Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Hamilton Morris

Episode Date: March 4, 2017

A LIVE DTFH recorded at the Bell House in Brooklyn with Hamilton Morris (Hamilton's Pharmacopia, VICE) and Emil Amos (Holy Sons, OM).

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This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Squarespace.com. Go to Squarespace.com and use that for code DUNCAN to get 10% off a brand new, beautiful website. Hello, my dear, sweet children of Linda. Tis ID Trussell, and now we're listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. Pleased to announce that I just finished my third feeding session at the Cantal Institute in downtown Brooklyn. I'm just going to play a quick, quick public service announcement from the sweeties over

there, and then we're going to jump right into this live podcast recorded at the Bell House in Brooklyn. I knew when I woke up that morning that something had to change. I stood in front of the mirror and realized that the night before, I had ground my teeth so much that I had no more teeth in my mouth. There was just a pile of old tooth dust. Also, my fingers had been exploratory the night before, and while I slept, they went places that I did not want them to go.

And there was a general funk all over my hands, a funk I could not wash off. My husband saw me and he said, Jean, if something doesn't change, then I'm afraid our marriage might be over. That's when I knew it was time to call the Cantal Institute. It's time to wake up, come to the Cantal Institute. Your life is going to be fantastic. Linda's undercarriage is covered in nipples. When they wheeled me up to that undercarriage, I could not believe how many beautiful nipples

there were for me to choose from. I picked the biggest one. Linda is ours. We took her, and now she's happy. Come on down to the Cantal Institute and you can feed the kind of vibratory sauce dripping out of these nipples is A grade stuff. You're going to feel like you're sucking off a rainbow. You're going to feel like your entire being is filled with light, love, and happiness.

Come on down. It's time to feed. Use offer code DTFH when you go down there and you will get a free feeding. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Squarespace.com. You got no money but the feet, the stinks, sit down at the computer and give it a think. Some folks want wine, some folks want sweets, some folks want socks, fused with the stink. That was MC Rad. He makes a great point.

I've talked about it before in this podcast. I know a lady who makes money selling her socks online and if that's possible these days, then anything is possible. All you need is a great website and there's no better place to start building a website than Squarespace.com. They make it easy for you to build an incredible website with their beautiful templates for you to pick and choose from to create a hypnotic, awe-inspiring, and truly glorious extrusion from the worldwide web.

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Thank you so much to those sweet children of Linda who continue to use the Amazon link located at DuncanTrussell.com. Every time you slide through that link, Amazon gives us a very small percentage of anything you buy. It costs you nothing. If you hear us talking about something on the podcast or if you hear me talking about the insane arcane alchemical device that I now own called an Ableton Push 2 and you feel called to pick up something that feels as though it fell off of the Roswell UFO that

crashed so long ago, then just slide through that link and order one of these suckers and get ready to be drawn one step closer into the great singularity that we are all about to be aerosolized by. We also have a great shop with lots of merchandise and t-shirts and stickers, etc. If you want to buy some stuff, just click on the shop link at DuncanTrussell.com. I've got some live shows coming up, March 21st. We're doing another live podcast at the Bell House in Brooklyn. The guest is going to be Kirtan Walla, amazing musician and devotee of Neem Karoli Baba Krishnadas.

It's going to be a really great one. You can get tickets at DuncanTrussell.com. I'm also going to be at the Spring Retreat in Maui with Ramdas and I'll be doing podcasts there. I hope you can make it out to that. I'm also going to be performing at the Independent in San Francisco in April. I'm going to have ticket links up on the website soon. Those tickets don't go on sale until, I think, until the 8th, so next week.

All right, sweet babies, let's do it. Welcome to the DuncanTrussell Family on our podcast. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct pleasure. He's been a guest on the podcast and I would love for y'all to give him some love and respect and applause right now for the very wonderful Emil Amos, everybody.

There's no divining while the pattern gets cold, it gets me, it gets cold, cold, cold. Something makes the world go round and I don't know what it is. If it blows through me, get it out of me, cause I don't know what it is. If it blows through me, get it out of me, cause I don't know what it is. If it blows through me, get it out of me, cause I don't know what it is. That's a new song, but in hopes that somebody knows any of the stuff, I think I'll play this song, it's like 21 years old, that's fucked, actually. If anybody knows it though, it's because it's on this record in Duncan's like, we're tripping

in Oran College and we're in my dorm room on like my bed, just looking into each other's eyes, normal, Tuesday night, and we're like, we're tripping and I guess I just, I don't know, it was like a not cheesy moment where I was like, you wanna hear this new song man? It was like, seriously doubt I said that actually, but I'm telling the story and just breaks into a song and then you hear him be like, what the fuck was that? You know, and we're like peaking and it's on this record, it's like particular recording off the Walkman is on this record, it's always a really special moment cause that only happens like one time in your life where Duncan like is on your track like talking to you and just

But anyway, it's called Young Man, it's got to be, it's 21 years old. When this storm's clear, I'll be standing right here, I'll survive the sadness of this world. So let the sun rise, I am a young man, I live a long time. I hope my heart is not set on much, I gotta move slow and let my eyes close. Trust in this world with my life. And I will stand before you, and I will bring a smile. And I will stand before you, and I will bring a smile.

And I will stand before you, and I will bring a smile. And I will stand before you, and I will bring a smile. And I will stand before you, and I will bring a smile. And I will stand before you, and I will bring a smile. And I will stand before you, and I will bring a smile. And I will stand before you, and I will bring a smile. I gotta ask you, you travel the world, and you put yourself in some of the most desperate places that I've ever seen, the dangerous situations. Have you ever felt like truly in danger, like in a position where you thought things were gonna go south, or is that just normal for the show?

I want to say yes, because that would be a more interesting answer than saying no, but I don't think it's all that dangerous for me most of the time. Okay, let me cut to this clip. Yeah, I mean, I have to, like, put the password and hold on one second. God damn it, man. Fucking reality, seeing a perfect universe that wasn't malfunctioning. I would pull up the clip of you hanging out in the park with the PCP smokers, but hold on. I'm telling you, it's like I get fucked by my past by not remembering my password right now. Hold on one second. It's like either Trump is amazing, or I'm so happy that Trump is president. One second. Sorry, we're almost there. Hold on. This is gonna take a second longer than I thought. One second.

You know what? I'll cut this out. This is the beauty of recording a podcast. I'll just cut this out. That's what's incredible about it. Fortunately, I've sent myself the links. Hold on. Sorry, you guys. Just like, can you guys start oming again, please? I'm not even joking. Start oming, please. Keep fucking oming! Perfect. Perfect. Okay, great. Here we go. This, for example, maybe you can introduce the clip, because I'm gonna bring up the clip where you are talking to the former leader of the Process Church. Hold on one second. It's 222. Hold on one second.

And previous to this, only because we don't have time to show it, Hamilton was just... Well, first of all, can you just talk a little bit about the... Can you talk a little bit about who Timothy Wiley is? Timothy Wiley was a sort of priest in the Process Church. If anyone is familiar with that, or implicated in the Manson murders in some kind of nebulous way that I've never fully understood. But they're like a semi-Satanic religion. Not semi. I would not call them semi-Satanic. They were full-on hardcore death metal hippies. They were into... This was like a real hardcore hippie cult. They were into Lucifer, Luciferianism. And from the philosophies, it's a sticky... You know how some cults have a sticky philosophy?

You know, like, Mark Marin has got a fantastic joke about how he doesn't want to read Dianetics? Because he's worried that like five pages end up like, you know, this kind of makes sense. It's a glorious joke. But in the same way, if you look into the Process Church's philosophy, it's sticky. Like, it sticks in your head and you're like, God, I don't know. Maybe Lucifer really is the Lord of the Earth. I don't know. So this is the guy that you were hanging out with. This is the guy. And it was hard to find someone who's really pro-PCP. That was something that I wanted to... Yeah, but how do you... So like... I was looking.

What do you... Go on Craigslist? I couldn't find anyone. I mean, there were people that they used it, but they didn't have a lot to say about it. It was not compelling. And then there was this one guy who had a website with this essay that he'd written about the miraculous properties of PCP. He wrote a whole mythology where he reimagined the Garden of Eden as being this sort of computerized, extraterrestrial invention with a serpent that was like symbolic for PCP in some way. Well, I mean, I guess that kind of makes sense, right? I mean... I think the re... Well, you know what? I'm just going to play this clip and then we can talk about why I don't think I could do this kind of show myself. Interactive dolphins. What was the motivation for doing that?

I've always been interested in dolphin intelligence. Using PCP especially with dolphins was just wonderful. And you can just go straight into communication with them. How would that manifest would be an example? One of the questions I... telepathic questions I had asked was, how do you convey information down through time? How do you store information? And I was at about waist deep one time. There was a dolphin swimming out about 10 or 15 feet away. And I had the impulse to pick up a sand dollar. And when I looked at the sand dollar, the impression that came was that these sand dollars are information storage devices.

