#337: Hamilton Morris on Better Living Through Chemistry: Psychedelics, Smart Drugs, and More

Hamilton Morris (TW: @hamiltonmorris https://twitter.com/HamiltonMorris, IG: @hamiltonmorris https://www.instagram.com/hamiltonmorris/) is a writer, documentarian, and scientific researcher who currently studies the chemistry and pharmacology of tryptamines at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. His writing has been featured in Harper’s Magazine https://harpers.org/blog/tag/hamilton-morris/, Playboy https://playboysfw.kinja.com/p-is-for-pleasure-1564930873, and Vice https://www.vice.com/en_us/topic/hamilton-morris, and he is the creator of the television series Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia https://www.viceland.com/en_us/show/hamiltons-pharmacopeia, which recently completed its second season, and it is absolutely one of my favorite series of the last five years. Hamilton is exceptionally good at explaining complex subjects simply and making science sexy, as you’ll discover in this episode. Enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Inktel http://www.inktel.com/tim/. Ever since I wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, I’ve been frequently asked about how I choose to delegate tasks. At the root of many of my decisions is a simple question: “How can I invest money to improve my quality of life?” Or “how can I spend moderate money to save significant time?” Inktel http://www.inktel.com/tim/is one of those investments. They are a turnkey solution for all of your customer care needs. Their team answers more than 1 million customer service requests each year. They can also interact with your customers across all platforms, including email, phone, social media, text, and chat. Inktel removes the logistics and headache of customer communication, allowing you to grow your business by focusing on your strengths. And as a listener of this podcast, you can get up to $10,000 off your start-up fees and costs waived by visiting inktel.com/tim. That’s inktel.com/tim http://www.inktel.com/tim/. This episode is also brought to you by Leadership: In Turbulent Times https://doriskearnsgoodwin.com/ by the ever-amazing, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin — who you may have heard on this podcast recently (if not, I recommend checking out our conversation at tim.blog/doris https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/). Leadership: In Turbulent Times https://doriskearnsgoodwin.com/ is a culmination of five decades of acclaimed studies in presidential history, which offers an illuminating exploration of the early development, growth, and exercise of leadership drawing from the experiences of four presidents — Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ. Goodwin asks and answers questions like: 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? 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hamilton Morris?

  What else do you recall from your breakfast, Hamilton? I ate it from a ceramic bowl with a metal fork.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:17Speaker 03

  No, I would have seen it before.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:33Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by InkTel, and I've used them personally. Ever since I wrote The Four 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 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 Four Hour Body, which was very, very involved,

• 1:13Tim Ferriss?

  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. 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. InkTel 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 service, which, by the

• 1:55Tim Ferriss?

  way, in a competitive pool is a huge liability, long wait times or unanswered messages, carries a massive cost and risk to your business. InkTel removes the logistics and headaches of this type of communication, allowing you to focus on On your strengths and grow your business. It can be a real competitive advantage. And I see many, many e-commerce companies and tech companies thinking of customer service as a good enough checkbox or an afterthought. And just like Airbnb used design and innovative ways to be a competitor and to win, you can do the same thing with customer service. So as a listener of this podcast, you can get up to $10,000 off. It's a big discount.

• 2:38Tim Ferriss?

  $10,000 off your startup fees and costs by visiting inktel.com/tim. So check it out. For more info, go to inktel.com, I-N-K-T-E-L.com/tim.

• 2:54Tim Ferriss?

  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 Curran 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/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 illuminating exploration of the early development, that's super key, early development, growth and exercise of

• 3:38Tim Ferriss?

  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 recognized 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

• 4:22Tim Ferriss?

  failures, their near misses and lessons learned.

• 4:26Tim Ferriss?

  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 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 Doris Kearns Goodwin.com. That's Doris Kearns, K-E-A-R-N-S,

• 5:08Tim Ferriss?

  Goodwin.com. And Leadership in Turbulent Times is available in hardcover, ebook, and audio wherever books are sold. Check it out.

• 5:20Tim Ferriss?

  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 @HamiltonMorris, Instagram @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 Pharmacopeia or Pharmacopeia, which you don't have to worry about spelling. It's easy to find as soon as you type in

• 6:04Tim Ferriss?

  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. 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 gonna keep prodding him is HamiltonMorris.com. Hamilton, as you would think, M-O-R-R-I-S dot 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,

• 6:46Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 7:05Tim Ferriss?

  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, we're gonna bounce around a lot, I will mispronounce many, many things, so please pardon my ignorance. 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.

• 7:50Tim Ferriss?

  And I think the best way to do this is to read the opening of the last interview with Alexander Shulgin.

• 7:59Tim Ferriss?

  And here we go. Feel free to correct any of this. I'm already feeling embarrassed before you even start. 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. "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, Pcal. Phenethylamines I have known and loved, and every milligram of his 1.13-kilogram tryptamine treatise, Tcal. Tryptamines I have known and loved. Above my bed, I've pinned a large picture of Shulgin cuddling with his wife, and I often sleep with a copy of Pcal, not under my pillow, but as my pillow. He is the grandfather of ecstasy, the molecular magician, the atomic conquistador.

• 8:44Tim Ferriss?

  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."

• 8:55Tim Ferriss?

  Who is Alexander Shulgin?

• 8:57Hamilton Morris?

  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.

• 9:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 9:21Hamilton Morris?

  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 freshman dormitory and then decided to leave Harvard and join the Navy. And in

• 10:04Hamilton Morris?

  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

• 10:48Hamilton Morris?

