect on them but they actually seem to be in the throes of one of these sorts of delusions that we've just described that's actually a pretty

a pretty common one and and that goes to show um how i think that actually represents one of the central problems with psychoactive drugs is you can think that they're helping you but that's very different from them helping you and i think that's actually one of the most important reasons to try to use them as infrequently as possible is it will aid that self-assessment because if you're constantly in the throes of it you can easily lose track of who you are and how you relate to who you used to be and where you're going so you know it's yeah it's yeah it's it's very tricky and i and hamilton when i told my wife i told my wife at one point after i'd like gotten out of the ketamine's grip i was like but you know what it was helping me make music and the look on her face

said everything she's like she's like you think it was helping you make music and then i went back and listened to some of the music i was making horrible horrible but in the midst of the haze i was in i was like this is cutting cutting edge and it was not so yeah i hear you may i've experienced it and it's like i'm lucky i it's just embarrassing you know but it can get much worse so i didn't even know this that this had happened with you maybe you've probably talked about this in past uh podcast so i don't know if it's something you want to rehash but i'm just sort of curious because i've actually been hearing about a lot of people especially over the pandemic who have gotten very seriously into

dissociatives um both ketamine and nitrous oxide i used to never hear about nitrous oxide addiction among just like you know my acquaintances and in the last few months i've casually heard people reference having to have multiple nitrous oxide interventions was this something that you were going through during the pandemic or is this more distant past it was it was in the past more but yeah it just it's classic addiction it just snuck up on me you know it's it started off just like what we were like it with a i was just excited because because it it to me it is a kind of visionary substance and wildly alien and it and it sort of checks all the boxes and what i love about psychedelics and also it's 45 minutes you know so you're not committing to uh six or eight

or 12 hour trip which is really delightful but then you know just it's nothing new just a classic story like it it stopped it wasn't even working anymore uh but i was doing it all the time all day long it was embarrassing i was getting that like i i've been addicted to a few things in my life uh i got physically addicted to benzos a long time ago when i was on a long comedy tour because i was taking him to go to sleep but then i also started taking him in the day and i was and i and i only had maybe a four week supply but i wasn't aware of how they can i wasn't quite aware of how they can get their hooks into you and so i just went it was a i went through withdrawals it was the most fucked up i got lucky it was just like 24 48 hours but uh and then the catamine it

was it was more nefarious and that it doesn't seem to be fit i don't it's not physically addictive but you get really like it's like cigarettes which are physically addicted you just i just got habituated and it wasn't working you know the last time i did it uh over over a year ago the last time i did it longer the last time i did it it took me like four and a half hours to do a commercial for my podcast and i just realized like you this is not only is this not inspiring you anymore but it's coming up your ability to create something you love creating so i i just got i was able to kick it i'm just lucky in that way that i can just flush a thing down the toilet and then it's over or you know not with it took a few flushes to be honest but yeah yeah but it's it's scary in

that way i think that's the big problem with it is that it's it is a treatment for depression it does it and i think i was using it to cope with like a lot of like my dad's and my mom passing and you know i think it was legitimately keeping me out of a long depressive episode but just like what you're saying you know it's you it's you can't isolate and do these things this is why i think you know when people talk about psychedelic therapy it seems like they forget that that involves a therapist you know it involves an expert who's there to be the person who can hopefully help you avoid all the sand traps that are out there when it comes to any of these substances i mean we all love bliss who can blame us right of course and i mean this is another one of the

complicated aspects of psychoactive drugs and addiction is sometimes someone who has no experience they'll look at a news report of somebody who's freaking out after having consumed so-called bath salts or spice or something like that and they think oh i never want to do that what would drive a person to do that why on earth would the person do that but what they're not recognizing is that was the worst time for that person but previously it was probably good that's why they were doing it it starts out good often and then there can be a slow change that occurs where you either stop responding to it or in addition to the good things there's a bad thing or it becomes entirely bad and tracking that is yeah something that a therapist or a friend

