Modern Wisdom - #284 - Hamilton Morris - Creating The Future Of Psychedelics

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

Hamilton Morris is a journalist, documentary producer and a chemist. Hamilton's Pharmacopeia is one of the most interesting documentaries around chemistry, psychoactive drugs, psychedelic culture and traditional uses for plant medicine ever. Sadly Season 3 is the last one, but Hamilton joins me today to talk about his interest in consciousness, why chemistry hasn't captured culture like other sciences, why Mkat failed because of a branding issue, why we should be synthesising DMT ourselves instead of squeezing Bufo Alvarius the psychedelic toad of the Sonoran Desert and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount off perfect teeth at https://www.dwaligners.co.uk (use code WISDOM10) Extra Stuff: Buy Hamilton's New Pamphlet - https://www.psychedelictoadofthesonorandesert.com  Hamilton's Pharmacopeia - https://g.co/kgs/ASx1sU  Follow Hamilton on Twitter - https://twitter.com/HamiltonMorris  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello beautiful people, welcome back. My guest today is Hamilton Morris, journalist, documentary producer and a chemist. Hamilton's Pharmacopia is one of the most interesting documentaries around chemistry, psychoactive drugs, psychedelic culture, and traditional uses for plant medicine ever. Season 3 is the last one, sadly. But Hamilton joins me today to talk about his in consciousness, why chemistry hasn't captured culture like other sciences, why MCAT failed because of a branding issue, why we should be synthesizing DMT ourselves instead of squeezing toads and much more. If you haven't got chance to watch Hamilton's Pharmacopia and you enjoy this episode, you will absolutely adore it. There is a link in the show notes below where you can search to just see where you might be able to watch it in your country. Hamilton's awesome.

Like he's such a, he's so in love with the science in a really sort of rationalist way and then has this other side to him, which is very empathetic and very sort of forgiving and he's interested in psychology. I really, really enjoyed this. And it's been a long time coming. I've watched his work for years, years and years,

like a decade and yeah, got him on the show. Pretty cool. But now it's time to learn about psychedelics with the wise and very wonderful Hamilton Morris. Hamilton Morris Hamilton Morris look at the show Thanks for having me really happy to have you here man if you meet someone at a party for the first time and they ask, what do you do? What's your answer? It depends on what I'm doing at the time because I do a number of different things. If I'm directing a TV show, then I'll say

I direct a TV show. If I am writing, I'll say I'm writing an article or I'm doing research on this story for a magazine piece or something like that. And if I'm primarily doing chemistry, I'll say I'm doing chemistry right now. I'm doing some chemistry. So that just depends on what I'm doing. Because I do different, I've tried to balance these three components of my life and as best I can not only balance them but allow them to feed off of each other and integrate them into each other in an interesting way. So I think that's actually been very helpful. What ties those three things together? I think curiosity and a desire to

investigate the natural world to understand the world that's certainly a huge goal of chemistry is to understand the natural world. It's been the focus of almost every article I've ever written, whether it's about crime or chemistry or psychoactive drugs to try to understand things phenomena, how they happen, what happened in the past, what's happening now. And filmmaking is the same thing as well

to try to document things, to characterize them, to understand things that are mysterious. I think I've heard you say before that a lot of chemistry is in not superbly accessible formats. A lot of it's in quite sort of difficult to understand written words. And that was one of the reasons why you enjoy doing the film making as well to make it a bit more accessible.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's kind of amazing to me, given how many people have cameras and the existence of YouTube and the existence of this international chemistry community, how many basic chemistry things seem to have never been filmed before. Like, I was talking with a chemistry quaintants

in Australia a couple nights ago, who's doing this really cool project of trying to synthesize this substance called QBane, have you ever heard of this before? No, what is it? For chemists, this is like one of the coolest things ever created. It's a cube made of carbon. So it's eight carbon atoms that are connected in a cube. And it's very, very hard to do that because carbon doesn't want to have 90 degree angles. It's a very strained bond for a carbon atom. And this guy is doing it in his garage, which I just think is so cool. But this is like a very famous chemical. It's in most textbooks. And I was thinking,

I've never seen a photograph of Cubane. I don't know if Cubane has ever been photographed before. I don't know if, you know, like there's a lot of industrially important, academically important reactions that basically are visually unknown to people. They have no idea what they actually look like. And so that was another big part of it is like one of the, you know, one of the, I think the most amazing things that I have learned from years of doing lab work is that chemistry is beautiful

and having the ability to bring that beauty to people, to show them, you know, well, you might see methamphetamine synthesis as this exclusively negative thing, or you're only thinking about it in terms of its potentially destructive effect on society. But what about the beauty of a salvated electron? I mean, it's pretty remarkable. Some people go to bed thinking about that at night. I do all the time. Something that I thought of while I was watching the most recent season of your show and your love for chemistry, so it comes across really strongly in it, is there isn't, I don't think there is

the same societal, cultural, further, and interesting chemistry as there is perhaps in physics and biology at the moment. I'm not sure whether you get the sense of this, but when we think about all of the large Hadron collider and we're searching for extraterrestrials and we're messaging extraterrestrials and there's new particles being formed and stuff like that. And then CRISPR, gene editing, the side of, I don't know whether that's technically chemistry or biology or somewhere in between the two. But still, I just feel that things like this, perhaps don't get the level of public exposure that their rival sciences might do. I agree completely.

It's absolutely true. And I find it a little bizarre that physics and astrophysics of all things dominate pop science discourse, this discipline that is more disconnected from our everyday life than almost anything else. And I'm sure there's some astrophysicists listening to this saying, like, what the fuck did he decide? But that is my feeling. It is, you know, like black holes are obviously totally fascinating. And I am not going to suggest for a moment that people shouldn't be interested in black

holes or neutron stars or anything like that. It's totally, totally fascinating. I'm fascinated by it. But at the same time, it's almost like science fiction. It's almost like fantasy. It has no connection to our lives whatsoever, as remarkable as it is, whereas chemistry is so insanely important to our everyday existence and is happening immediately around us, inside us, in front of us, it's controlling every aspect of our reality all the time, and it's considered boring.

So that is something that I do find remarkable. And it's not only remarkable, I think it's, I've asked myself why, how could this have happened? How has big astrophysics destroyed the small interest in chemistry that should be present in every person? And I think there's a lot of reasons for it, but I do think this kind of like safety culture, fear of the power of chemistry, fear of psychoactive drugs, fear of explosives, fear of chemophobia is what chemists call it, where someone will say,

oh, this food doesn't contain chemicals. And people will say that's a good thing. Of course, all food is made of chemicals. Chemicals are a bad thing. So it's just like, you know, it's all just kind of, shows how disconnected we are. And how, you know, you can't go to a pharmacy in the United States and get a pH indicator anymore.

Like we're totally disconnected from, I would say, even the most basic aspects of chemistry. And it's really sad because I think it's a science that is one of the most ancient scientific disciplines, maybe the most ancient. And it, I mean, especially if you include metallurgy as a form of chemistry, which it is. And something that humans have been connected to for such a long time, so important to who we are, how we are here right now.

