#511: Hamilton Morris on Iboga, 5-MeO-DMT, The Power of Ritual, New Frontiers in Psychedelics, Excellent Problems to Solve, and More

Hamilton Morris on Iboga, 5-MeO-DMT, The Power of Ritual, New Frontiers in Psychedelics, Excellent Problems to Solve, and More | Brought to you by Dry Farm Wines http://dryfarmwines.com/tim natural wines designed for fewer hangovers, LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim electrolyte supplement, and Oura smart ring https://ouraring.com/ wearable for personalized sleep and health insights. More on all three below. Hamilton Morris (@HamiltonMorris https://twitter.com/HamiltonMorris) is a chemist, filmmaker, and science journalist. A graduate of The New School, he conducts chemistry research at The University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. Hamilton is the writer and director of the documentary series Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Mushrooms-in-Mexico/dp/B01M7UV0KE/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, in which he explores the chemistry and traditions surrounding psychoactive drugs. His research has allowed him to study psychoactive plants, fungi, and chemicals, as well as the culture that surrounds them, in more than 30 countries, using an interdisciplinary approach that combines anthropology and chemistry. Hamilton’s recent republishing of a book on Bufo alvarius http://www.psychedelictoadofthesonorandesert.com/ has, at the time of writing, raised more than $205,000 for Parkinson’s disease research. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Dry Farm Wines http://dryfarmwines.com/tim. I’m a wine drinker, and I love a few glasses over meals with friends. That said, I hate hangovers. For the last few months, most of the wine in my house has been from Dry Farm Wines. Why? At least in my experience, their wine means more fun with fewer headaches. Dry Farm Wines http://dryfarmwines.com/tim only ships wines that meet very stringent criteria: practically sugar free (less than 0.15g per glass), lower alcohol (less than 12.5% alcohol), additive free (there are more than 70 FDA-approved wine-making additives), lower sulfites, organic, and produced by small family farms. All Dry Farm Wines http://dryfarmwines.com/tim are laboratory tested for purity standards by a certified, independent enologist, and all of their wines are also backed by a 100% Happiness Promise—they will either replace or refund any wine you do not love. Last but not least, I find delicious wines http://dryfarmwines.com/tim I never would have found otherwise. It’s a lot of fun. Dry Farm Wines http://dryfarmwines.com/tim has a special offer just for listeners of the podcast—an extra bottle in your first box for just one extra penny http://dryfarmwines.com/tim. Check out all the details at DryFarmWines.com/Tim http://dryfarmwines.com/tim. * This episode is also brought to you by Oura https://ouraring.com/! Oura https://ouraring.com/ is the company behind the smart ring that delivers personalized sleep and health insights https://ouraring.com/ to help you optimize just about everything. I’ve been using it religiously for at least six months, and I was introduced to it by Dr. Peter Attia. It is the only wearable that I wear on a daily basis. With advanced sensors, Oura https://ouraring.com/ packs state-of-the-art heart rate, heart-rate variability, temperature, activity, and sleep monitoring technology into a convenient, non-invasive ring. It weighs less than 6 grams and focuses on three key insights—sleep, readiness, and activity. Try it for yourself. The Oura Ring https://ouraring.com/ comes in two styles and three colors: Silver, Black, and Matte Black. For $299, you can give or get the gift of health by visiting OuraRing.com https://ouraring.com/. * This episode is also brought to you by LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim! What is LMNT? It’s a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink-mix http://drinklmnt.com/tim. I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this and usually use it 1–2 times per day. LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or Paleo diet. If you are on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim came up with a very special offer for you, my dear listeners. They’ve created Tim’s Club: Simply go to DrinkLMNT.com/Tim http://drinklmnt.com/tim and select “Subscribe & Save” on any 30-count box of LMNT for only $36. This will be valid for the lifetime of the subscription and you can pause it anytime. And perfect for the warm days, they have a new flavor, Watermelon Salt http://drinklmnt.com/tim, which I've been quite enjoying. * If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Oura, O-U-R-A. It is the only wearable that I wear on a daily basis. Oura is the company behind the smart ring that delivers personalized sleep and health insights to help you optimize just about everything. And I've tried every device out there that you can imagine. This one really makes the cut. I've been using it religiously for at least six months now, and I was introduced to it by Dr. Peter Attia, who's also vetted just about everything. With advanced sensors, Oura packs state-of-the-art heart rate, heart rate variability, HRV, super important to me, temperature, activity, and sleep monitoring technology into a convenient, non-invasive ring. It's tiny, it weighs less than six grams, and focuses on three key insights: sleep,

• 0:45Tim Ferriss?

  readiness, and activity. So I can use it to help focus my attention on the type, volume, intensity of exercise that I should do in a given day. I use it to determine how certain types of alcohol at different times of the day affect my sleep, which they do, and I can see all of that in graph form trended over time. There are tons of actionable insights that have come from using this ring for me. They have a number of incredible people on their team. Dr. Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, and also author of Why We Sleep, the mega-hit, is Oura's chief science advisor, as just one example. The Oura Ring is one of the most accurate wearables available because it measures your vitals directly from your finger.

• 1:30Tim Ferriss?

  So it's not deducing that or making a best guesstimate based on a bunch of other things and trying to triangulate. Compared to a medical-grade electrocardiogram, the Oura Ring is 99.9% accurate for resting heart rate and 98.4% accurate for heart rate variability. And I work with HRV doctors, and they recommend that I use the Oura Ring. So try it yourself. It is super cool and super practical, very actionable. The Oura Ring comes in two styles and three colors: silver, black, and matte black. I use matte black. For $299, you can give or get the gift of health by visiting Ouraring.com. That's O-U-R-A-R-I-N-G dot com.

• 2:15Tim Ferriss?

  Again, that's Ouraring.com.

• 2:21Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike, and I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it. Or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera, another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough.

• 3:05Tim Ferriss?

  And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low. But suffice to say, this is where Element, again spelled L-M-N-T, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which, as a side note, you can also use to make a kick-ass, no-sugar margarita. But for special occasions, obviously. You're probably already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer. Things clicked and bam, company was born.

• 3:49Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends. Three Navy SEAL teams, as prescribed by their Master Chief, Marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA weightlifting, and on and on. You can try it risk-free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. Element has come up with a very special ...offer for you, my dear listeners, they've created Tim's Club.

• 4:33Tim Ferriss?

  Simply go to drinklmnt.com/tim, that's L-M-N-T, drinklmnt.com/tim, and select subscribe and save on any 30-count box of Element for just $36. This will be valid for the lifetime of the subscription, and you can pause it any time. Again, that's drinklmnt.com/tim for this exclusive offer. And now, perfect for warm days, they have a new flavor, watermelon salt, that I cannot recommend highly enough. It is delicious.

• 5:06Tim Ferriss?

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

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Now is a significant appropriate time.

• 5:16Speaker 01

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

• 5:29Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And I'm going to keep the intro short. My guest today is Hamilton Morris, on Twitter @HamiltonMorris. That's with two Rs, one S. Hamilton is a chemist, filmmaker, and science journalist. A graduate of the New School, Hamilton conducts chemistry research at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. He's the writer and director of one of my favorite documentary series that you can find anywhere, Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, Pharmacopea? Tomato, tomato, take your pick, lots of vowels at the end, in which he explores the chemistry and traditions surrounding psychoactive drugs. His research has allowed him to study psychoactive plants, fungi, and chemicals, as well as the culture or cultures that surround them in more than 30 countries,

• 6:14Tim Ferriss?

  using an interdisciplinary approach that combines anthropology and chemistry. His recent republishing of a book on Bufo alvarius has, at the time of this writing, raised more than $150,000 for Parkinson's disease research. You can find him, as I mentioned, on Twitter @HamiltonMorris, Instagram @HamiltonMorris, Facebook, HamiltonMorris, and on Patreon, at patreon.com/hamiltonmorris. And the reissued pamphlet on what some of you may refer to as 5meodmt, at least derived from the Sonoran Desert toad, can be found at www.sycodelictoadofthesonoran desert.com.

• 6:56Tim Ferriss?

  Hamilton, welcome back to the show.

• 6:58Hamilton Morris?

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 7:00Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm looking at a summary of our first conversation, and we covered a lot. We will have no shortage of new material, but for people who didn't listen to episode one, I'll just provide a few points that we explored quite deeply. Alexander, AKA Sasha Shulgin, we spoke a lot about him.

• 7:20Hamilton Morris?

  There was some news on him as well.

• 7:21Tim Ferriss?

  What is the news?

• 7:21Hamilton Morris?

  Can I tell you about his, his new book that's coming out?

• 7:24Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 7:26Hamilton Morris?

  Oh, yeah, I don't even know if this has been publicly announced, but sorry to cut you off right as you were about to summarize.

• 7:31Tim Ferriss?

  Please, please cut me off.

• 7:32Hamilton Morris?

  Should I allow you to finish what you were saying?

• 7:34Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, you shouldn't.

• 7:35Hamilton Morris?

  Okay, okay. I guess, just very briefly, for anyone that doesn't know who Alexander Shulgin is, he was this brilliant medicinal chemist who was responsible for the discovery of an estimated 200 novel psychedelic compounds. And he wrote these two amazing books, Pcall and Tcall, that came out in the 90s. And he died maybe five or six years ago, and they recently found some tape recordings of a class that he gave in 1987. And they're publishing it as a three-volume set. And I was sent a review copy of the first volume, and it is so cool. It is one of the most amazing, because this man is, no matter how you define it,

• 8:19Hamilton Morris?

  the greatest expert that has ever lived on the gigantic subject of drugs. He understood the anthropology, the chemistry, the botany, the mycology, the law, the history. He understood every dimension of it and was truly a genius. And at this time in 1987, it was, I think, a very important moment in the history of drug policy and the history of that sort of research.

• 8:46Tim Ferriss?

  1987 being when this class was recorded?

• 8:49Hamilton Morris?

  Yes, and it was, I think, a moment when he was becoming radicalized, when he was realizing that there could be no more playing nice, the way he had in the past, because he'd had this very close relationship with law enforcement throughout his career. And then... Things were getting worse.

• 9:09Tim Ferriss?

  In part, not to go back to episode one, but in part because he'd done a lot of work for established pharma companies.

• 9:17Hamilton Morris?

