Otherworld - Interview with Hamilton Morris

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

Jack is joined by Hamilton Morris — scientific researcher, documentarian, journalist, and podcaster. Best known for his VICE column-turned-TV series Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, Morris has spent years exploring the culture, history, and science of psychoactive substances. He continues this work today through his YouTube and Patreon channels. Check out our Merch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For business inquiries contact: [e-mail] If you have experienced something paranormal or unexplained, email us your story at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. Right now, we are deep in researching, interviewing, and editing for our upcoming fall episodes, which is very fast approaching. While we're working on all of those, I thought it would be a good time to bring on some guests to the show for interviews, and I'm excited about this one in particular. In this episode, I'm speaking to Hamilton Morris. Hamilton Morris is a chemist, filmmaker, writer, researcher, and much more. I'm sure many of you know him from his vice column turned TV show, titled Hamilton's Pharmacopia, where he travels the globe investigating everything from ancient rituals with psychedelic plants to modern underground labs making synthetic compounds.

Hamilton's work has been hugely influential on me in so many ways. In recent years, it's become much more common to hear psychedelics, consciousness, and altered states discussed in the mainstream in a serious way. But not long ago, Hamilton was one of the few people doing that. And for me, he was the first person I encountered exploring these topics. And I'm sure that's true for many of you listening as well. These days, Hamilton hosts his own podcast and runs incredible research projects on his Patreon, which I highly recommend. By the way, I'm going to be posting a video version of this interview on our Patreon, if you're interested.

Hamilton describes himself as a materialist, skeptical but curious, and I think his work has so many clear crossovers with the subjects that we cover on Otherworld, and I was thrilled to have him on. So, this is my conversation with Hamilton Morris, and you're listening to Otherworld. All right, everybody, welcome to Otherworld. I am joined now by Hamilton Morris. Hamilton, thank you for coming on the podcast. I've been really looking forward to this.

Thanks for having me. First, I want to ask you, how do you prefer to be credited? What do you consider yourself these days? A chemist, a host, what would be your preferred title? I am a chemist. That was what I was doing for years. I haven't really hosted anything in a while. I've always disliked the term host,

so I don't know that I would go for that either, because I was making all these things, and there's a sort of passive connotation with the word host, or there's almost a sense that, like, someone else is making it, and then you're hosting somebody else's story, something like that. So I was never a huge fan of that term. Yeah, I think it's interesting that you are actually doing the chemistry. In fact, you, I mean, we'll get into this later,

but you told me recently that for the past few years, you've been focused only on chemistry outside of your shows and your podcast and documentaries and things like that, which I think is really interesting. There are so many people who host shows about this stuff, but don't really do it themselves, you know? There's a lot of people out there like that. Certainly, yeah, yeah.

And at the moment, I am still doing chemistry, but not full-time the way that I was a couple years ago. And, yeah, it definitely helps things. I mean, I think that this domain is extraordinarily bad, the domain of drug coverage in journalism, and it certainly helps to have some understanding of the subject matter. Okay, I want to ask you about how you got started doing all of this. For those of you who aren't familiar with Hamilton's work,

obviously you're known for studying, drugs, doing drugs. I mean, there was a lot of early articles that were like, Hamilton Morris does drugs for a living, you know, which I think is a lot more normalized now, like studying this stuff. But at the time, it was especially out of the ordinary. And you were the first person that I saw really doing a super creative show on the internet. This was back when like everything was on TV. And I, when I first came across your work, completely blown away by it, honestly. seeing what you're doing. And it was all on the internet.

And of course, eventually VICE TV. But how did you get into all of this? And eventually, where did it find a home? How did it find a home? Yeah, it was very gradual. I started out writing a monthly column. And then this was during a period where VICE was investing resources into a pivot to video, which is kind of a thing that pretty much every media organization eventually did,

but they were early on that. And so they were just looking to anyone that was doing things related to the magazine to try to see if there could be some video made in addition to an article. So that was kind of the idea where if you were proposing an article, the next question would be, is there a video that can be made about the coverage of the story for an article? So they were trying to sort of figure out a way to milk two stories out of any project. Again, this was a novel, a somewhat novel idea at the time.

Now it's totally normalized, or if anything, now people just don't even write the article. They just only make the video. But this was when print was still very much dominant. And that was the idea of make very low-budget videos. and as the resources gradually grew over the years, it just became an interesting opportunity to get deeper. And I started thinking about the videos as less a excuse to write something, which was sort of the original idea.

It was like, okay, sure, if I can write about this, but they want a video, I'll make the video. But then I started to also see the videos as dominant because it was clear that, an article might be read by tens of thousands of people, but a video might be watched by tens of millions, and it just had a much, much, much bigger reach and impact.

And it's also just fun. I really enjoy now, really enjoy the process of doing things like that. Of course. I mean, going back even further, like, when you first... What do you think of as the earliest step towards your eventual career, And did it come from an interest in chemistry or in psychoactive substances? I mean, it was a few things that happened. I had a weird situation where I was working as an intern in a courthouse after high school,

interning for a judge, and sat in on some drug crime trials. and was really shocked by how unjust all of this was. Of course, I knew that drug crimes were kind of a bullshit category, but seeing it firsthand really radicalized me. And I also was struck by how interested people were in drugs and how important drugs were and how terrible the coverage of the subject matter was how it was totally normalized everywhere. It doesn't matter whether it was vice or the New York

Times. The norm was to write absolutely fucking terrible stories. I mean, even what you said of like me doing drugs for a living, right? That's a kind of bizarre and insane mischaracterization, but there's an incentive. I mean, whatever, there's nothing wrong with doing drugs. And I suppose even doing drugs for a living, but that's not what I was doing. I was covering drug-related things. and sometimes I use drugs as part of the story. But that article then became like a very popular characterization. And so I'd get endless messages from people saying like, how do I get your job, bro?

Like how do you, I want your job. And the implication, of course, was that they liked to use drugs and they wished to get paid to do it. And it's like, if that's really what you want, there's a way you could work in a weed shop or be a weed trimmer or like you want to be a weed tester, bro. You could be a, you could be a weed. You could be a weed test, or I'm sure if that's really what you want.

Like, I'm sure you could be that or have drugs tested on you in clinical trials or something like that. But of course, that's not what people, it's not actually what people wanted. So the whole thing became a kind of odd thing where part of me was annoyed by how much people cared. Like what a big deal. I mean, it's one of these things, I suppose, sort of like having sex where it's like simultaneously normal. but if you do it on camera, it's like a huge deal. And drug use is pretty much ubiquitous. Most people use some type of drug for some period in their life.

It's really not very uncommon at all. But there was this incredible, I don't know, sensational interest in anyone being honest about their drug use. I think it was – and then the other implication, was like if you've ever been honest about using drugs, you must be like the craziest drug user of all time, which again is kind of a weird take on things. But I guess the basic message was that people are doing it very, very, very, very badly. The bar was so unbelievably low in this domain that there wasn't a single person that I could point to, really,

and say, like, they're doing a good job. Maybe they're a couple. But it was very hard to find someone who wasn't a scientist or someone who's like a drug policy expert or someone who is specialized in that field. Just a general journalist who is regularly generating constructive and informed takes. Maybe you would find a little bit of that in like libertarian reason magazine type enclaves because libertarians historically have been pretty good with drug policy related things. that's arguably like the main thing that they've done well. So, you know, there were maybe some people doing it. But for the most part, the norm was just horrible coverage of drugs.

And it remains that way as well. I want to go back even further before you were writing articles, back in the days of young Hamilton, if they were making a really cheesy biopic of your life, like when, when did, the interest in all of this begin for you? Was there anything specific? Oh yeah, I always found it very interesting. I mean, pretty much for as long as I can remember, I was very, very interested in drugs and watching the way drugs are talked about on the news as well, watching the news and

seeing reports about people overdosing on GHB or people dying of accidental drug overdoses, the whole, even the concept of dying of a drug overdose was like totally fascinating to me when I was in kindergarten. The kindergarten? Yeah. That's really, I don't think I even knew what drugs were yet. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember like being in kindergarten talking about this,

just being like blown away conceptually by just the idea of chemicals killing that you could combine chemicals and accidentally die. So, yeah, I've always found this stuff pretty interesting. When did you first try something? And what was that experience like for you? Probably. I mean, I smoked weed and maybe tried a low dose of mushrooms when I was in middle school.

But I didn't actually have a trip as far as I can tell. I think it was like a placebo type thing. I didn't really start using psychedelics until I smoked salvia when I was in high school, but didn't really start until I was in college. So I wasn't someone that got, like, I was very interested in this stuff, but I was also very neurotic and didn't dive into it until I was in college. Yeah, I mean, I know that you're hesitant about being, you know, considered a guy who does drugs for a living, but like, do you still enjoy doing them or has it become work for you? No, no, of course. I enjoy, yeah, I do enjoy using drugs.

and I very much enjoy trying new drugs. That's the main thing that I like. Because, I mean, that's what made it unique when I first saw your work. Like, not only were you covering this stuff, like, you were trying these things, and a lot of them were pretty wild, like, you know, stuff I've never even heard of

and you were testing it out. This was, like, very mind-boggling to me at the time. Are there ones that you haven't tried that you have, like, is there any that you have not tested, or like, is there a line? Oh, of course. I mean, there's conceivably infinite drugs.