And yet, it's considered boring. That's why you're here, man. How much does a intrigue or an interest in consciousness and the phenomenological experience of our day to day experience guide what you do? I would say it's a huge, a huge motivator. I wouldn't say that I'm especially optimistic about consciousness being understood in the next few years. I mean, what I really think is the case is that, you know, there's a lot of concepts that aren't really scientific concepts, but they're useful. It's like, I think about consciousness the way historically people would look for life, you know, like if you ask a, like we're aware

life exists, life is a thing that exists. And if you ask a biologist, can you show me where life is in a cell, they can't point to life in a cell because life isn't a single thing and it can't be discovered scientifically or understood scientifically because it's not really a scientific concept exactly. It's a sort of collection of phenomena that we are using to describe something that isn't one thing. And I think consciousness is like life in that sense, that it doesn't actually exist the way that we, you know, we're not going to realize, oh, the consciousness is, it is the classroom.

That is what consciousness. It's this region of the brain and it's a quantum mechanical interaction in the classroom and that produces consciousness. No, it's consciousness is going to be many, many things in the way that life is many things. You can reduce what life is and say, okay, it's homeostasis, it's reproduction, it's metabolic regulation, it's a certain type of organization, and we can agree that those are useful to finding characteristics of life, which, of course, biologists still to this day argue about constantly what constitutes life.

And I don't think consciousness is going to be any simpler. So, I am motivated to understand consciousness, but I'm also doing that with the understanding that I don't think consciousness will be understood in a single way because I don't think it is a thing. I think it is a label that we use to describe the complex experience of being or the perceived experience of being. Yeah. These emergent properties are very difficult to try and wrangle together when you think about the synergy of different cells.

Wenders, a particular number of cells become skin. When does it become an arm? When does it become a body? When does it become a human? And I wonder... Yeah, man, I mean, we've had a few philosophers on Philip Goff talking about the philosophical schools of consciousness, dualism and his particular belief as well. Given that you seem to have quite a rational, scientific approach to things, it's interesting that you don't think that we're going to

find out what consciousness is. I would have thought that you would have maybe expected it to be able to be explained by science. Well, I think that it will be explained by science in the way that life has been explained by science, but in being explained by science, it will be explained away. It will not exist anymore because I don't think it is real. I don't think consciousness exists in the way that DNA exists. I don't think it's a single thing that can be understood and characterized. I think it's a collection of different

computational, experiential, perceptual phenomena that in concert create a perceived experience that we call consciousness, but it's not a thing. that in concert create a perceived experience that we call consciousness, but it's not a thing. And so we will understand how emotion and memory are regulating aspects of perception and motivation and all these things, but it's very, I mean, it's very complicated. I would think, I imagine, maybe I'm wrong,

maybe it turns out that someone is gonna find out that it's a really simple thing. And it is one thing and everything that I'm saying is wrong. But my intuitive sense is that there will never be a paper published in nature that's consciousness explained. Here's what it is. It's this one quantum mechanical interaction and a microtubule in the classroom, and that's it.

Okay. What is the place that psychedelics under the mind-altering drugs have in life? But why should anyone take them? Hmm. I don't know that anyone should take them. Why would anyone want to take them perhaps? Yeah.

Why would anyone want to take them? Because they have the potential to dramatically enrich your life in the same way that music and art and love and a lot of other technically unnecessary things have the potential to enrich your life. So if someone is saying, you don't have to do that, you can do it another way. Sure, you don't have to listen to music either. You don't have to do that, you can do it another way. Sure, you don't have to listen to music either.

You don't have to do a lot of things, but I don't really see a good reason not to assuming that, you know, you're doing it responsibly and you are, you know, I suppose, stable enough to benefit hearing it somewhere. A lot of the people on the most recent season of Hamilton's Pharmacopie were talking about psychedelics being sacred. You had this debate around the uh, Toad Venom and you were saying, look, we can save these Toads if we synthesize it in a lab,

as opposed to chasing them down. And they talk about them being sacred and gifts from the gods and the universe and stuff like that. How do you feel around this sort of rhetoric to do with psychedelics? I feel different ways about it. It kind of depends on what culture I'm interacting with. I would say I feel, it's like everything, you know. If somebody says something is sacred and there's no cost to that perspective, then sure, that's fine. Or if it's part of a multi-generational tradition and I have no place interfering with it, fine. There's a belief among many Native American church members that

peyote is not a drug or a plant that contains a drug. It's a spirit and to even talk about masculine as an active principle in the cactus is a sort of sacrilegious reductionist perspective that also acknowledge the depth of the spirit of the peyote. And so if you say, hey, come on, come on, guys, you're going to drive this plant to extinction by overharvesting it. And you can synthesize it in a couple of steps.

And then you don't have to interfere with the natural world. That's a hard argument to make. That's not an argument that I'm... If I made that argument, I'd make it very gently, and I would probably instead start with suggesting that the pay-o-d be cultivated, but they don't even like cultivation. And arguably with good reason, because a lot of the cultivation techniques have been focused on growing very large pay-o-d, as opposed to growing pay-o-d that has a high alkaloid concentration. And so I think some early attempts to cultivate pay- peyote for the Native American

Church produced low potency cacti that they considered inferior. And so this is my impression having reported on this a few years ago, they kind of decided that this cultivation was a bad root to go down. So that's a complicated interplay of tradition, indigenous people who have been horrendously discriminated against and marginalized, and something that has had a very positive effect, and then you want to come in and say, hey, I know this is having a really positive effect on you and your family and your community, but it's not good for the sustainable life of this cactus. So you have to change your practices. I can understand why that would be an objectionable thing. With the Toad, I think it's different because we are dealing with something that is not a tradition.

It is not something that has been done for generations by a marginalized group. It's a new thing that started in the 80s by a white guy in Texas. And I actually really find that important and interesting because there's a tendency that many people have to, they have to, in order, they feel, I think some kind of insecurity about their use of these things. And so they need some justification. They need to say that it's therapeutic

or traditional or spiritual or something. They can't just say, I enjoy this. And so you really bought up against that with modern practices because there is no tradition. There might be no evidence that it's therapeutic, and any spirituality associated with it will be something that is new, and so that doesn't have the same value to people. And so people basically invented a tradition for Bufu Alvarious Venom, and you know, my, like, I got so many messages from people saying, like, you're just another white colonist erasing the history of Native

Americans. This 30-year-old history. Yes, and it's like, but I am acutely aware of the fact that people very much want this to be a Native American practice. And if anyone produces any evidence that that is the case, I will change my mind. I have no, I'm interested in the truth. So if somebody provides strong evidence, I'll change my perspective on this.