  Yes, yeah, he'd worked for Dow Chemical, he'd done pharmaceutical research, he'd worked with law enforcement, he'd had deep ties to the counterculture, he'd done a little bit of everything, he was friends with everyone. But during the Reagan administration, it was becoming increasingly clear that things were getting worse and worse with every passing year. There was an idea that, okay psychedelics have to be illegal because they cause hallucinations, and that's unacceptable in our society. But MDMA is different. MDMA doesn't cause hallucinations, and it can be used therapeutically, and physicians were recognizing that in the 1980s. And then it was placed in Schedule I. So that was the first moment, I think, where

• 10:02Hamilton Morris?

  he started to think, this can't go on the way it's been going on, because they will destroy every new medicine that I create. And then on top of that, they had just passed the Federal Analog Act as well. So this was a law that exists to this day, where they said, if you're making something that we will arbitrarily define as an analog of a Schedule I controlled substance, we can prosecute as if it is that controlled substance. So if you are making DMT plus an arbitrary number of carbon atoms, we can just say that that is DMT and charge you accordingly. So those two things combined, the destruction of any

• 10:46Hamilton Morris?

  potential use of MDMA and the passage of the Federal Analog Act, had made him enraged. This was also the period that led to his writing and publication of Peek Call. So this class that he's teaching is razor sharp and extremely educational, and I think it's going to be wonderful when these books are published this summer.

• 11:07Tim Ferriss?

  Will the audio also be made available?

• 11:09Hamilton Morris?

  I haven't asked them yet. I certainly hope so.

• 11:12Tim Ferriss?

  Please ask them if they would like a cross promotional opportunity to put some of the audio on this podcast. I would be very interested to help them. And so that shares a bit about Sasha Shulgin, who also, I think it was Dave Nichols. Dave Nichols or Nickel?

• 11:31Hamilton Morris?

  Nichols.

• 11:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Dave Nichols, who is featured prominently in one of the episodes of season three of your television show, who had a lot of correspondence with Sasha and said that he was more, he considered him more of an alchemist than a scientist because he was almost like an ethnobotanist, not trying to preserve a first-person objectivity. I mean, he consumed and tested many of the, if not all, of the compounds that he produced, at least for tasting parties and things like that.

• 12:02Hamilton Morris?

  Yes, and was proud of it. He made no secret of the fact that he consumed the compounds that he synthesized. And I think that there's an idea, it's a very widespread idea, that if you have personal experience with a psychoactive drug, this biases you in such a way that the research that you do is not trustworthy. But this is something that we don't evenly apply to other disciplines. No one would ever say that an ethnomusicologist is biased because they've listened to music, or because they enjoy music themselves, or that a sports commentator is biased if they have a past as an athlete. Instead, we would say that

• 12:42Hamilton Morris?

  this is something that makes them an expert who is qualified to discuss the subject. So he was very open about the fact that he'd tried an enormous number of substances, but was not dependent on any of them. He did it in order to better characterize them so that he could speak authoritatively to his students, to law enforcement, and to inform his own research. Really brilliant guy. And this book is a very exciting text. It actually gave me chills as I was reading it because it's so good.

• 13:14Tim Ferriss?

  Can you tell people where they should look for this?

• 13:17Hamilton Morris?

  Yes. I mean, I think you can preorder it on Amazon. Alexander Shulgin's family has a press called Transform Press. It's called The Nature of Drugs.

• 13:26Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great title. That's a great title. And for people who don't know PCAL, T-CAL, those are phenethylamines I have known and loved and tryptamines I have known and loved, respectively. I mean, these are encyclopedic compilations of not just trip reports or descriptions of experiences, but also details related to synthesis.

• 13:52Hamilton Morris?

  Yes. And back to the experience. I mean, that's been a big part of this psychedelic renaissance is talking about how the new wave of researchers are these sort of objective, dispassionate people who have never used them themselves. But not only is that not true, most of, in fact, all of them have used psychedelics, but they sometimes publicly say that they haven't, which I think is not a good way to go about this, you know? There's a big difference, I think, between long-term and short-term strategies when it comes to being part of a marginalized subculture. The short-term strategy is to

• 14:34Hamilton Morris?

  be dishonest and to hide and to lie about who you are and what you care about. Because if the dominant culture tells you that it is wrong, that it's immoral, that it's illegal, that's what you do. You hide. And that way, you can protect yourself. But that only protects you. What if you have children who feel the same way? They're not protected. What about your grandchildren? If you want to actually create a cultural change, you have to be open about who you are and what you care about. And so, one of the most disturbing things that I get sometimes in response to my show is when people say, "Oh, you should never talk about this chemistry. Don't you realize if you talk about this chemistry,

• 15:17Hamilton Morris?

  then they'll make it illegal? You can't talk about that synthetic route. We've got to keep it secret. You can't show yourself consuming a drug." Then that acknowledges the fact that people actually use these things, and we've got to keep it an objective, clinical domain. And sure, if the point is to distort reality in order to sell something...

• 15:36Hamilton Morris?

  Fine, but that's not what it really is, and that's not going to help people long term.

• 15:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I could not agree more. This is also part of the reason why, slightly different example, but in the process of fundraising for, say, the Psychedelic and Consciousness Research Center at Johns Hopkins, or for Phase 3 studies for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, when I was talking to potential donors, it was a prerequisite in my mind that they be willing to use their names and not donate as anonymous and thereby reinforcing stigma that I think is largely unearned. So I wanted people to not just take a public stance, but to be proud of their

• 16:23Tim Ferriss?

  involvement and to show there were some, I know these are slightly different examples, but reputational upside potential, not just reputational downside potential. And also coming back to your ethnomusicology example, we don't even apply the same standard to researchers of other drugs or compounds, right? So if you're studying opiates, or you're studying morphine, and you happen to have been administered morphine in the course of being a patient in a hospital, right? I don't think it is assumed that that somehow jeopardizes your scientific integrity for studying those things later.

• 16:59Hamilton Morris?

  Oh, of course not. No, there's a tremendous amount of inconsistency and hypocrisy in the way these things are discussed. And I think a lot of it boils down to puritanical objections to euphoria and joy. You know, I don't think anyone would care about scientific self-experimentation with topical capsaicin or something like that. Why? Because it's not going to cause any sort of euphoria and might even cause pain, and pain is dignified. Pain is good. Pain shows that you're working hard, you're self-sacrificing. That's all right. But if you're having a good time, that's a different story.

• 17:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm contemplating where to go next. I still have three pages from our last conversation. I don't think we'll make it through. Just to give a quick disjointed recap of a few things I underlined from our previous conversation. Bullet, he realized in high school, after taking salvia, that psychedelics were misunderstood and likely had more potential than people realized. Jump Forward, for those who would like to learn more about psychedelics... Neuro psychedelia by Nicholas Langlitz.

• 18:05Hamilton Morris?

  That's right. He's got a new book as well.

• 18:08Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, so many updates. Is it out already?

• 18:11Hamilton Morris?

  It's out, yeah.

• 18:11Tim Ferriss?

  What's it called?

• 18:12Hamilton Morris?

  It's a meta primatology book that's about, not about primatology, but about primatologists. It's like the primatology of primatologists. It's really good.

• 18:23Tim Ferriss?

  We will put a link in the show notes to that new book as well. So tim.blog/podcast. We will, we will have that. We talked about your experience with your cameraman in a hotel in Shino with the synthetic cannabinoid UR144, which led to a quote, "fractal of uncertainty", end quote. That was very unsettling. We have covered a number of stories of the unsettling experiences one can have, or the, put a different way, the dangers of use of some psychedelics, or more accurately, use of psychedelics in uncontrolled or improperly supervised settings,

• 19:03Tim Ferriss?

  which includes documented fatalities. So I don't want to give anyone the impression here that these compounds are without risks, because there's so many other factors that also come into play, not just the compound itself. And I have to give a disclaimer here. So excuse me, Hamilton, while I do so, but nothing we're going to talk about in this episode is intended to constitute medical advice. We are not doctors, neo shamans, and this is all for informational purposes only. So caveat emptor, be safe out there. Don't break any laws. But jumping to the next point real quick, low doses, and I want you to fact check me if I'm getting any of these recaps wrong, but low doses of drugs,

• 19:48Tim Ferriss?

  including, say, cocktails like ayahuasca, can be more beneficial than the overwhelming, what do I do with this experience at high doses? That you have had low dose experiences that helped you to see, I think in this case, quote, "the nicotine gum was inside of me", end quote.

• 20:04Tim Ferriss?

  So there's a long story about the nicotine in our first conversation. And we also talked a bit about Ibogaine, a bit about 2CD, and then topics that we might cover next time, which is now this time, including Oliver Sacks and Claudio Narangial. So now, here we are in the present moment. We didn't discuss, we've already talked about Sascha Schulgun a bit, Oliver Sacks or Claudio. How do those figure into your life as influences? Or how would you explain either of them, either of those figures?

• 20:39Hamilton Morris?

  Well, those are, just to go back to what we were saying earlier about people who are in the closet about their drug use. You know, of course, when Oliver Sacks wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and described the medical student who's having the olfactory hallucinations after using PCP, he's talking about himself. But he didn't want to acknowledge that he'd used PCP because he didn't want to acknowledge that he'd used drugs at all. You know, he was addicted to amphetamine for a period as well, possibly methamphetamine, I don't know. There's a biography written by Lawrence Weschler that came out recently that I know Lawrence Weschler, but I haven't had the opportunity to read it. It might go into that. But yeah, he didn't want people to know, as did, you know, many people. Carl Sagan would be another example.

• 21:23Hamilton Morris?

  You know, he wrote a portion of Lester Grin spoon's Marijuana Reconsidered and talked about his revelatory experiences with cannabis, but didn't want his name attached to it, right? So you have all these prominent, brilliant minds that have benefited from the use of these things, but they're afraid to publicly acknowledge that fact. And that is, I think, damaging. But Oliver Sacks in general, you know, he's wonderful. He's an amazing writer. I think he's one of the greatest science writers that has ever lived. Uncle tungsten, the man who mistook his wife for a hat. These are really beautifully written books. His book on hallucinations is also very good.

• 22:05Tim Ferriss?

  So you can hear that airplane overhead, folks. This is audio verite. Do you hear palm fronds in the background also? Part of our experience in the world of COVID. I would imagine you have had to pause for audio a fair amount in your life.

• 22:19Hamilton Morris?

  Oh, so much pausing.

• 22:20Tim Ferriss?

  The joke that I remember someone told me at one point is they said, why does thunder come after lightning? Because even God has to wait for sound.

• 22:33Hamilton Morris?

