The Tim Ferriss Show - #337: Hamilton Morris on Better Living Through Chemistry: Psychedelics, Smart Drugs, and More

Starting point is 00:00:00 What else do you recall from your breakfast, Hamilton? I ate it from a ceramic bowl with a metal fork. Optimal minimum. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

Starting point is 00:00:24 Me, Tim Ferriss Show. over and over again, how I choose to delegate tasks, how I do 80-20 analysis, and so on. At the root of many of those decisions is a simple question, actually two questions. Number one, how can I invest money to improve my quality of life? I use that in investing as well. The second, how can I spend a little money or moderate money to save significant time? Inktel is one of those investments. They're a turnkey solution for all of your imaginable customer care needs. I used InkTel during the launch of the 4-Hour Body, which was very, very involved. And they provided 24-7 customer service for my land rush campaign because it was critical for me to take care of every person who purchased my books and

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Starting point is 00:02:59 by the ever amazing Pulitzer Prize winning author, Doris Kearns Goodwin. I had her on the podcast not too long ago and she just blew everyone away. What an incredible storyteller and weaver of history and lessons from history. You can check that out if you want at tim.blog forward slash Doris, D-O-R-I-S. It was a captivating conversation that really blew me away.

Starting point is 00:03:26 Leadership in Turbulent Times, that is the latest book, is a culmination of five decades of acclaimed studies in presidential history, which offers an illuminating exploration of the early development, that's super key, early development, growth, and exercise of leadership, and draws upon four presidents, which we'll get to in a second. Goodwin asks and answers in those pages the questions, are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the leader make the times, or do the times make the leader? And she draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely, namely Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson, to show how they recognize leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by

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Starting point is 00:04:53 This seminal work provides an accessible and essential roadmap for aspiring and established leaders in every field. I highly, highly recommend it. For more information, you can visit doriskernsgoodwin.com. That's doriskerns, K-E-A- visit doriskearnsgoodwin.com. That's doriskearnsgoodwin.com. And Leadership in Turbulent Times is available in hardcover, ebook, and audio wherever books are sold. Check it out. Well, hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. Today's guest, I'm going to keep this intro short and skip the preamble because I'm so excited to share this with you, is Hamilton Morris on Twitter at

Starting point is 00:05:36 HamiltonMorris, Instagram at HamiltonMorris, who is a writer, documentarian, and scientific researcher who currently studies the chemistry and pharmacology of tryptamines. What are those? We'll talk about it. At the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. His writing has been featured in Harper's, Playboy, and Vice, and he is the creator of the television series, and oh my goodness do I love it, Hamilton's

Starting point is 00:05:57 Pharmacopia, or Pharmacopia, which you don't have to worry about spelling. It's easy to find as soon as you type in Hamilton's Pharma anywhere that you want to find it, whether that's Amazon Prime or wherever, which recently completed its second season, and it is absolutely one of my favorite series of the last five years. I don't know how on earth it took me so long to find this.

Starting point is 00:06:19 It's fantastic, and I encourage you to check it out. His website, which should be up by the time this episode publishes i'm going to keep prodding him is hamilton morris.com hamilton as you would think m-o-r-r-i-s.com and this episode goes into the chemistry of psychedelics and mind-altering substances his adventures and misadventures around the world with different indigenous cultures, different clandestine chemists, and all sorts of characters. Very, very smart guy. Exceptionally good at explaining complex subjects simply and making science sexy. Please meet Hamilton Morris.

Starting point is 00:07:07 Hamilton, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I have been hoping to have this conversation on the podcast ever since I first saw your show and have recommended the show to probably more people than any other show I've seen in the last three to five years. So thank you for making it, first of all. That's great. I'm glad you like it. And I wanted to begin the conversation, and we're going to bounce around a lot. I will mispronounce many, many things, so please pardon my ignorance.

Starting point is 00:07:38 That's fine. This has been a trend already in our conversations. But I thought we could start off by introducing people to a character they may not know. And that's Alexander Shulgin. And I think the best way to do this is to read the opening of the last interview with Alexander Shulgin. And here we go. Feel free to correct any of this. I'm already feeling embarrassed before you even started. This is a pretty old piece of writing. Oh, okay. Would you prefer that? Let me just get through it. Is that okay? It's okay. Yeah. All right. I love Alexander Shulgin. I've loved him from the first moment I read about him. He is my idol, my hero, my son, my O2. I love each of the 978 pages of his phenethylamine magnum opus, P.C.A.L., Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved,

Starting point is 00:08:25 and every milligram of his 1.13-kilogram tryptamine treatise, T.C.A.L., Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved. Above my bed, I've pinned a large picture of Shulgin cuddling with his wife, Anne. I often sleep with a copy of P.C.A.L., not under my pillow, but as my pillow. He is the grandfather of ecstasy, the molecular magician, the atomic conquistador. Over the span of 50 years, he has created more new psychedelic drugs than the Amazon jungle ever has. He is more of a mythological creature, a chemical centaur, than he is a real person.

Starting point is 00:08:55 Who is Alexander Shulgin? Alexander Shulgin is a chemist who has just a career so amazing that you'd think he couldn't be a real person. He's very much a product of the 1950s. And I could tell you his life story in a condensed way, but I'll just do that very quickly. The basic story is that Alexander Shulgin came from a poor family of Russian immigrants in California. And he was accepted at Harvard as, I think, as an unusually young freshman. I think at that time it was somewhat more common for people that were very young to go to college early, and he felt alienated from his classmates because they all had money and he didn't. And he made a small bomb out of mercury fulminate and blew up the windows of his

Starting point is 00:09:58 freshman dormitory and then decided to leave Harvard and join the Navy. And in the Navy, he injured his thumb and had to have a small surgical procedure done to sew up the wound. And before the procedure, a nurse gave him a glass of orange juice that had crystals of morphine that were floating on the surface of the orange juice and he drank it and passed out and they sewed up the wound. And when he regained consciousness, he thanked the nurse and said, thank you so much for giving me that morphine. It really made the procedure painless. And I don't think I could have gotten through it without the morphine. And she said, there was no morphine. Those were sugar crystals. And that first encounter with the placebo effect was so profound for him that he realized he wanted to dedicate the rest of his life to understanding drugs in the mind. And when he was in the Navy, he brought this chemistry textbook with him by a chemist named Paul Carrere and studied it.

Starting point is 00:11:06 And, you know, these early chemistry textbooks, they had synthesis of mescaline, synthesis of lysergic acid, synthesis of harmoline. All these things were, they weren't treated as taboo subjects. They were simply legitimate areas of scientific inquiry. So he was being exposed to all of this chemistry that would later serve as the foundation of his career. And then he got out of the Navy, went to Berkeley, got a degree in biochemistry, and started working for Dow, which then was in a sort of it was a controversial time because they were supporting the manufacture of napalm in vietnam and there was all this sort of political protests surrounding the work but he had developed a profitable insecticide called zectran and because he'd made them all this money, they said, you can do whatever you

Starting point is 00:12:05 want. So while he was still working at Dow, he started making a variety of different psychedelics. And you can actually see his Dow notebooks online with the Dow logo and everything. At that point, he was not only synthesizing these things, but he was testing them on himself, which was the only effective way to do it. And at some point, they decided they didn't want him to do that anymore, but he had enough money that he decided to continue the research in his backyard. And he did this all openly. He didn't hide anything. He published in the most prestigious scientific journals then and now, Nature and Science, and he did it all from his home address with no university affiliation. And he did amazing research. I mean, there are entire pharmaceutical companies that have done less than he did in his backyard. He is considered responsible for reintroducing MDMA as a psychotherapeutic tool. In addition to that, he created countless derivatives of MDMA.

Starting point is 00:13:12 He also created a chemical called Ariadne or dimoxamine that was used as a potential treatment for senile dementia, created methadone, which he patented as an antidepressant. I mean, you could go on and on and on about the amazing contributions of this guy. So he's someone that, you know, you rarely have these experiences in life where you can point to them and say, that changed my life. But I remember as a high school student reading a profile of him in the New York Times Magazine, sitting in my parents' kitchen and thinking, and I wasn't even very interested in drugs. I mean, I was maybe as intro, I was probably a little bit more interested than a, than a typical high school student, but I wasn't a druggie. I had smoked salvia and used cannabis a number of times and drank alcohol a

Starting point is 00:14:00 number of times, but I wasn't actively pursuing this. And then I read a profile of this guy and thought, wow, he is inventing not only new drugs, but new types of drugs, drugs that I didn't know existed and no one knew existed. And he's doing it in his backyard. What an amazing human being, what a totally fascinating creature this person is. And, and became pretty seriously obsessed with them, you know, ordered his books, read the books, and the books, I think, have, have many levels to them that you come to appreciate. There's the superficial level, which is you read these things and they're fantastic. Some of the best, not just best books about drugs ever written, some of the best books about science ever written.

Starting point is 00:14:50 So, you know, if you're just interested in science, I can't recommend these books. Are they accessible to non-chemists? Yes, they're absolutely accessible to non-chemists because there's a narrative component to each book, a love story, and stories that are more accessible. And then there's hardcore chemistry as well. So the typical way somebody reads these books is you read the stories, and you read the qualitative effects of the drugs, and you kind of skim over the chemistry because it's too complicated. And that's the way I read it the first time as well. And then there's a kind of second reading, which is, you know, now you've taken, or I had taken, you know, general and organic chemistry, and now I'm ready to really understand

Starting point is 00:15:31 these things. And then you realize, okay, wow, all right, this is real. And then the most amazing thing, and this is maybe what really has reinforced my love for him is then following some of these recipes in a university research laboratory and realizing this is real. This really works. These are scientific tools and the syntheses that he provided

Starting point is 00:15:59 are not only effective, they're often brilliant roots to producing these compounds. And what an amazing contribution this man made. What made him so good in the sense that presumably other people had access to the same books and similar training? I don't know what distinguishes a great chemist from a merely good chemist. Well, he would actually often say that he was a terrible chemist, because his PhD was not in chemistry. He was more interested in biochemistry and enzymes and things like that,

Starting point is 00:16:35 and that's an interest that carries over into a lot of his later work in certain ways. But what made him great is not so much the chemistry itself, although that was fantastic and I would never, uh, suggest that it wasn't, but what made him great was he had a perspective on science that a lot of people don't have. A lot of people, they think whatever they're doing right now is state-of-the-art because it is. And they don't think, well, what if this fMRI stuff we're doing right now, what if a decade from now it's all garbage? And what if this was a huge, very expensive waste of time? But what's the one thing that won't be a waste of time?