is really helpful for or i think the easiest way is just to try to do these things infrequently that way you can track yourself absolutely yeah absolutely and it's always better if you do it infrequently anyway that it just it's so much better to like i know that somewhere around the corner in a few years it's not like i won't do ketamine again but i also know that when i do it it'll be wonderful because it's been a long time in between and i think that you know that's a you know our whole way of looking at addiction seems somehow you know tainted by the prohibition i don't think people understand that there's a there's actually a way that these substances can be used with very infrequently and successfully and it doesn't mean that your whole life is going

to fall apart after that but i'm sure you must have had moments where you worry about the effect that your show is having i mean do you have that do you have some sense of like you look like you're a disciplined person you're able to modulate the way you use these substances but sometimes with my podcast and especially earlier episodes when i was i think very irresponsible in my bugling the benefits of psychedelics i worry that uh you know i wasn't cautionary enough and that i might have you know i don't know and even in a in a small way i would hate to think that i led someone into a place they couldn't get out of yeah um i think that i've been pretty good about specifying the dangerous aspects or if not i try to implicitly communicate that so sometimes

people will say hey man i watched your show and you showed this this person who they're a weird oh they do ketamine and they're weird that that's not gonna end prohibition you need to show silicon valley micro dosers who are using it to empower their high productivity career that's the way you change the narrative and uh and one reason that i include people who are weird or who have beliefs that maybe um you know from like a drug policy or advocacy perspective these beliefs would not be the ones that most people would want to elevate and say this is what happens when you use a drug but one reason in addition to just i like talking to weird people as you do as well uh yes and uh and so i'm not i'm not you know like making advertisements for psychedelics i'm making

documentaries about psychedelics and in doing that i want to show people who sometimes have strange beliefs partially because i find it interesting but partially to show yeah you know these things do open your mind and sometimes that's beneficial and sometimes that might promote a type of uh thinking that maybe is undesirable to you and this is what it looks like you know i got a lot of people criticized me for showing you know this this guy that smoked dmt and believed in pizza gate and uh you know saying how how could you possibly do that you're gonna undo any progress but you know if you only talk about johns hopkins university and academic research with psychedelics you're neglecting to acknowledge the reality of psychedelic drug use for many people so that's

that's the way i try to handle it is to show that you know just to show honestly how these things exist in society and let people draw their own conclusions so if you see somebody who's you know a strange artist living alone in the desert who has a lot of outlandish beliefs about angels and ufo's and dolphins who uses a lot of ketamine and you think love that episode and you think that's terrible well then there you go then you then you have uh but if you think that's fantastic then there you go as well you know that's that's kind of my my take on it and hell in love with that guy me too what was his name timothy wiley wow what a saint that guy was he had to me and maybe it was just the lighting he really seemed to have this ethereal glow about him like he really seemed

like a some kind of i don't know awakened being or something oh well you know he was like a spiritual leader uh you know the process church yeah he was you know big part of the process church he was behind the scenes in a lot of different things you know genesis purge yes yes like her transformation was because of timothy wiley wow yeah giving her ketamine and helping her like transform so he was he was part of a lot of different things and he was a really you know he was a true artist a true weirdo a true um independent strange thinker and i love that you know i think that i don't want a reality that is so sterile that people only talk about these things as you know psychiatric medications for treatment of disease i think

that they're useful for expanding thought in directions that are strange and artistic and poetic and weird why not you know it's yeah this is all beautiful and good and in the finale of my show last night um i profiled this woman amanda fielding who reminds me of timothy wiley in a lot of ways you know she's brilliant she's a truly heterodox thinker who has uh spent her life in this quixotic quest to demonstrate that trepanation is a medically valid procedure and and and well i don't think that trepanation is likely to be medically validated although i'd be happy to be wrong um i i think that part of it comes from a certain insecurity that many people have that they need medical validation when i see this as a sort of artistic