But the reason that there is this misconception is that there was, there have been a few discoveries of large quantities of toad bones. One was in North Carolina and the anthropologist whose name was Jean-Grenquat, I believe. She, and this was also a problem in my episode. Like the article that I show in the episode has all these mistakes in it, but what I say in the episode is correct, but then people were criticizing me because there was like a, it wasn't like synchronized, but if you, whatever I say in the episode is correct for the record. And so she found all these toad bones and knew that there were some toads that produced

psychoactive tripdomines and wrote this paper that suggested that that was the case. And it's kind of sensational. People like any story about ancient use of psychedelics, myself included. And so it got written up a little bit in the popular press in Omni Magazine, which is a big magazine at that time. And this is really interesting the way it happened. And so this guy Ken Nelson saw this in Omni Magazine and then went to try to recreate what he had read about. But what's really interesting is that was mis- reported in Omni Magazine. So a mistaken report, a mistaken interpretation of

this Native American practice caused a real discovery to occur. The all- current evidence, there's an anthropologist named Matthew Compton who looked into this, points toward the toads having been used as a food source, not as a drug, and there's a lot of reels for that. There's a lot of evidence. One is that Bufal variate, which is the only species that produces 5MEO DMT, is not present in the carolinas. And so there's that. There is no plausible psychedelic toad.

Also, there are documented, there's a book actually have it, of like traditional Cherokee practices in food preparation. It has an infection on the preparation of toads for consumption. And they talk about how to detoxify it. So it on the preparation of toads for consumption. They talk about how to detoxify it. It's the opposite of using it as a drug. They're trying to remove any potentially toxic principle so that it can be consumed. Yeah, toads are a decent source of food.

It doesn't really make sense that there would be all these toad skeletons if it were used as a drug, but it would make a lot of sense given that there weren't any psychedelic toads in that region that they were using those as a food. So this misconception caused him to get interested in the possibility, and then he independently actually discovered that you could milk the venom of this toad and smoke it based on some research by an Italian biologist named Vitorio or spamer. Complicated story.

I don't blame people for being confused by it. It's very confusing. But that's what happened. So all these people are saying, how dare you? Like you said that he discovered it from a Cherokee midden pile and then you're saying that a white person discovered it. But the complicated thing is it was a misunderstanding of what that Cherokee mid-in pile was. I hope that made sense.

I don't know if that did that make sense. One mistake, man. Yeah. It's not bad as misrepresentations go that you get to open up an entire new world of psychedelic experience. What's your opinion on the sacredness coming along for the ride? Do you think there's anything more happening during the experience of taking a psychedelic than just the interaction of the chemicals with your brain? Are we accessing a higher power?

Is there someone talking to us? Is it energy in the universe? Well, what I find funny is people are constantly invoking the supernatural in places where just simple psychology is sufficient. You don't need to go into the spirit realm to understand that there are non-exclusively, externally chemical determinants of experience. And this goes back to the 60s. Timothy Leary did experiments at Millbrook where he would put LSD in milk that was dyed red, and then he'd put LSD in milk that was dyed green, and then he'd put LSD in milk that was dyed black.

You'd say, this LSD does this, and this LSD does that. Of course, people would have different experiences based on the different colored LSDs and the different types of experiences that he'd prime to them for. So this is like basic psychology. And of course, Larry was a psychologist. So it really makes sense that if you tell someone, hey, this was harvested from the sacred venom of a sacred toad, the medicine that they're, you know, they activate in a subterranean den for nine months, just like human gestation. And they create this chemical that causes a rebirth. And this is their gift to us and to increase

our ecological awareness or whatever. You can make a beautiful story. And for the record, I have smoked the venom and had an absolutely amazing experience with it. So I get it. I get why I think it's cool. I'm not one of these people that, you know, like I understand why people like it. I think it's amazing.

I totally get it. But it's not sustainable. And with the popularity increasing at the rate that it currently is, there needs to be a different way of doing it. It hasn't been studied as well as I would like it to. And one of the things that I'm doing with this episode is I republished the book that Ken Nelson wrote. and I'm donating all of the profits to charity and it's been this like unexpected and insanely successful fundraising

effort at like at as of today I think it's raised $130,000 for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research but also there's separate money going to the Tucson Herpetological Society. And I really want to get some carefully documented data on how the populations are impacted because most of what I know is anecdotal. I spoke with a number of the people that milk bufluolvarius for a living. And those people, if anyone have incentive to downplay the severity of any ecological

disruption because their livelihood depends on it and even those people were saying this is not sustainable, this is not a good practice. So it's not that I do believe that people can have different experiences based on different substances, but I think that the determining factor is psychological, not chemical unless you have a reason to believe that it is, and of course I am aware also that psychology is you know biochemically determined, but I'm talking about the chemistry of the drug itself. Like that if you I think that with the appropriate tradition and the appropriate packaging, you can extract that from any substance in the same way that you could make the best LSD in the world feel bad to people if you, you know, served it to them in like a brown tar and said that it had been scraped from underneath the toilet

and that it was cursed by a serial killer or something like that. These things impact the experience completely. That's the fascinating thing about set and settings. I don't need to make sure that I'm in a good place for ibuproofen to do its job properly, or like aspirin to do its job properly, but the environment that you're in and the mindset that you have going into the experience

does inherently change the experience of the substance that you're taking when it comes to mind-altering stuff. Yeah, oh, absolutely, absolutely. And that is one useful thing to come out of this kind of unusual new tradition. There are these two medical doctors in Mexico who have become toad venom evangelists. And they're very controversial in the toad venom community. I was also getting a lot of criticism from people that were saying, why didn't you talk about how bad these guys are? Well, you know, I can't fight everyone's

fights with these people for them, but they have... There's a lot of infighting, a lot of anger in the Toad Venom community, and I think part of it has to do with the power of the substance. I think that from what I can tell, some of the, they call themselves facilitators, the people that give 5MEO DMT containing toad venom to people almost become addicted to the power of the transformation that they are promoting with the administration of the substance. You can imagine being a psychologist or something and doing talk therapy with people for years and never, you might never see a change.

You might never see even the smallest change in someone's behavior and you can imagine the feeling of futility that that would promote in someone who's dedicated their lives to healing. And then you have a substance that will cause absolutely extraordinary change, spiritual experience, transformation, life changing, transformation in people,

immediately and how encouraging that could be to someone to think, you know, how could you do anything but that? What else, you know, what else would be worth your time as a healer, but to administer the substance? So I see where they get a little Lost in it themselves and to be honest, there's an element of that with me as well, where I, you know, when I had this experience, when I came out of it, I, one of the first thoughts I had was, you know, given the skills that I have, how can I help other people have this experience? And for me, that was chemistry. That was, you know, if I can show people that this is a simple molecule that can easily be produced by someone with the undergrad chemistry knowledge and made available to anyone that needs it,

and that will have a positive effect on the world. Why would you want other people to experience what you did? What was the benefit that you saw from it? You know, I would say that it's many of the benefits that people typically associate with a near death experience, where you feel extreme gratitude for life, you feel an appreciation for the beauty of the world that you can very easily take for granted.

I was totally tenderized. I was hyper-sensitive in the wake of this experience. I hyper-sensitized in every way. I would be moved to tears by the beauty of a cute dog walking down the street, just totally, totally amazed by plants and all life. And I think that that, without even medicalizing it, now, like obviously that has a lot of potential for treatment of depression and various diseases, addiction, and so on and so

forth. But even for a healthy person, that's pretty nice. That's a useful little change of pace to remind you that life is a gift and that it's beautiful and that it should be appreciated because it's really, really unbelievably strange and interesting and cool. Why do you think it is that people have these religious experiences? Why do you think it is that people have these religious experiences? Why do you think the phenomenological and not just with the Toe Venom, but with many things, many psychedelics, induce this sort of sacred, religious state I'm communicating with higher powers. One of the thought experiments I've been playing around with for ages is what would happen to someone? Did you ever see the film Mother mother who was made by Netflix?