Starting point is 00:17:18 What is certain to be timeless? And that's experience. That's the one thing that never becomes obsolete and he understood that if he had been like so many of his colleagues and said oh wow i just discovered a new derivative of mescaline i can't wait to cut out a strip of a rat's uterus and place it in a bath and see if this mescaline derivative causes the strip of uterus to contract. This will be so interesting to find out. Well, all the research that was done on isolated uterus tissue and things like that,

Starting point is 00:17:56 it's all obsolete. You can't cite that in a scientific paper in a meaningful way without kind of understanding that it's not considered useful because it doesn't differentiate between the different subtypes of serotonin receptors. And there's so many variables to consider. So he understood all that, that these pharmacological assays were flawed, but his own experience was the bottom line. That's what mattered. And there've been a number of philosophers that i think had a similar attitude you know goethe also wrote this amazing book on colors i don't know if you know about this book but he he's i know of it i haven't read it i have

Starting point is 00:18:35 a friend who's a memory competitor who's who has read this and recommended it to me well it's it's a really amazing idea i've been reading it it recently. And he was saying, physicists are saying color is made of waves of light or there's these different theories. But what difference does it make? We don't experience color as waves of light. So why don't we take our own experience as seriously as the physicists that are measuring the wavelengths of each color of light? And why don't I sit and

Starting point is 00:19:06 describe the experience of green and sit and describe the experience of yellow and what it's like and what does it look like during the day and what does it look like at night and how does it change? Everything, everything that I can observe and to not underestimate my perceptual apparatus as a sort of analytical device. How generalizable, what is the value of the subjective experience or describing that experience and how generalizable is it? I mean, you mentioned color, so it makes me think of how certain cultures

Starting point is 00:19:34 treat and perceive colors very differently. Right, of course. So in the case of, say, a Shulgin or others, what do you see in the value or what did he see in the value of describing the subjective experience and i'm sure the question a lot of people are wondering is how the hell did he risk mitigate like if he's creating these novel compounds how do how do you think about risk in such a case right and that's a that's a great question there's two ways to think about the risk issue um there's one way that's a great question. There's two ways to think about the risk issue.

Starting point is 00:20:10 There's one way that you could say like, how could, how could he possibly have done this? It was so dangerous. He was the first person to synthesize these things. No one knew anything about them. They hadn't even been given to rodents yet. So how could he possibly take that risk? The flip side is, do we really know anything about any drugs that we take? I mean, there's still fundamental debate going on right now about whether or not cannabis decreases IQ after long-term use. I mean, I have the psychopharmacology textbook that I was using when I was in college says that it does. Then there's endless debate about it. We haven't resolved very basic aspects of the toxicity of the most widely used drugs on earth. So I would say before we magnify the potential danger in unknown substances, we shouldn't minimize the potential danger in the known substances because really everything is unknown to a certain

Starting point is 00:21:07 extent um and the the basic way that he mitigated that risk and he actually published a scientific article describing his methodology that's worth reading for anyone that wants to get into this area is to start small, to start at one-tenth of whatever the absolute smallest imaginable dose might be for something. So if it's a, you know, suppose you made, this is just completely hypothetical, suppose you made six-methyl DMT. Six-methyl DMT is likely to be inactive. It probably won't have any activity. But just to be safe, if I were hypothetically making that, I might want to start at 100 micrograms. All evidence would point to it being less potent than DMT, but why risk it? Start at 100. Nothing, in an hour, move up to 200, then move up to 400. And then over the course of days, very gradually escalate the dose. And if you do it that way, you can say with a pretty high level of certainty that you won't poison yourself. Because even if it were cyanide, you wouldn't

Starting point is 00:22:22 poison yourself if you were doing it that way. You would recognize that it was toxic before you reached anything close to a lethal dose of the material. Same would be true of strychnine. There are very few... Which you wouldn't advise. Which I would not advise people, although strychnine has been used medicinally in the past, and I would actually be curious about trying it at a low dose, but, but maybe this just shows the sort of person I am. What would people search for if they wanted to find that, uh, that methodology and his description of it? I believe it was published in the journal psycho pharmacology. Um,

Starting point is 00:22:56 and I think it's called any type of gingerbread trail. We can put it in the, in the show notes, but we can give it a, I can definitely pull it up for you quickly with a Google search. I can't remember off the top of my head. Perfect.

Starting point is 00:23:10 Yeah, no problem. And for people listening, we'll put that in the show notes. And also for people listening, a quick audio engineer note here in my sound studio. This is the hour of the blue Jay. So if you hear any birds in the background,

Starting point is 00:23:22 those are blue Jays and it is my kitchen table uh shulgin he's captured my fascination in the last few years but part of me is maybe embarrassed or insecure about picking up this book beyond the narratives because i know no chemistry never taken a chemistry class. How would you recommend or would you recommend to people who are out of school who would like to gain a basic literacy in chemistry? Is there any particular approach that you would recommend? Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think this is a great time to learn anything. There's so many educational resources available to people on the internet.

Starting point is 00:24:07 So, you know, when I was taking organic chemistry, there are two books called Organic Chemistry as a Second Language, part one and part two. Those are fantastic, very well written, very clear, very accessible books. Do you need any, are there any prerequisites before reading this? Or can you just hop right into, it just depends. I would say on your basic foundational scientific literacy, I would say for most people that have,

Starting point is 00:24:33 let's say high school level understanding of, of chemistry in the sense that they, you know, know about elements and things like that, that should be accessible. I believe it's been a little while since I've looked at it um but i i remember it being pretty accessible and then there's con academy videos that are very good as well um and there's a kind of an industry there's actually a pretty big educational industry surrounding organic chemistry specifically

Starting point is 00:25:03 because it's a class that's taken by a lot of people that don't want to be taking it right because it's a pre-med requirement so the an industry has emerged to help all of these pre-med students who don't want to become chemists and don't find chemistry interesting to ensure that they can pass the class so they can go to med school which is nice because the same isn't true for some other technical things. This is really purely a product of the pre-med requirement, I believe. I remember having another scientist had spoken with Nav on a prior episode with Peter Tia. For people who've listened to this podcast for a while,

Starting point is 00:25:47 you've seen these characters recur, had recommended actually getting the test prep books for some of these related subjects. I think it was something or other 101 that was all in a Q&A format. But the organic chemistry is a second language will be on the shopping list. Definitely get that. And then the other thing is,

Starting point is 00:26:04 I learn about things when I have a practical application for them. There's a lot of things that as an abstract idea, don't have a lot of value. So, and I say this with some hesitation, but you know, if you really want to learn these things, the absolute best way to learn them is to do chemistry. Um, ideally in such a way that you don't hurt yourself or other people or get arrested, but there's a lot of basic chemistry work like distillation that you can do. And it's a lot of fun to distill essential oils or to, um, extract various things from plants. You know, you could extract piperine from black pepper or, um, or a number of different things and that's not illegal. And it gives you a basic idea of how to do these sorts

Starting point is 00:26:52 of chemical manipulations. Um, yeah, I mean, I think that if I didn't have experience working in a lab, I don't think I could ever care about chemistry as much as I do, because you need that practical application typically to really dig deep into something. When did psychedelics enter your life experience? And why has it stuck and held your interest for so long? I was always aware of them and always interested in them, even as a child. You know, I remember there was a book called Buzzed that was a sort of like, I think my school library had a copy of it and it was an educational drug book and they had a section about DMT in it. And I remember even as a,

Starting point is 00:27:46 maybe a fifth or a sixth grader thinking, Oh wow, this DMT stuff, it's called the, they call it the businessman's trip on the street. And, uh, and that,

Starting point is 00:27:58 that sure sounds interesting. And I remember, um, at, uh, I don't even know if this place still exists, but there was a, a shopping mall called The Garage in Harvard Square. I grew up in Cambridge and I remember a drug dealer approaching me at The

Starting point is 00:28:12 Garage and saying, do you want some LSD? And I said, well, I don't really want LSD, but I would like some DMT if you have that. The discerning consumer of streets. I was probably 12 or something like that. And, but, but, but, and he didn't, of course, and I didn't take the LSD, but I was aware that they had a certain power. My, my dad was very afraid of them. His child psychiatrist had written some medical papers about how damaging it is for people to use LSD as children. And so he had been very much influenced by his psychiatrist who had led him to believe that LSD was dangerous. So he had, I would say, pretty permissive attitude toward most things, but he really felt like he would say, you know, don't take LSD, promise me you won't take LSD.

Starting point is 00:29:13 And I had, I went to a kind of alternative high school. And there was also there a little bit of a sense that psychedelics didn't necessarily do people any favors. You know, a lot of the people that use psychedelics weren't people that I wanted to be like. Um, it wasn't, you know, the, I was, I was a pretty nerdy guy. I was on the science team and certainly no one on the science team was using psychedelics. And, uh, and, and so I was afraid of them and simply didn't use them in a major way in high school other than Salvia, which I actually loved. And, uh, although I was fascinated by them and their, and their power. How did Salvia enter your life? What was the, what was, what was the first experience? Because for better or worse, it was very available at that time in head shops.

Starting point is 00:30:06 And so it was the sort of thing that high school students would talk about, you know, there's this stuff, it's, it's legal, you can buy it in stores, you smoke it, it causes you to trip dramatically for a few minutes, and then you're back to normal. I mean, it's a pretty good sales pitch if someone's a 14 year old. And, um, and so I tried it and this was also before, um, people considered it as frightening as they consider it now. There wasn't this fear narrative surrounding the substance and I tried it and it was utterly amazing. Um, and you know, that was my first experience beginning to appreciate that these things were not only very different from the way they had been described, but to some extent they were

Starting point is 00:30:52 not describable to begin with that no matter who was describing them, there was going to have to be some degree of distortion. And it really was the sort of thing that had to be experienced. And then I started to understand a little bit more about culturally why these things are misunderstood and why they might have more potential than people realize. Why is that? Why, why do you think they're called? Well, let me mention two things. Number one is that before people listening run out to find their local Salvia distributor, uh, watch a few YouTube videos. I mean, it's worth being cautious about. I find salvia divinorum fascinating and the science equally fascinating, but it is fairly well known for people who jump into it without doing a whole lot of reading.