  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 Carrer and studied it. And, you know, these early chemistry textbooks, they had synthesis of mescaline, synthesis of lysergic acid, synthesis of harmaline. All these things were...

• 11:17Hamilton Morris?

  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 protest surrounding the work. But he had developed a profitable insecticide called Zectran.

• 12:01Hamilton Morris?

  And because he'd made them all of this money, they said, you can do whatever you 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. And 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.

• 12:36Hamilton Morris?

  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. He also created a chemical called

• 13:16Hamilton Morris?

  Ariadne or dimoxamine that was used as a potential treatment for CNL 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, 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, well, 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

• 13:59Hamilton Morris?

  a number of times, but I wasn't actively pursuing this. And then I read a profile of this guy and, 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 him, 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

• 14:44Hamilton Morris?

  they're fantastic. So the best, not just best books about drugs ever written, some of the best books about science ever written. 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,

• 15:26Hamilton Morris?

  or I had taken, you know, general and organic chemistry and now I'm ready to really understand these things. And then you realize, okay, wow, all right, this is, this is real. And then the most amazing thing, then this is maybe what really has

• 15:42Hamilton Morris?

  Reinforce 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 are not only effective, they're often brilliant routes to producing these compounds and what an amazing contribution this man made.

• 16:10Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 16:24Hamilton Morris?

  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 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 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

• 17:04Hamilton Morris?

  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? 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.

• 17:50Hamilton Morris?

  All the research that was done on isolated uterus tissue and things like that, 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's-

• 18:34Tim Ferriss?

  I know of it. I haven't read it. I have a friend who's a memory competitor who's, who has read this and recommended it to me.

• 18:40Hamilton Morris?

  Well, it's a really amazing idea. I've been reading it recently and, you know, 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 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.

• 19:23Tim Ferriss?

  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 treat and perceive colors very differently.

• 19:36Hamilton Morris?

  Right, of course.

• 19:38Tim Ferriss?

  So in the, in the case of, say, Scholgen or others-

• 19:45Tim Ferriss?

  What do you see in the value, or what did he see in the value of describing this 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 you think about risk in such a case?

• 20:00Hamilton Morris?

  Right. And that's a great question. There's two ways to think about the risk issue. There's one way that you could say, like, 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.

• 20:43Hamilton Morris?

  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 extent. And 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.

• 21:25Hamilton Morris?

  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...

• 21:54Hamilton Morris?

  A hundred micrograms. All evidence would point to it being less potent than DMT, but why risk it? Start at a hundred, 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 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-

• 22:33Tim Ferriss?

  Which you wouldn't advise.

• 22:35Hamilton Morris?

  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 maybe this just shows the sort of person I am.

• 22:46Tim Ferriss?

  What would people search for if they wanted to find that methodology and his description of it?

• 22:52Hamilton Morris?

  I believe it was published in the journal of psychopharmacology, and I think it's called-

• 23:01Tim Ferriss?

  Any type of gingerbread trail, we can put it in the show notes, but we can give it a-

• 23:06Hamilton Morris?

  I can definitely pull it up for you quickly with a Google search. I can't remember off the top of my head.

• 23:10Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, perfect, 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, those are blue jays, and it is my kitchen table.

• 23:28Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 23:58Hamilton Morris?

  Definitely, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think-

• 24:02Hamilton Morris?

  This is a great time to learn anything. There's so many educational resources available to people on the internet. So 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.

• 24:20Tim Ferriss?

  Do you need any, are there any prerequisites before reading this? Or can you just hop right into?

• 24:25Hamilton Morris?

  It just depends, I would say, on your basic foundational scientific literacy. I would say for most people that have, let's say, high school-level understanding of chemistry in the sense that they know about elements and things like that, this should be accessible. I believe. It's been a little while since I've looked at it, but I remember it being pretty accessible. And then there's Khan Academy videos that are very good as well. And there's a kind of an industry. There's actually a pretty big educational industry surrounding organic chemistry specifically because it's a class that's taken by a lot of people that don't want to be taking it.

• 25:07Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 25:08Hamilton Morris?

  Because it's a pre-med requirement. So 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.

• 25:32Tim Ferriss?

  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, you've seen these characters recur, had recommend actually getting the test prep books for some of these related subjects. I think it was something rather 101 that was all in a Q and A format. But

• 25:59Tim Ferriss?

  The organic chemistry is a second language will be on the shopping list.

• 26:03Hamilton Morris?

  Definitely get that. And then the other thing is, you know, I'm a, 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. 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 extract various things from plants, you know, you could extract piperine from black pepper or

• 26:46Hamilton Morris?

  or a number of different things. And that's not illegal. And it gives you a basic idea of how to do these sorts of chemical manipulations.

• 26:56Hamilton Morris?

  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.

• 27:11Tim Ferriss?

  When did psychedelics enter your life experience? And why, why has it stuck? And held your interest for so long?

• 27:25Hamilton Morris?

  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 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.

• 27:57Hamilton Morris?

  And that, that sure sounds interesting. And I remember.

• 28:02Hamilton Morris?

  At, I don't even know if this place still exists, but there's a shopping mall called The Garage in Harvard Square. I grew up in Cambridge and I remember a drug dealer approaching me at The 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." Discerning consumer of streets. I was probably 12 or something like that. And, 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

• 28:45Hamilton Morris?

  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, he had a, I would say, pretty permissive attitude toward most things, but he really felt like, he would say, "Don't take LSD. Promise me you won't take LSD." And, 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

• 29:26Hamilton Morris?

  any favors. You know, a lot of the people that used psychedelics weren't people that I wanted to be like. 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, 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 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. And so it was the sort of thing that high school students would talk about, you know, there's

• 30:09Hamilton Morris?