In other words, dolphins can project. They use sound to project images. And they project that image onto that and it stays within, right? Because when shells grow, they grow holographically. You see what I mean? I don't know. The shell will retain its information as it grows. So another dolphin will come along later.

We'll ping that with the same frequency and they will receive the information stored in the shell. So this is something, this is a realization that you had. You were on TCP, you picked up a sand dollar and you understood its significance in recording information. I was in this telepathic bond with the dolphins while this was happening. Wow. Wow. That's an amazing story. What I didn't show, only because it's like earlier in the clip, is prior to this scene, you watched as he snorted like four rails of PCP. Yeah, he loves PCP. In some moment of watching a man like that snorting PCP in front of you,

knowing the history of PCP, it's not always dolphin communication that happens. It's demon possession that happens. Didn't you feel slightly nervous about what could happen if this guy goes off the rails and decides to start chewing his lips off? No, I was excited. I thought that he could handle it. He definitely was a very experienced person. I think he knew more about how to handle PCP than anyone I've ever met. When you are coming up with episode ideas for the show, is this something that you pitch? Does someone pitch this idea of like, hey, PCP, not always bad. And you're like, yeah, let's do something on that. Let's find ways that baby PCP isn't the worst thing ever.

Well, yeah, that's actually how the show started. Vice acquired this TV channel that used to be H2, which was like a history channel derivative that just re-ran ancient aliens. They wanted to do a drug show and they were showing me some of their ideas. It was all scare stories and typical negative reporting on drugs and saying, it's just a really tired way to discuss this topic. Why not say positive things about drugs? And the person who was in charge at the time said, well, you have to admit there are bad drugs like PCP. No one could ever tell a positive story about PCP. And I suggested that I could.

And you were right. I think one of the beautiful things about the show is that with a show like this, if I was hosting a show like this, I think that I would fail miserably because my instinct would be to overdo how great drugs are. Like I think that I would be too much on the side of drugs and it feels like you managed to walk this beautiful tightrope where you don't come across, you do seem to be something of an advocate on the show, but you don't come across as like a rabid, drooling drug person whose belief is that it's all good. It's all fine. It's great. You do like show the dangers of these substances as well, which I think is really quite beautiful for you, but it feels like underneath it that you're like a profound advocate

for psychoactive substances. Is that true? Absolutely. I mean, I think if you really love something, you owe that topic skepticism. You owe it to really look at it in a rigorous way and not just talk about the positives. So if I seem balanced in my reporting, it is because I'm an advocate and really care about these substances. When was your first contact with psychoactive chemicals? Pretty much in college. I smoked Salvia when I was in high school and that was pretty interesting. What was that like? That was your first psychedelic experience? Yeah. I was afraid of psychedelics when I was in high school. My parents had sort of scared me away from them

and Salvia was very new at that time. There was not much information about it. So it was also widely available and it was completely amazing. I love Salvia. I guess I'm in the minority. Wow. You are in the minority. I hate Salvia. Yeah, a lot of people do. I don't know. Can you describe how Salvia affects you? You personally? It just depends on how it's administered and all these different variables. But generally there's this kind of bizarre dissociative effect where you sort of feel like you're being pushed backwards. There's strange, proprioceptive, gravitational effects where you feel like you're being stretched or tilting or falling through walls or barriers

and repeating patterns that kind of parallel mirror effect, that sort of thing. But it's a weird experience. I guess it's not for everyone. No. And it's interesting. It's not. Well, Salvia was one of the... I have fallen into this trap two times with Salvia and MEO-DMT. Pure hubris punished by the gods. But I remember with Salvia going in the old days... I don't think it's even legal now is that they scheduled it, didn't they? It's legal in New York. It's not federally illegal, which is nice. Because it never became popular because nobody liked it.

People liked it for YouTube videos. I mean, there's an entire genre of YouTube videos of people smoking Salvia, jumping out a window, smoking Salvia. I don't know if you've seen it. Of course, yeah. I think they're amazing. They're amazing, but to me, when you think about the mythology behind Salvia, do you know... I'm sure you're aware of the mythology behind Salvia. It's some kind of goddess spirit, right? That's what they say. It's the feeling that some people have, yeah. Or do they think that at least when it's used traditionally in Oaxaca, they think that it's a botanical embodiment of the Virgin Mary? Right. So Salvia is the Virgin Mary. And when you look at it through that lens, and imagine that the Virgin Mary is being summoned into these fucking apartments with like cat turds all over the floor,

where a guy's like, take another hit! Take another hit! How do you feel, man? Punch him in the arm. Wake him up. It's sad, you know, because it seems like the drug is being used in absolutely the wrong way. And when I use Salvia, I remember going to this head shop and they had it, and the guy's like, no, this is like 50 times stronger than LSD. And I'm like, shut up. No fucking way. I bought it, took a hit, and it was just miserable. Exactly what you're talking about, tilting through space, some kind of spiraling vortex, a feeling of like insanity and death, followed by a relief that it's over. Horrible. I hate this stuff in Hamilton. I hate it. What could you compare to Salvia? What are other drugs that are, is Salvia in a family of drugs?

It isn't. That's what's so remarkable about it is, you know, Salvia, when you look at the history of it, people had known about it since at least the 1950s, and no one could get any effect from it whatsoever. All of the anthropologists and botanists that went to study it weren't really able to characterize the effect, because the active chemical salvanor in A is chemically different from most other psychoactive drugs. It doesn't have what's called a basic nitrogen, so it was difficult to extract. No one knew what was responsible for the effect, and so a lot of people didn't even think it was active. It was a huge surprise when people discovered that it actually contained the most potent, naturally occurring psychedelic known to science in the 90s. Wow. I didn't realize it was, I always thought DMT was that.

Oh, this is far, far more potent than DMT. Really? Absolutely, by weight. Yeah, the active dose of DMT is 40 to 50 milligram. Salvanor in A is fully active at half a milligram, so it's arguably 80 times stronger than DMT by weight. But again, even after they discovered the active chemical in Salvia, when they would screen it at different receptors associated with psychedelic activity, it didn't bind to any of them. So then there was a second mystery of what is it even doing, and it wasn't until they were able to screen it at a really large number of different receptors

that they found that it bound to this subtype of opioid receptor called the Kappa Opioid Receptor, and that was a total curveball no one ever expected that a psychedelic... I expected that, you know, when I was on it, I was thinking to myself, oh, this is clearly something to do with the Kappa Opioid Receptor. Hamilton, how do you... This is going to sound... Well, you know what? Compared to you, I am a dumb person, so here comes a dumb person question. How do you remember all that, man?

Like, where did you... To me, what's interesting about you is you're the psychonaut, but you're also the chemist. And in an interview that I read that you did, you were talking about how consumers... There's consumers of drugs and people who study drugs, and the more you consume the substance, quite often the less you know about the substance. And you seem to fall right in the middle there, where you have a very academic understanding. How long did you study chemistry for? How did you get to that place? Most... I mean, I did study it in college, but most of what I know about chemistry comes from working in a lab

in Philadelphia with this chemist who's actually on the clip that's being queued up right there. But, you know, I've worked in this lab on and off for the last seven or eight years, and that's how I learned most of what I know about actual chemistry. But what I just described is in chemistry, that's just history. You can read that on Wikipedia. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so I don't know. Just read it on Wikipedia.

Do you think your experience of drugs is different from people who aren't aware of the way it's interacting with our neurochemistry? It's possible, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people have subconscious biases against drugs. They think of drug use as something naughty or self-destructive, and when you have that feeling that it's a bad thing to be using drugs, I think that that's going to color the experience in some way. Even with mushrooms, people often say, oh, this is food poisoning. The psychedelic experience is a form of poisoning. And even when you think about it that way, it's not the case.

It's a drug effect like any other. It's not food poisoning. It's not bacterial in origin. But if you're thinking about it that way, I feel that you're already setting yourself up to have a negative experience because you're thinking of it as something negative, a form of poisoning. Well, this is something I think about with mushrooms. Did they evolve? Why would a mushroom evolve so that it has psilocybin inside of it? What is the benefit for a fungus from an evolutionary perspective to have a psychoactive chemical inside of it?

Is it an accident or is it a defense mechanism? And if it's a defense mechanism, then what a sad defense mechanism, right? He spent all this time coming up with a poison to keep the monkeys from eating you, and they're like, oh, this is great, man. I love it. Or do they want us to eat them? Is there some benefit? Well, that's a possibility that it acts as an attractant, that it's somehow advantageous for it to be consumed or when you touch it, it spreads the spores. But ultimately, people don't know.