Starting point is 00:31:43 It's something that people do once in many cases. You you tend to or in some cases like to run away um to check out the youtube videos first but uh secondly uh why are these why are these substances culturally culturally misunderstood what are the part of it has to do with there being no place for it i think you know what what do we do with a salvia experience um it's a little bit weird to even talk about it for a lot of people so what do you do with it it doesn't fit into any spiritual or religious frameworks in our culture we don't have a framework for there scientifically at least at that time it was barely studied i think when i first used it it may have been before they even understood that it was a kappa opioid receptor agonist or anything about it um so there isn't

Starting point is 00:32:39 a lot to do with them so've become marginalized almost because there's nowhere else for them but the margins. It's, you know, what you do, you can write an Erowit experience report and tell your friends about it, and then that's the end of it. But the potential, of course, extends far beyond that. And these are really important tools for studying consciousness. And in certain cultures, or even in our own if you develop a framework to do it could be ways of treating disease or having a spiritual type experience what uh would you consider yourself and this is not a trick question there's no right answer here but since you use the word, to be spiritual, a spiritual person?

Starting point is 00:33:28 I am not a spiritual person at all. In fact, I'm not even sure I know what the word spiritual means. Me neither. Yeah. So in that case, is there value in the spiritual experience for someone like yourself? Yes, or I don't know. It's lacking a better descriptor. I mean, I recognize that maybe that's not the right word to use,

Starting point is 00:33:53 but I don't know how else to label it. Well, there's a very tangible value, which is that along with the visual distortions and the distortions of time and sense of self there's often these um very simple positive things that emerge like a sense of love for my parents something like that love for my friends appreciation for being alive gratitude um a desire to work hard to use the time that I have on earth in a way that will benefit other people. You know, these are basic things that sometimes emerge from the experience and to feel those

Starting point is 00:34:34 things in a, in a genuine way is fantastic. It's really good, especially if you are a somewhat cynical materialist person. And when I say materialist, I don't mean in the like, uh, acquisitive sense of the word, but just in a sense that you believe in physical reality is the ultimate be all and all. And,

Starting point is 00:34:55 um, and it doesn't change that belief, but it gives me a sense that within that physical reality, there's tremendous depth and beauty and so many things worthy of exploration. We were chatting a little bit yesterday about something that I'd love to dig into, which is very closely related. And is, I suppose, reflective of some trouble I've had with interacting with various types of explorers in this realm, meaning scientists on one hand, if I can simplify it, these are hard scientists on one end of the spectrum

Starting point is 00:35:32 who almost, I'm not going to say universally, but very much fall, I would say, in line with the type of thinking you're describing. And then on the other end of the spectrum, people coming from, uh, looking at psychedelics from a, for lack of a better adjective,

Starting point is 00:35:50 a shamanic perspective. And, uh, it's, it's hard to get, there, there, there seems to be allergies on both sides to the other,

Starting point is 00:36:00 uh, in some cases. Uh, what is the, what is, what are the reservations that you have about, aside from not believing in the deity spirits, whatever might be used for explaining things on the shamanic side, it seems to be many people in these psychedelic experiences

Starting point is 00:36:22 want that type of context or they, they seek, say the, uh, shaman of one type or another to provide them with this container and experience. And even people who are otherwise would view themselves as very hyper rational. How do you think about the sort of shamanic cultural context?

Starting point is 00:36:42 We lack it here, but there are cultures where that does exist, but it comes along with a lot more. That's a complicated question. There's a lot of aspects to it that I find slightly problematic. One is that plants are the be all end all. I think that plants are a wonderful starting place and they introduce us to so many things and maybe those things are

Starting point is 00:37:06 the best maybe dmt is as good as it gets but i've had the opportunity to try a number of different dmt derivatives met mpt dpt dipt and so on nipt and a number of others. And what I can say about having tried all these different tryptamine derivatives of DMT is that they have different properties and might be better for different things that we don't need to use these in a one-size-fits-all manner. So for example, people often talk about ego death. I, for whatever reason, don't even like using these psychoanalytic terms when describing psychedelic experience. But for whatever reason, with DMT, it tends to be about me, about my life, my friends, my family, my associations. With DPT, it feels more universal. It feels like this is an experience that anyone,

Starting point is 00:38:10 my DPT experience could have been your DPT experience or could have been anyone in the world's DPT experience because it's not about me. It's not about my life. It's about life. And I think with the shamanic root, there's often a lot of dogma. There's a lot of, um, this is the way to do it. And this is what's traditional. And there's a little bit of discouragement of experimentation in favor of what is traditional. And that's fantastic because we have a lot to learn from these traditions without question, an enormous amount to learn. But I don't think we've figured it out. I don't think any culture has figured it out. And I am most in favor of anyone that is continually trying to push things forward, trying to see how can they be even better than they are? How can

Starting point is 00:39:02 they, um, and that's maybe not a good mindset. Maybe it's better to just be satisfied, but this is, you know, maybe it's a scientific mindset. How can we change it? How can we make it better for people that don't like to vomit? How can we make it better for people that want a shorter experience or people that are sensitive to this or that? And I mean, we, we chatted about this a little bit yesterday but also the uh not just the specificity of action or being able to use derivatives for different types of experiences but also the reliability or accuracy of dosing right yes which maybe you could maybe you could chat about for a second yeah i mean i think that if there's one thing that is not talked about enough in the realm of psychedelics and drugs in general, it's dose. Dose is so, so important

Starting point is 00:39:53 to understanding a drug's effect. And it's often not even discussed. You know, people will say, oh, I hated Adderall. I hated this. I hated that. I'll say, oh, really? You hated Adderall? How much did you, how much were you taking? And they'll say, oh, really, you hated Adderall? How much did you, how much were you taking? And they'll say, oh, I don't know, a pill. Well, there's 20 milligram pills and there's five milligram pills and which one were you taking? And it makes a big difference.

Starting point is 00:40:16 It makes a huge difference. I mean, this is, you know, the toxicology is founded on this idea, Paracelsus' idea that the dose is the poison, that the difference between a medicine and a poison is the dose. And with plants, you don't have that luxury of knowing the dose. You simply don't. There's tremendous variability. Then on top of that, they're often being prepared in one way or another that can make it even harder to know exactly how much is being consumed. And then someone drinks a cup of brew and they say, I don't like ayahuasca, it's too strong, or I didn't feel anything,

Starting point is 00:40:52 I'm not sensitive to ayahuasca. And what's sad about that is you can't learn from the experience because you don't know what you took in the first place. Whereas if they had taken 45 milligrams of DMT freebase and a synthetic MAOI, then you could say, interesting, maybe you're unusually insensitive to DMT. Next time, try 55 milligrams and work your way up gradually, and eventually you'll find the dose that works for you.

Starting point is 00:41:22 And you can kind of troubleshoot the psychedelic experience. It doesn't need to be just a, I felt it, or I didn't feel it, or it was too much, or it wasn't enough thing. You can figure out what works for you. And that's really important because these are serious experiences. There's a lot of uncertainty going into these experiences. At the very least, to have that foundation of i know what i took and i know how much of it i took is something that can't be underestimated in its value there's so many different directions i want to go but i'll try to pick one and just one more thing in that vein that's the real tragedy of psychedelics right now is for a common person they have access to two

Starting point is 00:42:00 psychedelics lsd and psilocybin mushrooms, and they don't know the dose of either of those things. You take one blotter of LSD, maybe someone told you that it contains 100 micrograms of LSD, but you have no idea. I have analyzed blotters of non-LSD-containing lysergemides, like 1P-LSD blotter. I was working with a chemist friend on an experiment, and there's variation across the blotter. I was working with a chemist friend on an experiment and there's variation across the blotter. Then on top of that, there's different salts of these different things,

Starting point is 00:42:30 these different lysergemides. So you don't know how much you're taking to begin with. Making the assumption that it's exactly 100 micrograms per blotter is a huge mistake. You have no idea. And the same is true of mushrooms. Even the same species grown on the same substrate, there can be variation in potency between two different mushrooms. There can be variation in potency across the same mushroom, between the stem and the cap. And just for sake of clarity, when you say variation in potency, we're not talking like a 10% difference in potency.

Starting point is 00:42:59 Well, there's a chemist named Joshin, I believe that's how you pronounce it, Joshin Gartz, and he published some work on this. You can see exactly how much variation he observed. There hasn't been as much research on it as I would like. But the general takeaway is that these things are not homogenous. And if you're going into what is potentially a very profound experience, you really want to have that baseline confidence that I took this much of something. I think it

Starting point is 00:43:32 really helps and is not to be underestimated. I mean, particularly if you're coming in, as many people would, with a reasonable level of anxiety or fear or apprehension about something that you've never experienced that people describe, well, I suppose this is maybe an oxymoron, but describe as ineffable. Are there any books you would recommend or resources that you could recommend to people aside from Shulgin's books for those who would like to learn more about psychedelics. And you mentioned consciousness. I'm wondering if there are any books

Starting point is 00:44:08 that you've found very thought-provoking that don't also activate your gag reflex, given sort of the squishy nature of some of the writing. Right. There's one book that I think hits all of those points you just made that's really fantastic. It was written by my thesis advisor, Nicholas Langlitz. And the name of the book is Neuropsychedelia. It's an academic book.

Starting point is 00:44:32 So it's not as readable as maybe some of, as Michael Pollan's book, for example, but I think it's one of the best books ever written about psychedelics, neuroscience, and consciousness. And, um, what was his last name again? Langlitz. And he's a really interesting guy, MD, PhD, you know, really, um, very dedicated to understanding the subject. And he looks at it, it came out almost a decade before the Michael Pollan book, but it also takes a very different perspective on the value of a lot of the neuroimaging research. So I think it's a fantastic book that I can't recommend enough. You know, for those that are interested in the historical and anthropological aspects of all of this, you have, for those that are interested in the historical and anthropological aspects of all

Starting point is 00:45:27 of this, you have, um, there's an anthropologist named Douglas Sharon who wrote a lot about San Pedro. He's fantastic. Um, there's, uh, Marlene Dobkin de Rios who wrote a lot about ayahuasca in the eighties and maybe even in the late seventies. She's fantastic. There is, of course, Jonathan Ott, who wrote Pharmacotheon. He's fantastic and has written many books, and he's great for getting a sort of wide historical and scientific view of things. I think he was one of the best for that. Great. I will put all those in the show notes for folks. So you'll have links to all of those. Uh, why put together the TV show? Why do so much work? I mean, having some understanding based on our conversation, also just watching the show, you realize how much work it is to put something like that together.