Oh, you don't have a TV? The Darren Aaron Aske movie? Maybe. Was it about the girl that was raised by a robot? Oh, I watched half of it on an airplane. Okay, so you know the premise, right? So you have this human that is raised with essentially no culture. They're given words because they have language, but they're not given any cultural influence. It's just them essentially in a Petri dish, the Petri dish just happens to be a big building that they live in. Have you ever considered what would happen to someone who hadn't been imprinted by culture if they were to take a psychedelic?

Well, yeah, I mean, I consider it all the time, because I'm very interested in the way animals respond to psychedelics and what a psychedelic experience is for a rodent, or if there even is a psychedelic experience for a rodent. And it's hard enough to conceptualize experience for another human being, let alone an animal or someone that has no cultural imprinting or anything like that. So it's sort of hard to say, but what do you think? What is, what do you think would happen in the world?

Well, I mean, I think, based on my very mild introduction to psychedelics, stuff like the geometric patterns that you seem to see tense, they would be fairly ubiquitous, they don't necessarily require the cultural imprinting. For instance, if you were to take something like psilocybin and you get that sort of hexagonal psychedelic effect in front of you like a kaleidoscope, that, I don't think that that requires culture. It would be so interesting, man. If you don't know what a dragon is, can a dragon chase you down? If you don't know what a snake is, can you be scared of a snake? Is it blob? I'm trying to remove the programming from this

particular human in the test tube that we're talking about and see what's left when you introduce the psychedelic to them. Yeah, well, I mean, one one thing that I would imagine is religious experience. I think that that the psychedelic experience probably is a religious experience. I imagine as someone who is, you know, is a religious experience. I imagine as someone who is atheist agnostic, it's certainly the closest I ever get to what I imagine religious transcendence is like. And so I think that yeah, it could promote some version of that. I mean, the other thing to keep in mind is that, like, and one reason that drug education is so important is the way we think about drugs impacts the experiences I was saying previously. So, little things, like, you know, just even the way people talk about

drugs or they, people are burnt out, they're acid burned, they're frying on acid, all this, you know, there's people that think that the drug experience is like a form of brain damage. And, you know, outside of it being a misconception, it also makes me wonder, what does that person feel like when they take LSD, if they think that it's bad, if they think that this is, they're frying on acid and that it's like, that it's damaging to them in some way, how could you possibly have a good experience that way? I mean, there's also quite a lot of people that seem to think that the mushroom experience

is a form of food poisoning. You hear that all, have you heard that? At least in the US people will say, like, hey, my friend told me that when you strip on mushrooms, it's just food poisoning. And I think like, wow, there are people that have mushroom experiences who think that what is happening is food poisoning. I've heard you talk about some of the residual guilt that you get when you sometimes used to smoke weed, because it's kind of associated with this, I'm being a bit of a waste man, I should be working, I should be studying, I should

be being productive, and that's almost exclusively because of how you've been socialized. What do other people say about people who take that drug? That's true. Well, it's true, it's true and it's not true. It's very complicated, cannabis. That's one of the more complicated ones because I think that one of the advantages and disadvantages of cannabis is that it allows you at least allows me it does different things to everyone. It allows me to take things less seriously, a lot less seriously. And that's great sometimes, and not great as a daily alteration of consciousness. So it's very easy for me to just, I'm receiving like 100 emails a day from disgruntled weirdos. And I think, what is wrong with these people?

How could they possibly watch what I made and think and extract that of all possible interpretations? What is going on? But then if I'm stoned, I think, all right, well, I don't know. I guess, I guess people think strange things. And that's just the way it's going to be for that guy. But, and so that can be extremely, extremely beneficial in it. If you're living a frustrating life or you're just totally occupied with your professional responsibilities or your studies or whatever, but too much of it, at least for

me, and it has a bit of a dissociative type of fact where I'm not as engaged with the world, which again, can be beneficial. It really just depends on the context. And I agree with you that you could make a valid argument that this is all conditioning, and especially conditioning from a capitalist society that values productivity over everything else, over joy, over relaxation, over comradery with friends, over almost anything. are many extremely stoned people who are living a beautiful existence that is disconnected from our American, European value system that, if you're not just constantly generating things, you're of no value. And of course, there are also people that get sown all the time and are immensely productive and are able to do huge amounts of work. And I have a lot

of respect for those people. I'm not one of them. So, no, me neither. Do you think any drugs should be illegal? What's your stance on the legalization of drugs? No, I do not think any drugs should be illegal. I'm aware that my perspective on this can sound a little bit doctrinaire, and I try to remember that there are people who are just so irresponsible that maybe certain types of regulations are required for public safety, you know, certainly I think that it's really good that radioactive materials are regulated. I appreciate that I think that's really useful because you know if someone is selling you some flower extract is a treatment for covid or whatever fine you. Maybe not fine, but it's not gonna kill the person, I hope, most likely. I mean, I suppose there is exceptions for everything, but radioactive materials routinely make their way into quack medicine.

And that's really tragic for the people that get caught up in that sort of thing. Same thing with these, you know, like nitrile. What is that compound that's used as a quack cancer treatment, like late latrile or whatever. It's like a based, a science pro rug. I think that some things when they're sold as medicines and are extremely dangerous should be regulated. But I think that if things aren't being sold as medicines, just as chemicals, they should be available. Pretty much everything within reason, but not radioactive things, probably, probably not radioactive.

So if it's not a radioactive psychedelic, it's fine. There are radioactive. I've actually, like Tim Ferris was really nice and he like donated some money to to the lab that I work at and we used it to synthesize a radioactive psychedelic that we use for experiments. So did you take? Oh, absolutely not. No, it's really effective. It's a butt.

Yeah. Wow. But, but, but yeah, it's, you know, drug policy is really complicated and I wish I had a simple answer to what people should do because, because I, but I think that with liberalization, with increased education, with decriminalization, people will begin to work out how to use these things. And maybe bad things will happen, but that's the price of freedom. And I think that as a culture, we will mature and evolve to navigate that freedom. I mean, there's just a lot of dangerous things that happen all the time.