decision that she made a sort of body modification that is valid whether or not it has any impact on her consciousness as something symbolic is truly opening her head opening her mind you know i think that there's something amazing about that regardless of what physiological effect it may or may not have listen if you if anybody who has watched a documentary on trepanation and hasn't had at least the fleeting thought of like shit maybe i should try that that sounds awesome i think you're not looking into it deeply have trepanation is one of those things the problem with it is like how do you go back you know what if you're wrong but anytime i've seen these documentaries i would never be is it trepanated is that how you'd say it yeah we're

treponed i would never be treponed but come on aren't you curious about like what the effect is and this was it's not just like this is something body modification people are doing this was a like a cultural movement at one time right that this was something that was being practiced for centuries right like we're still finding skulls with that have been treponed oh yes it's one of the oldest known surgical procedures yeah it's some form of what what like neurological bloodletting or something like well what is the idea it relieves pressure on the brain or it enhances mystical states i haven't yet to see the finale so sorry if i'm making you repeat something that's no no and the finale actually doesn't even go into the science of it because i don't want to take a

public stance on trepanation you know for the record i i do not imagine that it has uh i don't predict that it has major therapeutic effects you know people routinely have holes drilled in their skulls for surgical procedures you know right craniotomy so it's it's not as if it's not done in the 21st century and it doesn't seem to uh have a major effect but you know and historically in these you know various artifacts that have been uncovered and these ancient skulls that have been treponed it makes a lot of intuitive sense if you have a headache well where's the pain it's in your head right so where are you gonna direct your medical intervention to the head you got to get out that demon that's in your head you're insane right there's something in your head

there's a problem in your head you got to get it out so it makes sense in this you know an intuitive understanding of the way the body works especially from a spiritual framework where you're attributing disease to malevolent spirits right yes oh yeah let me also emphasize i don't don't treponate yourself or your friends or anybody it's just a curious thing that has happened in the past also you know what was the anesthetic that they were using i mean maybe part of the you know experience in the past was the you know lack of any kind of anesthetic because we at least the ones we have access to now maybe there was some initiatory pain high that people are getting from it but do you you know this is to me what you know i i know you

get it now i'm hearing that you get it which is like the people who are very protective of what they see as some kind of you know flowering psychedelic renaissance what do they call it the third i don't know there's a name for the thing and i've forgotten what it is and their people are rightfully protective of it and i agree with you it does seem to me to be in right now maybe necessarily imbalanced towards the medical universe just so that it can get to the place where it can you know happily be used as a cultural amplifier stimulator and inspiring kind of something that could like you know shape movies and and art and things like that but the message i've gotten from people uh is more along the lines of we don't need any more tim you know gurus we don't need

any more psychedelic jesus's out there well you know what do you think is the the weird connection between psychedelics and the messianic thing that seems to like happen to people you know like inevitably someone emerges you get a person who's taken enough acid that they really believe they're the christ or the matreya or whatever an alien representative and weirdly they end up with a group of people following them around because uh you know there is some kind of actual gravity these people have but what are your thoughts on that do you do you have any thoughts on like the many psychedelic messiahs we've had in the past and certainly will have in the coming years well it depends on how you define messiah because if you're including timothy leary there i i think

timothy leary is very widely misunderstood you know the more i think about timothy leary the more i think of him as a comedian i really you know i think more than a psychologist more than a guru more than almost anything timothy leary was a comedian and he was someone who believed in psychedelics at a time when they were being attacked from every imaginable direction medically legally socially and he defended them and the psychedelic community does not appreciate what he did the sacrifices that he made he's you know routinely criticized people uh blame him for the end of psychedelic research i think a lot of what we have today is not something that exists in spite of timothy leary but because of timothy leary and um i don't really think he did anything

wrong at all i think that he was a victim of many many i mean he was he was facing life in prison he they were threatening to lobotomize him like can you imagine what he went through just because he was interested in lsd in cannabis no no no i can't and also let me clarify he i love him i've read uh much of his uh like writing and some of his obscure writing is is amazing the circuits of consciousness uh i really i really love him i could see though why he gets criticized i could see i mean they you know you want to scapegoat you know and he was i guess the loudest one that i could think of in in that movement tune in turn on drop out an invitation to sort of exit capitalism he would have these days he would have seemed like a almost like a square you know