So I have tried a minuscule fraction of the existing were possible drugs. There's countless drugs that I haven't tried. And the ones that I want to try that I haven't tried are either so unusual that I would have to make them myself. And it would be very laborious, which I'm willing to do. in some instances, but sometimes it's just, you know, some drugs take weeks to make. Sometimes it take months to make. It really depends. I was very interested in analogs of salvinor and a, the chemical in salvia. And I made some of those. I actually never tried them, though. I just did the chemistry. That's another thing is I get a big kick out of making drugs. I actually

enjoy making drugs more than taking them in many instances. There's a huge satisfaction in the process of constructing these molecules. When did you do that for the first time? Like you did Salvia as a teenager. Was there an early synthesis attempt? I mean, extracting things from plants, which is not synthesis, I probably did that as a teenager. And then actual synthesis, I wasn't able to start until I started working at a university. And then I was probably in my early 20s, maybe 23, 24, something like that. I'd have to double check, but something like that.

I remember, like, kids growing up out here about people, like, trying to make things in their backyard or even just, like, I remember some kids trying to, like, brew their own alcohol, like their own moonshine to drink at parties. but there was always some high school wizards crafting up some kind of concoctions in the backyard. I wish I knew more people like that. I mean, I remember talking to chemistry students when I was a freshman in college

and trying to gauge whether or not other people were interested in that kind of thing. Like, hey, you ever think about synthesizing PCP? Wouldn't that be kind of cool? Oh, yeah, me neither. Just too. And realizing that, in fact, this was not a desire that most people had. And that was kind of another thing was like,

how am I going to figure out a way to do this? Eventually I did, and do it legally, of course. And eventually I did. And it's very rewarding. But yeah, in terms of like a lot of the stuff, there's like the weirdness or what makes it interesting comes from the history of a compound or whether it involves some kind of unusual chemistry

or there's something kind of extraordinary about it in one way or another. I mean, I think that most of these molecules have some kind of fascinating history attached to them. And there's something very satisfying about going into old scientific literature, reproducing a synthesis. Sometimes it might be a synthesis that was done 100 years ago, something like that. And getting the same, observing the same color changes and the same crystal shapes as somebody doing something 100 years ago. The whole process is actually very beautiful and exciting, and it's sort of a shame to me that people don't get to see that.

I think this is one reason that people think of chemistry as being very boring is they just don't, they would have no way to know that it's interesting. They've never seen anything about it that would show that. And then a lot of the people, there's like a bit of a gatekeeper attitude, I think, among chemistry. where they don't, they almost don't want it. I've said this before and I always get criticized for it, but I do think that there's a little bit of a, of a, it's considered irresponsible to get people interested on the basis of explosives or psychoactive drugs. And so there's like, because those people might have a lesser motivation. And so it's almost at times feels like there's a desire to make chemistry more boring than it is to keep people from recognizing it and maybe recognizing

some of these supposedly dangerous things and sometimes actually dangerous things that can be done with that knowledge. It's not that simple, but... Yeah, I could see that. But at the same time, I think that's how a lot of kids or young people find their way into this. I remember, like, on the early internet,

the anarchist cookbook was something that everybody was really... Everybody was, like, downloading and, like, pouring over and getting into trouble doing. And I'm sure... Even though that's, like, devious behavior, I'm sure that resulted in like a lot of people ended up ending up pursuing a career in chemistry or something similar.

Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. It's amazing to me. I would say that it's the majority. I mean, obviously I'm not really representative. The sorts of people, the chemists that I talk to are almost all medicinal chemists who are doing drug-related research. So it's not that surprising that the majority of people that I know got interested in the domain because of drugs. But it's really actually very widespread.

Like, you would be, and also most people don't talk about it, because if you're a professor at an Ivy League University, you don't want to say, oh, hey, everybody, just so you know, like, I really actually first got into this because I wanted to synthesize heroin just because I was interested in doing it. And I did that when I was in high school, and that was my introduction to chemistry.

And look at me now. I'm publishing in the highest impact journals in the world. a lot of people don't want to tell the truth about who they are and why they're interested in these things. And so that's the other thing is that there is definitely as much as my vision of this may be skewed in terms of an emphasis on drugs. The broader vision is definitely skewed in terms of a de-emphasis where there's a ton of people that are hiding that fact. Eventually, you know, we were talking about the early days of this. Eventually, this found its way to Vice. You had the web series and then eventually the Weissland Show.

What do you think was the most difficult of the episodes that you made for both of those series? Was there one that was particularly challenging for you? They were all really, really, really difficult. And it's somewhat miraculous that I was. able to pull a lot of these things off. Other ones were, yeah, I mean, it's amazing. I say this because I recently did a shoot

that I think maybe overshot the difficulty slightly. It was too difficult. But I was able to hit the nail of difficulty where I could just narrowly get it, usually. But there were

so many close calls with the Kualud episode, which I think became the It wasn't technically the pilot, but it was the first episode of the first season. And there was a lot of, I really wanted to capture this synthesis of Kualud in South Africa. I thought that would be really, really cool. I am generally kind of fixated on capturing video of chemistry that's never been captured before because it's like, yeah, it's just you never see this kind of thing ever. Especially you never see it captured in a way that's intended to illuminate.

the process. Like maybe there might be some documentary where you see some, you know, supposedly cartel-associated guys stirring a thing or whatever. And they do a little like cartels in Mexico or making meth or whatever. But to really show the actual synthetic methodology is usually the domain of forensic chemistry and you just don't get to see it. So I really wanted to show this quailin synthesis. And I knew we'd been through so much trying to find a lab. that would allow this synthesis to be filmed. There was even a insane miscommunication where it had been lost in translation

that I was doing this, because I had established that I was a chemist and that I understood the process and that I was doing this out of some kind of scientific interest. And it had somehow been lost that I was also a journalist documenting it. And so I remember meeting with this. This is not filmed.

This is just something that happened during the production. I had this meeting with a quailude kingpin at a hotel. And I was under the impression that I was meeting with him to discuss filming in this quailute lab. And he was under the impression that he was interviewing me for a position working in his quailute lab. So he was like, you know, we've talked about whether or not it makes, sense for you to be involved and I was like oh thank you I really appreciate that and he's like ed you know we're willing to to offer you $20,000 a month and uh was that tempting at the time oh very much well you're you're i mean it certainly would have been a pay yeah it would have been a pay

increase a dramatic one but um yeah but uh yeah i i think i mean that was of course just like the most extreme miscommunication imaginable. And I was also tempted, I was also tempted because I was thinking like, oh, what I'd get, now I'd really see what it's like in one of these places. I mean, it's always tempting. Yeah.

But I was also always operating from this position of needing to be very careful about not committing crimes while doing the reporting. And so I wasn't going to work in this guy's lab. After you found out that I wasn't willing to accept money to do the chemistry, but rather wanted to document somebody else doing the chemistry. He had no interest in talking to me anymore. So I had to find somebody else.

The other person wanted me to film a music video as a sort of payment for access to the lab, which we did. That's amazing. Yes. And then we filmed it, but we filmed it truly last minute. We didn't even go back to the hotel. We went directly from the metacquilon lab to the airport and flew back to the U.S. with like 20 minutes to spare. It was so unbelievably close to not happening. And there were many instances of things like that where we just barely got what we were trying to get.

And so they were all very difficult. I mean, and there were some instances where things just didn't work. like going into a academy and factory in India. That was something where everyone was underestimating how difficult it would be. And I was spread very thin because we were making eight hours of documentary television in 10 months. And so I was just working every waking moment of the day. And I remember having this feeling that everyone was underestimating the difficulty. And we had this producer who was working on it, who was someone who had someone who had,

liked a lot personally, but he was like a very confident guy. And he would, and he'd be like, believe me, like, this is not going to be an issue. Don't, don't worry. We're definitely going to do this. And I'd think, are you sure? Are you really sure? Because I suspect that it will be an issue. I suspect that it's going to be much more difficult than anybody realizes. And then we, you know, go to India without ever confirming access to a ketamine factory and did not get to film it. So that was, you know, that was an example of, of something not working. And yeah, I was very lucky. There were, there were a lot of dangerous things that could have been where somebody could have been harmed. There were a lot of things that just barely were safe or just barely

worked. And so the question of most difficult, I would say virtually all of them were absurdly difficult to make. How did you guys handle? approaching some of these people, especially when you're interviewing drug dealers or drug users, like the beginning of that Quailudes episode you're talking about, involves you just on the streets in South Africa with these guys smoking ground-up quailudes out of a light bulb, and you're like in the dark. Like, I was watching that and wondering, like, what was the approach to these dudes? You were walking up with cameras. I'm sure you had met them before, but that must be a difficult line to walk because typically this is not something people want filmed, especially if you're

the one selling the drugs. They were pretty cool. I mean, that was not, that was not an issue, I don't think. Also, people that are using drugs or selling drugs, it's usually kind of easier, I would say. It's the manufacturing chemistry side that is most interesting to me and most difficult. And it's most interesting because it involves this scientific dimension that's very compelling. I do think that talking to people about, you know, distribution and prices and what patterns of use they've observed. It's interesting, but I've never been particularly drawn to that side of things. What about in terms of the show or any of your projects, like when it came to actually doing one of these substances yourself,