Roads are dangerous. Cars are insanely dangerous. But we have seat belts and airbags, and we have regulations where there are legal penalties for driving irresponsibly. And I think that it's not much of a stretch to assume that we could have a similar attitude toward chemicals that are potentially dangerous. I mean, we've seen a big cultural shift with the attitude towards cannabis, right, over the last sort of 30 years or so. Do you think that model that we're going to see

with other drugs moving forward would appear that psilocybin's kind of at the beginning of that threshold, a little bit of legalization, a little bit of therapeutic use, it's starting to get hold of the culture in a way that makes it seem less demonized. Is this just gonna continue to expand out and cover the entire mind-altering drug market? I think it will, yeah, because these are good things. These are things that will

have a good effect on many people's lives, and that could really help a lot of people. I genuinely believe that some of these things, I try to be very balanced and sober in my thinking about the subject and not get into, say, cannabis cure is all diseases or psilocybin is going to cure all of society's ills or whatever. But, you know, I think that there are a lot of dark psychological trends in our society, people are spending all of their time in front of computers. People are very, they're not reading, they're detached from certain aspects of reality, they're disconnected from each other, and I think that they're disconnected from the drugs that they use, they're disconnected from the food that they eat, they're disconnected from almost every aspect of their lives. And I think that drugs could have far-reaching positive effects.

Like I was even thinking yesterday, what if there were cannabis community gardens and people could just garden cannabis? Like how much fun that would be for a community? And you could go and people would just hang out and it would be fun for young people and old people and people could gather and play music or things like that. You know, these things bring people together.

We're so used to talking about how drugs tear apart families that we never or tear apart relationships or people's careers or whatever that we forget. They're also extremely social. I mean, that's the main thing that people use them for. Most of the time is to be with other people, to bond with people, to socialize. And I think that a lot of people would get interested

in growing plants and fungi if they were able to do it whatever they wanted, if they had freedom. And I think that what are the downstream effects? People become more interested in drugs, then they become more interested in therapy, they become more interested in art, they become more interested in science, they become more interested in helping their community.

I think that the responsibility associated with the liberalization of drug laws will actually help mature the world like in a good, very beneficial way, because this idea that they're bad and they're dangerous and anyone who uses them deserves what they get. It's amazing how little empathy people have. These are all just unfortunate vestiges of the war on drugs. Like I've heard people say things like, you know, like junkies should get one shot of

Narcan. And then after that, it's up to them. Let them die. You know, things like, what are you talking about? Why would you want to regulate how often someone gets a life-saving intervention? Why do you hate these people? Where is your, like, what did they ever, what did someone who's dependent on opioids ever do to you? And why don't you just see it as a medical problem that should be treated with empathy and care and science, like anything

else? I mean, meanwhile, that person's having half a bottle of wine per night and a few cans on a weekend. Right. Right. I mean, it's our whole, our concept of what constitutes addiction is so bizarre and distorted. I can't tell you how many people I've met who are sober, like on Instagram, like five months sober. Yeah, who are more addicted to drugs than like Then certainly I have ever been I mean I because but they will say oh, yeah I'm a dependent on opioids, but they're prescribed by a physician for pain

So it's not and it's like okay, well then you have a very distra and nothing against people that do that But it's you know, it's like if you need to Do that while simultaneously declaring that you are sober and that drug abuse is a problem, then you have a very confused attitude toward your drug use. I think there's so much pleasure that we can all take from highlighting hypocrisy.

And my other favorite one that's happened over the last couple of years has been people adopting the veganism movement, but still sniffing cocaine, I run nightclubs. I run a lot of nightclubs and I obviously see quite a lot of party drugs and people who are outwardly very concerned about the suffering of animals, but not so outwardly concerned about the suffering of people in Medellin or other like humans that have been trafficked or caught or shot or killed or tortured or in any

other way mistreated so that they can get a buzz on on a Friday or a Saturday night. Well, that's a complicated one. I am kind of on the fence about the moral implications of using cocaine because I've heard that argument. And you know, those are not, again, maybe this is my like, idealistic attitude, not reflecting the practical aspects of reality, but you know, those are not issues with cocaine, those are issues with prohibition. And so it's like, is it unethical to use cocaine? Maybe.

But it's not the cocaine. Cocaine's not the issue. It's the externality of the process that we have to go through to get it at the moment, right? Yeah, and the fact that it's all that is a product of it being illegal, not a product of people using cocaine or cocaine as a plant alkaloid. That's exclusively what happens in a black market economy. And so I don't know that I think that using cocaine is unethical as much as

I would maybe hope that anyone that really enjoys cocaine also cares about drug policy a little bit. And maybe they are thinking about what needs to be done cares about drug policy a little bit and maybe they are, you know, thinking about what needs to be done to reform drug policy in the regions where a coca is grown to minimize the negative impact that it can have on those communities, which is, you know, it's not easy. Fetch right cocaine. That's right. You're joking, but people actually, I've heard people

talk about that of like, you know, people do things like that actually. I've heard people talk about it. And yeah, so, but again, this is, you know, this is like, all this stuff is just a product of the illegality of these substances. It doesn't need to be that way at all. It could be an uplifting plant that provides a source of income for many people, which it is. I mean, it's also there's a huge market for COCA that is not illegal. Coca-Cola, of course, still uses cocoa in its formulation, and you have, although it's decochonized, and you have an enormous cocoa tea industry,

all sorts of cocoa candies, cocoa products that are used in South America. So it is, I think, a very positive plant and the only negative aspects of it come from its illegality. Do you have a wish that you could have tried some of the original Coca-Cola? Yeah, I think that would have been, I think, yeah, I actually think,

like I'm not a big, I, you couldn't pay me to sniff the sort of cocaine that exists seriously. I mean, I wouldn't and I don't. And but as a teenager, I used it a few times and I've analyzed a decent bit of cocaine, and of course it's all horrendously impure. And, but when it's taken orally in a tea, it's very nice. It's really very, very, and that's already, like, I think that's actually the best way to do it. Like this is another kind of aspect of the way black markets, drug usage trends, is you have a risk premium that's paid. So you

have to, you know, you're transporting the substance. You have to transport it in the most potent, most concentrated form possible, because it's sometimes, you know, coming on drones, in submarines, smuggled in airplanes, smuggled in people's bodies. You know, this is, this is incredibly difficult and dangerous. So you want the absolute most potent form of the substance that you're bringing into the country. Well, that's the best for black market smuggling of an illegal commodity,

but is that the best way to use cocaine? Almost certainly not. It's probably the absolute worst way to use cocaine. The best way to use cocaine is coca leaves in a warm tea in the morning and as you read the news or whatever. That's the best way to use cocaine. That is nice. It feels very similar to caffeine.

It does not seem to produce any negative physiological effects for users. It does seem to produce positive effects for many people. And that is the way the people use it traditionally in everywhere that there is a tradition where it's not illegal. It's only, it's really like all of these horrible things that we associate with cocaine are really horrible things associated with cocaine's illegality. That's such an interesting point. I had a story to tell you actually.

So I have a friend who's a DJ and he travels a lot and he does tours and stuff like that. He was telling me this story about when he was in South America and obviously cocaine has quite a luxurious brand attached to it. It's kind of seen as the Lamborghini sort of speak of like party drugs in its expensive. It's conspicuous consumption. It would be called by the sociologists. And he was down in Argentina or Mexico or wherever it was. And he was asking the promoter, someone in his entourage asked the promoter if they could get a hold of some cocaine. And the promoter looked at them like they'd asked for, I don't know, like heroin in the UK or something like that. And he's like, really, you want that?