he would he would have had a podcast would have seemed cool but in those days yeah he was a culture shatterer i could see both sides of it but do you know what i'm saying though like this is something i've noticed specifically with psychedelics which is that you will meet people who have uh transform themselves legitimately heal themselves people who have taken ayahuasca and uh have become peaceful and people who are just have a kind of sweetness to them that they report being related to a series of experiences they had in a psychedelic but weirdly you run into these like people who somehow the thing is making them into egomaniacs and it's one of the more confusing aspects of these drugs it's just a bizarre thing to witness these people and also because you know

that there's a i i i guess to reduce it to less than a messiah what are your thoughts on this thing or the self-assignment of oneself as a shaman yeah yeah it's um i i i guess i would say i regard it with suspicion and distrust most of the time um as one should and i think that i think again like so many of the problems with drugs they're not actually problems with drugs or problems with prohibition and cultural problems more than they are pharmacological ones so you know if you think about it in the context of a society that says everything is bad or says a thing is bad and then you try it and then you realize that not only is it not bad it's good and you think okay well i'll make it my mission to tell everyone that it's good actually i think that's that's kind of the

basic thing that's operating in a lot of these people is they have some transformative experience and they want to share it i think it often is happening from a somewhat positive perspective but then i think where it tends to go wrong is not when people are talking about the positives but when people start to try to control behavior or try to um coerce other people into doing things or start creating a rigid set of beliefs that uh are used to create different types of moral dichotomies where you can criticize other people or or say that they're doing something wrong you know that's i think where you really run into problems and i've spent time with a lot of different religious groups that use psychedelics and indigenous groups that use psychedelics and the

ones that i think run into problems are the ones that start to dictate other people's behavior and force people to do things or force people to believe things you know there's a big difference between saying i think you shouldn't eat meat because meat is requires violence to an animal and you should try to minimize the violence of your existence in any possible way but it is your choice to eat meat and saying you know you're a bad person you're not enlightened you're not spiritual you're part of the problem if you eat meat you know i think part of of using these things constructively and existing in the world constructively is to be permissive of other people's behavior as long as they're not hurting other people and i understand that it's like you know it all comes into this

this kind of classic you know socratic idea that no one knowingly does wrong and so all these people are always thinking that they're doing the right thing they're thinking oh you know the problem with eating meat is it's so bad or the problem with being gay is that it's really bad god doesn't want you to be gay or whatever they think they're doing the right thing they don't they're not operating from a perspective of of uh usually i don't think operating from a perspective of wanting to contribute pain or evil into the world but that's what happens when they're trying to do good um and you know i've i got very close to a psychedelic cult for a while i was writing a story which call i am not going to say their name because it went sour with them and uh and

like ended with sort of oblique death threats from them uh but i was maybe i'll write something about it at some point it was for an article in harpers this was like one of the things that was contributing to my depression in 2018 but anyway um you know this group had a very strict code of conduct that i think i think that you know their psychedelic advocacy was wound up in control fantasies of the leader and you know that's i think that's the the major line it's there's nothing wrong with being you know thinking you're a messiah but i think there is something wrong with attempting to control other people or trying to um or trying to make other people feel bad about their actions unnecessarily you know this there's a famous story ramdas tells

because his brother got institutionalized because his brother thought he was jesus they found him in an apartment he had six elderly women around him worshiping him and he was having a messianic fan of delusion got institutionalized ramdas tells the story goes to visit his brother in a mental hospital and his brother says to ramdas look at you you know you're dressed like jesus you're you know you're you have followers people you know you're you're a you're like a scuru person how come you're out there and i'm in here and ramdas's answer was well the difference is you think you're the only jesus and i think everyone's jesus haha that's great yeah it's pretty cool but yeah well i mean your encounter with this leader