  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-

• 30:24Hamilton Morris?

  14 year old and and so I tried it and this was also before 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. 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 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

• 31:09Hamilton Morris?

  and why they might have more potential than people realize.

• 31:13Tim Ferriss?

  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, watch a few YouTube videos. I mean, it's worth being cautious about. I find 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 as something that people do once for in many cases, you tend to or in some cases like to run away

• 31:50Tim Ferriss?

  to check out the YouTube videos first. But secondly, why are these? Why are these substances culturally culturally misunderstood? What do the?

• 32:03Hamilton Morris?

  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? 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 it 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. So.

• 32:38Hamilton Morris?

  There isn't a lot to do with them, so they'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 Arowit 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.

• 33:18Tim Ferriss?

  What, uh, would you consider yourself, and this is not a trick question, there's no right answer here, but since you used the word, to be spiritual, a spiritual person?

• 33:28Hamilton Morris?

  I'm not a spiritual person at all. In fact, I'm not even sure I know what the word spiritual means.

• 33:35Tim Ferriss?

  Me neither.

• 33:35Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah.

• 33:36Tim Ferriss?

  So in that, in that case, what, is there value, or what, is there value in the spiritual experience for someone like yourself?

• 33:47Hamilton Morris?

  Yes, or, I don't know.

• 33:49Tim Ferriss?

  It's, it's lacking a better descriptor. I mean, I recognize that maybe that's not the right word to use, but I don't, I don't know how else to label it.

• 33:57Hamilton Morris?

  Well, there's a very tangible value, which is that, you know, along with the visual distortions and the distortions of time and sense of self, there's often these 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, 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 things in a genuine way is fantastic.

• 34:39Hamilton Morris?

  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 a

• 34:46Tim Ferriss?

  Acquisitive sense of the word.

• 34:48Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah, but just in a sense that you believe in physical reality is the ultimate be all and all. 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.

• 35:06Tim Ferriss?

  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 sort of hard scientists on one end of the spectrum, who almost, I can 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, looking at psychedelics

• 35:47Tim Ferriss?

  from a, for lack of a better adjective, shamanic perspective. And it's hard to get, there seems to be allergies on both sides to the other in some cases. What is the, 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 want that type of context. They seek, say, the

• 36:28Tim Ferriss?

  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 shamanic cultural context? We lack it here, but there are cultures where that does exist, but it comes along with a lot more.

• 36:48Hamilton Morris?

  Right, 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 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

• 37:29Hamilton Morris?

  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, my DPT experience could have been your DPT experience

• 38:13Hamilton Morris?

  or could have been anyone in the world's DPT experience because it's not about me. It's about, it's not about my life, it's about life. And I think with the shamanic.

• 38:27Hamilton Morris?

  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 they? And that's maybe not a good mindset. Maybe it's better to just be satisfied. But this is, you know, maybe

• 39:09Hamilton Morris?

  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?

• 39:22Tim Ferriss?

  And, I mean, we, we chat about this a little bit yesterday, but also the, 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.

• 39:37Hamilton Morris?

  Right. Yes.

• 39:38Tim Ferriss?

  Which maybe you could, maybe you could chat about for a second.

• 39:41Hamilton Morris?

  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 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, 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, and it makes a big difference. It makes a huge difference. I mean, this is, you know, the toxicology is founded on this idea, Paracelsus'

• 40:22Hamilton Morris?

  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.

• 40:36Hamilton Morris?

  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, 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 45mg of DMT freebase and a synthetic MAOI, then you could say, interesting, maybe you're unusually insensitive to DMT. Next time, try 55mg and work your way up gradually and eventually you'll find the

• 41:21Hamilton Morris?

  dose that works for you. And that's, 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 for now. 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 psychedelics, LSD and psilocybin containing mushrooms, and they don't know the dose of either of those things.

• 42:06Hamilton Morris?

  You take one blotter of LSD, maybe someone told you that it contains 100mg of LSD, but you have no idea. I have analyzed blotters of non LSD containing lysurgamides, like 1PLSD 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, these different lysurgamides. So you don't know how much you're taking to begin with. Making the assumption that it's exactly 100mg 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.

• 42:52Tim Ferriss?

  And just for sake of clarity, when you say variation in potency, we're not talking like a 10% difference in potency.

• 42:59Hamilton Morris?

  Well, there's a chemist named Jocelyn, I believe that's how you pronounce it, Jocelyn Garts, and he did, 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, the general takeaway is that, is that these things are not homogeneous. And, 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 really helps and is not to be underestimated.

• 43:34Tim Ferriss?

  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, this was 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 that you've found very thought provoking that don't also activate your gag reflex, given sort of the squishy nature of some of that, some of the writing?

• 44:18Hamilton Morris?

  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 Neuropsychidelia. It's an academic book. So it's not, 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

• 44:49Tim Ferriss?

  What was his last name again?

• 44:51Hamilton Morris?

  Langlitz. And he's a really interesting guy, MD, PhD, you know, really 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.

• 45:21Hamilton Morris?

  You know, for those that are interested in the historical and anthropological aspects of all of this, you have, there's an anthropologist named Douglas Sharon, who wrote a lot about San Pedro. He's fantastic. There's 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 Pharmakothion. 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.

• 46:02Tim Ferriss?

  Great. I will put all those in the show notes for folks. You'll have links to all of those. 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. Why do it?

• 46:27Hamilton Morris?