It's a great question. I think about it constantly, why this would be the case. You know, it's also very tempting to have this anthropocentric interpretation, because it has a drug effect in a human that must be why the mushroom is producing. But from the mushroom's perspective, it could have all sorts of other uses that have nothing to do with us. It could be preventing ultraviolet light from damaging the spores. Or the elves like it? The elves like it. With mushrooms in particular, psilocybin, it is a poison, though.

When I take mushrooms, as opposed to, say, LSD, there's a body-heavy thing happening that feels like this isn't exactly what my body wants inside of it. Like, if I eat mushrooms, I'll have to shit. I don't know if that happens to you, but it upsets my stomach. And then you're doing the, like, portagion experience when you're tripping, which is like a Uranumous Bosch painting. I don't know if you guys have felt this before, but witnessing the spiraling, swirling breathing of a portagion

with skulls and fractals spiraling into the shit in the fucking portagion. All right. To me, it feels like mushrooms in particular. Maybe they are somewhat poisonous. Well, even the word poison, it's sort of poison, drug, medicine, all these words don't really have exact meanings. It's certainly not more of a poison than LSD or anything else. And the reason that it has that effect is because you have serotonin receptors in your intestine.

The original name of serotonin was enteramine because they thought it was exclusively in the intestine. All these receptors in your periphery that are activated by psychedelics as well. So it's not because it's having some kind of poisonous effect necessarily. It's because you have these receptors outside of your brain. I love that. No, that's a beautiful thing to think. I think that what you're talking about is, it goes very deep into our psyche because since, at least when I was a kid, I think things have shifted maybe a little bit. But I've been programmed from the moment I started watching TV to think that every single drug that isn't prescribed by a doctor

is in some way or another evil. Like, this is the, I am a casualty of the war on drugs because no matter how much I would like to escape or evade or drop the conditioning every time I take LSD, every time I take MDMA, every time I take a psychoactive chemical there's still the kid from the Reagan era who was watching on Channel 13 the commercial where the egg gets broken in the pan. You know, this is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions? Remember? And I think that poisoned a lot of us and I don't know if there's any way to like separate myself from that

because when I take drugs, even as much as I love them, as happy I am that they exist in the universe I still in some way or another feel that this is evil, right? That's conditioning. Do you feel like that? Are you able to escape into pure hedonism when you take these substances? I don't feel it's evil. I don't believe it's evil. But I've been programmed to think. We live in a puritanical society. People still believe that sobriety is a virtue and that drug use is a bad thing. And you know, when you look at the list of controlled substances, the government doesn't control dangerous drugs. It controls euphoric drugs. Cyanide is not a controlled substance. Strychnine is not a controlled substance.

Tetrautotox and any of these ultra potent poisons, none of them are included. It's the euphorians. It's the drugs that make people feel good. That's what's being prohibited. Why? I don't know exactly. People are afraid of them. I don't know. There's complicated reasons. I mean, even if you take salvia, it's amazing tracing the prohibition of salvia in the United States. I don't know if you know the story. I don't. But there was this emo guy named Brett Shiddester who smoked salvia and then years later killed himself.

And his mother was grieving and looking through his diary and found this entry from the previous year where he wrote something like, just smoked salvia tonight, learned that life is meaningless. It was fine. It was fine. Something like that. And then she thought, oh no, that's what is responsible. It was because he smoked salvia in the previous year that caused a spiral and depression. And I lost my darling Brett and went on a crusade to have salvia made illegal across the United States. And in some states, the prohibition of salvia is called Brett's law in his name. So what happened is you have one grieving mother who decides that this is a dangerous drug.

You have a lot of politicians who don't care at all about salvia. In the slightest, they've never used it. They don't know what it is. They don't know that it has all sorts of potential therapeutic and scientific uses. All they know is that there's a grieving mother saying, make this illegal and maybe that they can gain some political traction by doing what she says. And so before you know it, it's a schedule one drug, the same schedule as heroin in half the United States. That's insane. That's absolutely insane. And I liked it. Your version of the story is, I guess, slightly more comforting than what appears to be happening, which is a concerted effort by people in power to control society's ability to access high utopian states of pleasure.

That there seems to be someone at the top. I saw this interview with the Grateful Dead and one of the band members in talking about LSD said something that I think about all the time. He's like, they don't want us to go into that room, man. And I think about that a lot because it's like, oh, it does appear that way. Like, yeah, I guess it's a mother's fault, but it seems more like there's something bigger than that than just some individual doing that. Or some politicians are like, I don't know what salvia is. It feels like there's something behind the scenes. Oh, of course.

What is that thing? Racism. Racism. Yeah, probably. You think that it's... Well, historically, yeah. It's been a great way to target various races and selectively prosecute people based on their drug of choice. This is the Nixon regime, right?

This is the idea of like, let's make marijuana illegal because we can't target... Let's target the sacrament because we can't target the movement. That's what you're saying. Yeah. And by prohibiting drugs, you give yourself access to an enormous number of people. You can lock up almost anyone you want. You can plan drugs on them. It's a very convenient way to control people.

That is so fucking sinister, man, to think that. Right at this point, this is where I get lost because to imagine who would think that? Who would, like, in a meeting somewhere, sitting down? Who would formulate that plan? Like, you know what? Let's just make these incredibly healing, beautiful molecules illegal so that we can begin to throw people into dungeons whenever we want. For those words or some version of those words to come out of a human being's mouth and for the person to hear themselves saying it and not want to put a gun in their mouths implies that there's some different species that we're living under the control of.

How could a real human being actually implement that plan? Power control. And also because they, you know, they maybe convince themselves that it's truly the case. It's still happening today. Now, you know, we look at the history of cannabis prohibition and it looks insane. We think, how did this ever happen? But there were times in the past where it wasn't approved of in the same way that it is now by the public and it didn't seem like such a bad idea. And we're repeating the same mistakes now.

Everyone seems to agree that cannabis is okay to use in most cities. But synthetic cannabinoids are a different issue. Everyone hates synthetic cannabinoids. They're eager to control them. They want them all prohibited. And maybe 50 years down the line we'll be saying the same thing about the synthetic cannabinoids. What were we thinking? Why did we think that it was necessary to prohibit all of those compounds just because there were some media reports and a few people had problems with them?

Do you think, do you consider Hamilton's Pharmacopia to be a form of activism? I mean, there's definitely an ideology that I'm promoting. There's something that I'm trying to communicate. Yeah. What is that? What are you trying to communicate? I guess in its simplest form to value drugs and to think about them critically and not take them for granted. Because I think that, you know, we get so caught up on, like, are they good?

Are they bad? Are they addictive? Am I addicted? Is it toxic? Is it right? Is it wrong? Will it benefit me that people don't even stop to appreciate how amazing it is that it's even possible? Like, I can't see any evolutionary reason that human beings have to be able to have a psychedelic experience.

Just the fact that that's even consciously a possibility is utterly amazing. Right. Yeah, you're right. I mean, this is actually, you know, like for example when Wiley's talking about the dolphin telepathy. And in other moments, as I've been watching, I get the feeling that you're something of a skeptic. Like you clearly connect with the potency of what these psychoactive chemicals can do for a person. And I think you are underplaying how much you're putting yourself at risk from doing this show. You say that you're not in danger at all, but I wonder if you're just telling yourself that because you don't want to acknowledge the danger that you're putting yourself in.

For example, right now, politically, we're witnessing how fragile the political system is and how things can change so quickly that a person with a show like this could be breaking laws that haven't been put into place yet. You know, you're putting yourself, you know, I kind of hate it when people say this to me. They're like, you know, you're on a list, right, man? You're on a list. But Hamilton. You're on a list, motherfucker. You are on every list.

You're on every list. And I'm sorry to laugh about it. I've got a quote here from, let me find it, from one of your friends. I hope it wrote it down. Sorry, I can't remember his name. He's the LSD chemist that you're friends with. Casey Hardison. Yes.

And in this beautiful quote, you're a burning man this year. And in this beautiful interview with him, and he seems just like an incredible human being, he said, most people who take psychedelics don't think of the chemist who risked their liberty to produce them. And I wonder if people who watch your show are thinking the same thing about you, that you're risking your own liberty by putting a show like this on. Do you feel like that, man? You really are putting your ass on the line here, man. Maybe.

I mean, sometimes someone will contact you and say, oh, you know, you're just trying to get high. This is just about getting high. And when people say something like that, I can assure everyone this is the absolute worst way to get high. Making these documentaries about drugs publicly is a really, really bad way to get high. It's just the most expensive, worst way. And I am probably putting myself in some degree of danger, but the people that I really believe are putting themselves at risk are the chemists. They're the people that appear on the show. Because ultimately, as a journalist, I do have a legal justification to be doing all of these things.