was there any that was particularly difficult or, like, unpleasant or extreme? What was the hardest one for you? I mean, there was a episode about hallucinogenic fish poisoning, something called ichthyo-alienotoxism. This is the scientific term for it. And a lot of these fish

like no one had done any sort of chemical analysis of the fish that were implicated in this hallucinogenic poisoning. And so there was really fundamental ambiguity about what was at play in these reports. And when you talk about hallucinations, most people think about like LSD or psilocybin or something like that. But the reality is that hallucinations are not particularly uncommon in, different types of poisoning, like I would say many different types of undesirable poisoning are associated with different types of hallucinations, as well as disease states, like Parkinson's disease, or, you know, I don't pull, I'm not certain about this one, but it wouldn't surprise me if like lead or arsenic poisoning are associated with hallucinations, right? It's not, sure,

that might be a bad example, but things of that nature, it's not that unusual to encounter something like that. So that was one of the concerns was what if there's basically a mischaracterization of some type of really undesirable poisoning as hallucinogenic that is interesting people because they think that it's an LSD-like effect when it might have absolutely nothing in common. And then on top of that, there's this really potent neurotoxin called Cigrase, toxin that produces this syndrome sequitera that is incredibly undesirable. Like, it causes very long-lasting dysregulation of temperature sensitivity. So people, like, can't eat ice cream because they feel like it's burning them,

or they can't go swimming because the water feels too hot. There's this reversal of hot and cold sensation that is insanely disruptive. There's an interesting documentary about it called Reef or Madness, not Reef or Madness. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Reef or Madness. Reef or Madness, yes. So I had watched Reef or Madness and started thinking, I don't want to fuck with this

multi-year, very unusually sexually transmitted. This is so toxic. It's one of the only things that I have heard of. where the poisoning is established to be sexually transmissible. Hmm. That's very strange. It's that potent. So, yeah, like, I'll leave it up to the imagination of the audience to figure out how that would work.

It has been observed in both directions, male to female and female to male. So crazy, crazy toxic substance. How long would it stay in somebody's system? Years, potentially. years. Okay, and did you try the fish? I didn't get sequitera, but this was kind of on my mind. It was like, what are we even talking about here without any kind of chemically established pharmacological relationship? What is this phenomenon?

Right. Like one of the major sources of information on this was a paper that as far as I could tell was borderline bullshit about this one species Sarpa Salpa. It's been years since I've reviewed it. I think actually up there I have all the like

the Halstead books which I kind of wanted to review again. Oh wow. Those green ones at the top, the Halstead books. Those are the Bible of poisonous and venomous marine animal toxicology.

It's like really they're good. But yeah. So I mean, I just didn't really know what I was getting into. It made me uncomfortable. Also, yeah, there's so much undesirable marine toxin production that nothing happened. But that was one example where I was very unsure about the phenomenon that I was even investigating. And so I couldn't make a evidence-based

risk assessment really, which is vital for most of what I do. People think that what I'm doing, or they think I'm like reckless or crazy, or that I'm doing like a Hunter S. Thompson shit, which really, I have nothing against that type of behavior, whatever, whatever you're into. It's just not, it really is not my vibe. I'm way too neurotic. Like, I'm so neurotic that I have grown mushrooms and wouldn't take the mushrooms that I grew myself because of the uncertainty. about the dosage. And not only was I that way, I stand by it.

That's just not, I wouldn't, because I need to know exactly precisely how much of what substance I'm consuming and need to have confidence in the chemical identity. It's just, it's like the absolute bare minimum, I think that people should do. And when people say, like, how are you not freaking out or whatever?

it's like mostly just because of that having that baseline confidence of what I have consumed and at what dose. And the fact that most people don't know those two things when they consume a drug, it's amazing to me that people ever have good experiences. Yeah. How do you handle that in the field, though? Because obviously there must be times where you can't have that level of control. I mean, there has been episodes, projects you've done where you're like out in the jungles looking for a hallucinogenic frog. that you've then tested, you know? Like, I doubt you had the opportunity to control that much yourself. Like, in my memory, you're, like, out in the woods at night, and then there's the frog. Like, how was that for you?

Not having that control, having to relinquish it? Yeah, I mean, I was 21 when I made that. It was a long time ago. Of course. And it is not really what I'm drawn to, typically. but I will do it if it's part of an indigenous tradition, because that also represents a sort of, it's not the same as chemical analysis

and having a milligram sensitive scale, but it is, if you have somebody who has a lot of experience using something, it does, I think, provide some sense of safety and understanding. Same thing was true with the Buiti Iboga religion in Gabon, where, you know, they dose the Iboga root bark powder with just a spoon. And the people that do it are insanely experienced. I mean, they've done this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. They've done it for the elderly.

They've done it for children. They've done it for men. They've done it for women. They've done it for people who have substance use disorder. They've done it for healthy people. They're very, very good assessing the appropriate dose. And there's even a word for it, poseology, and they used it, which I thought was awesome in the interview. And they did a great job.

But the dose that I was given was perfect. And I was able to do that. Like, would I have, if someone had offered me a milligram sensitive scale when I was there and said, hey, do you want to weigh that first? I would have definitely done that if I had the option. But I didn't, and it was fine. And a lot of that trust had to do with the apparent experience that the practitioners in this particular religion had. You consider yourself a strict materialist, but obviously so much of this work you do involves indigenous practices, magic, shamanism. How have you learned to approach these topics over the years and study them despite your own views and beliefs?

Are there any things that you specifically bring into that approach? Yeah. I mean, it's so complicated because I think the fundamental disconnect that a lot of people have, when they think about this conflict between materialist beliefs and spiritual beliefs of one kind or another, is that they think that there can be no interplay between them. And crucially, while I am a materialist and do not believe in the spiritual in a kind of, I suppose, philosophical sense, it's a indisputable fact that these beliefs have implications for the material world.

So whether or not God exists is, to me, irrelevant because it is clear that the idea of God has enormous effects, right, in every culturally, psychological, psychologically, obviously. There's just no question. Same thing with ghosts. Same thing with pretty much any spiritual or

immaterial idea. They have so much bearing on the material world that I feel like a discussion of whether or not they are real is ultimately sidelining the more important issue,

which is that the impact is real, regardless, and that's what really matters. So, you know, do I believe that the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Genesis existed? No, I guess I don't believe it existed, and do I believe that it was actually an aboga shrub? I guess not for reasons having to do with the geographical distribution of Iboga

and my understanding of where the authors of Genesis would have been located, right? You can come up with a million materialist objections to these ideas, but it doesn't matter because the functional impact of that on people is powerful and constructive and introduces ideas that are transcendent. It doesn't matter whether or not they're true, right? Like, someone doesn't have to believe in vampires to be afraid. during a vampire movie. Someone doesn't have to, like,

I feel like the truth or one's belief in these things is almost inconsequential. And there's, you know, there's like a famous, a famous, apocryful, I think Edgar Allan Poe quote,

he never, but he said, I don't believe in ghosts, but I've been afraid of them my entire life. He never actually said this. But the idea, I think that is,

kind of captures the crux of it, which is, you don't need to believe in these things for them to have, a enormous, enormous impact. So that's why I don't really see there being a contradiction when I'm in these groups, because it doesn't matter to me whether or not what they believe is true. The impact of it is entirely evident, and that's all that really matters. So they'll do these rituals in Buiti that clearly have a profound impact on people. You know, they'll sacrifice animals

on your body and you'll bathe in the blood of these sacrificed chickens and then you'll be buried alive with your head sticking out of the ground and while tripping children and the elderly is part of the episode actually and left overnight to contemplate your own mortality while staring at the stars so whatever framework you want to use it just makes intuitive sense that that would have a profound psychological impact. There's almost no way it wouldn't, whether it's Christian or part of some shamanic tradition or whatever. And that's, I think, what really matters. And so if someone is saying, like, how do you as a materialist deal with something like that? It's like, well, it's not really in conflict with my materialist beliefs, because I understand completely how and why something

like that would be done and what the impact of it is on the people that are doing. All right. We'll be right back after this quick break. I thought you had a really interesting way of defining reality when you have talked about hallucinations. Do you mind explaining to me how you personally define reality and make sense of it? Yeah. I mean, I basically just think that the kind of the fundamental concepts of all this were pretty succinctly outlined by Kant. You know, there's numina and phenomena. There's what the world appears like to you. And then there is the world without a perceptual filter, the numina. And that seems like a pretty decent breakdown and when you think about it, what you realize is that the phenomenal world is essentially

a evolved hallucination that exists because it facilitates the dissemination of genes. I mean, this is like basic, you know, Richard Dawkins' stem lord stuff, but this is the reality, right like color doesn't exist sound doesn't exist these are all things that we have evolved to perceive because they facilitate the dissemination of our genetic material and so um when people talk about you know us not understanding reality or only seeing like a small fraction of reality 100% like i don't think anyone would dispute that who understands anything about perception right it is an absolutely minuscule portion of the world that we see. And conceivably, we could see the world in an infinite number of other ways. And this is actually one of the things that I really like

about chemistry is you are introducing what are effectively new senses that organisms do not have as ways of seeing the world. Right. Like what is mass spectrometry? It's like a different sense, basically. You could imagine there might be some sort of organism that would evolve like a type of mass spectrometer as a sense organ, maybe. And they would see the world through their mass spectrometer nose or whatever. Or, you know, you have like birds that are capable of detecting magnetic fields as a sense. This is an established phenomenon. This is real. And apparently it's actually visual as well, which is a more interesting. So birds, of course, it's hard to know exactly what the experience of a bird seeing a magnetic field is like,

but it does appear to be a visual sense because the blocking of their eyes seems to interfere with the perception experimentally. It's been a little while since I've reviewed this. So like it's a color maybe or something. I don't know what the... It's hard to imagine, right? It's like impossible to imagine. Yeah, having a beak, having wings. There's a lot of stuff.