  All right, so Claudio. Yeah. Did you ever interview him or talk to him? No, sadly. Yeah, me neither. You know, he wrote some enormous number of books and I've only read The Healing Journey. I really enjoyed that book. Me too, me too. I mean, I can't imagine being a psychologist and working with a patient for months or years and seeing such gradual change, maybe no change at all. It must be very discouraging for someone that really wants to affect some kind of positive change in somebody that they're working with. And then when you look at the sorts of accounts that are described in The Healing Journey, it's like a psychological fantasy of having this, you know, these immediate revelations

• 23:19Hamilton Morris?

  that affect profound and lasting change in the people that use these substances. And of course, there are similar, you know, for people that are interested in books that describe psychologists administering psychedelics and their patients having very positive experiences. There's another book written by William Richards called Sacred Knowledge. Excellent book. It's a really, really good book. It's kind of half clinical primer on best practices with psychedelics, but then it also has a number of biographical sections on Bill Richard's life, which is just fascinating.

• 24:02Hamilton Morris?

  And I've been moved to tears by, have you seen the video of him administering DPT to the dying cancer patient? No, I have not. This was, uh, it was on 60 Minutes in the seventies. And I mean, it's one of the most moving pieces of television I've ever seen. Did you say DPT? Yeah, DPT, although I don't believe they specify it in the report. I uploaded it to my YouTube channel recently for anyone that's looking for it. And watching people who are at the end of their life make peace with their own mortality in the presence of their family and the effect that that has on their family is, it causes so many emotions, one of which is it's almost infuriating to think that this wouldn't be available

• 24:46Hamilton Morris?

  to everyone that might want it when you see how beneficial it is. And I remember when I first heard about end of life psychedelic psychotherapy when I was in my early twenties, I kind of thought, well, what's the point of that? If the people are at the end of their life, wouldn't that be the lowest priority psychologically? Wouldn't you want to help people that have their entire life ahead of them? That way you can affect the greatest change. But I had no idea that the way somebody ends their life can have a tremendous impact on their family. And if they are at peace with their own mortality at the end of their life, that can relieve a lot of the trauma of losing a loved one.

• 25:27Tim Ferriss?

  I have not seen that video, and I'll look for it on your YouTube channel. Bill Richards, for those who want a little bit more context on him, is a beautiful human being. I felt very privileged to be able to spend time with him. I don't know if he's still associated with Johns Hopkins, but he was for a very long period of time. He, along with Mary Kosamana, who I want to give a nod because she's just an exceptional human and also a very experienced, I suppose therapist, therapist may not be the right term, facilitator, I don't know what term they actually use within Johns Hopkins, but she and Bill have, they have one of the kind of larger sample sets that is in the hundreds

• 26:09Tim Ferriss?

  of sessions that they have administered legally, mostly involving, I would say, psilocybin at this point, probably in the kind of 30-milligram range, something like that. But Bill is not just an excellent, from my perspective, clinician, but he also thinks very deeply about the philosophical theological underpinnings and/or implications of administering these compounds. So for all those reasons and more, I definitely recommend that people check out his book. Have you met him before?

• 26:40Hamilton Morris?

  I've spoken with him. I've never met him in person, though. And he's so good, it almost worries me a little bit, because when people talk about the potential of psychedelics, I think one thing they don't realize is that The people that are working on this right now are the best people in the world. Bill Richards is one in a million. And by definition, one in a million people are hard to come by. You're not going to have someone as compassionate and skilled as Bill Richards working in every psychedelic psychotherapy startup. And so when we look at how promising the results are from some of this clinical research that's coming out of Johns Hopkins, I think it's important to remember that these are some of the most talented and passionate people to ever enter the field.

• 27:25Hamilton Morris?

  And it might not be the case that all of these results generalize to a larger population, though of course I hope they will.

• 27:32Tim Ferriss?

  It's a really important point. I mean, these are people who have been able to withstand, in many cases, decades of not just resistance, but abuse by various establishments. So they're not fair weather entrants to this space. They've really endured a lot. And that includes many people at Hopkins, including Roland Griffiths and many other research institutions. And I suppose this is as good a place as any to say that since you and I last spoke on the podcast, which was a few years ago, a lot has happened. Been an extraordinary amount of acceleration has occurred in the research space, as well as in the for-profit sector related to psychedelics.

• 28:17Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anything in particular that worries you? I mean, we could talk about the promise, but then there are maybe the concerns, one of which, I'm just inferring from what you said, would be the assumption that we can scale results and scale in therapists based on, say, the results obtained through someone like Bill Richards. Although there has been a high level of replicability within the MDMA Phase III trials, because they had similar concerns, or similar questions at least, related to Michael and Annie Mithoffe, who are very, very skilled therapists in the MDMA-assisted psychotherapy space. And do any particular concerns come to mind for you?

• 28:59Hamilton Morris?

  Well, yeah. I mean, back to this Shulgin book, there's a really funny moment where he says that every drug has no side effects for the first five years. So if you're going to use a drug, you have to use it in the first five years when it comes out, before people realize that it has any problems associated with it. And...

• 29:18Hamilton Morris?

  Every new drug does have a hype phase. Ketamine is in its hype phase right now. Then after the hype phase, you enter a more sobering confrontation with its limitations. Right now, you have a lot of people with treatment-resistant depression taking ketamine, and they're experiencing miraculous results. Five years from now, some of those people might start to suffer urogenital toxicity of one kind or another that could make people less optimistic about using this as a treatment casually, right? It's known to cause damage to the urinary bladder under some circumstances.

• 29:57Hamilton Morris?

  And we're going to see in a few years what happens with more widespread use of it. So, and cannabis is also somewhat in its hype phase, where if we're talking about cannabis as an intoxicant relative to alcohol, which sets the bar very low, in my opinion, yeah, it's great. It's not going to cause liver damage. It's not associated with overdose. It doesn't cause the same sort of physical addiction in the vast majority of instances, though of course, some people do develop problematic relationships with it. But I predict in a few years, we're going to start to scrutinize a little bit whether

• 30:39Hamilton Morris?

  or not it's a good idea to be as stoned as many people are all the time. I mean, again, I think it's almost certainly, it is certainly better than being drunk all the time, but you know, there's the cannabis hyperemesis disorder, which is something that wasn't discovered until relatively recently, and it seems that that's a product of new patterns of cannabis consumption.

• 31:04Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Dry Farm Wines. I'm a wine drinker. I love it. Love a few glasses over meals with friends. That said, I hate hangovers. It kills me often for multiple days. Right now, all of the wine in my house is from Dry Farm Wines. Also, for my last two book launch parties, all the wine has been from Dry Farm Wine. Why is that? Because in my personal experience, their wine means more fun with fewer headaches. Dry Farm Wines only ships wine that meet very stringent criteria. Close to sugar-free, so less than 0.15 grams per glass. Lower alcohol, less than 12.5% alcohol. Additive-free, there are more than 70 FDA-approved winemaking additives.

• 31:49Tim Ferriss?

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• 32:31Tim Ferriss?

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• 32:54Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any other compounds that you think are undervalued or overhyped at the moment? For therapeutic purposes? So let's just say, and this could segue to your experience, actually, which I'd love to hear about, iboga or ibogaine for opiate use disorder or opiate addiction? What is your evaluation of that?

• 33:18Hamilton Morris?

  I think there's a lot of promise there. I think there's a lot of promise for pretty much all substance abuse disorders, and I predict many sorts of compulsions and addictions in general, which is something I didn't fully come to appreciate until I went to Central West Africa and participated in these iboga rituals, which gave me a far greater appreciation of

• 33:46Hamilton Morris?

  Both the ritual elements and kind of the larger spirit of a bogey beyond its antagonism of the alpha three, beta four nicotine, nicotinylcholine receptor.

• 33:58Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's the first time I've personally ever heard you use spirit.

• 34:02Hamilton Morris?

  I know. I, as I said it, I said, oh, did I go there? And I just say the words, they say the S word.

• 34:12Tim Ferriss?

  Could you tell us more about your experience? I thought that episode of season three. And do you say pharmacopeia or pharmacopoeia? I ask this every time.

• 34:20Hamilton Morris?

  Pharmacopeia is correct, but I say pharmacopeia.

• 34:22Tim Ferriss?

  Pharmacopeia.

• 34:23Hamilton Morris?

  It's always the battle of, do you say, yeah, there's endless ones of these where you look like an asshole and say cratom. Or do you say kratom like an American and say it wrong? Both ways are annoying.

• 34:36Tim Ferriss?

  Leaving aside psilocybin and our friends across the pond, what was your experience like? Could you speak to some of the experience, whether sort of phenomenologically in the drug experience or plant experience, if people prefer, or considering the ritual elements? What were some of the bits and pieces that you felt were particularly impactful? Because in that particular episode, in contrast to some episodes like the xenon gas episode, there's relatively little footage of you.

• 35:08Hamilton Morris?

  Yes.

• 35:08Tim Ferriss?

  In the actual ceremony.

• 35:09Hamilton Morris?

  Yes. And that was very important to me. I wanted to be entirely absent from it. And I have almost complete creative control of my show within the bounds of the law. But one thing that was very problematic.

• 35:22Tim Ferriss?

  That means just within the bounds of the law just refers to showcasing chemical synthesis?

• 35:27Hamilton Morris?

  I mean, even then I do pretty much everything that I want to do, but you know, I can't, I don't know, depict myself committing a crime. I don't know that I would want to either. But the one thing that was real, there's a lot of pushback was showing myself. And I didn't want to be a part of that episode. There have been a number of bogey documentaries made where a white outsider goes to central West Africa and participate in Buiti rituals and.

• 35:55Hamilton Morris?

  I felt that this was one time I didn't want to do that. I wanted to show the tradition and more importantly, I wanted to show that the tradition is changing. I think a lot of people have this idea of traditions as being the static, unchanging force. And in some cases, actually, there are many aspects of the Bouite religion that appear unchanged since anthropologists documented them in the 60s. But one big cultural shift that has occurred is there are now opioids in Cameroon and Gabon that were not there previously. There is no tradition of using opioids in that region. There is no heroin trade there.

• 36:37Hamilton Morris?

  Historically, pharmaceutical opioids have been far too expensive to be street drugs. It just wasn't a market and the naturally occurring opioids don't exist there. So you have a new pharmacological class of drugs introduced to a new culture that didn't grow up watching Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream and Christian F and Permanent Midnight and daytime television specials about addiction. We're inundated with this stuff. Imagine if you'd never even heard that an opioid is addictive before. How much more difficult it could be to develop a responsible pattern of use.