  I wanted to do it for a number of reasons. One is that I've always felt that even that there's certain 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, you know, right now, no one could write an article about opioids being good. You simply couldn't do that. It's not, 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

• 47:09Hamilton Morris?

  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 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 someone can, 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.

• 47:54Hamilton Morris?

  And 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. 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, 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. Um, you know, 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

• 48:37Hamilton Morris?

  this into their traditions and into their spirituality and they really appreciate it. 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.

• 49:15Hamilton Morris?

  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 of this. It's just drugs, it's drugs, it's drugs, just drugs. It's everything. It's your 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, 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

• 49:59Hamilton Morris?

  that druggies use." It's so much more than that.

• 50:02Tim Ferriss?

  So I've, I've recommended this, I've recommended, well, there, let's see, a few different pronunciations, but Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, Pharmacopeia. Don't worry about the spelling, just search Hamilton on your, your favorite provider and you'll find the show. I watch it on Amazon Prime, you can watch it anywhere, or many, many, 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, who would consider themselves or who is professionally a scientist.

• 50:39Hamilton Morris?

  It depends on what the, there's an episode from this most recent season 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 MDMA. And it's real. It's, you know, that's what you see is a real synthesis of MDMA. So just the-

• 51:13Hamilton Morris?

  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, but the chemist starts with, you know, crude sassafras root bark oil and takes it all the way down to the recrystallized MDMA hydrochloride over the course of five days. And it's, I was just kind of blown away by watching that process. And I also televised a total synthesis of quaalude. And also, we

• 51:53Hamilton Morris?

  did a little bit of a drug called gaboxidol, 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-

• 52:09Tim Ferriss?

  I would be astonished if that's not the case.

• 52:11Hamilton Morris?

  Which is cool. I mean, I, 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.

• 52:25Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I love, 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 they'll have, that certain words will come up, and there is no pause for, you know, a 10-minute explanation of the term. It's just, it's provided in context, but it is sophisticated, sophisticated show, but still very entertaining to watch. For, for someone who is a non-scientist, let's just say they're fascinated by the, what they have read about psychedelics or heard about psychedelics, they've never taken a psychedelic, they find it terrifying on

• 53:09Tim Ferriss?

  some level, the prospect. Is there an episode-

• 53:15Tim Ferriss?

  Or set of episodes you'd recommend?

• 53:17Hamilton Morris?

  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. 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.

• 53:46Tim Ferriss?

  What would be the first one you would recommend?

• 53:48Hamilton Morris?

  Probably a clandestine chemist's tale or the lazy lizard school of hedonism episode about this chemist who operated an MDMA lab in the center of a volcano.

• 54:00Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned, which is a fantastic episode, you mentioned the mushrooms. What have the other most popular episodes been?

• 54:09Hamilton Morris?

  I think the people like the episodes that detail shamanism. I think people are very interested in shamanism, partially because it's, 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, they've just never seen anything like that before. And I hadn't either until I saw it myself.

• 54:40Tim Ferriss?

  What episodes would fall into that category?

• 54:43Hamilton Morris?

  The mushroom episode, the salvia episode from season one, both have that. And the San Pedro episode from season two 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, 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

• 55:28Hamilton Morris?

  treat a doctor in the United States, just. I have epilepsy. I have a sprained ankle.

• 55:36Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I don't know what he would call himself, Wachumero or Curandero, but I mean, probably not shaman. Maybe he does, but I'm not sure how he would self-describe from that episode. What would he call himself, do you think?

• 55:49Hamilton Morris?

  Hmm, he may have called himself a shaman.

• 55:52Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, he did?

• 55:53Hamilton Morris?

  He may have. I would have to double check.

• 55:54Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe in English. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those guys would say Curandero or Wachumero, something like that. This is not gonna make, be relevant to anyone else, but since I'm curious, did you actually have like 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.

• 56:23Hamilton Morris?

  Hey, okay, you caught me. I couldn't resist that gag.

• 56:27Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 56:28Hamilton Morris?

  I just couldn't resist it. I have.

• 56:32Tim Ferriss?

  It's very fast. It's very fast.

• 56:33Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah, I have a slightly childish sense of humor. And, and, and yeah, it was just, it's, you had to.

• 56:42Tim Ferriss?

  That was a good gag. Got me. It stuck in my mind. The, that episode also features, I think, perhaps my favorite wardrobe of yours, which is otherwise fairly constant, but the gigantic yellow, like big bird hat.

• 56:57Hamilton Morris?

  Yes.

• 56:58Tim Ferriss?

  That you're, you're, you're dressed in towards the end. I don't wanna 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, in the San Pedro or Wachuma cactus tradition, but the soplas where he was, where he was having you take in the like Florida water or whatever that was into your mouth to spritz on him. You did not look happy to be doing that.

• 57:24Hamilton Morris?

  It's so terrible. Have you done that before?

• 57:28Tim Ferriss?

  I have, yeah. You don't, you don't want to, certainly don't want to drink it.

• 57:33Hamilton Morris?

  You don't want to hold it in your mouth. It's, it's what? Probably 95% ethanol. And I lost the ability to taste for several days after doing that. It was, 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.

• 57:54Tim Ferriss?

  What, agua de 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? Is there, is there an episode you'd recommend? The, the DMT episode? The opener for that episode, I think, does a pretty decent job.

• 58:21Hamilton Morris?

  The 5-MEO DMT.

• 58:22Tim Ferriss?

  The 5-MEO DMT.

• 58:24Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah, um, you know, I, it's, it's hard to say because

• 58:31Hamilton Morris?

  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 5-MEO DMT is, is like, "I've done a 10 strip, dude. I've done..."