If I'm at a clandestine Kweilud lab and the police in South Africa show up, I can walk home. I can get on my flight back to Brooklyn if... Wait, let's think about what you just said. If I'm at a clandestine Kweilud lab... Okay, where were you? Where was it? In South Africa. South Africa. So, like, the South African police go rolling into a clandestine Kweilud lab.

And they see this guy is like, no, no, no, I'm a journalist. They're like, shh, shh, shh, sit down, bitch! You're going to jail! Like... I don't know. I mean, luckily it didn't happen. I think I would... Maybe I would go to jail, but I think I would get out quickly. Because ultimately it's not illegal to be a journalist and witness something that is illegal. But there's no question that the chemists who were manufacturing the Kweilud on camera definitely would go to prison for what they were doing. They were the ones that were taking the true risk.

So I just don't want to overestimate my risk and underestimate the risk of the people that trusted me enough to participate in these documentaries. Well, I think that's another thing that comes across in this show, is that you love these chemists. And that you, whether it's the PCP chemist Flaca, who was showing you the secret recipe for making PCP, which I think I could pull up here, or whether it's... What's his name? Who lived in the volcano? Daryl LaMaire. How many people here have seen the show?

If you haven't, you have to go home and watch this. But one thing that comes across is that you have this profound respect for these people. Something I was wondering is, and maybe this is a terrible question, but which do you love more? The psychoactive chemical and its effect on the human nervous system? Or the synthesis of the chemical? Because it seems like you're almost more infatuated with the chemical process that goes into making these things than the effect of the things themselves. I am, yeah.

Wow, that's so fascinating. But it's almost like the high itself seems like a secondary consideration to what these people are going through to produce the substance. Yeah, I mean, I think it's fascinating because there's so much uncertainty in science. Sometimes when I'm working on this, some executive advice will watch it and say, like, oh, it's good, but can you scientifically explain why it is that when somebody smokes PCP, they strip nude and punch a hole through a wooden fence? And you can't really give a satisfying explanation to that question. There's a lot that's known in terms of molecular neuropharmacology.

People know a lot about how the drug binds to a receptor in the brain, and they know a lot about the qualitative behavioral effects of a drug, but connecting the two between the molecular level and the behavioral level has been very difficult, and ultimately it's not something that people can explain in a satisfying way at this point. Thank God, right? Thank God. Because you don't want them to know that. Like, that's a bad thing for them to know. Like, the moment the government figures out how to make people strip their clothes off and punch holes in fucking walls,

that's a new bomb. Like, that's a new, definitely that's a new thing that a Trump drone is going to dispense over some protest. You know, that's going to happen. Do you feel a little nervous right now as a journalist seeing what's going down politically, this like fascinating war that's happening between our government and the press? Do you feel a little nervous about what could happen? Well, of course, yeah. I think any thinking person is profoundly uncomfortable with what's happening right now. But in terms of drugs specifically, that hasn't been an emphasis of Trump's,

he's mentioned it, he mentioned it during the inauguration speech, he mentioned it when he was campaigning. During the inauguration speech, he said they're cheaper than candy bars. Yeah. Is that true? But you've got to be nervous. I mean, like, when I see what's going down, I'll tell you, and I don't mean to keep ringing the paranoia bell here, man, but one of the things, what's that? Yeah, it's making me paranoid even thinking about it.

Listen, I'm sorry, I'll pull you out of it in a second. Okay. Because we're all going to die, it doesn't matter, man. But one of the things that has made me feel incredibly careful about talking about these substances, even though I guess I'm not being careful right now, is that when I did an interview at Singularity University on this whiteboard, they were talking about how the potential exists thanks to technology for people to be breaking laws right now that don't exist yet. And that in the future, you know, we can all end up getting, like, arrested.

Like, when what you're saying, the idea is, let's prohibit a substance that is, nothing's wrong with it at all, a substance that is actually pro-life, that someone who is healthy and was into existence itself would want this substance, a substance that you'd probably want to, like, teach your kids to use, something that's, like, jogging. You know, and that's what I think of as LSD. LSD to me is that thing. It's a healthy, powerful, life-affirming, positive, beautiful chemical that has the potential to transform society in a way that could really create a lot of beautiful effects that have already happened to some degree, but if it wasn't prohibited, then God knows what could actually happen in society, you know.

But these substances are, when you think about the fact that there is the potential for even mentioning these things in the future to land you in a dungeon, right, then you have to be very careful, you know. It just seems like you're putting yourself, your ass on the line. Sorry to go back to that again. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, ultimately, I think this is, like, a bad way to think about it. And maybe another point of my show is to try to dilute that kind of thinking a little bit. It's like, oh, don't talk about it publicly, you'll be on a list, you're going to end up in prison.

Because the truth of the matter is that all this is vetted by the legal team advice, none of it's illegal. I haven't broken any laws, and I love talking about it. I think it's fascinating. I am free to talk about it, and if everyone is afraid that they're going to be locked up in some dungeon in the future because they spoke their true feelings about something that's benefited them, then you're already punished. Beautiful. Ah, God. Run for president!

How did you connect with Vice in the beginning? Like, how did this come into existence at all? Well, when I started, it was a very different company. It was, you know, 2007 or 2008, and it was small. It was easy. I walked to the office, and the editor-in-chief was a friend of a friend, and met him and told him that I'd been hanging out with these Hasidic Jews who were transitioning into secular life and using a lot of psychedelics to help the transition, and he was interested, and I wrote an article, and then I wrote for the magazine, which was a thing then,

and then they started making videos, and I did that. They asked me to make videos. It's kind of a boring story. All right. I don't know. Hasidic Jews transitioning with drugs is pretty cool. Your idea of boring is probably way different than most people's ideas of boring, man. When you've been in a fucking laboratory underneath a volcano, I guess nothing's going to be quite as exciting as that,

but are there any, since you are on the cutting edge of psychoactive drugs, are there any new drugs that maybe we don't know about right now? What should we look into, Mr. Morris? Well, there's so many. I think that's a thing that people don't appreciate, is that there are literally tens of thousands of drugs, and I guarantee that there will be new types of drugs that are discovered in the future that are completely different than anything that's currently known. That was the case for Salvia, pretty much.

There was a little bit of research in the 50s where they were looking at these Kappa opioid receptor agonists as potential morphine type drugs, and they noticed that everyone that took them would have these bizarre hallucinations, so they just thought, okay, this is not a viable way to treat pain, because too many people are thinking that their bed is a train, or their hands are made of dogs. I'm on the pain train, man. But again, to go back to the question, if I was a person who wanted to try a new psychedelic that I hadn't tried yet, what would be a psychedelic that you could recommend? One of the interesting ramifications of prohibition is that every time a drug is controlled,

new drugs hit the market to take the place of that controlled substance. So prohibition has actually catalyzed the sale and availability of an almost unfathomably large number of new drugs that no one would be using if it weren't for prohibition. All these synthetic cannabinoids, the vast majority of people using them, are only using them because they're cheap, or because cannabis isn't legal, or because their urine is being tested by their employer, or they're on parole, or whatever. So there's an unlimited number of new things, new psychedelics, that's happening all the time. Name one or two?

Yeah, man, why are you holding out on us, brother? We want to know about a couple. You're like, there's over 30,000 beautiful new drugs. They induce orgasms, they make you see angels, they make you talk to your ancestors, you can levitate. Next question. What's just like, let's say tonight, if you wanted to do a brand new substance, what's on the... If it's brand new, you don't even know if it's good or not, you don't know anything about it.

Okay, here's an example, there's a new drug that's appearing on the market called NDTDI. It's structurally really interesting, it's kind of like a hybrid between a tryptamine like DMT and an Ergoline like LSD. Wow, that sounds incredible. But it hasn't been tested by humans yet. It's new. Hold on, wait, what mailing list are you on, man? Humans aren't even taking it? Where did you hear about it? These things are available from great market vendors in China.

It's a whole huge industry, making these derivatives of MDMA, making derivatives of masculine, derivatives of DMT and selling them on the internet. And talking about these things publicly is a little bit weird because people will actually try things. I wrote an article a little while ago about, as chemist Alexander Shulgin had speculated, that there could be a marine psychedelic that was produced by certain sponge species. And no one had ever tried it. And so I wrote an article about the synthesis and qualitative effects of this drug. It was the only psychedelic that has been isolated from the ocean and only the ocean,

the only known marine psychedelic. And it was kind of just answering a small little psychedelic mystery that had interested me for a long time. And then someone starts selling this drug on the internet and suddenly there's reports on Reddit of people saying like, oh yeah, there's five bromo DMT, the CDMT stuff. It's really great when I mix it with my weed, but what's like... I get it. I get it. So yeah, you feel a little bit of responsibility.