did he demonstrate to you inequalities that were magnetic or did you feel sort of you know vacuumed into his uh social gravity well my impression was that you know again when you're part of a a subculture an underground group you have beliefs that are not only not shared by the majority of people that surround you they're illegal you'll kind of go with whoever you can find so this guy i wouldn't say that his beliefs were especially unusual they're just at that heat this is someone who was operating starting in the really in the 60s and continues to this day um and uh but but really just someone who believed in psychedelics and believed in nonviolence and believed in vegetarianism and believed in a lot of good things and so that

drew people in not because he was necessarily charismatic or magnetic but because they thought oh okay well here's a guy that at least gets what's going on he understands the value of health food he understands the value of meditation he understands the value of psychedelics he has liberal ideas about about the importance of sex you know things like that so um i think that for a long time you could cultivate a following just by not hating these things basically right right right wow yeah well you know congratulations on uh getting out of that thing you know i think there's something to be said i think it's a good sign if you have gotten vacuumed into a cult and if you know that's a that means you're living life if you ask me you know importantly that you've

got also got now but i should say i was not although i actually did try to join this cult as a freshman in college uh i was never a member of this cult i was involved with them via a strange series of connections and was ultimately trying to write a story about them because i at the beginning felt very sympathetic toward them i felt that they had been uh that they'd gone through horrible horrible uh adversity in order to you know believe in psychedelics for decades and they did they you know that's like so many of these things it's complicated they really did um fight for psychedelics at a time when very few other people were and they did they were both persecuted and prosecuted by the government and they uh you know understandably developed

a number of different complexes as a result of it but right but yeah so i was trying to write a story about it this was uh not as a a member of the cult thankfully well you should get into a cult hamilton but hey let me end on a kind of mundane question what a wonderful conversation i i'm so grateful for being on the show but i what are your thoughts on this is by the way speaking of like people who have gone through hell because of the war on drugs who had the initial understanding that these things were medicines they had great potential and it got arrested had their lives destroyed uh i feel i am so exhilarated by the reality that right now you can buy stock in companies that are you know synthesizing lsd and uh you know doing real

legal research on it but i feel a little bitterness uh too you know it's like oh great now you're you know i can literally buy stock and accompany doing experiments with lsd when not that long ago if i had it in my pot well to this day if i had it i have i'll go to jail but do you do you feel that kind of bitterness for me there's like a i don't know how to put it there's just this feeling of like yeah we knew this you know we knew how many lives have been destroyed how many people have lost their children how many people have you know been like completely ostracized from society for you know just doing a thing that is ultimately like very beneficial to a person's life do you ever do you get that feeling like you don't have talking about like a

kind of oh twinge of of course of course and you know it's this is what you're describing is a feeling you should have because it's deeply contradictory it's deeply disturbing and at the same time it's good it's weird it's a weird feeling and it's you know of course it happened first with cannabis you have people becoming multi-millionaires from cannabis at the same time that there are people locked in cages isolated from their family their lives destroyed for cannabis this is happening right now as we speak so um yeah there's a deep and painful hypocrisy in that and we're seeing it happen with psychedelics and the weirdest thing about it is that it's a good thing you know that you look at this and you think this is deeply

unjust but it's even weirder to think this is actually the right thing to be happening because this is progress this is how things change and this is the rate of change in our society it doesn't happen overnight in fact it's happening a hell of a lot faster than i or almost anyone else thought it would you know that yes that there are publicly traded psilocybin stocks that you can invest in on robin hood right now that's mind boggling and that you know like for example i've done chemistry research for over a decade at the small pharmacy school in philadelphia and um and in the past that there was a little bit of money from the university i would you know self fund the research a few nice people like you know tim ferris gave me some money at one

point for research but you know for the most part we were just we barely had enough money for solvents to do this chemistry and now there are so many pharmaceutical companies trying to hire me to do research to be on their board of advisors and yeah it's it's like it's a weird feeling but i am also aware wow this is how things are going to change now this isn't going to be a question of oh can i afford you know this reagent now people are are going to be able to do so much research so they never could do before so many of these you know multi decade lasting questions about the potential of psychedelics both positive and negative are on the precipice of being answered and it's it's going to be great you know i'm so excited for what's happening i really am i'm not and if you