• 58:46Tim Ferriss?

  10 strip meaning LSD?

• 58:47Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah, I've done whatever, whatever. I'm a, there's nothing that can...

• 58:51Tim Ferriss?

  I'm a veteran psychonaut. Bring it on.

• 58:53Hamilton Morris?

  And, and then, you know, it's a bad attitude. You don't want to enter any experience with that attitude because what, what good could possibly come of that? 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 a 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

• 59:37Hamilton Morris?

  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 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

• 1:00:21Hamilton Morris?

  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-MeodMT with a cocky attitude, be my guest. But it's, it's, 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 it is a very serious experience and it could be difficult.

• 1:01:02Tim Ferriss?

  What was, 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're going to, I can think of a few scenarios offhand. I mean, kratom also, safety. I mean, my God, there's so many ways that you could put yourself into difficult situations that are unrelated to the psychedelic, the consumption of psychedelics themselves. But if, were there any experiences you had that were particularly difficult?

• 1:01:33Hamilton Morris?

  I had, I had one interesting experience many years ago where I've been to China for undercover reporting 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, and I went to the lab, interviewed the chemists, and they gave me a sample of the UR144. So then I was back at my hotel room with my cameraman, who has Crohn's disease and loves to be stoned. He's stoned all the

• 1:02:15Hamilton Morris?

  time. And, and, 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 UR144, this synthetic cannabinoid? And I thought, well.

• 1:02:32Hamilton Morris?

  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, uh, and I'll smoke it. So I smoked a grain and he smoked a grain and we were both sitting in our hotel room and, um, and starting to get very, very high. And as I got more and more high, I started experiencing this fractal of uncertainty

• 1:03:14Hamilton Morris?

  where I was thinking, I don't know if this is UR144. But then I was thinking, well, even if it is UR144, I don't know anything about UR144. I don't know 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.

• 1:03:56Hamilton Morris?

  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, 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 UR144 and know that you've consumed one milligram so you can at least rest on that foundation.

• 1:04:37Hamilton Morris?

  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.

• 1:04:57Hamilton Morris?

  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 gonna be okay. This will be, it was over four hours last time. It's gonna be over four hours this time.

• 1:05:12Tim Ferriss?

  And you also have the ability and the training to assess or improve purity yourself.

• 1:05:21Hamilton Morris?

  That's true. That is true, yeah. So minimizing uncertainty, I think, is really important. But then some of these things are more challenging. And 5-MeodMT is an example of that. You know, it has an ability to really frighten people. There's some people that only have these negative experiences. And when I was using it most recently, I, 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-MeodMT together. And they both smoked it at the same time, which is something that you shouldn't do. You want somebody watching over you.

• 1:06:04Hamilton Morris?

  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.

• 1:06:19Tim Ferriss?

  Holy shit.

• 1:06:19Hamilton Morris?

  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 is, it's frightening to me. And he was saying, oh, yes, it was so terrible, just terrible. And no one ever would have expected 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.

• 1:07:02Hamilton Morris?

  And he was 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, so 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.

• 1:07:31Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned drowning. So I have to ask, because I wanted to save it for this conversation. It's part of the reason that the the five MEO 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?

• 1:07:50Hamilton Morris?

  It's 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. But at the same time, that experience showed me that you want to maybe set an example. I certainly got a lot of criticism for it.

• 1:08:28Hamilton Morris?

  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.

• 1:08:56Hamilton Morris?

  I want to.

• 1:08:59Tim Ferriss?

  Revisit something 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 just 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 where we picked up, but it was related to shamanism and the providing of explanation, I believe it was, or something along those lines.

• 1:09:39Tim Ferriss?

  And the mention of uncertainty earlier helped me to recall that portion of the conversation. But why not feature ayahuasca?

• 1:09:51Hamilton Morris?

  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 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.

• 1:10:33Hamilton Morris?

  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 in 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 actually

• 1:11:16Hamilton Morris?

  having isn't traditional in the slightest, then what was the point of traveling in the first place? So what, one thing that happened is you had all these white outsiders that 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 Chimbrei, and the shaman says, "I'm actually a Martian. I'm always a promising start." Is it? No. But this is a question. So you're a white outsider, and somebody says, "I'm a Martian." Yeah. You don't want to, you don't want to appear racist. Right.

• 1:12:01Hamilton Morris?

  This could be their tradition. You don't know what their tradition is. Right. Maybe, maybe they come from a long line of Martians, and, 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 Munkoluto, and he disappeared.

• 1:12:46Hamilton Morris?

  His parents go to the retreat, looking for him. The shaman says, "Oh, he just..."

• 1:12:52Hamilton Morris?

  Walked away, 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 happened. Yeah, then all these people come out of the woodwork and say that that maestro Munkuluto, 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 anyone. 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

• 1:13:32Hamilton Morris?

  or what was safe. And if, 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

• 1:14:13Hamilton Morris?

  if it wasn't conducted in South America. But the other reason that you were initially getting it is that, you know, the mystery of existence or the mystery of life is sort of the grand mystery that we all must figure out for ourselves. And it's so difficult and painful to think about your own mortality and the death of the people that you love and.

• 1:14:44Hamilton Morris?

  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, uh, and so I understand why people want these interpretive conceptual frameworks for the psychedelic experience. 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

• 1:15:29Hamilton Morris?

  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, but to have that experience by yourself with no one explaining anything to you, to be confronted by the full 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.

• 1:16:13Tim Ferriss?

  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 cosmology or anything like that in, in every experience, but what is the, I guess, internal, the self-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?