Starting point is 00:46:25 Why do it? I wanted to do it for a number of reasons. One is that I've always felt that there are trends in journalism and that certain things become demonized and then everyone talks about how terrible they are and then the public decides that that's truly the case. So right now, no one could write an article

Starting point is 00:46:55 about opioids being good. You simply couldn't do that. It wouldn't be allowed. You'd be violently attacked. But you can easily write an article about how psilocybin is good, and you will be congratulated for doing that. And I started thinking about what things can and can't be talked about, and what can I talk about that no one else is going to talk about. And the main thing that I was interested in with the show is clandestine drug synthesis. That's sort of the thing that I

Starting point is 00:47:27 feel is most widely misrepresented in the media are the people that run underground drug labs. So somebody at Johns Hopkins, if they're doing research with psilocybin, we're very eager to congratulate them for their work. But someone who's actually responsible for providing these drugs to the public so that normal people can use them, we're eager to demonize them, even though they're risking their freedom to do that. And they're typically not bad people. In many cases, they're very good, idealistically motivated people that do this because they think it's the right thing to do with their lives.

Starting point is 00:48:02 They really believe in it. So I thought, okay, with my understanding of chemistry, this would be a great opportunity to clear up a lot of the misconceptions regarding clandestine drug synthesis. That was kind of the most important thing for me to do. But then beyond that, I wanted to tell drug stories that hadn't been told and to present a basic case for understanding the value of these things. And there's a lot of different ways to do that. You can say that, look, this is valued by an indigenous group, and they've integrated this into their traditions and into their spirituality, and they really appreciate it.

Starting point is 00:48:41 So maybe think twice before making it illegal, because these people are not only not experiencing problems with it, it's making their lives better. So think very carefully before making a plant illegal. That's one basic idea that I wanted to communicate. But then the other is, these are real scientific tools. You know, I've been on both sides of this discussion journalistically. I've had the opportunity to interview enormous numbers of people and to be interviewed many, many times. And I've, from being on the opposite side, from being interviewed and profiled by people, I've become aware of how stupid a lot of these discussions are and how easy it is for people to minimize and reduce the importance of all this. It's just drugs. It's just drugs. It's everything. It's your

Starting point is 00:49:34 consciousness, all of medicine, medicinal chemistry, pharmacology. This is not a niche subject of study. This is one of the most important areas known to mankind and has been for thousands of years are medicines. So, just to get people, at the very least, even if they don't like it, to acknowledge its value and to take it a little bit seriously and not just say, oh, drugs, just that stuff that druggies use. It's so much more than that so i've i've recommended this i've recommended uh well they're let's see a few different pronunciations but hamilton's pharmacopoeia pharmacopoeia don't worry about the spelling just search hamilton on your your favorite provider and you'll find the show uh i watched on amazon prime you can watch anywhere there are many many

Starting point is 00:50:23 many different places. Which episode might you suggest? And I'm going to give you a few different profiles. A scientist start with. And I know that's really broad, but let's just say somebody who would consider themselves or who is professionally a scientist. It depends on what the, there's an episode from this most recent season

Starting point is 00:50:42 called A Clandestine chemist's tale and that's about how the war on drugs has made it more difficult for people to have home labs partially that's one of the ideas that i was trying to communicate it's also about clandestine mdma synthesis and features the first ever televised total synthesis of mMA. Um, and it's real. It's, you know, that's what you see is a real synthesis of MDMA. So just the amazingness of even capturing that on film is something that I think is cool for almost anyone who really wants to see this is where it comes from. This is how it's done. You know, it goes, we start with, not we, I didn't, uh, but the chemist starts with, um, you know, crude sassafras root bark oil and takes it all the way down to the

Starting point is 00:51:33 recrystallized MDMA hydrochloride, um, over the course of five days. And it's, I was just kind of blown away by watching that process. Um, and I also televised a total synthesis of Quaalude. Um, and also we did a little bit of a drug called Gaboxadol, um, got a little bit into LSD chemistry. I mean, there's, there's a lot of chemistry. I would say that drugs aside, there's probably more hardcore chemistry in this TV show than there has ever been in any TV show ever. If anyone can find it. I would be astonished if that's not the case. Which is cool.

Starting point is 00:52:12 I mean, I think it's great because people find it interesting. And I get so many emails from people saying that they find chemistry interesting for the first time. And the way to do it wasn't to simplify it. It was to show people how complicated it is. It's not only not dumbed down, but I love that routinely in these episodes, and I'd like to think of myself as a reasonably well-read guy, but I haven't taken much chemistry. And you'll go through a number of different diagrams or certain words will come up, and there is no pause for a 10-minute explanation of the term.

Starting point is 00:52:47 It's just provided in context, but it is a sophisticated show, but still very entertaining to watch. For someone who is a non-scientist, let's just say they're fascinated by what they have read about psychedelics or heard about psychedelics. They've never taken a psychedelic. They find it terrifying on some level. The prospect,

Starting point is 00:53:11 is there an episode or set of episodes you'd recommend? Well, I'm so, I'm probably the worst person to ask because what the things that I like in my own work are always the things that are the most obscure that no one has ever done, but that's from my own perspective. Whereas I think the mushroom episode that I did was the most successful of them all.

Starting point is 00:53:33 So that's probably, I guess, that's the people speaking. They like that one the most. I, that wouldn't be the first one I would recommend, but people want to learn about mushrooms. What would be the first one I would recommend, but people want to learn about mushrooms. What would be the first one you would recommend? Probably a clandestine chemist's tale or the lazy lizard school of hedonism episode about this chemist who operated an MDMA lab

Starting point is 00:53:57 in the center of a volcano. So you mentioned, which is a fantastic episode, you mentioned the mushrooms. What have the other most popular episodes been? I think people like the episodes that detail shamanism. I think people are very interested in shamanism, partially because it's non-technical, but because it's such a foreign idea that you could have a spiritual tradition based around drug consumption and that it's so non-taboo that people do it with their families and they do it to heal and they um they've just never seen anything like that before and i hadn't either until i saw it

Starting point is 00:54:40 myself what episodes would fall into that category? The mushroom episode, the salvia episode from season one, both have that. Um, and the San Pedro episode from season two, um, is a pretty in-depth analysis with actually no voiceover though. It was a different, it had a different format from the other episodes, but it's, it's a view of cactus shamanism in Peru that I think gives you an appreciation for the medical context in the community that this really is. Um, this is so different from what you would think of when you would hear this guy gives people mescaline every night. You know, these are people that are treating him exactly the same way you would treat a doctor in the United States.

Starting point is 00:55:30 Just, I have epilepsy. I have a sprained ankle. I mean, I don't know what he would call himself. Watch you metal or a curandero, but I mean, probably not shaman.

Starting point is 00:55:43 Maybe he does, but I'm not sure how he would self-describe from that episode. What would he call himself, do you think? He may have called himself a shaman. Oh, he did? He may have. I would have to double check. Maybe in English. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those guys would say curandero or huachumero, something like that. This is not going to be relevant to anyone else, but since I'm curious,

Starting point is 00:56:03 did you actually have toilet shit or chicken shit splashed on your face in that episode? Because there was a shot while you were doing your chores where something awful, and it was edited in to your cleaning montage, got splashed on your glasses, and it looked awful. I don't know if that was done in the effects studio.

Starting point is 00:56:23 Okay, you caught me. I couldn't resist that gag. Okay, all right. I just couldn't resist it. It's very fast. It's very fast. I have a slightly childish sense of humor. And, yeah, it was just, you had to.

Starting point is 00:56:42 That was good. Yeah, it got me. It stuck in my mind. That episode also features, I think, perhaps my favorite wardrobe of yours, which is otherwise fairly constant, but the gigantic yellow big bird hat that you're dressed in towards the end. I don't want to give away too much. You didn't look too happy to be doing, I guess, I'd imagine, I haven't encountered this directly in the San Pedro or Huachuma

Starting point is 00:57:12 cactus tradition, but the sopladas where he was having you take in the Florida water or whatever that was into your mouth to spritz on him. You did not look happy to be doing that. Oh, it's so terrible. Have you done that before? I have, yeah. You don't want to, certainly don't want to drink it. You don't want to hold it in your mouth. It's probably 95% ethanol.

Starting point is 00:57:39 And I lost the ability to taste for several days after doing that. It was actually maybe one of the most damaging things I did in the entire show was holding the Florida water in my mouth. Agua Florida. Agua Florida, yeah. What was one of the, for people who maybe, so we talked about people who are nervous or apprehensive yet curious. What about the overly confident, cocksure person who might go into something without a healthy level of respect?