know i'm not an especially optimistic person i am usually a somewhat pessimistic person actually but this forces a tiny bit of optimism out of me and we'll of course see how it all plays out but you know i think that there's a lot of of good things that can come out of it even if every pharmaceutical psychedelic fails then maybe at least in this process we will have taught people that these things do have at least medical potential or that they shouldn't be illegal and that would be tremendous progress that we will see in our lifetime so i am i'm really excited i'm excited to be a part of it you know i i uh i'm pretty much planning to you know i have a podcast and i'm going to continue doing that i'm going to continue writing but i'm planning to do a lot less of this

documentary work in order to focus on chemistry because the resources are available now you know now is the first time that this could be a full-time job and it's so exciting wow but wait you you can't close saying that you're not going to do another season is that what you're saying well it's funny it's you know at the same time that all these resources are being made available for scientific research the season was i don't i don't want to like close on something negative but it was a herculean task to finish it right um you know for me and for the many people that worked on it it was you know the the consensus among most of the group was we could do it this time you know working 13 14 hours a day seven days a week sacrificing everything to finish it working unpaid but that's

not sustainable you can do that right you can do that for a year you can't do that for the rest of your life and so if some you know offer emerges that would change that that would make it a reasonable thing that people wouldn't have to you know there was someone who was working on the show who had you know had a breakdown from the the level of stress working on it you know it's i think it's hard for people to fathom what went into that so when people contact me and they say like oh why didn't you show you know you really should have shown xenon distillation why didn't you do that it's like well because it was a pandemic and and and i wanted to and it wasn't possible and we were already completely out of money and like filming things on our iPhones so um but you know so it

was it was really really hard and i'm proud of a lot of what we all created but uh i think now the time has come to do some chemistry and i'm excited to do that Hamilton Morris i love you thank you so much for coming on this show everybody Hamilton's pharmacopia season three it's on amazon please watch it it is a beautiful show and i could tell that that y'all sweated blood to create it but thank you for making it what's the name of your podcast Hamilton it's it's my patreon patreon.com slash Hamilton Morris it doesn't have a name it's really just a chemistry mostly chemistry and psychoactive drug science podcast and and then some other assorted little projects so yeah people can check that out and

and oh and one final thing is i i just republished this small book that i should send you a copy Duncan but it's it's a cool book about Bufwell Various it was written by this guy Ken Nelson and um it also has information about the synthesis of five m e o d m t and all the profit from that goes to the michael j fox foundation and spend this kind of amazing fundraising success where it's now raises like a hundred and twenty thousand dollars for parkinson's research and that's still available so if anyone wants to check that out w w w dot psychedelic toad of the sonoran desert dot com wonderful all the links you need to find that will be at dugatrustle.com Hamilton thank you so much and uh you're just the best thank you you're

the best let's talk again soon okay great Hare Krishna thank you that was Hamilton Morris everybody i hope that you will download season three of Hamilton's pharmacopia a tremendous thank you to our sponsors remember by supporting them you support us and much thanks to my dear patreon family all right pals i'll see you next week i hope you have a great weekend and don't forget starting monday i'll be back to our weekly meditation group journey into boredom at patreon.com for d t f h i hope to see you there thanks for listening Hare Krishna a good time starts with a great wardrobe next stop jc penny family get-togethers to fancy occasions wedding season two we do it all in style dresses suiting and plenty of color to play with get fixed up with brands like

liz clayborn worthington stafford and jay furar oh and thereabouts for kids super cute and extra affordable check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at jcp.com all dressed up everywhere to go jc penny with one of the best savings rates in america banking with capital one is the easiest decision in the history of decisions even easier than choosing slash to be in your band next up for lead guitar you're in cool yep even easier than that and with no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts is it even a decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply see capital one dot com slash bank for details capital one and a member of d i c