• 1:16:56Hamilton Morris?

  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. I remember the first really, really, really, really strong ayahuasca experience I had.

• 1:17:16Hamilton Morris?

  I had, I had a bit of that. I remember my friend was watching Seinfeld in the other room and, and I came out of it thinking.

• 1:17:26Tim Ferriss?

  And when you say ayahuasca, are you talking about the?

• 1:17:28Hamilton Morris?

  Pharmawaska, synthetic DMT with mclobomide. And, 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. I,

• 1:17:48Hamilton Morris?

  time had completely deconstructed. I saw my entire life as a book with each day, a page in the book. And, you know, 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?

• 1:18:08Tim Ferriss?

  I think that'd be very difficult to do. I don't know. Or maybe, maybe the easiest thing in the world. I, I wasn't inside your experience at the time. What did you do?

• 1:18:17Hamilton Morris?

  I apprehensively watched some Seinfeld and then decided against the Seinfeld.

• 1:18:30Tim Ferriss?

  Newman!

• 1:18:34Tim Ferriss?

  And what did you, what did you gain from that experience? If anything, I mean, what, what did you take from that?

• 1:18:41Hamilton Morris?

  Well, it's, okay, here's what I would say about that experience is that I am not, I, I don't know what to do with experiences of that magnitude. And I'm reluctant to find a framework that explains 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.

• 1:19:12Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give an example?

• 1:19:13Hamilton Morris?

  Yes. I remember once I had taken a low dose, I believe it was 45 milligrams of DMT with 300 milligrams of mclobomide and.

• 1:19:24Hamilton Morris?

  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 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.

• 1:20:08Hamilton Morris?

  And the nicotine gum is already inside me. I can create my own nicotine gum. And I dramatically threw the nicotine gum across the room. I was like, I don't need this. I already am the nicotine gum. And, 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 a- Yeah, flashback to Shulgin with the sugar crystals on the- Right. Horn shoes. That's amazing. I'd never heard that story.

• 1:20:54Hamilton Morris?

  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. 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 could 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.

• 1:21:38Hamilton Morris?

  Those are things that you have practical applications and I think that's important are the practical applications.

• 1:21:45Tim Ferriss?

  This may or may not be a good segue, but I'm gonna give it a shot anyway. I know nothing of Wade Davis. I don't know if you'd be open to describing who Wade Davis is and perhaps furthermore defining the cultural matrix. But who is Wade Davis?

• 1:22:07Hamilton Morris?

  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.

• 1:22:22Tim Ferriss?

  Later made into a movie.

• 1:22:24Hamilton Morris?

  Later made into a movie by Wes Craven. 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 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

• 1:23:07Hamilton Morris?

  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 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'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

• 1:23:52Hamilton Morris?

  borders on being suspicious and I understand why people regard him with suspicion because he's...

• 1:24:00Hamilton Morris?

  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, you know, he discovered a fungus called Dictyonema huarani that contains, it's a sort of 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.

• 1:24:41Hamilton Morris?

  That one strikes me as unbelievable, but I've examined the specimen at the Harvard herbarium myself 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 its height. But he, 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.

• 1:25:17Tim Ferriss?

  Was the field exploration and sort of the cultural examination, is that something that you try to emulate? Or is that?

• 1:25:25Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:26Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, it seems like that's a strong component of at least the TV show.

• 1:25:31Hamilton Morris?

  Sure.

• 1:25:32Tim Ferriss?

  From what I can tell. There's another compound that I wanted to chat about, which is ibogaine. We didn't, we didn't really get into it yesterday over dinner, but can you perhaps introduce people to what ibogaine is? And?

• 1:25:54Hamilton Morris?

  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. 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 Lotzoff who was addicted to heroin.

• 1:26:37Hamilton Morris?

  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 treatment we have."

• 1:27:20Hamilton Morris?

  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

• 1:28:02Hamilton Morris?

  of opioid addiction, is that I think it has a general anti-addictive, anticomulsive 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, 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

• 1:28:45Hamilton Morris?

  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.

• 1:28:59Tim Ferriss?

  Are there other, outside of addiction, are there other applications or potential applications of Ibogaine that people are exploring or hypothesizing?

• 1:29:13Hamilton Morris?

  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 in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. There's been some limited clinical work where they showed that it can cause a regrowth of dopaminergic neurons, and 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. And they found that

• 1:29:52Hamilton Morris?

  Ibogaine causes a release of the same therapeutic protein. So that's pretty damn useful. And that's just the tip of the iceberg with it. I mean, it also seems to synergize with 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.

• 1:30:32Hamilton Morris?

  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 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

• 1:31:15Hamilton Morris?

  neurodegeneration. And if this does, and patients are being deprived that treatment, it's a tragic thing.

• 1:31:25Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned in the beginning of your description of Ibegane, that it's extracted from plants, and it is difficult to synthesize?

• 1:31:36Hamilton Morris?

  Very, very difficult, yeah.

• 1:31:37Tim Ferriss?

  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 don't know, 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 5meo DMT episode, and the capturing of toads, and also your commentary at the end, made me think, or contemplate how one of the weaknesses

• 1:32:19Tim Ferriss?

  of the argument for whole plants is that, or squeezing toads for that matter, is 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 Diamond, where they have ayahuasca vines for just hectares and hectares and hectares, but...

• 1:32:39Hamilton Morris?

  Oh, wow, that's amazing. Have you seen that?