• 37:14Hamilton Morris?

  And so tramadol is being pressed in ultra-high potency tablets specifically for the West African market and they're extremely inexpensive and the addiction has become pretty widespread. So what I found so interesting is that-

• 37:32Tim Ferriss?

  What is the clinical application of tramadol? What's the indication?

• 37:36Hamilton Morris?

  Tramadol is sort of like codeine. It is a low potency opioid analgesic that is unregulated in many countries. It is in Canada. It's not a prescription drug in Canada until a few years ago in the United States. It wasn't a prescription drug. It wasn't controlled. So because it's considered to have a low abuse potential, it paradoxically ends up being one of the more used compounds because it's more available. This is like, you know, this is why it's really hard to talk about abuse potential as some sort of intrinsic factor of a drug's chemistry or pharmacology because it's so much dependent on these social regulatory factors as well. So-

• 38:17Hamilton Morris?

  Tramadol is relatively unregulated because it's considered relatively non-abusable, but ironically gets used all over the place for that reason. And it's a mild kind of codeine-like effect, but if you take a lot of it, it becomes less mild. And like all opioids, if you use it chronically, it can induce dependence and in some instances, problematic addiction. So the idea that ibogaine is an anti-addictive drug is not an African tradition. That is something that was discovered in the United States by a New York-based heroin addict named Howard Lotzoff. Do you know this story?

• 38:58Tim Ferriss?

  I don't.

• 38:58Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah. He was a guy who, in the 60s, was using heroin. He was friends with a chemist. The chemist said, "There's a psychedelic called ibogaine. You might think it's fun." And that's all it was. It was just a psychedelic. And he tried it. He tripped. He had a fine time with the ibogaine. And then when he came down, he realized that he hadn't used heroin and he wasn't experiencing withdrawals. And his concept of heroin had changed. Suddenly, he didn't consider heroin desirable. He saw it as symbolic of death and repulsive and had no desire to ever use it again and didn't. And dedicated the rest of his life to being a sort of crusader for the anti-addictive

• 39:43Hamilton Morris?

  effects of ibogaine, which he had discovered. And they were later validated in laboratory experiments with rodents. So it is pretty well-confirmed at this point in humans and rodents and a number of different models that ibogaine is in fact, an anti-addictive drug.

• 39:59Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know the names of many researchers involved with ibogaine, iboga, or any similar compounds. Was that in Deborah Mash's laboratory, that those studies were done with rodents? Or was that somewhere else?

• 40:12Hamilton Morris?

  Deborah Mash may have been one of the early researchers on it. It's been replicated in a number of different labs. This is one thing that's pretty well-characterized at this point. And of course, there are also synthetic derivatives of ibogaine, like 18MC. That have slightly different pharmacologies that also exert the same anti-addictive effect that's hypothesized to be derived from antagonism of this one subtype of the nicotine acetylcholine receptor, the alpha 3 beta 4 nicotine acetylcholine receptor. So this is not part of the tradition in Gabon because A, there's no tradition of using opioids, and because it's a religious sacrament. It's part of a religion called Buiti. So now

• 40:55Hamilton Morris?

  that opioids are present in that region, they are modifying their traditions to accommodate the treatment of local addicts. And that's what I wanted to document in my piece.

• 41:07Tim Ferriss?

  I thought the documenting of a local being shepherded through the process by these Buiti elders was really well done. I thought that was a very strong episode.

• 41:19Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah, and I think it is important that they understand that they have this amazing medicine available to them, because it always also struck me as ironic that everywhere else in the world, people are exclusively using and talking about ibogaine as an anti-addictive drug. But the one place where there's actually a tradition of using it, where there's now a problem with tramadol, they're just now beginning to recognize that they can use their own medicine to treat people in their community. And it was really cool to see that happening and to see how well it worked.

• 41:52Tim Ferriss?

  Providing that as sort of historical and cultural backdrop, what elements of the experience stood out for you personally, since I can't ask anyone else about the experience that was depicted in that episode? It is for those who may have some experiences with psychedelics in the, let's just call it, perhaps in the Western kind of psychotherapeutic or pseudo-psychotherapeutic model, where you lay down, you listen to spa music, basically, with eye shades on. This ritualized setting could not be more different.

• 42:27Hamilton Morris?

  It's the opposite of sensory deprivation. It's the most stimulating thing I have ever been a part of. It's continuous dancing, continuous music, continuous drumming, no sleep, no food, no water, no break.

• 42:45Hamilton Morris?

  Maximum exertion. And they divide the ceremonial space into different regions dedicated to different purposes. So for people that are there for medicinal purposes, they occupy a sort of recessed zone where they lay side by side and everyone dances around them. And they take such high doses of iboga that it has an almost anesthetic effect. They'll even prick people to make sure that they're still responsive to the sensation. And if they are unresponsive, that's the indication that they've had enough iboga. It's time to stop and allow them to recover a little bit.

• 43:27Hamilton Morris?

  But there's continuous consumption and everyone must consume. Babies, children, adults, the elderly, everybody takes iboga. But there is a different dose for each person depending on who they are, what they're doing in the ceremony, and what sort of treatment they're trying to receive. And then it's really very amazing. They have people that wear military outfits and they are an army, a spiritual army, who guard the iboga ceremony from bad spirits. And they have iboga guns and iboga knives that they use to prevent anyone from entering that might interfere with the healing of the participants.

• 44:10Hamilton Morris?

  There's a lot of incredibly beautiful symbolism in these rituals, including burying people alive. And I had read about this and I had always wondered if this is still something that's practiced. But they will dig a grave and you will lay in the grave on iboga with your face up, looking at the stars, and just your head protruding from the ground. And you spend the night in the ground to contemplate your own mortality. Now, I can't see that being integrated into our Western medical practice, but I can imagine how profound that could be. Even without a psychedelic.

• 44:54Tim Ferriss?

  Do they observe any cardiac complications in their tradition? I ask because my understanding is that there have been documented cardiac issues associated with, perhaps not iboga, maybe it's ibogaine administration in places like Mexico. Do they appear to run into any health complications?

• 45:16Hamilton Morris?

  I asked about that and they told me that they were aware of people that had died using it. And so it seems that they are aware. There's no pretense that this is a medicine that can't hurt anyone under any circumstances. They're aware that it is very powerful and has to be dosed very carefully. Because ibogaine binds to something called Herg channels. And these are potassium ion channels that regulate heart rhythms. A lot of topical anesthetics bind to Herg channels. And ibogaine actually has a mild topical anesthetic effect. So if you take high doses of it, it can cause fatal arrhythmias. They didn't say that specifically.

• 46:01Hamilton Morris?

  They didn't talk about, you know, observing QT interval prolongation or something like that. But they knew that it had to be used very cautiously and you had to observe each person as they used it.

• 46:11Tim Ferriss?

  There's certainly a lot more to say about how the people use iboga. There are many different directions we could go. This is as good a place as any to ask you to describe, or actually just answer the question, is iboga itself, this plant from which they derive this sacrament, at risk or threatened in any way? And this is a question of sustainability as the global demand for this continues to accelerate.

• 46:44Hamilton Morris?

  Yes, yeah, no, I've been thinking about this a lot recently. And I was thinking that it's funny that these drug laws were.

• 46:55Hamilton Morris?

  Ostensibly drafted to protect us from drugs, but may have actually had the only benefit of protecting drugs from us. And now that more and more people are recognizing the benefit of these substances, there is going to be a tremendous burden on the natural reserves of things like iboga, ayahuasca, bufalvarias, venom, not to mention the even more unusual things that are out there. And for anyone that does recognize the benefits of these things, it's very important to take sustainability seriously because medicinal plants,

• 47:40Hamilton Morris?

  and especially medicinal animals, are widely documented to be destroyed when they are integrated into a popular medical practice. It doesn't even need to exert a therapeutic effect. Rhinoceros horn, pangolin scale, these are things that have no pharmacological effect whatsoever. Although pangolin scales were reputed to contain tramadol at one point, but they absolutely do not. But that's all it takes, is someone to say something like that. And before you know it, pangolins are severely threatened, or even worse, human intervention with some of these animals can cause the transmission of viruses, cause pandemics.

• 48:23Hamilton Morris?

  I mean, there's a lot of reasons to be very careful about the way that you interact with animals in medical practices unless it's absolutely necessary to do so. And I feel conflicted about iboga because on one hand, I want so much to sing its praises and talk about the tremendous benefit that I think it had for me, even using it just this one time. But I know that when people hear that and understand that, the natural response is going to be, well, I want to try that myself. And An iboga tree has to be about five years old before you can even begin to harvest the roots.

• 49:05Hamilton Morris?

  There's talk about sustainable harvesting where you only cut off half the roots and leave the rest of the shrub alive. I certainly never observed that in Gabon. Every time I saw anyone harvesting roots, they would kill the entire tree. There's talk about different types of hydroponic growth or hairy root culture that can be done to increase the yield. It could also be grown on a larger scale. I did see some people that had small iboga farms in both Cameroon and Gabon. It's possible, but there has to be a strong incentive and the consumer has to be willing to pay the price to know that what they are consuming has been responsibly sourced.

• 49:49Tim Ferriss?

  So you know that I recently wrote and published a blog post on considering a more ethical menu. The piece was targeted at psychedelic users or people who use compounds that often overlap with psychedelic use or administration like combo.

• 50:07Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Tim Ferriss?

  And discussing some of the telescoping potential ramifications of these things becoming 10 times more popular, 100 times more popular, 1,000 times more popular, which is not outside the realm of imagination or possibilities.

• 50:22Hamilton Morris?

  Not at all.

• 50:23Tim Ferriss?

  Actually, very easily could be the case. And there are a lot of points that I tried to describe or make in this piece and people can find it at tim.blog/conservation. It's kicked up quite a lot of discussion and also blowback because some of my recommendations hit a lot of people directly in the wallet who are providers of various things. If we grab one example, let's just take Bufo alvarius and 5-amiodamt as an example. How contained is the ecological impact of synthesizing versus procuring it from these toads? I mean, this is a fairly, I suppose, easy example and this is maybe a good example to start with because others become...

• 51:09Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe a bit more complex to talk about in the sense that if we're talking about MDMA, people can point to deforestation in Cambodia, or they can look at the dumping of various chemicals used in producing MDMA in Holland and so on, and in other locations. But how should people think of synthetics and environmental impact? Is there a way to minimize the impact in the case of, say, 5-MeodMT?

• 51:33Hamilton Morris?