And what it turned out was that because it's so cheap to get ahold of cocaine wherever the guys were, that was seen as a really scummy drug, the branding for cocaine down there was awful. Whereas 2CB, which if you were to take that in the UK, would be like, why are you taking 2CB on a night out? But because 2CB over there is a hundred pounds, a hit, or 50 pounds a hit, or something like that,

that is the drug which is put on a pedestal. That's the one that's all about status. And because cocaine's so cheap, that's the one that's seen as a really sort of scummy, awful drug that people shouldn't take. I thought that was really hilarious to see how cultural interpretations of drugs completely change how they're positioned. That's absolutely true. I actually wanted to dedicate an entire episode to that in the third

season. And I was going to do two CB labs in South America, but I wasn't able to find a chemist who was making it. I really tried. We had a team scouting really trying to make, if anyone listening to this is associated with the synthesis of 2CB in South America, please do contact me. I'd love to have a conversation about it because I think it's totally fascinating, and I completely agree with what you said

that a lot of the way we perceive these drugs it because I think it's totally fascinating and I completely agree with what you said that a lot of the way we perceive these drugs is a product of the way they're marketed, they're cost, they're social connotations. There was a drug in the UK called methadrone. Are you familiar with that? Yeah, it went in MCAT, oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, which had a very, as I understand it, as a American, a very bad reputation in the UK, it was sort of like really disgusting. Of course, because it doesn't smell very nice, it smelled really strong,

and it was basically the poor person's version of taking cocaine. But dude, there was a period, I shit you not, there was a period in UK nightlife where people would rack that up on a bar, on a bar because it wasn't a controlled substance yet. And if the door staff would come over and quite rightly say, excuse me what the fuck you're doing, they would just be like, mate, not illegal.

And obviously they'd get thrown out for being a dick, but the police could come up. And there was nothing to be done. It didn't last very long. There wasn't a big period of time. I remember, man, once I got a broadcast message on WhatsApp and it must have been a couple of weeks before this stuff became illegal and someone was trying to sell kilos of it. Well, I was trying to shift a couple of,

does anyone want a couple of kilos of MCAT before the new legislation comes in? Like, no. No, who wants that? But yeah, very much so that was exactly the same. Like, I mean, the effect of it, it's very speedy. Have you ever tried it? Oh, yeah. I've tried. I think it's one of the greatest drugs ever discovered. MCAT? Really? Yes. Wow. Yeah yeah yeah yeah it's very I think that it's a perfect rushy and I think it's a perfect example of it was considered disgusting garbage it was the grimiest stuff out there and so no one care they just it was junk no one cared about

it no one appreciated it but I guarantee if someone had carefully presented you with methadrone and said, you know, there's a brilliant biochemist who spent his entire life studying the serotonin transporter and the dopamine transporter and the balance of dopamine reuptake inhibition to serotonin releases optimized for maximum euphoria with no neurotoxic effect, then you would have had a totally different experience. And I think that it was not appreciated at all as a substance when in fact, I think that it was in terms of what people are looking for in a recreational drug. I think that it represented almost like the perfect recreational drug. If you considered going into branding, you could rebrand some of these

drugs and give them a new name, give them a new, honestly, I genuinely think the price was a big part of it. The fact it was so cheap and price is seen as an indicator of quality. If it had been 50 pounds a gram as opposed to, there was a period where you could get it for between five and 10 pounds a gram. You're talking like one 20th to one 10th of what it should be for cocaine. Yeah, yeah, it's really really interesting.

And the other thing that you mentioned that I think is also really interesting is that when a drug is made illegal, it causes people to panic by enormous quantities of it. This guy that's selling you a kilo, or trying to sell you a kilo, that was not uncommon. That was happening to people all over the UK. Similar things have happened in the United States. So the government announces their plan to make Crittom illegal. What is the first thing I do? I don't even like

Crittom at all. I never use that. And the first thing I do is buy a kilo of it because I think, well, maybe they'll just regulate it in like on a state level and it's better to, and maybe it'll be hard to get, and I might want to use it in scientific on a state level and it's better to, and maybe it'll be hard to get, and I might want to use it in scientific research and who knows? And so suddenly, I have like a massive quantity of this substance I don't even like or want to use. It's just like gav dust in my closet. And that would have never happened if the DEA hadn't announced their intention to prevent people from accessing it. So this panic buying is a reality with psychoactive drugs.

I mean, you could hardly think of a worse way to regulate use of psychoactive drugs in the way that the government currently does it. It would be funny if it weren't so horrendously tragic. They have the strizand effect as well with this, right? It's like, don't bother looking about this and then everybody wants to know what the hot new shit is. Oh, wow, oh God, like schedule one.

Like that must be some strong shit. Gotta get me some of that. Yeah, yeah. And because of the totally warranted distrust of the media, you know, like no journalist, every journalist is writing these sensational stories about a legal drug team, and tears their scrotum off from me out, yeah. That's what I remember the story.

I remember the story for Badam Headline from the Sun, I believe, and here's a funny story. The reporting was so insane at that time that they were just publishing anything. And I started to think, like, what are the barriers for entry here? Like, can I just contact one of these journalists and just say some insane thing

and we'll end up in the sun? So I, like at the beginning of this conversation, I was talking about Cubane. So I was thinking, like, wouldn't it be hilarious to chemists, if I said that like four cubanol meth-cathenone, like this just like absurd molecule that has never been synthesized, were like a new methadrone derivative that was taking the the UK by storm. So I wrote a journalist at the Sun and said, like, you know, I'm a chemist. I've done a lot of work with substituted Cubans.

And, you know, you really need to be aware of this four-cubanol meth-cathano, and it's a serious problem. And I hope that you care enough about, you know, your readers at the Sun to raise awareness. And they immediately contacted me. They got my phone number. They called me on the phone,

and then when they were doing the interview, I was like, I can't, I can't go through this. This is too, too much, I can't. I can't. I can't go through this. This is too much, I can't. I can't go through this. This is too much, I can't go through this.

This is too much, I can't. Too much, I can't. Too much, I can't go through this. Too much, I can't. Too much, I can't go through this. Too much, I can't go through this. Too much, I can't go through this. Too much, I can't go through this. Too much, I can't go through this. Too much, I can't go through this. Too much, I can't go through this. Too much, I can't go through this. you know it's really horrifying we don't live in a mature enough society for for pranks like that because it's like what then then what are they gonna make you be legal as a little by stupid

like you know it's something something like that is not out of the question so um so i just started to think okay this is this is too much but they would write it would report anything and so people don't trust anything that they say justifiably. And so the, like any potential public health interventions that could in an ideal world come through the media are totally meaningless because no one trusts anything that they say. And if anything serve as, as you said, like strisand effect, like advertisements for these substances, the people know whether they're good or bad, the media would never represent them accurately, so you might as well give it a shot. Are there any drugs that you haven't taken

or any substances that you still want to? Oh, I mean, you know, chemical space is virtually infinite and so there are a near infinite number of drugs that I have not taken. And there are specific unusual things that I would hope at some point in my life to evaluate. Many of them I'm not in a rush to try because they are either potentially dangerous or potentially very disruptive to my functioning for periods of time. So they're not high on the list.