There is a responsibility because I don't know about NDTDI. I don't know about the toxicity of five bromo DMT. I get it. Yeah, that's it. And that would be a heavy burden to like announce something like that and then find out like somebody chewed off their foot in a bathtub because of it. So yeah, I get it. Yeah, you got to be very careful.

All right, cool. Let me just write that down. I'm NDTII. In an interview with you, somebody asked you the classic question. I want to re-ask you the question just to see if maybe your mind has changed on it or if you've had any new revelations about it. So I smoked DMT and I have the experience and I think to myself my mind couldn't produce this. I have come into contact with a higher intelligence.

A lot of people who sacramentally take these substances and on your show, you've come in contact with them a lot. They report their experience is mystical. They feel as though they're shamans. They feel as though they're not making LSD for profit. They're making LSD for transformation and they feel as though some, it feels as though they've come into contact with the divine. Do you feel that psychedelics connect us with a higher intelligence or do you think this

is a purely endogenous process that has nothing to do with some external force? I think it's a purely endogenous process and I think it's all the more amazing for that reason. I mean, give your mind some credit. Right. This is something that is happening in your brain as a result of your consciousness, your memories, your life. The DMT molecule contains no memories. It contains no information.

It produces different effects for different people. It's a completely internal experience and I don't think that diminishes it in any way. I think it makes it that much more amazing that it's possible that people still don't understand how it happens, why it produces this sort of effect. Yeah, no. This is like the Carl Sagan perspective. It's like, why do you need some extra thing? It's already a beautiful thing that the planet spit out life at all and then that life

evolved to the point where it could have an interaction with chemicals in such a way as to achieve these transcendent states. And yet, in these transcendent states, for me and for other people I know have entered into them, it's not as though there is an ambivalence here. It's in that state. There seems to be some kind of direct communication. It's not as though my mind is saying to me, hey, this is your mind talking to you, Duncan. Hi, I'm the universe.

I'm everything. And I'm going to have a little conversation with you for the next six hours. And it's going to suck. But whenever the universe comes to talk, you're like, no, please get anyone else. But it doesn't feel endogenous, Hamilton. For me, it feels like I can accept, all right, this is just your brain. This is just your brain outputting this some deeper part of it. But it just doesn't feel like that for me and for a lot of us.

And I don't think you're saying this as though you know for certain. But how can you be sure that it's just your mind? How can you be certain that there isn't some communion happening when the history of shamanism, the history of taking these chemicals is one that has within it a built-in mythology that involves connection with entities or higher consciousness? I just don't think it has any explanatory value, ultimately. I don't think that it solves the mystery in any meaningful way to say that entities are supplying you with information. Then what are these entities? Why does this molecule only expose you to these entities?

And why isn't it there all the time? If anything, it makes things more complicated. It seems like a really inelegant way to solve what is maybe the most important scientific question in the world. Or the most important question in the world. And that question is, are we alone? That's the question. And we're trying to answer that question. We're answering it with our telescopes. I think we are.

We're trying to answer it. We're trying to answer it with our radio telescopes. We're trying to answer it. And it's a question that people have been speculating about for a very long time. And many people have returned an answer which is as complicated as it makes things. Why does it dial us in to a specific frequency of intelligence? Well, I don't know. It's like a phone number, man. DMT is curious to me.

It's specifically DMT. Because when I take LSD, I can emit projection. I'm totally comfortable with projection on LSD. I'm seeing some projection of something inside of me. And what I'm seeing on LSD is usually different than other people on acid. I mean, there's a wavering breathing quality, a fractal quality, but it definitely feels like subconscious elements of myself are being revealed to me. And the universe is the screen they're being projected on.

But with DMT, what's fascinating about it is how so many people have the same experience. They report the same kinds of entities. The same kind of place that it takes you to. The implication to me being this is not something inside of us. It's allowing you to see a thing that's always here, but maybe isn't necessarily within us. Any more than anything outside of us is within us. Yeah, I don't know.

God damn it, Hamilton! Not the way it is. Except Jesus Christ as your savior! Ultimately, it's however you want to construct meaning, solve the mystery, however you want to do it. It's up to people to decide. It's like any other mystical thinking. If you want to believe in God, everyone is welcome to do that.

If they want to, it doesn't have much explanatory value for me, so I avoid it. And I think that humans have a tendency to fill in the cracks between their understanding with mystical thinking, instead of accepting ambiguity and mystery, which is very uncomfortable. People want answers. That's why people like shamanism, I think, is they want someone to say, you're vomiting because you're expelling toxins, negative memories, negativity from your body,

you're cleansing yourself as opposed to the truth, which is you're vomiting because of serotonin receptors in your intestine, and who knows what you ate earlier, and maybe there's no answer for why you're vomiting. Maybe you just have to accept the mystery of the origin of your vomiting, and no one will ever explain it. You would be a fun person to take psychedelics with, but you would not be a good shaman, Hamilton.

But you would be such a wonderful person, because you know what, we need both, I think. We need both. When I'm tripping out, it would be nice to have a Hamilton with me, and it would be nice to have some kind of deep shaman with me, so that the shaman could say, yeah, that's your darkness, you're vomiting your darkness, because that lens is particularly beneficial.

Whether or not it has some quantifiable truth to it, it doesn't matter. If I'm vomiting and someone says to me, that's your darkness, let it out, then it opens up a lot of room for healing. But then maybe as I'm puking and someone says, that's your darkness, you need to get it out, I might be like, shut up, shut up, hippie, that's not, I don't feel good, Hamilton, what is this?

It's just your fucking serotonin receptors, man. Don't worry, so it's beautiful. But even that's limited. It's not as if you have this one little scientific explanation and that suddenly solves a mystery. There's a site, the 5-HT2A receptor, that most classical psychedelics bind to, but it's not as if that explains it.

Knowing that they bind to this receptor doesn't explain anything, and then you go deeper as science evolves, then you learn that there's functional activity at the receptor. There's an agonist, an antagonist, a silent agonist, an inverse agonist, what is it doing? And then there's a second, and then you go further, what's the second messenger, what's the downstream effect, what systems are being activated,

and the mystery keeps getting deeper. But I think the advantage of looking at these things scientifically is ultimately you are answering questions, even if you're not answering the grand question, you're answering small questions, and as you answer all these small questions over the years, you're chipping away at consciousness, you're chipping away at an understanding of how the brain works,

and that's a worthwhile pursuit. Harold and Morris, everybody, let it hear it! Beautiful. Thank you so much. All right. Well, we've come to the part of the show where we take questions, so there's a microphone somewhere up there. Anybody who has a question, please come up and feel free to ask away.

Hello. Hello. Hi, my name is Bob. I was just curious, this doesn't really relate to anything that you guys have been talking about tonight, but do you have any idea why the government is aiming their sites on CBD and CBD oil and why they're trying to take it away from us?

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I don't actually have a great answer. There truly is no rhyme or reason to a lot of this, and, you know, a few years ago, the DEA placed a drug called 2CN in Schedule 1. Has anyone here heard of 2CN? No one has heard of it, because no one used it. It was never a drug.

What is it? Yeah, 2CI and 2CBR drugs people have heard of that people used, and those are also illegal now. But 2CN was just a random drug that Alexander Shulgin synthesized, and they kind of just threw it in. Why not make it illegal? No one's going to stand up for 2CN, throw it in Schedule 1, and that is where it sits,

and that's where it will be until people really thoroughly deconstruct all the controlled substances, because, of course, there's people standing up for CBD and cannabis, but the truth is that the list of controlled substances is ridiculously long. It's more drugs than any pharmacologist would know off the top of their head. It's literally close to 300 different substances. So why CBD? Because they could. Also, when you consider, I mean, again, to think of it in this way,

you have to believe there is some cobble of people making these sinister decisions purely for the sake of profit, but every time you make a substance illegal, every time you schedule a substance, you immediately open up a pathway for revenue to flow into specific industries. So you make CBD illegal, and now you have another reason to put someone in a for-profit prison. You're making money for lawyers.

You're making money for the cops who, in whichever states, allow confiscation of a person's money or vehicle. So it opens up just more and more avenues for the state to make money. There's a clear benefit for the state to schedule substances. There's an undeniable monetary benefit for scheduling substances, and a lot of people do say, just follow the money. Like, who's profiting from this? Who profits from CBD being illegal?

CBD, an anti-inflammatory substance that can help with nausea, a substance that helps with insomnia, a substance that is amazing. Who benefits from that? Lots of people benefit from that, not being accessible. Who wants to take a fucking ambient? Who wants to, like, come to you on a plane jerking off into a bag of Doritos? Nobody! Who's gonna, like, pick that over, like, CBD.