• 1:32:41Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't seen it, but I know, I know a guy who knows a guy. But is there, is one of the arguments for synthesis that it is just a more scalable? Solution 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 I, 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 realities of extracting or synthesizing,

• 1:33:23Tim Ferriss?

  so I've done neither. 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, seeing the kind of devastation and 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, it's so much violence, so much destruction.

• 1:33:47Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:48Tim Ferriss?

  Does synthesis fix that?

• 1:33:50Hamilton Morris?

  Sustainability, of course, does matter 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, you know. I'm sure there is, are old ayahuasca vines that contain beta-carbolans that have never been found before. And if we're just chopping them down to use them in a brew, when you could just

• 1:34:29Hamilton Morris?

  as easily use Syrian rue, pegunatum hormala, or something like that, you have to wonder whether or not we're potentially losing the opportunity, or they could be, you know, useful cultivars, they might be faster growing. There's all sorts of reasons to keep and study plants as opposed to just using them up. Same is true of peydie, there's so many different alkaloids, and there's been very little study done in terms of finding.

• 1:34:59Hamilton Morris?

  You know, faster growing varieties of peyote or finding strains that have a higher mescaline content or a higher peyote in 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 THCV or high CBD content. And, and so, you know, I think that that's really important. You want to have natural reserves of these things that, that can be studied and can be used as stock for breeding.

• 1:35:43Hamilton Morris?

  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 pufferfish, 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?

• 1:36:26Hamilton Morris?

  I mean, those are the sorts of things that I would love to be doing with the toads, answering these basic scientific questions. When it comes to just using them as a source of drugs, you can make 5-MeodMT 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 15mg of 5meodmt freebase as opposed to this is 100mg of toad venom that might contain who knows how much 5meodmt

• 1:37:08Hamilton Morris?

  and however much 5meonmt or serotonin osulfate or whatever steroidal lactone that's found, you know, 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.

• 1:37:26Tim Ferriss?

  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 1,000 times alkaloid. Can you define what an alkaloid is?

• 1:37:39Hamilton Morris?

  Sure. In the strictest sense, an alkaloid is a material isolated from a plant that contains 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. Salvinor and A would not be an alkaloid because it doesn't contain a nitrogen atom.

• 1:38:13Tim Ferriss?

  Turpinoid?

• 1:38:14Hamilton Morris?

  No.

• 1:38:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Another thing that I don't understand, but I've read.

• 1:38:17Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so that's it. It's, 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. And that's how they get this name.

• 1:38:42Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. Now, this is, this is the type of education that I need, but I won't, I won't take up the podcast to do that. I'll, I'll be looking at the, the book recommendations. Love to, I know we have not too, too much time left and I'm keeping an eye on time, but gear shift to.

• 1:39:01Tim Ferriss?

  Smart drugs, no tropics, no tropics, I'm not sure how to pronounce that either. Are there any particular types of cognitive enhancers 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-

• 1:39:27Hamilton Morris?

  Daryl La Mer.

• 1:39:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:39:29Hamilton Morris?

  Two C D.

• 1:39:29Tim Ferriss?

  Two C D.

• 1:39:30Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:30Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Are there any particular cognitive enhancers that you have found effective and/or interesting?

• 1:39:39Hamilton Morris?

  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-

• 1:39:49Tim Ferriss?

  Don't know what that is.

• 1:39:50Hamilton Morris?

  It's these two psychologists at Cornell, I believe, found this effect that the more competent someone is in a given task, whether it's 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 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?

• 1:40:31Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good point.

• 1:40:34Hamilton Morris?

  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 no tropics. 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? Is being more creative a sign of intelligence? It's typically not included in any kind of objective measure of intelligence. So-

• 1:41:17Hamilton Morris?

  So how do you define it to begin with and what are these drugs doing and what is the intended effect? It's a really complicated question. 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, 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

• 1:42:01Hamilton Morris?

  it really helps me read, especially if I'm going 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. But New Pepto was okay. PRL 853 was okay. Phenylperacetam is okay. They're all, typically it's the stimulating ones that are a little bit better, but then the question is, are these nootropics or are they simply stimulants? And are stimulants nootropics? How do we designate these things?

• 1:42:40Tim Ferriss?

  Have you tried 2CD? I have not.

• 1:42:43Hamilton Morris?

  Yes, absolutely. And 2CD is really interesting because one thing, if you read about people, Neumonists, people with photographic memories, one thing they all seem to have in common is they're all synesthetes.

• 1:42:58Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:42:59Hamilton Morris?

  And one thing I've wondered about that synesthesia that they have is, is this multisensory cross-linking of information aiding recall? Because if-

• 1:43:08Tim Ferriss?

  And just for people listening, just to define that term, so it's if people who may smell colors or visualize numbers, that's the type of cross-linking that you see in these, like The Mind of a Neimanist by A.J. Luria gets into this in great depth, but sorry to interrupt, please continue.

• 1:43:27Hamilton Morris?

  Right. So, yeah. So- Yeah, if when you think of an orange, it's not just an orange, it's the color, it's the smell, it's the taste, it's the sound, it's the texture, and there's all this multisensory encoding of the information, 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 2CB do have

• 1:44:12Hamilton Morris?

  any sort of nootropic effect, 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, because you got locked into

• 1:44:54Hamilton Morris?

  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.

• 1:45:05Tim Ferriss?

  Jim's great, he's really fun to chat with, too, about the studies that they had conducted related to the problem solving with hard sciences and a lot of engineering problems. For people interested, I also spoke with Jim on the podcast, so you can find the Fadiman episode pretty easily. But for you personally, then, if you had nicotine gum currently in pole position, would you put anything in second and third place?