And I would say that I have experienced many of the things that I want to experience in that realm. And my interest now is primarily in synthesis and discovery of new things. That's, you know, I think that there are so many amazing traditions out there. And I've had the tremendous privilege of being able to spend time with many different Indigenous groups and learn about the way that they use psychoactive plants and fungi. And now my hope would be to integrate all the things that I've learned in my travels and try to use it to inform the discovery of new compounds

and try to think about the best ways that these compounds can be integrated into our culture. The interesting thing that I find about your work is that although you're obviously engaged in the substances that you take and you're very inquisitive about what does this feel like? You're pretty good at describing the phenomenological experience of it as well, but I've never seen you cross the line into someone who's just kind of recreationally being very blasey around the drugs. It seems like there's quite a lot of respect for them. Obviously, you come at this from the side of a chemist as well. I know that you always talk about knowing dosages correctly, like super, super anal around when it comes to what's the dosage,

exactly what am I taking, what's the level of purity and stuff like that. But yeah, I think it's, from my perspective, as someone who's been around a lot of drugs for a long time, especially in the party scene, where people are taking, they literally have no idea what it is. Like, it could be a caffeine pill, it could be an aspirin, it could be a gram of MDMA. You just don't know. And seeing that, I just call it respect for drugs, I suppose, I think is a really good example

to be set. Is that something that you consciously try and do to come across in an overly responsible way? Yeah, it is because, I mean, there's a number of reasons for it, but one is that having that respect, it's not some abstract thing. You know, this directly impacts the experience and has a very positive effect.

So when people will say these things to me, like, what's the craziest thing you've ever done? Aren't you afraid that you're gonna go, like, you're never gonna come back? It's like, well, I'm extremely cautious. So I don't know what to tell you. I'm very careful. And so I would be much, people, like,

yeah, some woman came up to me at Whole Foods and was like, how are you still alive? It's like, how am I still alive? On my walk home from work, I see people dead drunk on the street who are more intoxicated than I've ever been every day. So, like, why is it, like, this is, we're so confused by anyone that is like open

about their occasional, responsible use of substances that we assume that that person must be a maniac. And so even when I'm very cautious, people have that attitude. The other thing is that even at the times when I was like the first piece I ever made, I was 21. And I was making it. It was a trip down the Amazon to find this frog, Phil and Medusa by color that's pretty good.

Is it only you got burned? Yeah, so I was, yeah. I have seen that. Yeah, I was 21. I was a college student. I was deeply unaware of many things. And in particular, I was unaware of the way my actions would be perceived by other people.

Because it's not until you make things for public consumption that you start to even think about that. Because you're with your friends, you're with people that know you, people basically get what you're doing and who you are. And so you don't have to think too much about way, this will be perceived. And one of the things that I did is I took Ritalin with Iowaska to this day and criticized by people, robotically, it's like, if people are criticizing me, they'll be like, that guy, you're talking about the guy who took Ritalin with Iowaska,

quite frankly, I wouldn't trust him at all. And they don't understand, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter that for the record, it is not dangerous to combine Riddle in with Ayahuasca. I, maybe I shouldn't say that publicly, but for the record, it is, you know, Riddle in is metabolized by hepatic hydrolases. So it's not metabolized by MEO,

the enzyme that is inhibited by the beta carbolines in the Iowoscovine. So there is no potentiation of ridylane by monomine oxidase inhibitors. Okay, that's just the way it is. So you can talk about how it's dangerous all day, but it's simply, I mean, I'm not going to recommend other people do it, but Ritalin is not metabolized by M.A.O. So, and so, you know, all these, but I have to deal with it. It doesn't matter that what I did wasn't dangerous. What matters is that people say that it's dangerous, and then they harass me about it, and they write it on forums, and then they robotically repeat it on critically and never actually learn about the metabolism of Ritalin and so like just that is an example.

It's like you have to think about what is what is going to be the like decade long fallout of some little action, you know, like and there's part of me that's things like well, I guess maybe good, because I showed that I was honest about something, but there's a price for that type of honesty, and it can be very obnoxious. I think that the main problem with coming up here is this singular thread, which is through a lot of things, not just your work, but almost everybody else. When you talk about child YouTubers

or people who've been on Twitter for a decade, society and civilization just isn't meant to have all of the things that we did or said, like encased in stone and able to be reaccessed perfectly for the rest of time. Like that's just not the way that it's supposed to happen. It's supposed to be that a thing happens and then maybe it was right, maybe it was wrong, but after 10 years or so, people can't remember it in any case and half of them have died. And that's how our society grew over time. But now, sadly, the things that you did, I said when you were 13 or 17 or 21,

they're just enshrined for the rest of your days and that's going to be, you know, potentially, that could be the thing. Now that's, oh, you're Now, you're the Ritlin and Iowaska guy, and you've kind of to spend the rest of your life trying to constantly wipe this slime off you. Right, and it's especially annoying because there is nothing wrong with it. You're also battling against people's bizarre misinterpretations of things.

That's really the biggest issue is not actual problems. It's things that people have decided our problems and their critical thinking skills aren't good enough to recognize that whatever it is that they're angry about isn't actually an issue. Yeah, there's that. And then there's another problem that I think about a lot, which is I think people have become so disconnected from the act of creation. Many people that they confuse consumption with creation. And they think that the order that they confuse consumption with creation. And they think that the order that they view things is the order that those things exist in reality.

So like some, you know, some like, some cultural critic was writing a snotty review of my show recently, and he was talking about how, you know, he had a lot of hope for me because he read this great Harper's article that I wrote. But then he saw this horrible video that I made later about Crystal Cole. And again, this is another misconception that people robotically repeat because they're not capable critically thinking about things. But anyway, but what was really annoying to me is he's talking about, he's talking about a like, he's confusing the chronology of my work because that's the order that he looked at things. That's not the order that they happened.

And I see that all the time where people are like so disconnected that they don't even care about when things are created or where they're created or the context. I mean, a lot of websites now have to put a notice on articles that say this article is five years old because people won't even look at the date that things are made because they don't seem to even care.

And it's not those people's fault entirely. Like we are being disconnected from the act of creation. Like in all sorts of different ways. Like on most streaming web services, they cut out the credits entirely now. Why would you want to look at the credits? That's just names of people that made it. That's not important.

It's like, that is who made it. That is the information. That is extremely important. You should, maybe you don't recognize the names, but if you care about it, you should look at them. And maybe you can learn more about if that episode is particularly beautiful. Maybe you should look into who photographed it.