Like, a nice, gentle sleep versus a potentially psychosis-inducing amnesic doom drug spit out by a corporation. You know, so if you look at it from that perspective, there could be some nefarious plot involving lobbyists who are well aware of the profit that comes from scheduling certain substances. Yeah, thank you so much for answering my question. But the point that I wanted to bring up is that, in my opinion, it seems like that the pharmaceutical companies want to kind of control CBD as a substance,

make it illegal, and then offer them, offer CBD as a drug that you need to get a prescription to, and that seems like just fucking, just evil as fuck. Yeah. And it's just bizarre to me that, yeah. Anyway, so thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Hello. Hi. My name is Stephanie. Thank you for the show. You're amazing. Thanks. I'm curious about microdosing. What's your opinion?

Also, dosages, specifically psilocybin and LSD. Great. Yeah, it's amazing what a craze microdosing has become. It's become the thing that I'm asked about more than anything. Every single day when I wake up, I have emails about microdosing, and I would have never expected that the way to get everybody interested in psychedelics was to make them not psychedelic. But it's a very compelling idea that you could use a psychedelic in a way

that's interchangeable with caffeine or something like that. Ultimately, it hasn't been studied in any meaningful way, and it's just sort of being passed around different news outlets as a novel idea. Silicon Valley. Exactly. Yeah, and it's a very attractive idea. I don't know why, but it depends on all these different psychedelics have different pharmacologies.

LSD has more of a stimulating dopaminergic effect than psilocin and psilocybin, so maybe it's better suited to that sort of thing. Ultimately, most people don't have access to the pure chemicals to begin with, so it becomes very difficult to gauge the dose unless you're working with pure crystal LSD, and then you can volumetrically measure the dose, or if you have an incredibly sensitive scale, you could use that. But it's tricky. It's tricky when you're working with a black market commodity,

and you don't know how much you're consuming, and you don't know the purity. And because they're microdosing, there's no real definition for it. Different people are using different doses of different chemicals. It probably comes down to what works for you. Well, I love it. It's great. If you happen to find the problem with it is just what you're saying. It's like, how do you know if you're going to microdose,

then you have to have some idea of what you're taking a fractional quantity of. So that is a problem, which means that you would have to... Fortunately, and this is a ridiculous idea that popped into my head, but I was thinking if anything has benefited for profit LSD chemists, it's got to be the new microdosing craze, because they can now sell microdoses, which they do, of LSD for the same amount as a regular dose of LSD, and just exponentially increase their profit from it.

So I kept thinking, fuck, is this some nefarious plot? Did some genius LSD chemist just write a blog post for the Huffington Post? Just take smaller amounts, it's great. But it is fantastic. I have tried Adderall, I've tried various ADD medications, and I've microdosed LSD, and microdosing LSD seems so much better and yet somewhat similar to a lot of these ADD medications. It seems to have a very similar effect, at least subjectively for me.

So try it out, just give it a shot. You'll love it. Thank you. Maybe it's just one cautionary thing. I feel a little weird about saying this because I don't want to scare anyone, but a lot of psychedelics do have affinity for what's called the 5-HT2B receptor, which is known to cause some heart problems, and there have been studies done in rodents where repeated low-dose administration

of psilocin causes abnormalities in the heart valve. So it seems like, I just would hate if everyone gets wrapped up in this weird idea and then suddenly it has a negative effect and makes psychedelics look bad in the long run. So be careful would be my other piece of advice. Be careful, he's right too. Yeah, be careful, be responsible. Don't be the fucking, don't get some law named after you, please. Hey guys, thanks again for the podcast, it was awesome.

Cool, glad you enjoyed it. So my question is actually because both of you guys are creatives, you guys both write, I know you do your comedy and you record and stuff like that. How do you guys go about your work week? What pushes you? How do you break things? Do you plan in the beginning of the week? How do you go about it? Well at the moment I'm working in an office, so I kind of have to show up and work. Yeah, to make this TV show because I just started making the second season of the show

and yeah, so I have no choice but to work. And there's lots of people that would get really angry at me if I didn't show up, so that's fear and necessity or... Here, cool. Is the shit... Is it planned for you or do you plan to do the show about around the week? It depends. It's kind of planned by me because I write these episodes and create them,

but then there's a showrunner who forces me to actually complete tasks. Do you script the whole thing yourself? Yeah. Holy shit, do you write the songs? I did for the final episode, yeah. Wow, cool. Falling in love with you, Hamilton. I'm not as disciplined as this man.

I have stand-up spots at night, so at night I go to do comedy. Since I've been in New York, I've been doing it a lot, so I'll go and do stand-up comedy at night. And in the day, I will either have a pot, I'll interview someone for a podcast, or more likely I will have to sit down and try to record like an intro for a podcast. So that's how it works for me, is I'll wake up and then sit in front of a microphone, drink coffee, and ramble, and feel crazy, and wonder how this is my job, and then upload the thing to the internet, and then go and do stand-up comedy at night. And then somewhere in there, I'll try to work on jokes.

And then also, I'm learning to play piano right now, and I'm trying to learn how to like... You know, one thing Alex and Allison Gray said to me. Are you a creative person? Yeah, editing stuff like that film. So one thing Alex and Allison Gray said to me that's always stuck with me is they said, take what's working and make it bigger. So whatever is in your life that's like working out for you, see how you can amplify it.

And so for me, that means like, okay, well with the podcast, how can I make it more intricate in its production? Can I like learn to make music? Is there a way to like make... Like what you're doing, man, at some point you're like, I'm gonna make a fucking song about some of these chemists and record it and put it on my show. And I think that's a really brave thing to do in the same way. That's what I'm... I've just gotten obsessed with like Ableton Live and like Synthesizers.

And so my idea is to try to incorporate that into the podcast. So that's what I do. Awesome, thank you very much guys, appreciate it. Thanks for the question. Thank you guys for the podcast again. Thanks. So do you think Trump should take psychedelic drugs? Great question.

It's an interesting idea. I mean, it's an old idea. You know, if people were to put LSD in the water supply, then there would be no war. Everyone would love each other. We live in a utopian society. I certainly wish that were the case. I have a feeling it wouldn't be the case because there are many bad people that have used psychedelics. Obviously Charles Manson and many, many others.

Psychedelics aren't some kind of magic bullet that make every narcissist or psychopath good. In fact, they're extremely unpredictable, which has been the main barrier toward using them as weapons and using them medicinally. It's hard to know exactly what they'll do. That's what makes them so valuable. So do I think Trump should take a psychedelic? I would love it if he did. It would be interesting. So yes, I guess it's a short answer.

Right on. I think that the question is interesting because it implies that you think he hasn't taken a psychedelic. And I would bet a lot of money on the fact that Trump has done plenty of drugs. Really? Yeah, sure. For sure. He's like, hell yeah. He doesn't even drink. His brother died of cirrhosis.

I know that he says he doesn't drink, but he says he doesn't do a lot of stuff. I just think that, you know, I think he's done, there's a lot of things I think Trump has done. A lot of things that you'll never hear about. And I think drugs are the least interesting of the crazy shit that guy has done. Like that guy, I would bet $10,000 that that man has been fisted. I would bet $10,000 that by the fucking barbed glove of some hardcore New York dominatrix just comes to Trump Tower once a month and just fucking Mike Tyson's his asshole. Bam! Bam!

Probably while he's snorting DMT or so. I bet the disappointing thing, we all think the idea is like the bomb is the psychedelic. Just like what you're saying, that's the dream. Oh yes, we'll drop the dust on ISIS and they will inhale it and realize that death is wrong. I know so many people in what some people call the psychedelic satsang, people who are in the psychedelic community, who have severely inflamed egos. Like the idea that there's some kind of ego diminishment that happens through psychedelics. I can remember being at like a screening of God, what's the name of it? Do you know this show about Tim Leary and Ram Dass, what was that called?

It was a great show about there like, anyway, I went to the screening of the, what's it called? Dying to Know. Dying to Know. I went to the screening of that and at the end of it, some psychedelic person stood up and yelled out, I have the truth that comes from LSD, talk to me after the show. So that psychedelics can create that state of consciousness too, where you know this is the right way. So I think Trump takes a psychedelic and like you're saying, it could be interesting. In the same way that like getting annihilated in some blast of radioactivity could be interesting, but I don't think it would necessarily be a good thing. But maybe MDMA, I don't know.

Thank you. What's that? Or ayahuasca. Yeah, but what if he drinks ayahuasca and in the ayahuasca state, the spirits come to him and they're like, you're amazing. You're the best president there ever was. North Korea sucks. You should bomb them, Donald. You know?

You never know. That's the problem. I think that would happen. And again, I think that's why this is an internal experience. If there really were some benevolent elves or entities, then they would be more reliable because these elf entities would always want people to do the right thing. What? Why would they always want someone to do the right thing? This is one of my favorite Ramdas quotes, which is, just because a thing doesn't have a body doesn't mean you should trust it.