Starting point is 00:58:11 Is there an episode you'd recommend? The DMT episode, the opener for that episode, I think does a pretty decent job. The 5MEO DMT. The 5MEO DMT. Yeah. Um, you know, I, it's, it's hard to say because that's a great example. And I've seen that outside of my film work. I've seen, um, someone who had a very cocky attitude approach five MEO DMT is, is like like i've done a 10 strip dude i've done 10 strip meaning lsd yeah i've done whatever whatever i'm a there's nothing that can i'm a veteran psychonaut bring

Starting point is 00:58:53 it on and uh and then you know it's a bad attitude you don't want good could possibly come of that? Um, so it's, it's good to take things seriously. You don't want to be afraid, but it's a serious experience. I mean, it's, I would say it's no less serious than being reborn. So if you want to be reborn with an angry, cocky, confrontational attitude, then go for it. But it's probably not the best approach. But, you know, that's the other thing is I've had to cultivate a really laissez-faire attitude toward a lot of things to do my show effectively. If you're going to be a journalist and you're going to interview people, you can't constantly be telling them what's right and what's wrong. And there's a lot of moralism and there's a lot of psychedelic prescriptivism in the community. People love to say, you're doing it wrong. You're doing it. You're not serious enough. You're just trying to get high. It's not

Starting point is 01:00:00 respectful. It's not traditional. It's abuse. And I really hate to see that. I think that's one of the worst things that somebody can do because ultimately, if you do that, you're just aping the government's same mistakes of setting up these rules of right and wrong ways to use drugs. So you can use Marinol if it's prescribed by a doctor and it's synthetic THC, but you can't use it from a plant. That's the wrong way. You know, all this, you don't want to go down that road of telling people what's right and what's wrong, assuming they're not hurting other people. So I try not to tell people what is right and what is wrong. So if people want to smoke 5-MeO-DMT with a cocky attitude, be my guest. But it's really anything that I say, it's just, you know, in an effort to minimize any harm that could come from these substances, because

Starting point is 01:00:57 it is a very serious experience and it could be difficult. What was the scariest, if you had any scariest experience or unsettling experience that you had? Not necessarily, I mean, given the places that you were going to, I can think of a few scenarios offhand. I mean, with Kratom, also safety. I mean, my God, there's so many ways

Starting point is 01:01:19 that you could put yourself into difficult situations that are unrelated to the psychedelic consum, the consumption of psychedelics themselves. But if, were there any experiences you had that were particularly difficult? I had, I had one interesting experience many years ago where, um, I've been to China for undercover reporting, uh, three times. And the first time I did it, it was maybe 2012, something like that. And I was going undercover to a lab that was producing a synthetic cannabinoid called UR144, which has a cool structure. And I went to the lab, interviewed the chemists, and they gave me a sample of the UR-144. So then I was back at my hotel room with my cameraman, who has Crohn's disease and loves to be stoned.

Starting point is 01:02:14 He's stoned all the time. And it helps him with Crohn's, but also he just loves to be stoned. And so he was saying, you know, should we try out this UR-144, this synthetic cannabinoid? And I thought, well, yeah, yeah, I suppose we should maybe give it a little, give it a little try. But I didn't have a scale. And typically, I would never use a drug without a scale. But I thought, okay, this has been used by people before. There's a little bit of information on it. I'll take one grain of this granular crystal and I'll smoke it. hotel room and starting to get very, very high. And as I got more and more high, I started experiencing this fractal of uncertainty where I was thinking, I don't know if this is UR-144. But then I was thinking, well, even if it is UR144, I don't know anything about UR144. I don't know

Starting point is 01:03:28 if it has toxic metabolites. I don't know if it is carcinogenic. I don't know if it has any form of toxicity. But even if it didn't have those things, I don't know if this is pure UR144. And if it isn't pure, I don't know anything about the toxicity of those impurities. But even if it is pure and doesn't have toxic impurities, I don't know the dose that I consumed. I could have maybe consumed an overdose. And, you know, just going on and on and on, all the branching uncertainty about safety and purity and potency and dose. And, um, I was fine actually, and actually ended up having a good experience, but it just made me think, you don't want to go down the fractal of uncertainty road. You don't want to, you want to minimize the uncertainty as much as you can because your own mind is already infinitely uncertain. So why not at least know that you've consumed your 144 and know that you've

Starting point is 01:04:31 consumed one milligram so you can at least rest on that foundation. So the negative experiences that I've had have almost always been a product of uncertainty and inadequate preparation. I would say that the negative experiences that I have had after carefully measuring doses have typically been okay because I did have that ability to fall back on. I took 1.4 milligrams. Previously, I'd taken one. This is not going to be that much stronger. I'm going to be okay. This will be, it was over four hours last time. It's going to be over four hours this time. And you also have the ability and the training to assess or improve purity yourself. That's true. That is true. Yeah. Um, so minimizing uncertainty, I think is really important, but then some of these things are more challenging. And five MEO DMT is an example of

Starting point is 01:05:30 that. You know, it, it has a inability to, to really frighten people. Um, there's some people that only have these negative experiences. And when I was using it most recently, I, um, there's a chemist, Casey Hardison, who's a friend of mine, and he had gone out drinking with a friend of his. And after drinking a little bit, they decided to smoke 5-MeO-DMT together. And they both smoked it at the same time, which is something that you shouldn't do. You want somebody watching over you. And they both dissociated because it has a sort of dissociative character. And when my friend Casey came back, his friend was dead. He had asphyxiated on his vomit while he was in this state and there was no one watching him. Holy shit. Yeah. So that's a pretty frightening thing to have happened. And then I was filming this piece about it. And I remember talking to this gynecologist turned toad venom shaman. And I was saying, you know, I really have some reservations about this, to be honest with you, because, you know, this friend of a friend very recently died. And, you know, the fact that that happened, it's frightening to me. And he was saying, oh, yes, it was so terrible, just terrible. And no one ever would have expected

Starting point is 01:06:53 it to happen to him because, of course, he was the son of a shaman. And I was saying, oh, I didn't realize he was the son of a shaman. That's interesting. And he's saying, oh, you're talking about the recent death in Brazil? And I was saying, no, no, this is a recent death in Colorado. There are multiple recent deaths. And, you know, just the fact that it's even implicated in these deaths, even though it's not a direct effect, a direct toxic effect, it's always people drowning while they're dissociated or asphyxiating on their vomit. But just the fact that this had happened at all was enough to really give me some concerns about doing it. So you mentioned drowning. So I have to ask because I wanted to

Starting point is 01:07:35 save it for this conversation. It's part of the reason that the 5MEO episode opener is so attention-grabbing. Why on earth did the, I suppose, shaman slash facilitator choose a location with so much water and so many rocks? I have gotten so much criticism for featuring that. And that's an interesting thing about making these documentaries is that there's a question of showing things the way they are, even if the way they are is potentially unsafe or trying to always set an example for other people, because I don't want to misrepresent reality and say things are a way that they're not.

Starting point is 01:08:16 Um, but at the same time, that experience showed me that, um, you want to maybe set an example. I certainly got a lot of criticism for it. His reason for doing his, um, his sessions by the water is I think simply that it was a beautiful location and the people that were smoking the venom were very experienced. So he thought that they could handle it but clearly there's a risk of drowning and clearly you could hurt yourself on a sharp rock or something like that i want to revisit something we we chatted about a little bit last night because I had asked you, and feel free to correct my recollection here, why you hadn't produced an episode with ayahuasca. And I don't remember this train of conversation in the truth barrel in the sauna, but I found what you said very thought-provoking, and I wanted to explore it here. I don't know if you recall

Starting point is 01:09:27 where we picked up, but it was related to shamanism and the providing of explanation, I believe it was, or something along those lines. And the mention of uncertainty earlier helped me to recall that portion of the conversation. But why not feature ayahuasca? Well, there's a number. We can get back to that. I actually tried. I tried to do a story about the death of Kyle Nolan. I don't know if you know that story. Because one of my concerns, again, with dogma and with prescriptivism is that people start to say that there is only one way to do things. So when ayahuasca was at the height of its popularity, in New York at least, if you said to someone, I've done ayahuasca, the next question

Starting point is 01:10:20 they would ask you is, did you do it in the Amazon? And if the answer is no, then you didn't really do ayahuasca, did you? You just did some perversion of ayahuasca that shouldn't be called ayahuasca. And I found that very obnoxious and elitist and stupid, because ayahuasca is a tea. And it's a tea that anyone listening to this can make. Not that they should, but they can, assuming that you can boil plants and water. And it's not a special knowledge to make it. So the idea that you have to go to a foreign country and be with a different culture to experience it, I think is flawed, especially because a tourist industry has emerged to satisfy this enormous demand of white outsiders in the Amazon. I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with drug tourism, but if the whole point of going there is to have a traditional experience, and then what you're

Starting point is 01:11:16 actually having isn't traditional in the slightest, then what was the point of traveling in the first place. So one thing that happened is you had all these white outsiders. There isn't all that much anthropological literature on the subject, and they probably weren't reading it to begin with. So they don't know what is traditional to begin with. So someone comes to a retreat. In this case, it was a retreat called Shimbre. And the shaman says, i'm actually a martian i'm i'm always a promising start is it no i mean but this is a question so you're a white outsider

Starting point is 01:11:55 yeah and somebody says i'm a martian yeah you don't want it you don't appear racist right this could be their tradition you don't know what their tradition is right maybe that maybe they come from a long line of martians and uh and it would be very offensive to question their martian heritage right you don't know true so no one wants to say anything so people are getting away with saying absolutely ridiculous things about themselves just neglecting their duties. Forget spiritual duties, just their duties as basically babysitters. They're not watching people. And there was a teenager named Kyle Nolan who went to Peru to have one of these sorts of experiences with a shaman named Maestro Moncaluto, and he disappeared. His parents go to the retreat looking for him. The shaman says, oh, he just walked away.

Starting point is 01:12:53 Then they find his body buried in a shallow grave on the outskirts of the retreat. So as soon as that hits the news, and that was actually international news, it was in tabloids. I do remember when that yeah then all these people come out of the woodwork and say that that maestro mon caluto i always knew there was something up with him i always knew there was something wrong he he would say that he would just sit and watch soap operas while everyone was on ayahuasca he wasn't watching

Starting point is 01:13:20 anyone and uh and and something about that struck me as being very dangerous, that people cared more about what they perceived as being traditional than what was effective or what was safe. And if he had thought, you know what, this is a tea, and if I'm really interested in it, maybe I can brew a low-dose batch of it myself and test it out and figure this out on my own. I guarantee he was capable of it and he would probably still be alive. So what was the cause of death? Was it ever determined? It was never determined, unfortunately. So I don't, and that's often the case with these. So, so it's really out of open-mindedness that I think that people should be aware that there's multiple ways to do these things, that it doesn't make your experience non-valid if it wasn't conducted in South America.

Starting point is 01:14:19 But the other reason that you were initially getting it is that, you know, the mystery of existence what the purpose of life is that religions emerged to help people deal with these big existential questions. And they help, they help a lot. I think that's one reason that religions are as popular as they are, because it's rough to sit alone in your apartment, scratching your head, wondering what the meaning of life is or something like that. And so I understand why people want these interpretive conceptual frameworks for the psychedelic experience.