• 1:45:33Hamilton Morris?

  I think, you know, the classics, nicotine, caffeine-

• 1:45:38Tim Ferriss?

  Just like caffeine and hydrants, or I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly.

• 1:45:41Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah, you are, yeah.

• 1:45:42Tim Ferriss?

  Sweet.

• 1:45:43Hamilton Morris?

  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 using low dose Ritalin has helped me.

• 1:46:09Tim Ferriss?

  What does low dose mean?

• 1:46:10Hamilton Morris?

  10mg. I don't take it every day, but it's, you know, 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 it's helped me.

• 1:46:32Tim Ferriss?

  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. I was, 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, I mean, yerba mate or alcohol, doesn't really matter. There are tests, if you look up some of the studies done by any number of cognitive neuroscience,

• 1:47:13Tim Ferriss?

  Kahneman and others where you can, you can identify online tests that can give you, help you to establish a baseline if you want to look at some of the effects.

• 1:47:23Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:24Tim Ferriss?

  But yeah, the intelligence can be fine sliced into so many different component areas.

• 1:47:30Hamilton Morris?

  Right.

• 1:47:30Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, it can get really, really complex for people who are, who would be, I was actually involved with a study, people should check this out. He's also been on the podcast, Adam Gazali out of UCSF at the Gazali Lab. They developed a software called NeuroRacer that was very, very effective. They ended up, I think it was the cover of Nature at one point, being able to 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.

• 1:48:09Tim Ferriss?

  At least six months later. It was really remarkable. 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?

• 1:48:37Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah, I mean, I have a Twitter at Hamilton Morris and Instagram at Hamilton Morris. I'm starting a website, HamiltonMorris.com, but it's not up yet.

• 1:48:48Tim Ferriss?

  My prediction is that we will have it up, 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.

• 1:48:59Hamilton Morris?

  HamiltonMorris.com. And if you want to watch my TV show, Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, it can be purchased for $3 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.

• 1:49:20Tim Ferriss?

  And if you have Amazon Prime, I think it's actually available with Prime membership 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?

• 1:49:33Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah, if, you know, 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 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.

• 1:50:10Tim Ferriss?

  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 2 to 5K for something interesting, what might that be applied to?

• 1:50:23Hamilton Morris?

  Right now, I'm... Working with a chemist named Jason Wallach and we are trying to do a process called autoreadiography 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 on our understanding of auditory perception.

• 1:51:03Tim Ferriss?

  We didn't have time to get into Oliver Sacks, but have you read Musicophilia?

• 1:51:07Hamilton Morris?

  I haven't read it.

• 1:51:08Tim Ferriss?

  I think you would love it.

• 1:51:08Hamilton Morris?

  I have to, yeah.

• 1:51:10Tim Ferriss?

  It's almost entirely about auditory pathologies of various types, but I think you would greatly, greatly enjoy it. 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?

• 1:51:24Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:25Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe another time.

• 1:51:26Hamilton Morris?

  He's amazing.

• 1:51:27Tim Ferriss?

  So for people who might be interested in helping you with some of this science, I would encourage them to first go to hamiltonmoors.com. It may be unavailable, but there may be a contact form on there by the time that is ready. If not, is Twitter generally the best way?

• 1:51:44Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:45Tim Ferriss?

  To contact you?

• 1:51:47Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any other recommendations, suggestions, parting words, book recommendations? Anything at all that you'd like to say or share?

• 1:51:58Hamilton Morris?

  I really can't overestimate the value of Peacock for 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...

• 1:52:17Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah, it's a moving experience to read it, so I hope everyone will run out and buy a copy. I think it's 15 bucks or something.

• 1:52:24Tim Ferriss?

  Why P-call and not T-call?

• 1:52:26Hamilton Morris?

  Well, P-call is the first one, and if you like P-call, I think you'll move on to T-call. I would hope.

• 1:52:32Tim Ferriss?

  And I've also, not surprisingly, in almost every office I have been to with researchers who are involved in these fields, they have P-call and T-call right there prominently displayed, 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.

• 1:53:08Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:53:11Tim Ferriss?

  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-ameo DMT, but the ketamine episode also, I thought, was just beautifully shot and edited and crafted.

• 1:53:36Hamilton Morris?

  Yes.

• 1:53:36Tim Ferriss?

  It was really well done. And I mean, all of them that I've seen have been exceptionally, exceptionally well done. And I don't say that lightly.

• 1:53:46Hamilton Morris?

  Thank you.

• 1:53:46Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:53:56Hamilton Morris?

  It was a group of animators' advice, actually.

• 1:53:59Tim Ferriss?

  It's spectacular.

• 1:54:01Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah. It was a guy named James Blackdon, and he sort of contributed the style, and then it was a number of different animators' advice that executed it, and they did a great job.

• 1:54:12Tim Ferriss?

  On that, on that fine closing note, thank you to everybody listening. Thank you for taking the time, and 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 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.

• 1:54:42Hamilton Morris?

  Yes, I'll consider it.

• 1:54:45Tim Ferriss?

  Alright guys, until next time. 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 Schulgen, including his self experimentation methodology. I will figure out the best link for that. Fadiman episode, tim.blog/fadiman, and you can find links to Hamilton and everything else that we covered today at tim.blog/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?

• 1:55:27Tim Ferriss?

  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 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.

• 1:56:07Tim Ferriss?

  Just go to fourhourworkweek.com, that's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. 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 at tim.blog/doris. It was a captivating conversation that really blew me away.

• 1:56:49Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:57:34Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:58:17Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:58:59Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:59:41Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:00:25Tim Ferriss?

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