Not a mic drop moment. Great. Hey, what's up, guys? My name is Rob. Hi, Rob. I guess this question is for Hamilton. So you've experimented a lot with psychedelics and you seem like a really skeptical, rational person. And that's fine.

It's a good way to be. But have you ever had an experience that made you question, like, obviously psychedelics made you question the reality. But what I want to say is like, have you had a moment like, fuck, maybe I'll... I haven't. No? Cool. I wish I could say that I had. Yeah, yeah.

Because it would sound, it would make me sound less crazy maybe, because it would seem like I'm weighing both sides of the issue. But I am a hardened materialist. You know, I love science. I have a really profound love for science. And I think it's the best tool we have for understanding these states. And I've never felt that mysticism was necessary to explain things. Okay. Yeah.

You know what it is? I've been listening a lot to Jordan Peterson recently. And he really, like, he talks about how, you know, science is only like 300, 400 years old. And mankind, we evolved to function in this play, to view meaning in a different way than, you know... differently from my scientific method, you know what I mean? So what I'm saying is, like, man finds meaning in, like, symbols and stories. And, like, I feel like a lot of times when you go on these trips to psychedelic, you have these powerful experiences. And you experience these, like, I don't know.

You experience these, like, these, like, it's almost mythological stories when you go through this trip. And you come back with something powerful and you can share with people and tell people these stories when you go on the trip. I don't think science excludes that. I don't think that it's not as if a scientist doesn't have an awe-inspiring experience or someone that believes in... doesn't interpret it mystically, doesn't have an amazing and beneficial experience. They still have visions. They still, you know, think about their memories and everything else. It's not, it's just, there isn't this need to assume that it's happening through some force other than the brain.

I think the brain is really, really amazing. I think it's, you know, just about the most amazing thing that exists. So why wouldn't I use that to interpret these things? I just don't see any lack of complexity in the brain, like it's not enough. Awesome. Thank you for your... Okay. Hello. Hi.

Hey, thank you guys for everything. You're awesome. My question is, the gentleman up there said something very interesting. Hamilton. Yes, well, all of you guys. But including the bearded gentleman. Oh, up here. Oh, okay. Sorry. Yes.

Was that he saw a hologram of information data on a little sand dollar, right? And that's how the dolphin can communicate to him. It's like, oh crap, I picked up what you were, you know, putting on that sand dollar. That kind of aligns with these theories in the holographic universe. I'm not sure if you guys have heard of it. Interesting piece of physics that says everything in the universe is like unfolding and unfolding and stuff like that. And basically, everything is a hologram. Our consciousness, the universe, everything's a hologram.

We're all just not really seeing the big picture, you know, the park. Yeah. Have you heard of that? Like, what do you think of it? Do you think maybe he kind of was thinking that or tapped into that thinking somehow? I have heard of it. I think what he was thinking about is that there was like some kind of pop science interest in the 70s and 80s and the possibility that dolphins could communicate visual images with sound

in the same way that they perceived their environment with sonar. They could then, so for example, if there were a person like Timothy Wiley in front of the dolphin and the dolphin saw Timothy Wiley and it projected sonar on it and then was able to visually interpret him from that information, it could then make that same sound and communicate an image to another dolphin of what Timothy Wiley looked like based on, you know, the reflection of the sound waves that they can very accurately mimic. So that was an idea. Carl Sagan wrote about it a little bit.

As far as I know, no one has followed up on it in a meaningful way since it was a thing people were speculating about in the 80s. But so that's what I believe inspired his idea. But in terms of like a whole, like sand dollars being holographic, like a two-dimensional thing that, or three-dimensional information on a two-dimensional surface, I don't know about that. There's a difference between me and you, Hamilton, because when you're like, I don't know, I was like, I know exactly what he means, man.

I know exactly what he's talking about. But I think it's funny that in the 60s, at some point dolphins must have been like, damn, the monkeys are getting high, man. What's happening? Like, all these high monkeys keep swimming at us. Like, why are they? Just avoid the high monkeys. They'll try to fuck you.

Yeah, so I think there's something, honestly, I don't know, man. This is why you would not get Nicole, and I would. Like, if somebody like that, with that beautiful white beard and those sunglasses, got me, like, if I snorted PCP with that guy in like 15 minutes, I'd be like, take my money, sir, I believe you. My system's good. That's what I'm saying. But also, you miss out a little bit.

I think that there's a, who knows? I don't know. Maybe they, you know what? I'll tell you this. The next time I go snorkeling, I'm going to look at shells in a totally different way. Like, fuck, that could be a dolphin tweet. Thank you. Thank you guys so much.

Hi, Duncan. Hi, Hamilton. I've been reading a lot recently from the harm reduction community about purporting the positive effects of psychedelics on opioid use and opioid abuse. And however, I do feel like I'm kind of in a bubble in terms of just living in New York City and being, practicing with like more liberal physicians. So I'm just wondering, number one, how widespread is this kind of like harm reduction movement across the country?

And also, like, what can just the average citizen do to support like these kind of therapies without looking just like kind of a, I don't know, crazy? The therapy specifically you could donate to MAPS or the Hefter Research Institute or the Beckley Foundation or any number of different foundations that are working to research psychedelics and use them therapeutically, you know, depending on what you do. And also, start a website, teach a class. I don't know, it just depends on what your strengths are. But in terms of how widespread harm reduction is, I think the internet has been the major

tool in spreading harm reduction information. And that's something that's been happening since the 90s with Aeroid. So widespread, I think. Thank you. Hi. Thanks, guys. You've talked a lot about the mystic and metaphysical aspects of psychedelics, but I want to touch on a certain aspect of that and ceremony.

As you've seen different cultures use psychedelics, what do you think the benefits or maybe the negative aspects of ceremony are? Because it seems like one thing that ceremony really does is help to bring the individual into a grounded sense of intent and maybe some sort of responsibility with the experience. And what about that is important for us as a Western society that's really starting to use these drugs in a totally new way and we have this opportunity to learn from what people have done in the past and implement it in new ways. What do you think we can learn or what do you think we can avoid from these type of ceremonies

that cultures have used for thousands and thousands of years? Yeah, I mean, there's no question that our culture has gone about this in the absolute worst possible way. You know, we decided that the reasonable thing to do is to take people that sell or possess psychedelics and lock them in cages and it clearly doesn't work. So any culture that's figured out a way to use them beneficially, it's worth looking at what they're doing and studying it because not only do they not destroy people's lives for possessing and selling them, they actually heal people within their belief system with

these substances and there's so many different variations depending on the shaman, depending on where you are. The music is a common theme in these ceremonies, the chanting, often there's someone who's watching over people who is very experienced with the drug and knows its duration, knows the potency of the plants that they're working with and those are two simple but very important things. Yeah, great, thank you. Thank you.

Duncan? Yes. Thank you so much for this. It was amazing. Thanks for coming. My, I guess my main question and we've touched on it a little bit is, I mean, I know, Duncan, you support maps in Symposium. That's where I saw you before here in New York.

And Hamilton, I guess my question for you is, you talked a little bit about the legality and your action in this, but what is your opinion on their work that they're doing and I guess some of these drugs that you know about that are more experimental versus kind of LSD, psilocybin, some more use. I think all this new research that's coming out right now is great. But, you know, ultimately my scientific hero is Alexander Shulgin. I'm very interested in the chemistry. I'm very interested in new drugs and how humans respond to them.

And a lot of the clinical work that's being done right now is very basic. It's very safe work in a sense because it's, the stakes are so high, nobody wants to do something very risky. When you look at, you know, the Roland Griffiths work at Johns Hopkins, it got a huge amount of press. But the conclusion of that first clinical study was essentially that psilocybin is psychedelic. They concluded. And it's not necessarily a mind-blowing revelation, but that's the kind of work that has to be

done, just this very basic work at the moment to figure out, you know, does it help people with OCD? What are the therapeutic properties? The more accepted therapeutic effects that people can find for these substances, the easier it is to argue that they shouldn't be in Schedule 1, which by definition means that there's no therapeutic use, no medicinal use. So I think it's all great. I think that everyone involved in this work knows what they're doing.

They're doing it in a very politically conscious way because this is sort of a complicated game that everyone is playing. And I think it's great. But the work that I find most compelling is, you know, synthesis of new drugs, the new drugs that are being discovered every day. And that doesn't get as much attention because it's maybe less interesting for most people. Thank you. Hi.

Thank you so much for this first really quick question for Duncan and then a more general question. Duncan, welcome to New York. Thank you. Now that you're here, when are you making a trip upstate to visit your spiritual parents at New York? Alison Allison? Yes.