  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. A lot of the examples that you just gave are interesting because they're completely true. Yes, there's deforestation in Cambodia to extract saphereal from these trees. But that doesn't need to be a source of saphereal. That's a product of the black market. That's just because it can be done that way. You can make saphereal any number of other ways. You can make MDMA from black pepper. You can make it from catechol. You can make it from just endless different petroleum products, whatever. It's a relatively simple molecule. There's hundreds of ways that it conceivably could be made that don't involve the destruction of old-growth trees in Cambodia. The only situation where that

• 52:15Hamilton Morris?

  is a necessity is where MDMA is a Schedule I controlled substance, and the manufacture and distribution of it is controlled by the black market, and it's completely unregulated. It's sort of like when people say, "Well, how could you possibly do cocaine? You're supporting the cartels." And I understand the point, but the issue isn't doing cocaine. The issue is the prohibition of cocaine that makes it a black-market commodity that has to be sold by cartels. It could just as easily be a regulated market like anything else, like aspirin. So I think that there's a lot of misplaced moralism in some of these areas.

• 52:55Hamilton Morris?

  And synthesis does not have to involve destruction of the environment at all. 5-MeodMT especially because you can make 5-MeodMT from melatonin. And melatonin, I think, is produced microbially, at least a lot of amino acids are produced microbially. Or there's such an enormous industry for the production of amino acids like tryptophan, that they've figured out ways to produce those on an enormous scale with minimal ecological repercussions. So you can take 100 grams of melatonin and convert that to about 100 grams of 5-MeodMT, which is the equivalent of milking thousands and thousands and thousands of toads.

• 53:38Hamilton Morris?

  And so the question is, why not do that? Well, one reason is that there's a sort of vitalist, animist interest in the fact that it comes from a toad, which I understand. I actually think that's really interesting myself. I don't want to discount that entirely. And so then the issue is, how can we make synthetic materials have the same value as something that is derived from nature? How could you feel that same connection to a synthetic material? Because we think of a synthetic material as something that is soulless, something that is bad. Oh, it comes from some laboratory in China. That means it's bad, it's dirty. It doesn't have the sacred goodness of something that is derived from this toad that lives

• 54:22Hamilton Morris?

  in Sonora and est mates underground for nine months, just like the period of human gestation. And there's so much beautiful symbolism there that of course, this is a transformative, good experience. How could you find that same beautiful symbolism in a synthetic compound? Well, what if you knew that the compound was synthesized by someone who cared, who did it lovingly, who is very dedicated to purity? I mean, you hear stories of Nick Sand clutching the flask of LSD as he synthesizes it and trying to project love into the molecule itself. You know, you can do this to a synthetic compound if you want, and you can confer those same sorts of positive associations.

• 55:02Hamilton Morris?

  You know, you can have animist, essentialist attachments to anything if you want, if you choose. And that's what I think is so funny when people say, how dare you say there's no difference between synthetic and natural? That's actually not what I'm saying. I do believe that there is a difference, but I think we have control over that difference. I think that difference is a product of the value system that we have, and we could just as easily shift it if we wanted to.

• 55:27Tim Ferriss?

  Furthermore, I would say, and this is also what I wrote in that piece at one point, is even if we assume that some of these animal or plant derived options are 20% superior in whatever sense to a synthetic, I would find it hypocritical to...

• 55:47Tim Ferriss?

  inflict ecological damage or encourage increasing levels of ecological damage in the name of pursuing one's own healing if other tools may be adequate. And for that reason, also, if we're just looking at this from a historical and cultural perspective, I think lots of people, and not to malign this, but they want to kind of put a stamp for every plant or animal experience into their psychedelic passport. And I understand the drive. I'm a novelty seeker. I get it. But it's hard to find, I don't think, I would say impossible to find, any single indigenous culture that

• 56:30Tim Ferriss?

  has used the entire pantheon of psychedelics. It's just not something that we see demonstrated by these traditions that are venerated by the very same people who then reject a synthetic. Let me ask a question before I lose the thread. For those people who might synthesize, because I watch footage, whether it's in your show, or I do reading, and I hear about the dumping of solvents and other things after illicit manufacture of different compounds. What would your advice be to someone who is synthesizing anything in terms of minimizing how to dispose of their waste or otherwise to minimize damage? Are there any considerations? And I'm asking this as a non-chemist. I've never synthesized anything.

• 57:15Hamilton Morris?

  Right. It completely depends on what chemicals you're using, because there are many things that are relatively innocuous. You know, you could be using alcohol as a solvent, and then you could just evaporate it into the air, and it's just alcohol. It doesn't matter. Or sodium borohydride might form various borate salts that are innocuous. And then you can do whatever you want with them. You can probably put them in your garden if you want. And other times, you might be working with mercury salts that are deadly poisons. And in that case, it is your responsibility not to introduce them into the environment where they could hurt someone or enter the groundwater. And again, this is why having a regulated system is ideal, because you don't have to

• 57:57Hamilton Morris?

  depend on good intentions of every single person that's making these sort of things. You can leave it up to people that are professionally invested in doing the right thing. That said, for every story that you hear about clandestine chemists dumping

• 58:15Hamilton Morris?

  Solvents and waste material into the environment. There are actually a good number of people who are aware of that stereotype, who go far out of their way not to be like that. Casey Hardison, who's a sort of controversial LSD chemist who many people now have some problems with, but one of the things that he was most proud of was that in his entire LSD lab, all of the waste could be put in one trash can. That he was extremely aware of, you know, I'm doing something that society says is wrong, so I'm going to go above and beyond to do it as well as I possibly can so that no one can accuse me of having damaged the environment in the process of creating this chemical. And I've known a number of other chemists who have the same attitude, who actually,

• 59:00Hamilton Morris?

  not only do they do the right thing, they almost take neurotic pride in never doing any harm to the environment with their synthesis. And there's a whole subclass of chemistry called green chemistry that is dedicated to finding the most environmentally friendly way of producing a given chemical or a given reaction.

• 59:20Tim Ferriss?

  If someone, let's just say, ends up with their garbage can of waste, I don't know if this is something we can talk about, but hypothetically, how would they dispose of that in a responsible way, and I know it depends on the chemicals involved, but let's just say some of them are toxic, while minimally identifying themselves as someone who is engaged in illegal behavior? Does that make sense?

• 59:41Hamilton Morris?

  Of course, of course. It's a really good question. And again, I hate to keep saying this again and again, but it comes down to one of the problems when something is illegal, is you could be somebody that genuinely wants to do the right thing. I've got a little bit of mercury waste. I don't want to just pour this down the drain. I want to do the right thing and give it to a hazardous waste disposal company. But I'm afraid that in doing so, I will incriminate myself and end up in prison. And so I don't want to risk it. This is another attitude that you find. And in those cases, I don't know how to advise people. I would say that before you get involved in anything like that...

• 1:00:26Hamilton Morris?

  Make sure that you have a plan for absolutely everything. I'm not suggesting that people indiscriminately start synthesizing these compounds. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that synthesis is an alternative to harvesting them from the natural world for chemists that are trained and want to do so. I do have a sort of utopian vision where more people are involved in chemistry because I actually think that one of the best ways to reduce problematic relationships with drugs is to have people make their own drugs and grow their own plants. And I think the same is also true of food, by the way. I think if more people grew their own food and prepared their own food, they'd have much, much healthier diets. No one would be eating gummy worms.

• 1:01:11Hamilton Morris?

  There would be a lot less obesity. And it's because we are detached from the process of manufacturing a lot of the things that sustain our life. And if people grew their own mushrooms, I think that they would have a much better experience with those mushrooms because they would know everything that went into producing them. I think the same is true of cannabis. I think the same is true of mescaline-containing cacti. And I think, although this is where it enters a slightly idealistic and unrealistic territory, I think that it's also true of synthetic drugs as well. If you spent a year figuring out how to make MDMA and how to dispose of the waste effectively, there's no way that you would abuse it by the time you were done.

• 1:01:55Hamilton Morris?

  You'd have so much respect for what you had created and the work that went into creating it that you would have to take it seriously.

• 1:02:02Tim Ferriss?

  So to recap, just for the benefit of this podcast, with the assumption that most people are not going to read the piece that I wrote, even though I'll plug it again, it's nothing for sale there. Well, actually, that's not true. There's one link to your pamphlet on...

• 1:02:18Tim Ferriss?

  Related to 5 MEO and synthesis, but all proceeds from that go to supporting research related to Parkinson's disease.

• 1:02:25Hamilton Morris?

  Yes.

• 1:02:26Tim Ferriss?

  So, people can read this at timnublog/conservation, but a few options in terms of lessening damage, and I say this, I should say, because we're talking a lot about synthetics, as someone who's very fond, extremely fond, of whole plant derived or fungi derived psychedelics, whether they be slawseby mushrooms or ayahuasca, which is a combination of the Benistereopsis copi vine and most commonly the chacruna or Psychodria verrita's shrub leaves thereof, I've derived incredible therapeutic value from these things. And I've had to accept the uncomfortable truth that a lot of the sourcing that is currently

• 1:03:11Tim Ferriss?

  going on in the psychedelic world is just unsustainable. It is not scalable and totally unsustainable. I'll offer a few alternatives for people who may be interested in peyote. I would say, please do not use peyote, reserve that for indigenous use. Consider, like you mentioned, other mescaline containing cacti, San Pedro regenerates much more quickly. Combo, I would say just don't do it. Most civilizations have survived and thrived and developed deep spiritual practices without using toads of any type psychedelic animals. So I would argue that you do not need to either, or you shouldn't until you have exhausted all other options. The Sonoran Desert Toad, Bufo alvarius, we talked about synthesis options that have,

• 1:03:55Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, the yield is pretty incredible.

• 1:03:57Hamilton Morris?

  Oh, yes. I mean, this is the other thing, is if you believe in this medicine and you want people to have access to it, this is the way to actually make it available. There's no comparison to toads in terms of how much can be produced this way. This is how to actually get it out there. And there hasn't been a lot of research published on how toad populations have been altered by their recent popularity, but I think it's very telling. You know, if somebody is selling a product and they say it's great, you have to really scrutinize the claim. But if someone has everything to gain and they're telling you that they're doing something bad not to do it, you have to listen very carefully.

• 1:04:39Hamilton Morris?