Who is the director of photography in that episode? What else have they done? Maybe that explains it. Maybe it wasn't the overarching media corporation that distributed it. Maybe it was a human being who should be appreciated or whatever. So that's a complicated overarching issue I have

with contemporary media literacy. But it's a rough time and I agree. We did not evolve to have these lasting records and we have not culturally evolved to maturely recognize that fact, like all of this offence archaeology, all this stuff where people spend enormous amounts of time trying to dig up evidence that somebody said something that was bad 15 years ago, that is not integrating

this understanding that you just described, that people change, that we didn't evolve to be, to have this timeless record of every single thing that we had said. And I don't know, I don't know what the solution to this is other than, you know, like improved cultural literacy, or improved media literacy culturally and kind of like empathy for that fact and empathy for people in general. I don't know. I don't know what the solution is either, man. Like Nick Bostrom has this idea about pulling different types of technology out of an

earn, and he says that there is a temptation to pull out a black ball and the black ball is an existential risk. But I am really really concerned that social media and ubiquitous communication that stores everything that everyone's ever said or done forever. Is a slowly transforming black ball it might only be gray at the moment but it's getting darker gray and darker gray and darker gray all the time. And the reason for that is that it causes us to increasingly look at what other people are doing as opposed to trying to create something ourselves. Perfect example of this is you're familiar with Lindy. Do you know what Lindy is? The gas company. No. No. It's a particular heuristic. It's a model for how long something has been around.

If something has been around for a while, the classics have been around for a long time. So you read 1984, which has been around for 50 years. It's probably going to be around for another 50 years. It basically is a heuristic that says the most recent stuff isn't necessarily the best. Read the classics for a reason. But if you think about what most people have spent today consuming, almost all of the content that everyone listening to this show has consumed today will have been created within the last 24 hours. And that should fucking terrify almost everybody. She think that's the opposite

of Lindy. That isn't the classics. That isn't stuff that stood the test of time. That is just someone's meandering thoughts whilst they're wiping dog poo off their shoe like this morning on an Instagram story. Or like someone's annoyed tweet when they couldn't sleep at 2am. That is what we're feeding ourselves. I think it's, that's definitely leading us towards more of a black a black ball.

Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's really it's very tricky. It's very troubling and I just hope that people can be as kind to each other as possible because there is definitely a culture of meanness that I see on the internet that is slightly disturbing to me. And it's not even that people are mean because everyone is mean. I mean, I'm not trying to pretend

that I'm like a very good person who's never thinks mean thoughts about people. I think mean thoughts all the time. But the difference is that I don't feel comfortable being publicly mean. Even just that little rant that I just gave about the guy writing the story where he confused the chronology of my work and used it to criticize me immediately afterwards.

I was like, oh, that's not a good thing to talk about publicly. That's weird. Because if you are publicly mean, it just like, hoisens you a little bit and it has this, I've experienced this. I've made little tiny mean remarks and I've seen how it comes back to get you. And then I look at these people

who are so insanely mean, like, as their whole identity on the internet. And I think like, what is that doing to that person's consciousness? They've just created an ecosystem of meanness that is going to make them so miserable. And they're not interested in appreciating anything. They're not interested in, like, everything is hating people for who they're not, instead of loving them for who they are. And it's like, it's just not going to make people happy. I'm not even talking about the effect of the target of their meanness. I'm talking about the effect on the person who is being mean.

Like they are not going to be happy if they are that way. So I don't know. I just hope that, yeah, think like Facebook and all these social media companies had an interesting idea that if people's faces were attached to things and their real names were attached to things maybe they would be at the very least embarrassed to be publicly cruel, but that doesn't seem to have worked. So I don't know what the I don't know what the solution is other than I But the, I don't know what the solution is other than, I don't know. Huge dose of psychedelics. Maybe.

Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I mean, I think that, I think it could help. I guess we'll see. If it doesn't help, it was definitely worth trying. Yeah, I never had a great time. What should we expect from the next decade of psychedelics? I think it's going to be a really interesting decade. I'm very excited. I'm so excited

that I'm probably leaving most of the work that I've done for the last decade to dedicate myself entirely to psychedelic research, like scientific research. That's my plan right now. You're so well positioned, man. When you think about the background that you've got yourself to, the platform you have, the audience you you have the ability to be like the bright the Brian Cox of psychedelics Yeah, and it's it's surreal having all these companies contact me asking me to be on the or you know advisory board or to do this or that type of Research and it's really a dream come true because for the last year is I have self-funded the research, or there's been small amounts of money that come from the university that I work at, or did this research at, and it was, you know, there wasn't, there were no resources, and now there are tremendous resources.

So that's so exciting, because you think about the history of psychedelic research post-60s when there was no funding. As much as the politics of the war on drugs interfered with psychedelic research, another big factor that isn't talked about as much is lack of funding. There were people doing psychedelic research up until the very least late 70s and They just didn't have money they weren't shut down by the government. They didn't have money to do it So now that all these resources are available I think that some really really interesting things might come out of the sphere that could really help people and that's that's very exciting In 10 years from now. Yeah, I mean, I hope that there is growth in every direction. I hope that there is growth in the basic scientific

understanding of the pharmacological mechanism of psychedelics. I hope there's growth in the pharmaceutical implementation of psychedelic medicines that are made available to people that don't want to buy them via an unregulated black or gray market. And I also hope that there is a decriminalization that allows people to cultivate psychoactive plants and fungi on their own, create their own rituals,

their own communities to do it in the way that best suits them. Like I hope that there's just a expansion of knowledge and freedom. And I think that, yeah, I think it could be great. I hope. I'm not a usually very optimistic person, but it does force me to feel a tiny bit optimistic

That's good enough for me, man. Yeah, honestly, that's good enough for me look How many it's been awesome today if people want to watch the show in the UK or in the US where should they go? It's a hard show to watch you can in the UK You might be able to get it on Amazon iTunes In the UK, you might be able to get it on Amazon iTunes. You can watch it Hulu live. You can watch it on Hulu at some point, although I don't know when people have been ripping it and putting it on YouTube, which I'm actually really happy about,

except for they seem to cut off the end of episodes, or I have Spanish overdubbed music, because it got Spanish Hamilton or something on it. They put in soccer games into it. So that kind of stuff I don't really like very much. But search for it, you'll find it. It's out there. It's not that easy to find, but it's available.

I watch it on or would watch it on Amazon. Then I also have a podcast, which you can check out at patreon.com slash Hamilton Morris. It's largely chemistry oriented, but it has some other stuff that people might find interesting. It's very psychoactive drug oriented, as you might imagine. Then this pamphlet, if anyone wants to buy this book, which has a great historical document about Bufol Varius, it also contains a new forward and synthesis section that is really useful for anyone that's interested in the chemistry of five of me ODMT. You can get that at www.psychedelictoadof thesonorin desert.com.

Are there any of those left? I know you had to do a bunch of different runs, right? Yeah, the first one sold out in an hour. That was pretty wild. Then the second one sold out in an hour. That was pretty wild. Then the second one's sold out in a day. And then there's a third, very larger final printing that has not sold out. So if anyone wants to pre-order it as of this discussion, there's still a good number of them left.

And 100% of the profit goes to the Michael T. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research. So amazing. I'll link that in the show now to below if profit goes to the Michael T. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research. So amazing. I'll link that in the show now to below if anyone wants to pick one up along with wherever I can find Hamilton's Pharmacopia. Dude, I'm really excited to see what your work has in store for you. I know it's the final season of your show and you're now dedicating yourself fully to the chemistry. So it's like white lab coat as opposed to like sun hat and like white shirt and jeans

for the for the next few years, but it's going to be exciting to watch. Yeah, thank you. I enjoyed the conversation and I'll talk to you later. you