I'm asking for purely selfish reasons. I live right near there and go there a lot. I think the next full moon party, I was looking at the date. I'm doing another show here in March with Krishnadas and I'm afraid that that falls, either, wait, is the full moon tonight or is it next month? Yeah. See, that's the problem. It's like, so I can't go in March, so in April, I think that's when I'm...

The solstice event is next month too. That's the big one. When is that? Middle of March. Well, you know what? If I'm going up there, I'll tweet about it. I definitely will be going to one of their events soon. Okay.

And I do consider them my mommy and daddy. Thank you. Then more general question. It kind of relates to some of the others now, but this is for Hamilton, I guess specifically, with this research that's been going on with maps and Johns Hopkins when you're talking about it. And just in general, it seems like so many more people are so much more open to discussing their psychedelic experiences and coming out about it.

And it's a lot more of a comfortable situation now. Do you have hope for the future of psychedelics in general? And could we see more positive changes with that? Lifetimes versus way years off, as far as just society being more accepting of them? Yeah, I do have hope. Within my lifetime, growing up in the 90s, the only reporting on psychoactive drugs in general in the news is exclusively negative. Now, if you type in psilocybin in Google News, you're going to find more positive stories

than negative ones. And part of that has to do with the scientific research that's provided a substrate for reporters to say good things about psychedelics. Part of it has to do with fashion, that it's trendy to say positive things about psychedelics right now. There's a lot of different factors at play, but the end result is that the New York Times, every major media outlet is now semi-routinely saying positive things about psychedelic drugs. It's being read by millions of people.

It's changing people's minds. And I can only see that as a good thing. And that's another reason not to be afraid. That's the other thing. It's like this whole being on a list, don't say anything positive about drugs. It's like ultimately the media, as much as people hate the media, they sculpt public opinion on these issues. And the more people that are saying positive things, the more likely it is that minds are

changed. And then the next politician that comes along and thinks that they can gain political traction by scheduling salvia or 2CN or whatever will think twice about it because they might assume that people actually care. I think you're totally right, man. I don't know why I got so fucking severe on you in the middle of the show like that, man. It's just like, I just don't want to see you get murdered. I'm just kidding.

I keep doing it. I hate to see you get dragged off. But no, I think you're absolutely right. Who cares? You know what? I'll get dragged off to the fucking dungeons. It's a great way to die. You know, it's a great way to like, seriously, like, you know, this is like, God, I'm sorry,

I always do this. But to quote the Bhagavad Gita, in the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita, Argent of the warrior drops his bow and says to Krishna, the embodiment of the universe, God, I'm not going to fight. It's better, you know, it's better to go in the forest than to kill. And the responses, essentially, the essence of the Bhagavad Gita is to die in sacred duty. To die in sacred duty. If you're on a battlefield, and that's what we are on, for real, we're on a battlefield. And the battlefield is a war.

And the war is a war against a legion of people who think it's okay to put alchemists, chemists, healers, shamans, people whose only intention is to accelerate the intellectual evolution of their species in jail. There's a group of people who want to do that. And that is wrong. It'll never be right. It's always wrong. It's wrong on every level. This is a war.

So, in this war, if you were to get arrested, hurt anything in that kind of war, then what a beautiful thing to happen to you. Like, that's one of the highest victories. That's one of the highest achievements is to, in the pursuit of some justice, to fall in one way or another. And that's how heroes are made. So, that is why, when you're arrested, I'm going to build a Hamilton statue in my house, and burn candles in front of it. I'm sorry. That's an attempt at a joke. I'm sorry.

But no, it's still, I think that it's a very important thing, and that regardless of outcome, it doesn't matter. You can't think about the outcome. And every single person in here can immediately do something to accelerate us getting to a point where these things are prescribable just by going to the maps website and donating to maps and help. That's all you got to do, or volunteering with them also, because if you were really into it, you could start volunteering for their Zendo project. I've done the Zendo application all the way. There you go. Awesome. Hello.

Hi. Just wanted to tell everybody, you know, if you're thinking about it, just do the drugs, do them critically, think about solutions, and, you know, it might work, it might not work, but, you know, control your experience. No, that's good advice. Anyways, so how's New York? How's New York treating you? Warm welcome? Is everything good? Yeah, I love it here.

It's amazing. Like, it's, it really is, I have right now a very cheesy love for New York. I'm still fascinated by the subways, like I like riding the trains, and I think the people here are, it's so funny because the, you come here, it's weirdly, I've said this to Cora, my girlfriend, and like, I think she's like, this is actually the opposite, but I keep thinking, it's like Burning Man, because like, Burning Man's got such a bad rap that it creates a force field around it where you have this idea of what it's like when you go there, and when you get there, you realize, oh, fuck, this is the opposite of my fantasies about what it would be. So, New York being a city, a hard city that alienates people, a city of like, everyone's out for themselves, a kind of Machiavellian capitalist dystopia or something, it's the opposite of that. It feels like this humanistic, beautiful experiment. Sure, not everyone's like grinning from ear to ear here, but you get the feeling that if you fall down, someone's gonna help you stand up, and that people are like, well, he's sticking up for each other. And the other thing that I think is very sweet is that 2am on the subways when I'm coming home from a show, people are comfortable enough around each other that they're sleeping, and I think there's something really beautiful about that, so I like this city.

Wonderful. I'd say as a New Yorker, that's the best part of it. We could all just be ourselves. To me, I've been a few places, not too many, but it's the realest place. You could just be yourself, so wonderful answer, and Hamilton, you're awesome too. Thank you. Thanks. We have time for one more question, then we gotta wrap it up. What's up, guys? I'm just wondering, how has Timothy Leary's work influenced your own personal works, both of you guys? I wouldn't say he's had a huge influence. I think he's interesting, historically.

Yeah, he was not the guy that I was most interested in. A lot of other people have. Alexander Shulgin, John Lilly, Terence McKenna. Timothy Leary's obviously very, very important, but he's kind of stigmatized at this point because people think that it was his manic attempt to show everyone that LSD was great that resulted in this kind of mess that we're in right now. Some people will say that. I think that's a sort of simplistic explanation, but it's an idea that people have that if he hadn't gone off on this mission that maybe scientific research could have continued and ultimately it was a bad thing. It's arguing a counterfactual and it's impossible to know exactly what would have happened if Timothy Leary had never existed, but... Yeah, that's a sure. Yeah. Thank you. Good for you, Duncan.

Well, you know, one thing that's impacted me in my life is Ram Dass, and I go to the Ram Dass retreats regularly, and I think about a lot of those teachings, and those teachings come from Neem Karoli Baba, who was Ram Dass' guru. And it's actually, you're more like Timothy Leary. In that movie, Dying to Know, there's this fantastic scene where Ram Dass is sitting with Timothy Leary, who is in his last weeks of life, and Ram Dass starts talking about the soul. And you see this friendship between Leary and Ram Dass. So Ram Dass starts talking about the soul, and you see this is not a new conversation. This is a conversation they've been having since the 60s. Ram Dass is talking about the soul, and Timothy Leary is like, the soul? Where is it?

Where do you think it is? Like, here? It's something in you? What are you talking about? And it's this beautiful love between these two, the materialist and the spiritualist. They're never going to agree, but their interaction is so playful and sweet. So when I think of Timothy Leary, I think of the person who catapulted Richard Alpert, who was to become Ram Dass, into a state of consciousness where it made sense to take LSD to India and give it to people who were meditating to try to get a map for what that state of consciousness was. And because of that journey to India and diving into that level of what a lot of people would probably consider to be insanity, he came into contact with Neem Karoli Baba.

And because he came into contact with Neem Karoli Baba, Be Here Now came into existence. And because of Be Here Now, I was able to gather a lot of tools that I use every single day to keep myself from going completely nuts. And so for that, I feel a lot of gratitude for what Timothy Leary did. And that's what I think of him as. I think of him as the person who pushed Ram Dass into the unknown, or Alpert into the unknown. And we need people like that. So I'm very grateful for that person. I'm so glad that he was on the scene.

Yeah, me too. True. Thanks, guys. Thanks for the question. Everybody, thank you so much for coming tonight. I'm going to be hanging out in the bar there if you guys want to get a drink after this and just hang out. If you enjoyed tonight, we're doing another show in March with Krishna Das, who's going to see Kirtan in the beginning and talk about Channing Mantras. It's going to be pretty awesome. If I could please just have everyone give a gigantic round of applause for our spectacular guest, Hamilton Morris.

Let him hear it. Please. And thank you all so much for coming. We'll see you next time. That was Hamilton Morris and Emile Amos. Links to find them will be at dunkintrustle.com. Thank you Squarespace for sponsoring this episode. And if you enjoyed this podcast, be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes and give us a nice rating.

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