  So people that were making their living harvesting toad venom were telling me, this is not sustainable. The populations are dwindling and they had every reason to lie about that. They could have just as easily said, "Don't worry about it. There's so many, they're probably just hibernating." But they did not say that. They said that there needs to be an alternative available to people. And I actually see it as a source of inspiration. If you care about these things, then you can show your admiration by studying them and trying to recreate them synthetically to better understand them. I think that there's a tribute to nature and all natural product chemistry,

• 1:05:21Hamilton Morris?

  where you're recognizing this amazing feat of enzymatic synthesis that was conducted by a plant or an animal. And you're saying, "All right, that's a great challenge. I'm going to see if I can do it as well. I'm going to see if I can do it." And if there's more in the venom, although I don't actually think that there is all that much that is contributing, why not try that out as well? You can synthesize bufoctinine, you can synthesize serotonin osulfate if you want. You can synthesize any of these compounds and try them in different combinations. And let that be a challenge and a way of showing your admiration to the toad.

• 1:05:54Tim Ferriss?

  Let's stay on 5 MEODMT for a little bit longer. Well, specifically the toad-derived, quote unquote "toad," as it's often referred to. And I want to preface the question that I'm going to ask, because it's going to upset people, by saying, "I am in love with many of the traditions related to sacred plants in Central and South America. I've spent a lot of time in both places. I've read libraries full of books and have tremendous respect for these indigenous cultures and traditions." That said, let me ask the question. How much evidence is there to support that there is a long history of indigenous use of the Sonoran Desert toad?

• 1:06:40Hamilton Morris?

  As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no history whatsoever. Yeah. And it's a complicated point that I tried to make in my piece, and I think I ended up confusing a lot of people, because the history is that there was an anthropologist named Jeanette Runquist, who had found a Cherokee midden pile that contained a lot of toads and had concluded, I think maybe even partially on the basis of some work Alexandra Shulgin had done and her correspondence with Shulgin, that it was maybe possible that they were using it as a psychoactive drug, which was a compelling hypothesis, and it's worthy

• 1:07:21Hamilton Morris?

  of consideration, but subsequent investigations have shown that those toads could not have been Bufo alvarius, which is the only species that produces five amiodamt, and that there's really almost no way that it was any psychoactive toad, and that there's very strong evidence that they were using the toads as food. So you have no evidence of a psychedelic toad in that region and a history of using toads as food by those same people. It seems pretty clear that you can't point to that and say, this is evidence of ancient smoking of Bufo alvarius venom. It simply isn't. But to make things more complicated, this misconception served as the inspiration for an independent researcher named Ken Nelson in the 80s.

• 1:08:05Hamilton Morris?

  So he read this article, which got a little bit of popular press in magazines like Omni, which were very, very influential in the 1980s. And he decided to investigate it himself, thinking that he was rediscovering an ancient practice, but he wasn't rediscovering it. He was actually discovering it for the first time, which is just a really, actually very confusing turn of events. But that is what happened. He is, according to known history, the first human being to smoke the venom of Bufo alvarius.

• 1:08:38Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, just the trial and error and balls.

• 1:08:45Tim Ferriss?

  And also, intelligence that are encapsulated by Ken, I mean, it's really mind-boggling how much he was able to do and document.

• 1:08:57Hamilton Morris?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I think it's inspiring because it shows, you know, during the same period in the 1980s, when things were looking really, really bad for psychedelic research, how one person could make such an interesting and now culturally very important discovery just on the basis of their own curiosity.

• 1:09:16Tim Ferriss?

  I'll also add one more thing, and please, Hamilton, call me out if I'm wandering astray and getting things wrong. But I think another element or aspect of this that might be confusing to people is, I think what you're saying, if I'm hearing you correctly, is that there's no compelling evidence to suggest indigenous or historical use, up until a handful of decades ago, of the Sonoran Desert toad as a source of 5-MEO DMT.

• 1:09:47Hamilton Morris?

  That is correct, yes.

• 1:09:48Tim Ferriss?

  What you are not saying is that there's no historical evidence of indigenous use of 5-MEO DMT-containing plants.

• 1:09:59Hamilton Morris?

  That is correct, yes.

• 1:10:00Tim Ferriss?

  That is, yeah, that is the case. But if we're looking at toad specifically, and I'm kind of beating this dead horse, folks, because I have seen how popular toad has become in psychedelic circles, and it's very, very worrisome to me, just in terms of scalability. So that's why we're spending so much time on this. I should also say, just as a caveat, that I have, quite apart from the ecological impact, seen some very experienced psychonauts get knocked sideways and untethered by 5-MEO DMT experiences. Not to say that

• 1:10:40Tim Ferriss?

  that is always going to be the case, but at least anecdotally, among the circles that I know well... It has been alarming how many examples there are of people getting destabilized by their experiences. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

• 1:10:58Hamilton Morris?

  Oh, yes. I mean, I think one of the unfortunate things about 5-MeodMT is its name. So people think 5-MeodMT, that must be a version of DMT, it must be similar to DMT. But it's more distant from DMT than psilocin and psilocybin. You know, it's a pharmacologically and chemically and experientially, crucially, different compound. It's so different that I don't even think the word psychedelic really fully captures what it is and what it does. It's operating on a level that is different from any other psychedelic. And I'm not just talking about its potency, there's something else going on. It's not, doesn't cause visual hallucinations for most people.

• 1:11:42Hamilton Morris?

  It dissociates you entirely from your environment. You become largely unresponsive at high doses, almost as if you've taken an anesthetic. And it can produce very violent physical reactions for people as well. It's really like a near-death experience more than what people think of when they think of a psychedelic experience.

• 1:12:04Tim Ferriss?

  For all of those reasons and more, folks, please consider other options or a synthetic route with respect to Toad. In the new season, not to go from like horror to horror, you explored xenon gas.

• 1:12:18Hamilton Morris?

  Yes.

• 1:12:19Tim Ferriss?

  So I think this is a useful place to talk about not necessarily risks of compounds, but risks that can exist external to the compound or even the dose of a compound itself. So we were texting about this a few days ago, but can you provide a little bit of background on why you have a gas in the most recent season? And what some of its effects are? And then? Talk about what you observed in this clinic that scared the living shit out of me.

• 1:13:00Hamilton Morris?

  Yes, yeah. So for those that aren't aware of xenon, it is an element. It's on the periodic table of elements in a column called the noble gases. It's on the right most side and at the top you have helium, which everyone is familiar with. Then neon, which again, everyone is familiar with. Then argon, which maybe a few less people are familiar with. Then krypton and then xenon. Xenon is the heaviest noble gas that is not radioactive. Then you have radon, which is unstable. And if you've heard of xenon, you probably only know about it in the context of lighting. It's used in car headlights and projector lights and things like that. And it's very, very rare in our atmosphere.

• 1:13:41Hamilton Morris?

  It's 0.0000087% of Earth's atmosphere. So there's a little tiny bit in every breath that you take. But in order to concentrate enough of it to fill a tank, you need to distill millions of liters of air. You have to compress it and cool it down to a liquid and then fractionally distill off the nitrogen and the oxygen. And finally, after you've removed all the other gases, you're left with a small xenon fraction, which is why it's so expensive. A single breath of xenon costs somewhere in the range of $60. And that's unfortunate because for anesthesiologists that have examined xenon clinically,

• 1:14:26Hamilton Morris?

  they've concluded that it has a number of attributes that make it essentially the perfect anesthetic. It is not metabolized in any way. It can be recycled indefinitely. It's extremely potent, more potent than nitrous oxide. When it's given to a patient, they recover very, very rapidly after the xenon gas is removed within seconds. And the anesthesia also begins within seconds. And it has no known toxicity. So it is arguably the perfect anesthetic and maybe even the perfect drug. It's incredibly, incredibly euphoric. But, and this actually goes back to these, again, I was saying earlier about how there's so many different factors that determine addiction. When people are talking about addiction potential,

• 1:15:11Hamilton Morris?

  there could be the greatest drug in the world, but it doesn't matter if a single dose of it costs thousands of dollars or it's impossible to obtain. And I think xenon is an example of that. It is a drug that Is extremely enjoyable, but it's just something that nobody has access to. I never thought I would have the opportunity to use it. And it wasn't until I was visiting a chemist friend in New Zealand. I was in 2014, I was on my way back to the United States. I was about to get on the plane and he said, oh, before you go, I need to show you. I have this tank of xenon and I couldn't believe it. That it seemed so absurdly extravagant. It seemed almost on par with, you know, using gold or diamonds as a psychoactive drug. And I had that opportunity to inhale one balloon full of xenon.

• 1:15:55Hamilton Morris?

  And I, it was a cherished memory of this, you know, one absurd extravagant encounter with xenon gas, which is a source of fascination for anyone that cares about the periodic table.

• 1:16:10Tim Ferriss?

  Now, when you say balloon.

• 1:16:13Hamilton Morris?

  It was a balloon of sorts.

• 1:16:17Tim Ferriss?

  May or may not have been a condom.

• 1:16:20Tim Ferriss?

  So you're talking about this perfect drug. I think you're talking about it as a perfect drug from the standpoint of euphoria. I want you to correct me if I'm wrong. The first time that xenon ever came on my radar, outside of hearing about it in passing, maybe in high school on the periodic table, was as a possible performance enhancing drug at the Sochi Olympics for endurance. I think it was for biathlon or any number of other sports, but that it was being used for endurance enhancing properties as a performance enhancing drug. I don't know if there's any real plausible mechanism to explain that, but what are

• 1:17:02Tim Ferriss?

  the medical uses of xenon outside of inducing euphoria?

• 1:17:11Hamilton Morris?

  First as an anesthetic, but it's not used for that in the United States at this time. It was used experimentally for a brief period by an anesthesiologist named Mervyn Mays and a few others have investigated it, but it has not been approved by the FDA for that purpose and all uses experimental. There is a pharmaceutical company called Nobilis. It's trying to develop and release a xenon inhaler for PTSD. They actually sent me a prototype of it, which is the first time I've heard of a psychoactive drug inhaler for treatment of a psychological disorder. Very interesting idea. I don't know if it will ever come to market, but it was really cool to see somebody looking into that. In terms of performance enhancing, I think that it's basically working as a sort

• 1:17:56Hamilton Morris?

  of oxygen deprivation type intervention where in addition to the anesthetic euphorian effects that conceivably could allow an athlete to get a little extra workout in, I mean, this is, I think, among elite Olympic-type athletes. It would be far too expensive to use under any sort of normal training. And that was about it. You know, I had this one experience. I wrote it up as a fun novelty that I would never get to do again. And then somebody wrote to me and they said, you know, I was just in the sauna at the gym and some guy said that he's owns a xenon clinic. What's the deal with that? And I thought, well, I

• 1:18:40Hamilton Morris?

  don't know what the deal is with that. I've never heard of a xenon clinic. And I said, you know, could you get me this guy's phone number and could I talk to him? And he said, oh, you know, I'll do what I can. He sends me his phone number. We start talking. In the English language, there's almost nothing about this. This is all happening in Russia, Czech Republic, India as well, apparently. But if you look online, at least before I released my episode, there was almost nothing about xenon as a psychoactive drug. But these clinics are opening up where they give people xenon as a therapy for a variety of different ailments. And so I went and spent some time at one of these clinics and it was a fascinating and somewhat frightening experience.