of course, yes. But, you know, so much of our reality, like how most people think of reality is just our senses, which are limited, right? You know, it's like you said, color, sound, taste. These are all things that your brain

is essentially making sense of and creating reality, but it's impossible to imagine having another sense or receiving, like, different, data, right? Things start to really melt and break down once you start getting into that territory when you're talking about like these birds that can perceive magnetic fields. Definitely, because it's just, it's a absolutely established biological fact that there are

totally different ways of perceiving the world. Like, and that there probably, who knows, really, but there probably isn't even all that much perceptual overlap. It's hard to say. like you know it's it's like the range of hearing of rodents is like largely ultrasonic they're they're hearing completely different things than humans are um there's animals that can you know detect salinity or electricity or all that i mean i guess humans can also detect electricity in a certain way but it's just it's a yeah it's not surprising to me when people say that we're only seeing a small small fractures of reality, because of course, that is, I think, indisputably the truth. The second prong of that question, then, is, like, how would you define or categorize a

hallucination in terms of, like, your research compared to reality? Yeah. I mean, this is, and this is something that a chemist named Andrew Gallimore wrote a book that he kind of defines this as a... Actually, I can't even remember if it was his book. I think it was, but he's talking about this is really just a shift from a evolutionarily adaptive hallucination of reality to a maladaptive one. That would maybe be what a hallucination is.

And maybe one that isn't reflective of the numinous world in some complicated way, because it's coming from within as opposed to. being a product of the external world, although you could even get into the, you know, this is something that you sometimes, again, encounter in indigenous beliefs about psychedelics, which is that, you know, what you're seeing when you're tripping is the real world

and everything else is a hallucination. I don't think I wouldn't agree with that assessment, but of course I understand where they're coming from when they say that. So with hallucinations, is there a chemical event taking place consistently with these substances that cause hallucinations, or is it purely just like the brain misfiring or doing things on its own, kind of going off course? Yeah, I mean, I sort of alluded to this earlier when I was talking about the ichthyo-alienotoxism, that there is not, there is not a single event that you can point to and say,

this is the thing that causes hallucinations. I mean, hunger, sleep deprivation, 5HT 2A agonists, 5HT1A agonists, GABAA agonists, GABAA agonists, GABAA positive allisteric modulators, NMDA antagonists, CB1 agonists, probably anti-muscarinic drugs, and on and on and on. I mean, there's almost no pharmacological class where, some circumstances you don't observe the production of a hallucinogenic state. But these states are very, very different, very different in some ways. But then also there's this kind of issue where there's something that emerges, the people,

myself included, feel comfortable classifying with the word psychedelic. You have something like Salvin Ornay from Salvia. I feel very comfortable calling that psychedelic. The feeling to me is extremely psychedelic. And you have something like mescaline from peyote cactus, pharmacologically and chemically, a completely different substance, but also 100% a psychedelic. So why do these two substances that are chemically,

pharmacologically, and experientially so different, both fall under this umbrella of psychedelic, and it's like I don't want to use the Potter steward, you know it when you see it definition because that's a kind of cop out. But to the best of my understanding, that is where people are coming from. There is a feeling that people classify as psychedelic and nobody knows to the best of my knowledge why or what that truly means. Yeah, I mean, I'm assuming you don't have the answer, Like, is there any way of categorizing it? Or is there a way of identifying what's not psychedelic?

That's something I've never even considered. Well, this is, I think, what Andrew Gallimore was trying to get at by finding some kind of overarching framework that existed outside of chemistry and pharmacology to say that these are substances that change how you model reality. That's what it means for something to be psychedelic shifting from an evolved, adaptive modeling of reality to a potentially maladaptive modeling of reality. I'm maybe totally misrepresenting

his claim. As I recall, that was sort of the gist of it. Does that quite answer the question? No, it doesn't. And really what I think most people, myself included, then do, is in taxonomy, there are these two contradictory impulses called lumping and splitting. And lumpers are always trying to find commonalities between species and merge different species together into a single species. Splitters are always looking for small differences between species.

And this gets particularly complicated because the conventional definition of species that you might learn in like an undergrad biology class, which is like two organisms, that they're the same species if they can breed with one another and produce viable offspring, and they're not if they can't, right? That's like, but what happens actually is that that definition of species doesn't really hold for a lot of things, particularly birds, actually, where there's an enormous amount of interspecific hybridization. So you have like the kind of lumping impulse, which is to say, well, they're all psychedelic,

but that doesn't really get you anywhere. And so then the opposing impulses is the splitting. So you say you kind of forget the word psychedelic and you start really emphasizing the differences. And that kind of leads you out of the hedge maze a little bit because then you don't have to deal with this overarching question to the same extent. You can say, oh, well, they're actually very, very different.

How dare you compare an NMDA antagonist to a 5HT-2A agonist? these are totally, totally different substances. I mean, there are also known areas of pharmacological overlap, whether it's like downstream glutamate release in the prefrontal cortex or whatever. So you can also find things that may actually be downstream commonalities. And I don't doubt that we'll have a higher resolution understanding of these phenomena in the coming years. I mean, these are the sorts of things that really, benefit from being studied by many different pharmacological and neuroscientific disciplines

simultaneously where if you have results in the realm of neuroimaging and molecular neuropharmacology and they're all kind of supporting a similar hypothesis, you can move toward a better understanding, but I don't know if we're quite there yet. Yeah. And speaking of lumping, I think hallucination as a term gets a lot of things get lumped in and written off as a hallucination, right? Especially in what I do and how people talk about the paranormal, those experiences. You know, I'd say throughout modern history, that typically people write things off.

It's like, oh, they're just hallucinating. That was their subconscious, blah, blah, blah, you name it. But I do think this stuff gets really interesting when you consider how you defined reality earlier as like being completely produced by your sense, and then when we do talk about hallucination, it starts to become very interesting again, even if you do write it off in that way,

when you start getting into why there are so many patterns in what people see, you know? There are certain things that even if you want to say it's a hallucination, throughout history people have seen, like when you're talking about sleep paralysis, things like that, like, why are all these people seeing the same thing? What is that? is there actually something triggering that?

You know, these are the questions that fascinate me and maybe there will be answers to it one day, but I'm sure that comes up with your research and especially with psychedelics. I know specifically DMT, there's a lot of questions about that type of thing. Yeah, yeah, it is very interesting. And I think that there's multiple, like to even say

that people are routinely seeing the same thing is, of course, a little tricky because on one hand, you have, for example, Aeroid experience reports or Reddit reports or things like that, where it does appear that many people, for example, with Benadryl, it's allergy season right now. There's probably like a decent number of people. I'm not taking Benadryl, but I want to. I don't want to take it because I actually find that kind of effect very undesirable as much as I dislike having seasonal allergies. But what you find is that a lot of people, when they take high doses of this, they report,

like a hat man. Okay, I'm actually glad you brought this up. I wasn't planning to go there, but this is a thing. We can talk about the hat man. I've done an episode about the hat man. But, you know, let me be clear that a lot of people, the majority of people see the hat man having not taken Benadryl. They see this during sleep paralysis.

I've interviewed people who have seen the hat man, not during sleep paralysis. This is like a very broad, and widely reported thing. But in terms of the Benadryl, this is how a lot of people know it. Is there any... Do you have any knowledge as to why this is happening

with people who take high doses of venadryl? Well, there's a few possibilities. The first is that there's a memetic component where merely discussing the Hatman promotes the Hatman. So we're talking about the Hatman. Sure. How many people are going to hear us discussing the Hatman

or how many of them already know about the Hatman, but it's going to enter their mind. Now they're going to have a hatman thought. The image is now kindled in their consciousness, and as a result, they are that much more likely to think of the hatman. And this is, I think, a big that there's a neuroscientist named Stephen LaBerge, who is the first person to scientifically establish the existence of lucid dreaming.

and he's done a lot of really, really fascinating research on lucid dreaming, very interesting person in general. But I was reading one of his books on lucid dreaming, and he has all these techniques for induction of lucid dreaming that you see throughout lucid dreaming literature. One of the things is to get into the habit of asking yourself routinely, am I dreaming? And the idea there is that if you are in the habit of periodically asking yourself, am I dreaming, you're that much more likely to ask yourself, am I dreaming while you're dreaming? And thus initiate lucidity.