Starting point is 01:15:13 And that's why from the get-go in the 1960s, it was, you know, Zen Buddhism or the Tibetan Book of the Dead or whatever. Any explanatory framework that could be found was jumped on because the reality that there is no explanation is not all that palatable but as unpalatable as it is i think that that is the value exactly what makes it difficult is what makes it valuable and to have that experience and i i say this cautiously And to have that experience, and I say this cautiously, but to have that experience by yourself with no one explaining anything to you, to be confronted by the full

Starting point is 01:15:52 magnitude of the mystery with an absence of explanation is one of the most powerful experiences that you can have. And I don't know if a shaman prevents you from having that experience. They might not. But I know that you will have it if there's no one there to tell you what's happening. How have you found it, if you're comfortable sharing, positively powerful to sit with that great uncertainty versus profoundly destabilizing. I mean, and that's not, I'm not using that as a justification for having this overlay of like a shamanistic-talk or anything that allows you to, helps you to turn that into a positive experience as opposed to a negative one or an overwhelming one? Well, if you can, the more that you can direct these things toward values that will help your life, I think that that's generally good because too much destabilization isn't healthy. Um, I remember the first really, really, really, really strong

Starting point is 01:17:13 ayahuasca experience I had. Um, I had, I had a bit of that. I remember my friend was watching Seinfeld, um, in the other room and, uh, and I came out of it thinking, and when you say ayahuasca, are you talking about the farm, a wasca, synthetic DMT with maclobamide and, um, and coming out of it and thinking, well, that, that was a deconstruction of everything I have ever known and ever will know. I didn't know who I was. I didn't know what year it was. Time had completely deconstructed. I saw my entire life as a book with each day a page in the book and just these profound reconceptualizations of every aspect of being. And then you come out of it and what do you do? Do you go and join your friend and watch seinfeld i think that'd be very difficult to do i don't know or

Starting point is 01:18:12 maybe maybe the easiest thing in the world i i wasn't inside your experience at the time what did you do i apprehensively watched some seinfeld and then decided against the Seinfeld. Newman! And what did you gain from that experience, if anything? I mean, what did you take from that? Well, it's okay. Here's what I would say about that experience is that I am not, I don't know what to do with experiences of that magnitude and I'm reluctant to find a framework that explains

Starting point is 01:18:54 it. So I don't know that it's especially beneficial. I don't think it was damaging, but I can say that at lower doses, ayahuasca has had much more practical benefit and sometimes almost cartoonishly practical. Could you give an example? Yes. I remember once I had taken a low dose, I believe it was 45 milligrams of DMT with 300 milligrams of maclobamide. And I was writing and I was really enjoying everything that I was writing. And I was thinking, damn, I'm getting some good writing done. I'm really working through

Starting point is 01:19:32 ideas in an effective way. I'm loving this. But you know what would make it that much better is a little nicotine gum, because I like nicotine gum. And that will make my thoughts sharper. That will give me enhanced clarity and it will make my writing even better if I'm chewing nicotine gum. And then I looked at the nicotine gum and I thought, but then this is the thought that underlies all addiction. This is the thought that underlies all compulsive behaviors. I want more. It's not good enough the way it is. I want it to be that much better, but it will never be good enough. And the nicotine gum is already inside me. I can create my own nicotine gum. And I dramatically threw the nicotine gum across

Starting point is 01:20:17 the room. I was like, I don't need this. I already am the nicotine gum. And, you know, that's, I think, why these things can have an anti-addictive effect one of the reasons is you know there's all sorts of pharmacological reasons but even psychologically they teach you that all these things are inside you and that you have the ability to create these sorts of drug effects on your own to some extent that it's all you know it's it's your acetylcholine receptors that are being activated you can activate them on your own you know it's it's all, you know, it's your acetylcholine receptors that are being activated. You can activate them on your own. You know, it's a...

Starting point is 01:20:48 Flashback to Shulgin with the sugar crystals on the orange juice. That's amazing. I'd never heard that story. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a very practical thing is don't chew nicotine gum to make your writing better because it's already inside you and you just can create it yourself.

Starting point is 01:21:06 And I've had so many of those, those sorts of low level practical experiences. And I really like that because it's not about time. Like, what can I tell you about how my sense of time was deconstructed? I can go on and on about it and you wouldn't understand and I wouldn't understand. And it exists outside of the realm of any sort of comfortable comprehension, at least for me. Whereas thoughts about addiction, about how you construct your life, about how you ration your love or how much love you have or how to integrate love into your existence, those are things that you have practical applications. And I think that's important are the practical applications. So this may or may not be a good segue, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway.

Starting point is 01:21:49 Uh, I know nothing of Wade Davis. Uh, I don't know if, if you'd be open to describing who Wade Davis is and perhaps the furthermore defining the cultural matrix. But who is Wade Davis? Wade Davis was a student of Richard Evans Schultes at Harvard. He was an ethnobotanist who came to prominence in the 80s after writing a book called The Serpent and the Rainbow. Later made into a movie. Later made into a movie later made into a movie by

Starting point is 01:22:25 west craven um and proposing this pretty outrageous idea that the idea of zombies in haiti was not only real in the sense that there really was zombification this wasn't some kind of folk legend but that there was a intricateification. This wasn't some kind of folk legend, but that there was a intricate pharmacological explanation for how these zombies were created that involved scopolamine and the toxin from pufferfish, TTX. So really amazing idea. He got a huge amount of criticism for it at the time of its publication and was even accused of fraud and or contaminating his samples with TTX to prove his hypothesis. It was very, very controversial at the time, but it's such an interesting idea and it hadn't

Starting point is 01:23:21 been adequately tested. I wanted to go back and did in 2009 to collect samples just to see if anyone else could find further evidence for what he said, because that's one thing that people do all the time is endlessly debate. Is it real? Is it not real? Instead of just going out and trying to see for yourself and collect new samples and do additional analysis and figure it out. But he, he's had a lot of luck, I'll tell you that. He's one of these guys where the number of crazy things that he collected in his career borders on being suspicious. And I understand why people regard him with suspicion,

Starting point is 01:23:57 because he's, first of all, he's a great storyteller, which makes maybe people maybe regard him with suspicion for that reason as well, because he's not dry and serious enough. But he discovered a fungus called Dictyanema huarani that contains a lichen that contains psilocybin. Crazy. No one else has ever found the species. He just happened to find it. No one else has ever found it. Amazing. He also claims to have found the tallest San Pedro cactus ever observed. It was, I think, 100 feet tall. Okay. That one strikes me as unbelievable, but I've examined the specimen at the Harvard herbarium myself, um, and read his descriptions of it. I, you know, I think maybe he didn't bring a tape measure with him and made a little bit of a generous estimation of, of its height, but he,

Starting point is 01:24:59 um, but he really also was by all accounts, a very hard worker and really was, you know, out there talking to people. He was a prolific writer and made a lot of really amazing discoveries. Was the field exploration and sort of the cultural examination, is that something that you try to emulate? Or is that something that you try to emulate? Or is that... Yeah. I mean, it seems like that's a strong component of at least the TV show. Sure. I can tell. There's another compound that I wanted to chat about, which is Ibogaine.

Starting point is 01:25:41 We didn't really get into it yesterday over dinner, but can you perhaps introduce people to what Ibogaine is and why it might be of interest or is of interest? Yeah. So Ibogaine is an alkaloid that is found in the roots of a central West African plant called Tabernanthi iboga. And it's a pretty amazing molecule. It's very, very difficult to synthesize. All of the ibogaine that's used commercially has to be extracted from plants. It's very complicated structurally. And pharmacologically.

Starting point is 01:26:25 It is one of the most complicated drugs I've ever read about. But the reason that people are interested in Ibogaine is there was a guy named Howard Lotsoff who was addicted to heroin. He tried Ibogaine sort of on a whim and then afterwards lost his desire to use heroin and patented it as an anti-addictive intervention for treatment of heroin addiction. So it's a pretty amazing thing. I mean, one of the most difficult pharmacological tasks is getting people off of opioids to the point that, to some extent, people have thrown up their hands and said all right the best we can do is agonist replacement therapy we'll give them methadone we'll give them buprenorphine and we're just giving them another opioid that's regulated and that's the best

Starting point is 01:27:19 treatment we have when it comes to actually getting people off of it, there are very, there really, there's nothing in terms of pharmacotherapy. There's, you know, clinics that specialize in helping people wean off of it, but we don't have drugs that are designed to reduce the addictiveness of the opioid itself. So it seems to have that effect for a lot of people. Unfortunately, it hasn't been studied as well as I would hope because it's a Schedule I drug in the United States, which has interfered with scientific research. But what's really amazing about Ibogaine is, even though it's famous for its treatment of opioid addiction, is that I think it has a general anti-addictive, anti-compulsive effect. It also works for alcoholism. It also works for methamphetamine addiction. It seems to work for many compulsive behaviors. Does it only have that persistence of effect at high doses? That is a question that hasn't been thoroughly investigated, but my guess is that there are alternative dosing strategies that are safer than taking single high doses,

Starting point is 01:28:34 which are referred to as flood doses, and that would be microdosing over longer periods of time or taking lower doses over longer periods of time. And this is especially useful because ibogaine is cardiotoxic and has been associated with a number of deaths. So any way to reduce that toxicity is a boon to the therapeutic use of the substance. Are there other, uh, outside of, uh, addiction, are there other applications or potential applications of Ibogaine that people are exploring or hypothesizing? Yes. So one of the most interesting things that I have researched regarding Ibogaine is its effect on a protein called GDNF. That's glial-derived neurotrophic factor. And this is a protein that is very useful

Starting point is 01:29:31 in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. There's been some limited clinical work where they show that it can cause a regrowth of dopaminergic neurons, which is the mechanism of Parkinson's damage to the brain is loss of dopaminergic neurons so it's directly reversing the toxic effect of parkinson's um and they found that ibogaine causes a release of the same therapeutic protein so that's pretty damn useful and um and that's just the tip of the iceberg with it. I mean, it also seems to synergize with

Starting point is 01:30:09 dopaminergic drugs. So it's possible that it increases patient sensitivity to the L-DOPA treatment as well. And on top of that, it seems to have an antidepressant effect. And depression is one of the major symptoms of Parkinson's disease. So I think it could really be helping people with Parkinson's. And there's a sort of underground community of people with Parkinson's that use Ibogaine. And I occasionally receive emails from these sorts of people. Often they use it at 20 milligrams a day. And they seem to really believe in it as a treatment. And on one hand, I understand that it's irresponsible to talk about these things without a lot of serious medical support. But the flip side is that