• 1:19:23Tim Ferriss?

  It was one of the most surreal, I would say, maybe that's the word, surreal 20 or 30 minutes of television I've ever seen. I won't ruin the surprise, but there's xenon gas, there's operatic singing, there are breatharians, in other words, people who claim to survive on prana alone without eating food, which ends up being particularly relevant when we get to the horror story that I hope you'll share. It's, uh, and also the bizarreness of hearing how deep your voice becomes.

• 1:20:06Hamilton Morris?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:20:07Tim Ferriss?

  On xenon.

• 1:20:07Hamilton Morris?

  Yes, yes, it's, it's really funny. It's also funny, I, there's a number of videos on YouTube of people inhaling xenon exclusively for the purpose of altering the sound of their voice. I think this is another example of this sort of puritanical attitude that people have. So all these, if you inhale xenon gas to change the sound of your voice for a YouTube video, that's totally fine. I upload a video of myself inhaling xenon gas. My voice has changed, but like everyone else, I get high. The only difference is in the other videos, they want to change their voice. The highness is incidental. In my video, I want to get high and the voice change is incidental, but in my case, the video is demonetized.

• 1:20:53Tim Ferriss?

  You bacchanalian hedonist.

• 1:20:56Hamilton Morris?

  But that, I think that is sort of emblematic of the way these things are carried out in our culture. Two people can inhale the exact same gas, but if you're doing it with the intention of feeling euphoria, that's unacceptable. But if you're doing it to playfully alter the sound of your voice, then sure, that's fine. You can advertise with that.

• 1:21:17Tim Ferriss?

  Since I've been dragging this out with foreshadowing, what was the horror story?

• 1:21:21Hamilton Morris?

  Okay, okay, the horror story, yes. So in order to do the work that I do, I've had to cultivate a very non-judgmental attitude. And I often get messages from people saying, you know, how could you have possibly let this person say this? Or how could you have talked to this or that sort of person? But I think the best strategy, if you're trying to learn from someone else, is just to listen and to not judge them. And I've never been the sort of person that wants to catch people looking their worst. I always want to give people the opportunity to be shown the way they want to be seen. And I certainly did not go to this clinic with the intention of making anyone look bad. The novelty of xenon being used as a therapy was more than enough for me. And if people had had a perfectly

• 1:22:06Hamilton Morris?

  good time and everyone had benefited, that would have been the episode.

• 1:22:10Tim Ferriss?

  There was footage of people having positive experiences.

• 1:22:13Hamilton Morris?

  Yes, my experience was extremely positive, but over the time that I was there, it became clear that there were some risks associated with xenon therapy.

• 1:22:24Hamilton Morris?

  They were giving it to children. That I don't think is inherently bad, but it does raise the bar in terms of medical supervision. A lot of the research that has been done in the use of xenon as an anesthetic has actually been done on neonates. So it's not as if there's something inherently bad about giving this to children, or in that case infants. But you want to make sure that there's someone with training, at least as an anesthetist, who is available should anything go wrong. Then there was the issue with people potentially developing a problematic relationship, some sort of dependence. And again, you would never hear xenon discussed as an addictive drug because most people

• 1:23:09Hamilton Morris?

  don't have a tank of xenon. They could never hope to become addicted to xenon. But I think for some of these people who are working with it continuously, they may have developed a slightly problematic relationship with it. And I even heard a rumor that is unconfirmed, so maybe I shouldn't say it, but I heard a rumor that there was another xenon clinic operator in the Czech Republic who died as well. So this is an occupational hazard. The same thing is true of nitrous oxide. It's a problem in dentistry that dentists and dental hygienists develop addiction to nitrous oxide because they have tanks of it available and it's very easy after a stressful day to sit down in the dentist's chair and unwind for a few hours.

• 1:23:50Hamilton Morris?

  I spoke with one dentist who, you know, had pretty much lost everything because he enjoyed, he told me that he wasn't addicted to nitrous oxide and he wasn't addicted to Prince, but he was addicted to the combination of listening to Prince on nitrous oxide.

• 1:24:14Tim Ferriss?

  Dangerous, dangerous cocktail for your professional future.

• 1:24:17Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah, so that's something to avoid. So the other thing, of course, is that when you're administering an anesthetic, somebody is by definition unconscious. And if they vomit while they are unconscious, it can very easily be fatal if they inhale any of their vomit. So you have people laying on their backs who haven't fasted, which is standard before...

• 1:24:40Tim Ferriss?

  In this clinic, you mean? Fasting was not

• 1:24:42Hamilton Morris?

  It was not standard, yes. But it should, before the administration of a general anesthetic, someone should always fast, because if you vomit while you're unconscious, it can be fatal. So they were not asking anybody to fast. This ironically breatharian, someone who claims to never consume food, started to vomit while they were unconscious, while wearing this mask, which is quadruple strapped to the face in order to prevent any leakage of the precious xenon gas. And it was absolutely terrifying. And that was a moment where I realized, you know, I don't want to make anyone look bad, that's not what I got into this to do, but I also don't want to hide bad things

• 1:25:25Hamilton Morris?

  that I observe, because you can very easily hurt people that way as well. And it was a kind of difficult moment of realizing that there was something potentially dangerous going on, and I had to acknowledge it. The final thing that was not captured on film, it was not part of the episode, because again, xenon is so precious, it has to be recycled. When it's recycled, it's passed through a closed loop that contains calcium hydroxide, which scrubs CO2. I wanted to film a time lapse of this color change indicator in these calcium hydroxide beads changing just to show the passage of time. So I asked a producer that I was working with to just inhale into the calcium hydroxide repeatedly, so I could film this color change reaction.

• 1:26:09Hamilton Morris?

  And he's doing that, I'm filming the time lapse, I go into another room to film something else. When I come back, someone who was working at the clinic said, why don't we just give him some xenon as well? You know, he's here, he's sitting. And I said, oh, it's very expensive, you don't have to do that. He said, oh no, I insist, I insist that we give him some xenon. And I said, okay, well, it's very generous of you. And the producer wanted to try the xenon. And so he hooked him up to the xenon, and I left again. And then when I came back 20 minutes later, not only was this producer unconscious, under the influence of xenon, the proprietor of the clinic was using Xenon himself and was also unconscious and wasn't watching him. He couldn't wait to use it himself. And that's when I thought, okay, there's something

• 1:26:53Tim Ferriss?

  That's terrifying.

• 1:26:54Hamilton Morris?

  There's something terrifying going on here. And that same person tragically died shortly after we finished filming the episode. So, you know, I don't want to claim that Xenon is dangerous. I don't even know that I think that those clinics should be shut down. But I think that it's very clear that additional caution is required.

• 1:27:17Tim Ferriss?

  You have a very interdisciplinary bent and interdisciplinary approach. You have a journalistic eye, you have scientific training, you are a practicing chemist, you are doing research, and you have become this figurehead and magnet for all sorts of correspondence. So I think you have a very good 30,000-foot view of a lot of intersecting areas of interest and activity within the, let's just call it the psychedelic realm. Does anything come to mind if I ask, what would you like to see more or less of in the psychedelic space?

• 1:28:03Hamilton Morris?

  Yes. One thing that comes to mind that I don't have a good answer for, but something that I have come to appreciate more and more as I've gotten older, is when I first started researching the subject, I was a pure reductionist. And I had very little appreciation for the ritual associated with a lot of these things. And the more I experienced these rituals, the more I came to respect them. And the aboga ceremony was the moment where I realized that the ritual could be as powerful as the substance itself. And the integration of

• 1:28:45Hamilton Morris?

  that ritual could dramatically magnify the therapeutic properties of the drug. The reason that I felt that way is because this is an endurance ritual. It's five days of fasting, five days of almost continuous dance and drumming. And

• 1:29:03Hamilton Morris?

  With the aboga, you start to appreciate things that are very difficult to articulate. I had a rattle in my hand and I was tired at times. I didn't want to rattle anymore. And I would think, there's 20 people around me that are rattling. Do I really have to rattle continuously all night long? Haven't we rattled enough? And then, and then it hit me that yes, I did have to rattle. Because my rattle motivated everyone else's rattle in the same way that their rattle motivated my rattle. And every single person's movement played off of everyone else's movement. And it was my responsibility, no matter how tired I was,

• 1:29:45Hamilton Morris?

  to put every ounce of energy that I had into this ceremony. Because I was a part of it and because we were all connected. Now, that sounds like a pretty kind of new age idea, but it felt entirely logical. It felt completely rationalist to me. I am a part of this. Everything that I do influences everyone else. If I let my motivation slip for a moment, it could have an effect on someone else. It could have a butterfly downstream effect that diminishes the entire ceremony. And I can't allow that to happen. I have to give this every ounce of energy and enthusiasm that I have. And that was part of it. The other part of it, I would actually liken, bizarrely enough,

• 1:30:28Hamilton Morris?

  to breatharianism, which is, I've watched some documentaries on breatharianism. And I, you know, after this experience, I started reading about it and learning about it. And it's very, very easy to make fun of breatharians. I, of course, would have made fun of them because, of course, you need food to survive. Of course, you need water to survive. Obviously, this is one of the most obvious things in the world. But then I started thinking, well, wait a second. Is it really fair to just call these people idiots? Why might somebody do this? Why might somebody even think about the idea of breatharianism? And what I came to realize is that it's a tremendously empowering idea to think that there are reserves of energy within you that you can tap into.

• 1:31:11Hamilton Morris?