I found that I was achieving a similar effect from merely reading his book because now I'm spending hours a day thinking about lucid dreaming, well, that in and of itself is going to be sufficient to make it more likely that I'll think of lucid dreaming while I'm dreaming initiating lucidity. And I don't think it was a coincidence that I had

the only thing that I would ever consider a lucid dream, although I have even doubts about that, while reading his book about lucid dreaming. I don't think it's a coincidence at all. I'm relatively certain that it was because I was thinking about lucid dreaming. So everyone's talking about the Hatman, that's going to make it that much more likely that you're going to see the Hatman. There's also maybe certain kind of archetypal images that exist either as a result of cultural conditioning

or even our biology, right? It's like a lot of the things that we find discreetly, When you think about what is disgusting to you, there's a clear evolutionary reason why you find it disgusting, like rotten food. Like, you know, if you show someone like a bowl of like really moldy food, they will usually be repulsed, like maybe even frightened and will want to get away from it immediately. Why? It's not harming them immediately, but this is an evolved response to understanding that food that is, food that is, you know, colonized by microorganisms is potentially dangerous. Same thing with, even when you think about, well, why does something smell bad? Like, what is the source of a bad smell? Well, one thing that you,

like one of the things that makes, for example, like a rotten piece of meat smell bad is a lot of the amino acids and the proteins are being decarboxilated by bacteria. So a lot of these amino acids, if you decarmoxulate them, are really malodorous. Again, this is something that we evolved to perceive as aversive and undesirable and revolting, specifically because it's indicative of bacterial degradation of a protein source.

Sure. So like there's all these things. And so the example, I think, would be like snakes. Like lots and lots of people are horrified by snakes. That makes sense to me. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. But what about a hat? A man with a hat, you know?

Like, that's a lot different than a snake. Right. It is a lot different than a snake because, yeah, it's not as if we were being preyed upon by Hatman throughout our evolution. Sure. I mean, hats didn't even exist for a good chunk of that. That's a very good point. But I will also point out, because I, of course, get a lot of Hatman submissions, especially after the episode came out, a lot of people sending in reports of like seeing this thing, they do kind of like have a wide range of characteristics, but something very dumb and obvious that hit me not long after this as I was like, well, you know, some of these might not be the hat man.

It could just be a ghost of a guy wearing a hat. Like it might just be a guy in a hat, you know? If you, like, believe in ghosts, of course, like, you know, why couldn't they wear hats? How do we figure out what is actually the hat man, right? But the idea of him in the hat is like his main defining characteristic. It's like a shadow figure with a hat and I think sometimes red eyes, right? So for me, I wonder, like, why is this so widely reported? And there's even more extreme examples of that with things people see in sleep paralysis.

But, yeah, that's interesting. I mean to cut you off. Did you have any other thoughts on that? Yeah. So, I mean, so you have the sort of idea that there's been some imprinting or suggestion as a result of people talking about it, then you have the possibility of some kind of evolved response

to something like this, which, as you pointed out, doesn't quite make sense that the Hatman, although who knows. And the other is that, in some instances, again, particularly with these anticholinergic Benadryl-type compounds,

one of the most frequently reported hallucinations that people have is hallucinations of cigarettes, which is particularly interesting because a cigarette has essentially an opposing pharmacology to something like Benadryl. So it's almost like people are hallucinating the antidote. Like there's some kind of recognition that if they were to have a cigarette, that it would counteract the delirium that they are experiencing as a result of taking Deterra or Benadryl or whatever.

So then that's another, I think a very interesting one because it's... People are on Benadryl are hallucinating cigarettes. It's very, very, very common. This is with Datura as well, extremely common to see reports where people are smoking a cigarette and then they see the cigarette disappears all the time. The other thing is that I think that there's also like a very explicitly symbolic dimension to a lot of these things when you think about what is creepy. You know, often creepy things are things that are reminiscent of a forgotten past of some kind of. Like, why are basements creepy? What is creepy about a basement?

Yes, they're secluded and potentially dangerous because of that seclusion. But they're also this, like, very symbolic, metaphorical repository of forgotten, aging, broken things. And same thing with, like, many stereotypically creepy things. like a you know you go into an old abandoned house and there's a children's bedroom and the wallpaper is peeling off the wall why is it why is that creepy like what is the source of that is it because it's reminiscent of like this kind of uh thoughts of your own childhood and decay in the passage of time or what you know i think that there there is when you start to analyze these things there is a kind of uh rationale a symbolic rationale behind why starting

and things are perceived as being creepy. Sure, sure. Last question about the Benadryl. Is there anything, chemically speaking, that causes that with the compounds of Benadryl? Yes. Well, I don't know about Hatman specifically. Like, there's no chemical that induces hat men.

Yeah. I guess, I mean, or there is, and it's that. But it's a general characteristic of anticholinergic delirium. that's induced by either diphenhydramine, benedril, doxillamine, asropine, scopolamine, trihexifenidyl. There's a bunch of drugs that will produce something similar to this effect, and what they all have in common is this anti-colonergic, anti-muscarinic effect, which is, like, very loosely speaking, a kind of anti-nicotine type effect. This is a bit... oversimplified, but that's kind of the feeling is that you're inhibiting the neurotransmission

of acetylcholine. Huh. That's fascinating. I am long overdue to do a Benadryl episode. There have been many Benadryl officiados who have emailed the show, and I have thought about doing one of these, but I think I've got to finally do it sometime soon. It is interesting. I mean, I mean, it's fascinating. And I guess then the other thing is to disentangle the weird motivations. Because that's the other thing.

You see this with machine elves in DMT, where people, it's much cooler. It's a better story. It makes you part of a club if you saw machine elves. Then you have a thing that I can tell you, oh, I saw the machine elves, just like Terence McKenna, just like all these other people. They're real. They were like this. Whereas if you don't see the machine elves,

it's not as good of a story. If you don't see the Hatman, it's not as good of a story. Maybe. I mean, it is for me, but maybe people like to feel that there's some kind of continuity between their experiences

and other people's experiences. Actually, I'm glad you brought that up. I want to get into that next. My last thought, I would say, on the Hatman and all of all things related to that, is that it is interesting to me. Like I said, I'd say the majority of people

see the hatman not on a large dose of Benadryl. I want to make that clear. The Benadryl memes did frustrate me for a moment as a person who was interested in people seeing the Hatman not while on drugs. But I am fascinated. I used to write off the sleep paralysis stuff. Obviously, there's a lot of stories.

People have very frightening experiences while going through sleep paralysis. When I first started the show, I would kind of like write those off. It's like, oh, it's just sleep paralysis. It's just sleep paralysis. But as time went on, I got more fascinated in that just because these things are really repeated. And outside of the hat man, the other thing that people see is this woman sitting on their chest, right?

Like, that's actually the origin of the term nightmare is the nightmare that was like this thing sitting on people's chests. and I've done a series on this. I don't know how much you know about like the Hmong refugees who were suddenly dying in the 80s. I don't know about this all. This is a whole thing you could really dive into. But I was really blown away by... What is it?

Essentially, all these Hmong refugees came to America after the Vietnam War and they were, they started dying suddenly in their sleep. And when we sent in scientists to go figure out what was going on with these people, a lot of the people that were interviewed and including some of the people who had a close call with this, like basically what felt like a heart attack almost in their sleep, but then made it through. They were blaming this deity called Da Cho, which apparently they used to be able to do ceremonies to protect themselves from Da Cho back where they came from. But now they don't really have access to this.

and we were kind of forcing Christianity on them when they arrived. Like a lot of the places welcoming the refugees were churches. So the people that were being interviewed were saying, this is happening to people. Da Cho comes in their sleep and is killing them. But the thing is, like, they weren't able to find an explanation of why these people were dying suddenly. And it happened to, like, over 100 people,

specifically these refugees that were coming over. And they were just, their heart would stop in the middle of the night. How many, it was hundreds, you say? Yeah, over 100, I believe. I'll have to read about this. I'll send you some stuff. I'll send you some stuff. I'll send you some stuff.

I'm probably doing a bad job explaining it. But anyway, I started looking into that a little bit more, and I realized, like, how many cultures have a version of this. And I thought that was just so interesting, especially because, you know, over time, throughout history, fear does evolve. And culture to culture, there are different fears, right? Like an American living in Southern California

would probably have different fears than somebody living in the jungles of Vietnam. Surely there would be some variation. I'm fascinated by the fact that there's like a couple things people see in sleep paralysis that seem to be consistent throughout history. Like, why would that be happening, right? If it really was just like manifestation of fear, why aren't you seeing your boss, like walking in your room yelling at you?

Why aren't you seeing like the high school bully or like a shark or whatever, whatever scares you most, you know, kind of like the it movies. That doesn't happen. People see these like really specific things and it's been happening throughout history. I find that really interesting and I'm curious why. Yeah, it is interesting. I remember there was some product that was being sold that was a pair of, glasses that you would wear while you were sleeping and it would shine an LED light onto your eyes

when you were entering a REM cycle. And the idea was that this would be used as a trigger for lucid dreaming. And in order to promote this product, they had a little documentary or something. And they're interviewing all these people. And the people are talking about their motivations for lucid dreaming, as I recall. And every single person over and over and over again is saying, I can fly like a bird. And I'm thinking, what is the deal with flying? I'm not anti-flying. I understand the appeal of flying,

but in my day-to-day life, this is not a desire. I'm never thinking about flying. I'm never thinking, if only I could fly, if only I had the abilities of a bird. This is like coming up as a theme. But it just doesn't really occur to me. And then when I had my lucid dream,

the first thing I did was fly. And this was actually something that made me suspicious of the lucidity because I thought, well, what the fuck? So I supposedly have total lucid control over reality now. And the first thing I'm going to do is fly, this thing that I know that is not really a thing that I care about. Yeah, you're a no flying hater. Does this mean that either I don't even know my own desires and I'm a repressed flight lover? Or does this mean that there's some other thing where everyone thinks that they want to fly and they don't really, but there's something about the lucid dreaming process that gives you the ability to have this flying experience and this is just a commonality? I don't really know.