Starting point is 01:30:51 it needs to be studied. People need to be aware of it. And it's very sad to see the same treatments being used for Parkinson's today that were used 30, 40 years ago. I mean, it's still pretty much take L-DOPA, wait till it stops working, and then we'll switch you on to something else. But there's no treatment available that's actually addressing the root cause of the neurodegeneration. And if this does,

Starting point is 01:31:19 and patients are being deprived that treatment, it's a tragic thing. You mentioned in the beginning of your description of Ibogaine that it's extracted from plants. And is it difficult to synthesize? Very difficult, yeah. And this is... I'm so glad to have you on the show for many, many reasons, but also just to discuss this spectrum of scientific materialists, I'm not sure if that's the right description, all the way to, say, shamanistic practices and so on. But there's, because while watching the 5-MeO DMT episode and the, the capturing of toads and also your commentary at the end made me think,

Starting point is 01:32:14 or contemplate how one of the weaknesses of the argument for whole plants is that, or squeezing toads for that matters it seems very environmentally unsustainable and if the objective is to get some of these compounds to i mean you could have farms like they do in brazil for santo daime where they have ayahuasca vines for just hectares and hectares and hectares but oh wow that's amazing have you seen that i haven't seen it but i i i know i know a guy who knows a guy. But is one of the arguments for synthesis that it is just a more scalable solution

Starting point is 01:32:53 if one wants to, like, let's just say, maybe not in the case of Parkinson's, although it is widespread, but for OCD, or utilizing some of these psychedelic compounds, if they were to be rescheduled or derivatives developed that were not schedule one, uh, the synthetic route is more, it's the sustainable option compared to using naturally occurring plants and so on. I mean, is that, I don't know the, the realities of extracting or synthesizing, cause I've done neither,

Starting point is 01:33:24 but I mean, but i mean is that is that something that you thought about while quite a lot while making the show or something that came up a lot like kratom is another example right i mean i just uh seeing the kind of devastation and the the conflicts between i don't know if you would call them kratom poachers and people who are attempting to preserve some of these last existing forests. I mean, it's so much violence, so much destruction. Yeah. Does synthesis fix that? Sustainability, of course, does matter,

Starting point is 01:33:53 and synthesis is typically more sustainable. But the other thing is that, you know, these plants are genetic reserves that if we're just looking at them as a crop and not appreciating them as something to conserve and study, then we may be losing the opportunity to discover all sorts of new things. I'm sure there are old ayahuasca vines that contain beta carbolines that have never been found before and if we're just chopping them down to use them in a brew when you could just as easily use um syrian rue peganum harmala or something like that um you have to wonder whether or not we're potentially losing the opportunity or they could be you know useful cultivars they might faster growing. There's all sorts of reasons to keep and study plants, um, as opposed to just using them

Starting point is 01:34:50 up. Uh, same is true of peyote. There's so many different alkaloids and there's been very little study done in terms of finding, you know, faster growing varieties of peyote or finding strains that have a higher mescaline content or a higher peyote content or things like that. And if we wanted to make these things available, those would be necessary things to do in the same way that they've been done with cannabis. You don't just grow any cannabis. You grow cannabis that has been bred to have the qualities that you're looking for, typically high THC content, but there's a lot of other things, high THC-V or high CBD content. And so, you know, I think that that's really important. You want to have natural reserves of these things that can be studied and can be used as stock for

Starting point is 01:35:42 breeding. And you risk losing all of that if you're just thinking only in the moment, I want it now. Same is true of these toads. I mean, there's a lot of basic scientific questions that haven't been answered about the toads. I would love to see people, you know, studying the rate that they regenerate the venom or how they respond to the milking or if they're sensitive to their own venom, which is such a fascinating question because with, you know, with puffer fish, they've actually evolved a mutation in their sodium ion channel that makes them insensitive to the toxicity of TTX. Is the same true of the 5-HT1A receptor in the Bufoalvarius toad? Have they also evolved a different type of serotonin receptor that makes them insensitive to their own venom? I mean, those are the sorts of things that I would love to be doing

Starting point is 01:36:28 with the toads, answering these basic scientific questions. When it comes to just using them as a source of drugs, you can make 5-MeO-DMT from melatonin, and it's so much more efficient, and so much cheaper probably as well, that it just seems that without a good reason, why even potentially harass a toad? And then on top of that, you have the certainty regarding dose, which is so wonderful to be able to say this is exactly 15 milligrams of 5-MeO-DMT freebase, as opposed to this is 100 milligrams of toad venom that might contain who knows how much 5-MeO-DMT and however much 5-MeO-NMT or serotonin-O-sulfate or whatever steroidal lactone that's found.

Starting point is 01:37:18 There's a lot of stuff in there, and it's rarely looked at objectively or quantified in any way, so the people that are using it don't really know what they're getting. I'm going to pause for a second for just a remedial definition for me and anyone who might be curious because a word has popped up a number of times that I've read a thousand times, alkaloid. Can you define what an alkaloid is? Sure. In the strictest sense, an alkaloid is a material isolated from a plant that contains

Starting point is 01:37:47 a basic nitrogen atom. So that's an alkaloid. Sometimes the term is extended to include any material that's extracted from a plant, but in the strictest classical definition, THC would not be an alkaloid because it doesn't contain a nitrogen atom. Salvinorin A would not be an alkaloid because it doesn't contain a nitrogen atom. Terpenoid? No.

Starting point is 01:38:14 Yeah. Another thing that I don't understand, but I've read. Yeah. Yeah. So that's it. It's a term mostly derived from the classical methods of extraction from plants. So all these drugs that have basic nitrogen atoms behave in a certain way chemically and can be extracted from plants using an acid-base extraction.

Starting point is 01:38:39 And that's how they get this name. Thank you. This is the type of education that I need. Uh, but I won't, I won't take up the podcast to do that. I'll, I'll be looking at the,

Starting point is 01:38:51 the book recommendations. I'd love to, I know we have not too, too much time left and I'm keeping an eye on time, but gear shift to smart drugs, uh, no tropics, new tropics.

Starting point is 01:39:04 I'm not sure how to pronounce that either. Are there any particular types of cognitive answers that you find interesting? And one, which maybe you can recall the name of, came up in one of your episodes, in fact, because it was described in a pamphlet by one of the chemists. I think it was the same chemist who had the... Daryl Lemare. Yes. 2CD. 2CD. Yeah. All right. So are there any particular cognitive enhancers that you have found

Starting point is 01:39:36 effective and or interesting? It's such a philosophically interesting question, because whenever people say that something made them smarter, I always think of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Are you familiar with that? I don't know what that is. the more competent someone is in a given task, whether it's a musical ability or humor, the more likely they are to underrate their ability and the less competent they are, the more likely they are to overrate their ability. So I always wonder, you know, what would it, what would be the manifestation of a true cognitive enhancer? Would it make you feel stupid? Would it make you feel increasingly aware of all the things you don't know? Would you feel intellectually ashamed of yourself?

Starting point is 01:40:33 And could it be that the true smart drugs have all been abandoned because they actually made people feel abysmally stupid? There's a major problem with self-assessment in the realm of nootropics. Just because something makes you feel smarter does not mean that you are smarter. And then there's a larger question of how do we define intelligence? What does it mean to be smart? Is having an improved memory, does that mean that you're smarter um is being more creative a sign of intelligence it's typically not included in any kind of objective measure of intelligence so um so how do you define it to begin with and what are these drugs doing and what is the intended effect um it's a it's a really complicated question. You know,

Starting point is 01:41:26 the most basic thing I think is memory. That's the thing that most people can agree, if they had a better memory, it would be useful. And I do believe that some of these things, you know, often some of the most mundane things like nicotine improve memory and aid focus a little bit. So of all the things that I've tried in the realm of nootropics, and it's many, the one that I still use is just nicotine gum. I try to use it less. I sometimes don't use it at all. I know I told that story about not using it, but I still chew it on occasion because it really helps me read, especially if I'm plowing through a dense novel or something. I like to go to the library and pop in a square of nicotine gum and just really try to focus.

Starting point is 01:42:18 But, you know, Nupept was okay. PRL-853 was okay. Phenyl-paracetam is okay they're all you know typically it's the stimulating ones that are a little bit better but then then the question is are these nootropics or are they simply stimulants and are stimulants nootropics how do we designate these things it's have you tried 2cd i have not yes absolutely and 2cd is really interesting because um one thing if you read about people pneumonists people with photographic memories uh one thing they all seem to have in common is they're all synesthetes right and one thing i've wondered

Starting point is 01:43:00 about that synesthesia that they have is is this this multisensory cross-linking of information aiding recall? Because if just for people listening to, to just to define that term. So it's, uh, if people who may smell colors or visualize numbers, um, that's,

Starting point is 01:43:20 uh, the type of cross-linking that you see in these, like the mind of a nemonist by AJ Luria gets into this in great depth. But sorry to interrupt, please continue. does that allow you to recall the orange in a different way? Or do you have more handles on that memory that allow you to retrieve it more easily? So psychedelics also induce synesthesia. And that was one question that I had is, could this synesthesia-inducing effect be harnessed in order to aid retention of information? And I don't have a real answer to that question, but I think that if drugs like 2C-B do have any sort of nootropic effect,

Starting point is 01:44:14 it may be as a result of that kind of, I mean, there's different ways. That maybe encouraging synesthesia would be one way. Another way might be just a basic stimulant effect. Another way might be that they cause you to approach problems from a different perspective. And this is why James Fadiman is very interested in psychedelics in problem solving, is because sometimes having a different way is all that it takes. not necessarily a better way, not necessarily a smarter way, simply a different way of looking at something is all it takes to solve that problem

Starting point is 01:44:52 because you got locked into a certain way of approaching it. You're only thinking about it one way, and just to mix it up, to shuffle the deck for a moment and think, well, maybe I could have done this in a completely different way is what it takes. Jim's great. Uh, he's really fun to chat with too about the, the, uh, the studies that they had, uh, conducted related to the problem solving with, with hard sciences and a lot of engineering problems. Uh, for people interested, I also spoke with Jim on the podcast so you can find the Fadiman episode pretty easily. But, uh for you personally, then, if you had nicotine gum currently in pole position, would you put anything in second and third place?