I do think that there are aspects of our lives that have a huge amount of overlap cross-culturally, probably over time as well. And there are aspects that don't, right? When I was undergrad, I took a couple psychology classes. We had to look at the DSM. I don't know if this is in the most recent edition of the DSM. This was a previous one. But there was a section called culture-bound disorders.

and these were psychological disorders that didn't exist in other cultures. There was one called Koro. I don't know if you heard of Koro before. This is like a fear in certain Asian cultures that your penis or nipples will recede into your body. So this is being explicitly identified as something that only people in some regions have this disorder. But in other regions, there's no Koro. So you have that side of things where clearly people do have very different, even with psychedelics, that's another thing. So I wonder about a reporting bias.

This is my kind of my point is that even the sorts of people that want to report something like this may be biased if it falls into a defined path that is recognizable. Like if you look at, like it's very easy to assume that the. indigenous people, they're just like us, right? And when they take a psychedelic, it's got to be basically the same. But what's really interesting, when you read the anthropology literature, you find motivations for using psychedelics that are so unrecognizable that you will have never, ever met a person who has ever used a psychedelic for this purpose. One thing that you commonly see is finding lost objects.

Right? This is something that is You encounter that all the time. They're using this or that psychedelic to find lost objects. No one has ever done that in my life said like, oh man, I lost my car keys and so I'm taking LSD now in an effort to find my car keys.

That would be like extremely bizarre. I would wager to say that it would be the exact opposite for most Americans that you are losing things due to the psychedelic use. Right, that's a distinct possibility. And then you wonder, well, what does this even mean? Is it because we have so much stuff that even lose, there's very few objects that if we lose them, that it even matters that much? Whereas in a different culture, if you were to, you know, lose a knife or something like that, this could be like a, could be a terrible, terrible thing that could change the course of your life.

Maybe. I don't know. So it's hard without really good analysis of the prevalence of different types of visions to even say what is typical or what is common. And for all the people that describe a hatman under various states, you know, I've had sleep paralysis. It didn't involve a hat man. It involved thinking that there was an owl in a camper that I was sleeping in.

Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that is, that's fascinating, especially when it comes to indigenous groups, especially isolated ones, right? Those are always the most fascinating to me because then you get to see, like, what exists, what does not exist within their culture. That's essentially been in a vacuum for an extremely long time, possibly forever. I think that's a natural segue into what you were talking about before. DMT, this is honestly something I don't know a lot about.

And I have a feeling you do know a lot about it. So I want to talk to you about this. And yeah, let's start with, first, can you just explain what DMT is in very basic terms? DMT is a very simple, like molecularly simple drug. It's dimethylethyptamine. It is pretty widely distributed in plants. there's some suggestion that it's found in animals as well because of its chemical simplicity and similarity to the amino acid tryptophan it doesn't require a lot of synthetic metabolic sophistication

to make it in the way that something like ibegain or salvinor and a would these are substances that require a lot more biosynthetic effort to produce so due to its simplicity it's easy for it to be produced by different organisms. It's also very easy to synthesize. And despite its reputation, it is not a particularly potent psychedelic by weight. Sillacin and psilocybin from mushrooms are stronger by weight. But some quirks of its pharmacology, and specifically how it's metabolized, allow people to use it in a way that is different from most other psychedelics, which is that it's very, very rapidly metabolized by an enzyme called M-A-O. And so experientially, I actually think DMT is quite similar to silicin and mushrooms.

But the difference is that when you consume a silicin-containing mushroom, you have this very gradual onset, you know, multi-hour, four-five-hour duration. And you have a peak. But to get to a really intense peak, you have hours of high-intensity experience, which discourages most people from taking very high doses of mushrooms because it's such a psychological commitment. With DMT, it's almost as if you can shoot yourself right to the peak of a mushroom experience and have that core part of the experience and then come down in four or five minutes. And this is very attractive from a self-exploration standpoint because you can go really

really, really, really deep, but you're not committing yourself to a day of contending with all of the other effects of being in that safe for hours. So that's what DMT is. Yeah, this is, I've never done this myself, but it's very, very fast acting and short, right?

Like you were just explaining. That's mind-boggling to me, especially because people report the experience of being gone for, like, a very long time. a lot longer than minutes, right? Like, sometimes people, don't they report being, feeling like they've been gone for like months or years sometimes?

Sure, yeah. The way that the passage of time is perceived can be radically altered. And interestingly, I mean, just through, like, word of mouth growing up, I always heard that DMT, like, there's this idea that, like, DMT is in everything. I recently learned from, like, watching your show, actually, that, like, it's apparently not in the human body, right, or in animals. I always heard that like DMT is, it's in every plant, it's in every person, like, it's in the human brain, like, this is the thing that connects everybody, right?

Like, is it not the case that it's, is this naturally occurring in humans or no? I don't believe that it's ever been detected in a human brain. There's some related compounds have been found in human urine, but that's also complicated because the existence of something in urine is not necessarily indicative of it ever having been in the brain. And you have a number of things that can be biosynthesized in the periphery and could be excreted. I don't know that DMT itself has ever been found in urine,

but I'm pretty confident 5MEO DMT and Bufotin have been under some very old, in some very old studies. I think after that episode came out, maybe Steve Barker and Gimo Borgigin suggest. I think it had been found in rodent brains around the time of the episode. I have to double check exactly how the timing of that episode related to the Steve Barker, Gimo Borgiggen research. But it has been found in maybe one or two studies in rodents, as I recall. And it has various

hypothesized biological mechanisms, but I think that there's been a excitement for the possibility that DMT is responsible for different altered states of consciousness ranging from dreaming to

near-death experience to religious experience without the evidence really supporting those conclusions as interesting and compelling and provocative as those ideas might be. That was, interesting to me because, yeah, there is one of those things that just, like, you hear all the time and assume is true. I mean, another one of those things is that people say, oh, it's DMT is released in the brain when you die, which explains near-death experiences. Like, it seems that people are hypothesizing that, but I've always heard that stated as like, that's what's happening. Is there, is there any evidence that this is the case? Have they found DMT in the human brain when people die?

Because I've heard that as like the number one explanation. Like, oh, it's just the DMT. I have to double check the Steve Barker, Gimo Borjigan stuff. I think they may be, because they had an idea that it might, because then the question is, okay, if that is true, what would be the evolutionary purpose of this? Of something like this. There's very few things.

There's many things that evolve to promote procreation. There's very few things that evolve surrounding death and how something dies. But there are instances of things like that. So then their explanation was that this may actually have some kind of neuroprotective effect. And so it would enhance the survival of an organism. And I think that they did experimentally establish a neuroprotective effect.

I don't know that they were able to establish any kind of near-death association as I mean, there are all kinds of dramatic neurochemical changes that occur in the vicinity of death, you know, massive, depending on how an organism dies. Like, they've done experiments where they've monitored dopamine release in the breaking of the spine of a rodent. And there is in this instance where the spine is being broken, there is a massive release of dopamine preceding death. So, you know, there's also a few different things that could account for some near-death experience type, altered state of consciousness other than DMT. Sure. And a chemist David E. Nichols wrote a really good review paper exploring alternate mechanisms,

alternate pharmacological mechanisms for near-death experience. With DMT in general, like this, I mean, you could do many. episodes about this on its own, but you brought up the machine elves. This is one of the things that people report to see while on DMT. There's a lot of things that people report seeing like common things, common experiences while on DMT. This is a whole rabbit hole. You interviewed somebody that's currently trying to map the DMT universe, right? I mean, I might be oversimplifying it a bit, but let's just start with a, what are the machine elves? Can you explain this to me?

What are machine elves? What do they look like? Why are people seeing them? What are they? What do they think about them? Right. Well, okay, so, you know, DMT's been around for a little while. People were making it in clandestine labs in the 1960s,

but it was never very popular because the synthesis of it is a little bit challenging, and it's not the most potent drug, and there just wasn't really a financial incentive to make it. So it was always an obscure substance. And then really in the 90s, people started to realize that it was possible to extract it from plants. And people started disseminating so-called techs for doing this. And it really caught on with people finding different plants

and different ways of improving the techniques. And it went from being something that was incredibly obscure to something that lots of people could produce in their own homes. And with more people trying it, there was more interest in it. Terence McKenna was a huge DMT proponent. The stuff that he was consuming was synthetic, and he preceded this kind of this extraction culture a little bit. But he spoke about various types of imagery that he encountered.

there was a kind of chrysanthemum of some kind. There were self-dribbling basketballs, as I recall, and there was these machine elves, and that was the one that kind of really seemed to catch on. And I think it was the concept of entities in particular was very interesting to people because it carried all sorts of implications of there being other realities with other beings that had some bearing on our own reality

that could potentially provide us with wisdom or guidance or something. I mean, this is essentially like a religious idea. And I think that's one reason that it really caught on was the kind of provocative possibility that drugs can allow you to access a, realm where godlike creatures are capable of imparting wisdom or guidance. I mean, I'm kind of inflating it a little bit with that characterization. Maybe most people aren't looking at it quite that way, but I do think there's a definite religious element to this in the same way that I think that most UFO-related stuff

is ultimately like a ramification of a religious desire. What do people report that they look like? Is there something consistent? Again, it's really hard to know what people see because so much is lost in translation. You have certain people like Alex Gray who are artists specialized. Yeah, that's how I imagine the paintings. Yeah, so he's really made his career

being someone that produced these very accurate images of psychedelic visions. But even that, I wonder if that has some memetic component as well, where then these images enter the culture and people start thinking that Alex Gray is representing the visions when really it may be that the visions are caused by Alex Gray's imagery to some extent. Sure. It becomes a chicken before the egg kind of scenario. then on top of that, a lot of this Alex Gray stuff is a product of other types of imagery, religious iconography, even biological imagery that has existed in medicine, that is also kind of part of the fabric of our culture.

And so it becomes very hard to say what is organically emerging from one's consciousness and what is a product of culture and suggestion. And not only is it hard to say, I think it's impossible. Sure, yeah. Well, what are the other common things that people report experiencing while on DMT? And then perhaps you can explain to me what these guys are doing trying to map the DMT universe and how that even works. Yeah, I think you should talk to Andrew Gallimore. I should. I should.

Yeah, I'm happy to connect you. But there's a lot of fundamental questions about, the psychopharmacology of these drugs that have not been answered. Really, really basic things. Like, does DMT create tolerance? These are things that we're only now beginning to understand because for many decades, this just wasn't being studied. There's too much bureaucracy associated with doing research on psychedelics. You know, I think part of it is to attempt to characterize that space and to figure out whether or not there is something meaningful or valuable that is part of these visions. Because again, you even have these fundamental questions about if the idea is that these drugs

are being pursued therapeutically, which is often the justification for doing this sort of research. Then the next question is, okay, well, what is the therapeutic part of the psychedelic experience? Is it these visions? Are you trying to maximize vision? Do you want to have as much of that as possible? Or are you trying to minimize it? Is it something else? So understanding what doses, what circumstances, what compounds induce these sorts of visions

is definitely scientifically valuable. But I imagine he's also doing it out of a certain curiosity about what's out there and whether there is some kind of indication of people accessing a different reality. I think that he is interested in that. I am not hugely interested in that, but I think he is, and I think it's cool that he is. What of these types of things out there, like are there any topics similar to that

that do kind of get you going? I know that you're a pretty grounded guy, but are there any topics related to the psychedelic experience that kind of gets you, you know, thinking in machine elf terms? Yeah, I mean, I'm just very curious about what is out there, what is possible. Yeah. Because there are without question just types of drug experience that are unknown at the moment.

Yeah. And, you know, with the salvia type compounds, there was some awareness of that. But it wasn't really until people started selling salvia extracts. So there was a widespread awareness of this. stuff that was incredibly powerful that produced a really different type of psychedelic state. And I don't doubt for a moment that there are things of that nature that are left undiscovered that could in some instances be as simple as modifying the pharmacology of existing substances. So one reason, one of a few reasons that these Benadryl,

slash datura slash scopolamine type substances are regarded with so much dread. It's not just the delirium or the hatman or whatever. It's that they last a very, very long time. So usually when you have taken a high enough dose of one of those compounds in order to experience a delirium, you're in that delirium for days. And that becomes a hindrance where most reasonable people, myself included, do not have a desire to be delirious for multiple days. But what if there were a DMT, an anti-colonergic DMT, where you could experience that for a very short period of time and recover? That wouldn't necessarily

be a novel pharmacology, or would technically be a novel pharmacodynamics. It wouldn't be novel pharmacodynamics, but having just a kinetic alteration of the drug would be sufficient to open new avenues for exploring that. And so there's just a lot out there that is limited by our current understanding of things. Like, you know, you think about the way people talk about Adderall or whatever, and there's a lot of, I think, probably justified negativity associated with drugs like Adderall. And this idea of like, oh, yeah, you'll get a little energy, but you're just taking it out of the bank and you'll have to pay it back with interest.

And then you have something like caffeine where nobody says that. where people are basically like, oh, yeah, it just wakes you up, and that's pretty much it. Maybe you kind of crash, but most people don't really seem to crash in any meaningful way. It's not really crashing. Maybe they're a tiny bit tired or whatever. So, you know, in the umbrella of stimulants, you have these compounds that have all these kind of cultural problems associated with them. And you have something like caffeine that the majority of people respond really, really well to. And so that's the other question is just could there be substances that allow you to, access some of these types of consciousness, but do it in a way that is more comfortable.

I think psychedelics in general already represent an advancement in that domain because people will say, oh, well, you can do all this stuff with meditation anyway. A serious meditator could achieve all these states just through the power of their thoughts, which may or may not be true, but assuming that it is true, they can't achieve those states and walk around apart with their friends while doing it, having a conversation, right? It's like, It's just you, there's no question that the ability of psychedelics to allow normal people to have these experiences without cultivating some kind of discipline over the course of a lifetime, dramatically increases access in a way that is often but not always good. So that's the thing. It's like, I'm just interested in finding out what's out there because the majority of the time, we have no idea until it's discovered what was even possible.

Are there any anecdotal things that you've heard over the years that you find particularly mysterious relating to this stuff? Because, I mean, I've always heard things here and there just from people who have done DMT, other things like that. Are there any things that you find spooky or do you generally stay grounded enough that you don't let your mind wander in those directions? Oh, yeah. I mean, there's definitely lots and lots of things. I'm also interested in, you know, what contributes to difficult experiences. If you have these things like mescaline or DMT that actually most people seem to respond pretty well to. And then you have other things like one of the early chemical modifications to the structure of mescaline was a substance called TMA, Trimothoxy amphetamine.

This is just if you were to take mescaline and make an amphetamine of mescaline. And relative to mescaline, very, very, very few. few people have tried TMA. I've never tried TMA. But the reports on TMA are often pretty negative, and there's one kind of famously negative report from a chemist named Alexander Shulgin, who's like the great, great, great, psychedelic chemist and researcher, kind of the greatest it ever lived. And he had this very negative response to TMA, where he felt that it induced aggression and he dramatically crushed a rose after taking it. And you think, okay, well, What, if that is the case, if this is even a generalizable effect of TMA, why?

What is TMA doing that mescaline doesn't do? Why is it, and by understanding that, can you make some sort of contribution to a broader understanding of what makes certain drugs beneficial or not? I wanted to ask, what is the worst drug that you've done before? What is the most challenging or difficult experience, one that you wouldn't do again? Is there one? Yeah, yeah, there's lots of things that I wouldn't do again. And the threshold for that is not particularly high.

Like most things, if they're not. Sure, sure. I actually think that's one of the most, this is something Alexander Shulgin would ask people about a drug is, would you do this drug again. And if so, would you take the same dose, a higher dose, a lower dose? And this is a very valuable piece of information. I think it actually kind of comes, it says a huge amount about the nature of the experience if this is something that you would ever want to repeat. But yeah, there's plenty of things that I would have no desire to repeat, often for sort of mundane reasons.

I mean, it sounds like a little bit of a trite answer, but honestly, I think like alcohol and nicotine are the worst, probably, in terms of the damage relative. to the benefit. I mean, I still use nicotine on and off. I don't think nicotine is all bad. Alcohol, I consider much worse. I've never had anything terrible happen with alcohol. I just find that for what you get from it, it seems to take away quite a lot. I mean, it's, you know, you can really just feel terrible for like 24 hours. I completely agree. But also, I'm not accepting that bad as an answer that alcohol is the worst drug you've ever tried. There's no way. That's not, you know, that's not what I was looking for.

But what? Okay. Seriously, though, like, is there one of the more exotic ones that has been not fun? I mean, okay, okay, now I'll take it in the other, I'll take it in the other direction and just give something that no one is heard of where I won't even precisely identify the structure. But there's a compound. I may have even mentioned this at some point in a previous episode of my podcast, but there are, like, kind of, there's a few different serotonin receptors that a lot of the psychedelics bind to 5HT2A is considered the one of most significance. There's another 5HT1A that is also a target of many of the common psychedelics, LSD, psilocybin, DMT, less so with the phenethelamine-mescaline-type compounds, although mesclin itself actually has a lot of activity at 1A,

but other phenethelomines tend not to. And some, like, not all of these psychedelics that have a 1A-oriented effect induce something that's sort of similar to a dissociative fugue state where people have interrogated amnesia and they act in a totally irrational and disinhibited manner that's often dangerous. So there was a prominent chemist and psychedelic researcher named Robert Oberlander who was studying one of these

5H1A selective Tritamine compound that's called 5MEO Parolidine triptamine or 5Mio pyrty and he smoked some overdosed strip nude was arrested for public indecency pretty much got kicked out of

the research program that he was a part of had disastrous consequences for his academic professional life but he recovered and then invented the drug by vance Oh. Okay. He's a friend of mine. He's an amazing guy. But, you know, so I was studying some similar compounds many, many years ago, and I made something related to that. And I did try it. And I felt like I got a taste of the Oberlender effect. I didn't strip nude and get arrested for public indecency, but I felt a distinctly unpleasant. The thing is, I'm so cautious with this stuff. stuff that I wouldn't, I don't want to say under no circumstances could something like that happen, but I tend to be so cautious that I don't escalate the dose rapidly enough with a novel compound

that something like that would happen and hasn't happened. But those are the situations where there's some preliminary indication that something is probably if not physiologically dangerous and maybe psychological. unsafe or unworth pursuing further. Again, I know that this is not like a typical, like, here's the craziest shit I ever did. It was like this type story. But, like, truly, I do think alcohol is, is like,

it tends to be the most common things, actually. This is the irony is it's like these widely used things like opioids, alcohol, tobacco, that really seem to cause the most problems. It's very unfortunate. That's true. I mean, it's like a little bit of a boring answer, but it is, I don't disagree. That's for sure. What was the last question before we move on with that.