Starting point is 01:45:33 I think, you know, the classics, nicotine, caffeine. Just like caffeine anhydrous, or I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Yeah, you are, yeah. Sweet. And, you know, good old-fashioned Ritalin on occasion. I say this with a little bit of reluctance because stimulants are addictive and it's kind of a bad habit to get into. But I would be dishonest if I didn't acknowledge the fact that, um, using low dose Ritalin has helped me. What does low dose mean? 10 milligrams. Um, I don't take it every day, but

Starting point is 01:46:13 it's, you know, it's, it's a tricky one because it does give you a certain intellectual stamina that helps you read and write and think. And I think that with a lot of discipline, you could achieve those same effects without Ritalin, but, um, it's helped me. You mentioned something that I want to come back to just for a moment for people who might be listening and interested if they're, if they want to assess before and after effects on cognition. You can find online tests that are used in studies to assess reaction time, working memory, things of that type. So if one were proactively looking at the before and after effects of just about anything, yerba mate or alcohol, doesn't really matter.

Starting point is 01:47:05 There are tests if you look up some of the studies done by any number of cognitive neuroscience, Kahneman and others, where you can identify online tests that can help you to establish a baseline if you want to look at some of the effects. But yeah, the intelligence can be fine-sliced into so many different component areas. Right. I mean, it can get really, really complex. For people who would be... I was actually involved with a study. People should check this out.

Starting point is 01:47:42 He's also been on the podcast, Adam Ghazali out of UCSF at the Ghazali lab. Uh, they developed a software, uh, called neuro racer, uh, that was very, very effective. Uh, they ended up, I think it was the cover of nature at one point, uh, being able to, uh, reverse certain aspects of age related cognitive decline. And then after the cessation of training with software, there's a persistence of effect, I want to say, at least six months later. It was really remarkable.

Starting point is 01:48:12 So there are tests you can use to assess the effects of these types of compounds. Well, Hamilton, we could go on, or I could go on for hours and hours and hours. But I suppose we should probably wrap up in just a little bit. Where can people find you, say hello, and otherwise learn about your work? Yeah, I mean, I have a Twitter at Hamilton Morris and Instagram at Hamilton Morris. I'm starting a website, hamiltonmorrris.com, but it's not up yet. My prediction is that we will have it up,

Starting point is 01:48:51 the royal we in this case, meaning Hamilton and people I might introduce you to by the time that this goes live. So HamiltonMorris.com, HamiltonMorris.com. And if you want to watch my tv show hamilton's pharmacopoeia it can be purchased for three dollars an episode on itunes and amazon and it's also free on hulu and it's on national geographic and viceland and i'm sure you can also torrent it as well and if you have amazon prime i think it's actually available with prime membership okay uh as well is there anything do you have any ask of the audience is there anything that people can help you with besides the tv show um yeah if you know i i self-fund a lot of the scientific research that i do so if there are any psychedelic philanthropists out there that are interested in funding non-clinical basic science

Starting point is 01:49:46 research that's chemistry and pharmacology with no clinical end in sight but are just interested in understanding the mechanisms of these substances reach out to me because in a chemistry lab a couple thousand bucks can go a long way. And it's always important to remember that without the basic science, the clinical work can't really be done. To what type of research would, if somebody's listening and says, you know what, I don't have a lot of money, but I could probably dig up two to 5k for something interesting. What might that be applied to? Right now, I'm working with a chemist named Jason Wallach, and we are trying to do a process called autoradiography,

Starting point is 01:50:33 where you take a radio-labeled drug and you look at the distribution in the brain. And we're looking specifically at a drug that seems to distort the way sound is perceived, based on Shulgin's reports. And we want to see, with the radio-labeled drug, how it will distribute in a rodent's brain. So we're trying to raise a little bit of money to do that sort of research. It's not all that expensive, and it could really have interesting bearing

Starting point is 01:51:00 on our understanding of auditory perception. We do have time to get into Oliver Sacks, but have you read Musicophilia? I haven't read it. I think you would love it. I have to, yeah. It's almost entirely about auditory pathologies of various types, but I think you would greatly, greatly enjoy it.

Starting point is 01:51:19 We did not have a chance to get into Oliver Sacks. We did not have a chance to get into Claudio Naranjo. Is that how you say the name? Yeah. Maybe another time. He's amazing. So for people who might be interested in helping you with some of this science, I would encourage them to first go to hamiltonmorris.com. It may be unavailable, but there may be a contact form on there by the time that is ready. And if not, is Twitter generally the best way to contact you? Do you have any other recommendations, suggestions, parting words, book recommendations, anything at all that you'd like to say or share?

Starting point is 01:51:57 I really can't overestimate the value of P. Call understanding these things it's just a fantastic book it will tell you almost everything you need to know about psychedelics and drugs in general and it's a really great love story and um it yeah it's it's a it's a moving experience to read it so i i hope everyone will run out and buy a copy i think it's 15 15 bucks or something. Why PCOL and not T-COL? Oh, PCOL is the first one. And if you like PCOL, I think you'll move on to T-COL, I would hope. And I've also, not surprisingly, in almost every office I have been to with researchers who are involved in these fields, they have PCOL and T-COL right there prominently displayed

Starting point is 01:52:45 either in front of or right above exactly where they sit. And I'm embarrassed to say I haven't read it because I feared that I would perhaps like taking the ultimate smart drug, see just how ignorant I am and become overwhelmed by the chemistry. So it's nice to know that you can read it in multiple passes and get different things from it.

Starting point is 01:53:08 Yeah, absolutely. Well, Hamilton, thank you so much for the time today. I would encourage everybody to watch the show. It is spectacular. I don't know which I would recommend people start with. I particularly enjoyed and have enjoyed recommending the 5-MeO DMT, but the ketamine episode also I thought was just beautifully shot and edited and crafted. It was really well done.

Starting point is 01:53:39 And all of them that I've seen have been exceptionally well done. And I don't say that lightly. Thank you. But I encourage everybody to check it out. There's no reason not to. The episodes are very short, very digestible. Who did the opening animation for the series? It was a group of animators' advice, actually.

Starting point is 01:53:59 It's spectacular. Yeah. It was a guy named James Blagdondon and he sort of contributed the style. And then it was a number of different animators advice that, uh, executed it and they did a great job on that, on that fine closing note. Uh,

Starting point is 01:54:14 thank you to everybody listening. Thank you for taking the time. And, uh, I'll make one last request to the audience, which is if you would perhaps like to hear Hamilton do his own podcast, let him know. I think it would be a gift to

Starting point is 01:54:30 the world to hear some of the interviews you have done in extended form. So that'll be my plea to the universe that maybe someday you put some of your audio out there for people to hear. Yes, I'll consider it. Alright guys, until next time,

Starting point is 01:54:46 the show notes, we will include links to everything. The books mentioned, the studies that were conducted, or I should say, conducted and published by Shulgin, including his self-experimentation methodology. I will figure out the best link for that,

Starting point is 01:55:04 the Fadiman episode, tim.blog forward slash Fadiman, F-A-D-I-M-A-N. And you can find links to Hamilton and everything else that we covered today at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new

Starting point is 01:55:42 albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one.

Starting point is 01:56:15 And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Leadership in Turbulent Times, which is the latest book by the ever amazing Pulitzer Prize winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin. I had her on the podcast not too long ago, and she just blew everyone away. What an incredible storyteller and weaver of history and lessons from history. You can check that out if you want a Tim.blog forward slash Doris, D-R-I-S. It was a captivating conversation that really blew me away. Leadership in Turbulent Times, that is the latest book, is a culmination of five decades of acclaimed studies in presidential history, which offers an

Starting point is 01:56:57 illuminating exploration of the early development, that's super key, early development, growth, and exercise of leadership, and draws upon four presidents, which we'll get to in a second. Goodwin asks and answers in those pages the question, are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader? And she draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely, namely Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson to show how they recognize

Starting point is 01:57:29 leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others. And I mentioned early development being key because it goes back to their first sojourns and experiments and attempts at engaging with policy and public life and covers their failures, their near misses, and lessons learned. So it applies to anyone who is trying to make a study of leadership or how they can better lead both themselves and others. It's important to underscore that no common pattern describes completely a single trajectory of leadership. Although set apart in background, abilities, and temperament, these four men shared a fierce ambition and deep-seated resilience that enabled them to surmount uncommon hardships. And at their best, all four were guided

Starting point is 01:58:15 by a sense of moral purpose. This seminal work provides an accessible and essential roadmap for aspiring established leaders in every field. I highly, highly recommend it. For more information, you can visit doriskernsgoodwin.com. That's Doris Kearns, K-E-A-R-N-S, goodwin.com. And Leadership in Turbulent Times is available in hardcover, ebook, and audio wherever books are sold. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Inktel. I've used them personally. Ever since I wrote the 4-Hour Workweek, I've been asked over and over again how I choose to delegate tasks, how I do 80-20 analysis, and so on. At the root of many of those decisions is a simple

Starting point is 01:58:58 question. Actually, two questions. Number one, how can I invest money to improve my quality of life? I use that in investing as well. The second, how can I spend money to improve my quality of life? I use that in investing as well. The second, how can I spend a little money or moderate money to save significant time? Inktel is one of those investments. They're a turnkey solution for all of your imaginable customer care needs. I used Inktel during the launch of the 4-Hour Body, which was very, very involved, and they provided 24-7 customer service for my Land Rush campaign because it was critical for me to take care of every person who purchased my books and participated.

Starting point is 01:59:32 This allowed me to focus on the things that I am better at, my strengths, like the marketing plan that we'd worked on for six months, implementing that. Inkdell trains their experienced customer service reps to know your business and your products inside and out and make your customers raving fans. They answer more than a million customer service requests every year, and they can do so across all platforms, including email, phone, social media, text, even chat. Leaving your customers with poor service or just mediocre

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #337: Hamilton Morris on Better Living Through Chemistry: Psychedelics, Smart Drugs, and More

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #337: Hamilton Morris on Better Living Through Chemistry: Psychedelics, Smart Drugs, and More

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