What was, you said you got a little taste. Like, what was that like for you? What was the taste of the feeling? It was a feeling that was kind of reminiscent of having a, having, like, influence. or something where you have these sort of cycling bad somatic sensations where you're like you're really hot and so you like take off your shirt and then you get like chills and start sweating and then you put a blanket on and then you feel and then you feel weird and you want to lay down and then laying down feels weird and you want to stand up and then you feel tired and everything feels wrong you're hungry but you're nauseous but you're not hungry but like all these kind of contradictory bad feelings is is kind of how things were we're going with that. And this is a long time ago. Oh, that's terrible.

That's terrible. Yeah. That does not sound very fun. Yeah. I wanted to talk about your current work. You have a Patreon yourself. And I think it's really cool that you've been using Patreon to self-fund a lot of your own projects. You're just in Spain filming something.

Like, what have you been doing recently? What are the projects you've been working on recently that you're most excited about? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because, you know, I made this show. for years. And the weird thing about it is that it was actually very successful. Like my show was the most watched show on Vice, depending on how it was being measured. In some metrics, it was between my show and DeSis and Mero, because there were like number of downloads

and number of people watching or whatever. It kind of depended on exactly I was measured, but it was always between me and DeSis and Mero. And so this was like a successful show. And yet I've had so much difficulty. It's been crazy. getting any kind of institutional support for these documentaries and started doing a podcast on Patreon, which I also liked because I've had so much difficulty pitching things to editors about psychedelic chemistry or about these weird things. And the freedom associated with that is really kind of amazing. It eliminates a bureaucracy and just allows you to do stuff.

And now I've been self-funding documentary. projects and just finish this big, crazy shoot of trying to introduce a new element into a psychedelic drug for the first time. And that element is tellurium. And this is a, people refer to it as a heavy metal. It's not even technically a metal, but it's a kind of oxygen group element that's in the same column on the periodic table is salt. sulfur and selenium. And it's a very interesting stuff, but it creates this kind of creepy

poisoning where a single exposure to it will make you smell like garlic for potentially one year after a single exposure. Wait, yeah, yeah. Wait, why? How does that work? It's from gradual metabolic liberation of a volatile dialkal teleride. And Oh, okay, cool. Thanks for playing that. I mean, it's released in your breath and your sweat, and there are medically documented cases of people being exposed one time and smelling like garlic for a year,

and supposedly people even killing themselves because they couldn't stand the smell after being exposed. So it's pretty... By the way, I assume this is not why you were trying to do this. To poison myself with this, with tellurium. No, definitely not. And it was really freaking me out, especially because actually, like,

I've done, also done chemistry with selenium, which is, smells much worse than tellurium, but it's like you kind of, you understand. It's very clear that it smells bad. With tellurium, it's almost like the olfactory version of tinnitus, where it's like this background, this low-level background smell

that's always around and it seems to like emerge and disappear mysteriously. I mean, the whole history of this thing is weird. It's like from Transylvania. It's like super sensitive to light. These tellurium compounds are... Okay.

All this analogous vampire stuff. Yeah, like where those headed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's weird. But it's also... So the smell, the photosensitivity, and the potential toxicity are all things that have prevented people from really exploring its introduction into a lot of potential drugs. So that is the documentary that I've been filming, is documenting this process of creating the first tellurium containing psychedelic. And it has been, I mean, the lab was actually raided by police because of the smell.

Really? Yes. That is crazy. And what would be the benefit of adding this to a psychedelic? Exploration of the unknown. Just to see what would happen? Yeah, yeah. And what has happened so far?

I mean, I don't want to... You don't know yet. We don't know yet. It's, you know, I could come up with a lot of reasons why conceivably something like this might be beneficial, but I think the ultimate reason is exploration of the unknown. and finding out, because I think that there's definitely potential for applications or benefits that are something no one would have predicted.

That is crazy. And you guys got raided by the police? Yeah, it was because the neighbor was complaining about the smell. It was fine. It was actually, and the day that the police came was on a day that didn't smell bad. And raid is probably too strongly. The police came to the lab. So not only doesn't make a person smell like,

garlic and like or they're smelling it like the wherever you're doing this also smells like garlic yeah or were you guys all just smelling like garlic uh we were pretty good about it and the day that the police came it was actually it didn't smell very bad it was at this um this awesome lab in spain that does mostly substance testing kikean analytics were the ones that were allowing this and there were no criminal charges to be clear all this stuff was legal whatever whatever It was just a neighbor was freaking out about the smell. There were a lot of reports of like COVID. People when they would get COVID,

it would either change their sense of smell. I've also heard about people saying that like their own body odor would change, even though sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between those two. Did you hear about that happening with people? Oh, absolutely. It happened to me. I think that was a very, this kind of discusia, I think was one of the, for me, actually one of the most recognized.

symptoms of having COVID was this kind of weird taste in your mouth. And yeah, and there were also lots of reports of people taking psychedelics and regaining their sense of smell. Really? Yes. Yeah. I had a threat on Twitter where I collected a lot of the reports. It was an interesting phenomenon, but it's never been scientifically studied.

And it could, again, it could be like all these things where it's just people liked the idea and kind of convinced themselves that this was happening. but I probably got a dozen messages from people describing this. What were they taking? It was many different psilocybin containing mushrooms, LSD, 2CB, were the ones that I remember. There may have been DMT as well. Hmm. That's really fascinating.

Okay. Where could people watch that work that you're doing? It's ongoing your project, potentially permanently making yourself smell like garlic. or maybe having a scientific breakthrough. Where can people watch that? Yeah, yeah. I'm going to be releasing pieces of the documentary as I edit it on my Patreon,

patreon. patreon.com slash Hamilton Morris. I also have a YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Hamilton Morris, where you can see these various projects. And, yeah. One last question before you go, you know, there's, I was saying earlier that a lot of things,

things that seem very outlandish right now eventually become quite normal once they're properly studied and discovered or, you know, figured out. Are there any things in your field that you're particularly excited about learning more in the future? Things that you hope people learn more about, you know, either in the next few years or like maybe many years in the future? Oh, yeah. There's so much. I mean, truly the main thing for me with all these things, maybe science in general, certainly with psychedelics, is I'm excited by the possibility of people discovering things that I'd never even considered. That's what really is amazing about this, is just totally new things. Of course, I'll be happy once there's more clinical research on the antidepressant effects of psilocybin.

and exactly how best to harness those effects and what dosing schedule elicits the most robust therapeutic response. And same thing with MDMA. And questions about their toxicity, specifically, there's one subtype of serotonin receptor 5HT2B that's implicated in the cardio toxicity of some drugs and whether or not that's a meaningful contributor to the toxicity of psychedelics. Also very interesting. I look forward to people studying that more thoroughly. but it's for all those types of things. But really, what I really love are the discoveries that are things I would have never even considered. Well, Hamilton, thank you so much for talking to me.

This has been extremely interesting, folks. Be sure to check out his Patreon and go see all of the strange things that he's up to, strange and exciting. Hamilton, I really hope you don't permanently make yourself smell like garlic. I'm like, I'm rooting for you on this one. I don't think I do. I've done it for now five, well, more than five weeks, but five weeks of continuous toleram chemistry. And I don't think I got the poisoning.

I don't think. Okay, that's good. People tell me that I don't smell like garlic. Yeah, we're on, we're doing this remotely right now, so I have no way of verifying that. But I genuinely wish you the best and hope you guys make a breakthrough without, you know, creating more unpleasant smells. Yes, thank you. I appreciate that.

All right. Thank you once again to Hamilton Morris for joining me. If you want to hear more from Hamilton and see some of the projects he is currently working on, you should check out his Patreon. I believe that's patreon.com slash Hamilton Morris. Thank you once again to Hamilton, and thank you for listening. Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. This episode was edited and engineered by Theo Schaefer. Our associate producers are Nikki Kate Delgado and Haley Pearson.

Our artwork is by Coltac Studios. If you want to hear bonus episodes of Otherworld, you could become a patron at patreon.com slash Otherworld. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, and telling your friends about the show. Our social media is at Otherworld Pod. Thank you to the team at Odyssey. Leo Reese Dennis, Rob Barandi, Eric Donnelly,

Morric Curran, Kate Rose. Colin Gaynor, Michael LeVay, Josephina Francis, and Hillary Schuff. Follow and listen to Otherworld Now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained, you could send us your story at Stories at OtherworldPod.com.