  And if you have enough will, enough power within you, you can subsist off your own life force indefinitely. And while there was no breatharianism in the Aboga ceremony, I think that spirit of reserves of energy within you was a tremendous part. There is no need to get tired because there's more inside you. There's no need to eat. You can keep going. There's no need to drink water. You're not going to die of dehydration right there and then. You'll be OK. You don't even need to pee. You can just keep going. It's all within you. And that was a really empowering idea. And it doesn't matter if you are addicted to drugs or not. It doesn't matter if you're religious or not. The idea that there are tremendous reserves of energy within you is something that can

• 1:31:56Hamilton Morris?

  benefit everyone. And I don't know how that could be applied in our current medical practice.

• 1:32:01Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. Yeah, the translation of ritual, although I suppose it's, we already have ritual in our medical practices, they are just, they just differ very widely from the indigenous rituals, right? We've got, there's certain protocols and outfits and hierarchies. I'm not saying they're unnecessary, but they form in some ways their own codified set of rituals.

• 1:32:30Hamilton Morris?

  And they've started to introduce them. You know, Bill Richards does talk about the things that are done in Johns Hopkins. And, you know, they serve the psilocybin capsule, which of course is synthetic psilocybin, in a copal burner that's sort of like a chalice. And they have a rose at the end of the session that people examine, and which has become a sort of psychedelic tradition in 20th century psychotherapy in and of itself, where people can see the rose at the end and in the petals, they can recognize their own mortality. So there are rituals that are being integrated. How widespread these will become? Is another question, but I think that's actually as big a question as the chemistry

• 1:33:13Hamilton Morris?

  and the pharmacology of these substances is how can we develop the best rituals to ensure that people are getting the best and the most out of them?

• 1:33:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, set in setting, right? I mean, I want to pursue this same question a little bit further, but before I do, let me ask, given the multiplication of fly-by-night rent-a-shamans in South America and the fraud and disaster and sexual abuse and other things that can befall a tourist in South America, are there also fly-by-night operators who are dealing in iboga?

• 1:33:48Hamilton Morris?

  Oh, I'm sure. And by the way, I am not saying this to make any sort of claim like you have to have a traditional buiti iboga ceremony. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm really just trying to appreciate the power of some of these traditions. And I actually think that they can paradoxically be disempowering as well. If you think that you need someone else to give you this experience, that you have no intuitive understanding of your own psychology, that you need someone else to explain life to you, that's a problem as well. There's a balance. And I actually think that it probably helped me a little bit that I don't speak French. And so I was able to absorb some of the symbolism, I was able to absorb some of the rituals,

• 1:34:31Hamilton Morris?

  but I didn't fully understand any of it. And I learned what I could, I had a translator, I asked questions, but it would be a huge mistake to say that I fully understood their rituals. I just think that there's a lot to be done in the way that we administer these substances and the cultures that have spent a few generations figuring it out. Some of them seem to have done a really remarkable job, but that's not to say that people should invalidate their own intuition and they should obviously be very, very careful.

• 1:35:06Tim Ferriss?

  There are some... Really outstanding scientists who are not first and foremost psychedelic researchers who are going to be coming into this field, who I think will do a really nice job of looking at context in some of these inputs, although they might not put transplanting of ritual on their initial list, they might be looking at olfactory cues and things like that, but Adam Gazali at UCSF is going to be stepping into this world. I'm really excited to see what he does. And I'm sure there are others. Let's talk about the ritual a little bit further. So I may get a little far from shore with the initial question, which was, what would you like to see more or less of? We can just bookmark that. I think it's important

• 1:35:49Tim Ferriss?

  to also note, which you already described in part with this changing of Buiti ceremony to address this new problem of, say, tramadol addiction or addiction that they're experiencing in their society or surrounding societies, that these traditions and rituals are not static in the sense that one shouldn't feel that in order to have the one and only authentic ayahuasca ceremony, they need to go find a certain person from a certain tribe because the real thing has been frozen in the amber, amber, amber, has been frozen in the amber

• 1:36:32Tim Ferriss?

  in a certain village in South America. That is to say that people have been mixing and matching all along. So if you look at the traditional ayahuasca, and by traditional, I mean, pre-Spanish Inquisition, kind of pre-Mestizo tradition ayahuasca ceremonies, very often it was only the ayahuascaero, only the shaman, or they wouldn't call themselves that, who would drink for purposes of diagnosis, or divination, or whatever the purpose might be, prophecy. And that if you look at even in the remotest parts of the upper Amazon, for instance, some of these ceremonies, you're going to find elements of other languages, say, certain

• 1:37:14Tim Ferriss?

  types of Quechua that don't occur natively in those regions, you're going to find things like Agua de Florida, Florida water, which we've both had experiences with, which was originally manufactured in the United States and is a very strong cologne. I don't know how it's it made its way into the remotest parts of the Amazon. Maybe you do. I suspect it might have something to do with the rubber industry.

• 1:37:41Hamilton Morris?

  That's a great question. I'd love to know the answer.

• 1:37:44Tim Ferriss?

  But you find it all over the place. Agua de Cananga, Cananga water also, at least one of the most common versions of it, initially manufactured in the United States. And so these kind of syncretic hybrids are found everywhere, which is to say, I think we should give ourselves license to continue to experiment with these new combinations.

• 1:38:04Hamilton Morris?

  Oh, absolutely. Yes. I mean, Christianity has permeated every great psychedelic tradition internationally. It's part of the Buiti tradition. You bow down to Christ. It's part of Mazatzic salvia and mushroom ceremonies. It's part of the Native American Church in the United States. It's part of Wechol traditions as well. It's certainly present in a lot of South American shamanism. So I don't think I can think of a single psychedelic tradition that doesn't strongly include Christianity and Christian symbolism. So that right there is evidence that these traditions are evolving. They evolved to reflect the environment, to

• 1:38:48Hamilton Morris?

  reflect the best practices of the people who are engaging with these plants. And I think that we have a lot of room for growth and improvement.

• 1:38:59Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anything else that worries you right now with respect to the explosion of attention and popularity and capital, the influx of new participants in the psychedelic space? Like, what are you most optimistic about and what are you most concerned by?

• 1:39:19Hamilton Morris?

  I'm very concerned by the hype phase that we talked about, that there's a lot of people that are interested in the money, and that's okay. I don't think there's anything wrong with money. And I don't think there's anything wrong from wanting to sell or profit from psychedelics. But it's definitely a problem if that interferes with people's appreciation of them, if they start behaving in corrupt or unethical ways. And journalists right now love to write positive stories about psychedelics because the pendulum of novelty has swung in the direction of describing psychedelics as something new and good. And it's fashionable to talk about how prohibition is a mistake and these psychedelics are valuable medicines. And look at all these people at Johns Hopkins University.

• 1:40:03Hamilton Morris?

  They just did this or that. So that's the big new thing. Well, what happens when that gets a little bit old? And what happens when, I don't know, someone has a bad experience? Maybe a celebrity has a bad experience and they decide that mushrooms caused their psychosis. And then what? And we start writing stories about that. Maybe we went too far. Maybe someone has some kind of problem. I mean, historically, that is the way these things go. They become very popular. Then Art Linkletter's daughter jumps out a window. Or someone decides that Timothy Leary is crazy and he's emblematic of the problems with psychedelics. And that becomes the story. So I just hope that everyone will be responsible in their use

• 1:40:46Hamilton Morris?

  and will recognize that it is up to them to ensure that the mistakes of the past aren't repeated.

• 1:40:53Tim Ferriss?

  What books? There's a long list. I've seen your library. You have a lot of books related to psychedelics. If you could assign required reading for anyone involved with psychedelics, whether using, administering, pursuing them in the form of a business. I know that's very, very broad. But are there any books that stand out to you?

• 1:41:20Hamilton Morris?

  Oh, well, P call and T call are the two that I would say, read those first. And thankfully, they're long enough that I think if people actually took my advice and read them by the time they got to the end, they wouldn't need advice on further book recommendations. But-

• 1:41:37Hamilton Morris?

  Those are the big ones. You know, with Iboga and Bouiti religion, there's a very rare book that you can find PDFs of online by UChicago anthropologist whose last name is Fernandez. I'm trying to remember his first name. It's called Bouiti, that's the name of the book, published in the 60s or early 70s. That's a great text. That's pretty much all that's out there in English. Most of the Bouiti literature is in French, unfortunately. When it comes to psyllacyn, psyllacyn mushrooms, obviously there's Terrence McKenna and Paul Stamets that have contributed really interesting books on the subject, depending on whether you're interested in cultivation or mushrooms in general. For mesclun-containing cacti,

• 1:42:21Hamilton Morris?

  Douglas Sharon wrote a beautiful book called The Wizard of the Four Winds that goes into Peruvian cactus shamanism that I recommend. I could recommend a lot of books. They might be a little bit on the technical side for the average reader. I mean, there's a lot. It really depends on what you want to learn about. In some of these areas, there's less literature. There aren't many books that I would recommend on 5-Meodmt and Bufo alvarius with, and this is very self-serving, I'm aware, with the exception of this book that I am republishing right now. It's the original book. It's maybe 10 pages long, something like that, 15 pages long. It's very short, but I think that it tells you everything that you need to know about Bufo alvarius, written by the man who discovered that the

• 1:43:03Hamilton Morris?

  venom could be smoked, Ken Nelson. And then I expanded it a little bit to include some historical background. The whole thing is 30 pages long. It's a booklet, very, very short, but I think it's good. And I think that the other books that are not scientific texts, like there's a UTexas monograph called Evolution in the Genus Bufo, but that's chemical analysis. I mean, it's great if you're a scientist who's interested in Bufo alvarius, but in terms of a larger appreciation of 5-Meodmt, I mean, you have other books, but they tend to be a little bit more in the new age vein.

• 1:43:38Tim Ferriss?

  There's a lot of garbage out there.

• 1:43:39Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:40Tim Ferriss?

  On all of these things that we're discussing. What is the URL again for the pamphlet?

• 1:43:45Hamilton Morris?

  Yes, that is www.sychedelictoadofthesenorandesert.com. I wish I'd just gotten psychedelic toad.

• 1:43:57Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Hamilton, we've covered a lot of ground and we could go for another five hours, but maybe we'll save a little in reserve for our next round. I don't think there will be, even if I exhausted myself, I think we would still have lots of material. It's about to get really interesting. I think there's gonna be a lot to talk about in the coming years. Oh, I think so too. I think there's going to be an absolute cyclone of activity and also conflict, intellectual property being one of kind of the flagpoles that I'm gonna watch very closely. And innovation, I mean, a lot of novel psychedelics being pursued

• 1:44:41Tim Ferriss?

  by many for-profit companies, bigger and bigger players coming into the space, lots of research centers being established at various universities, and I'm thrilled that this appears to be a field that is more and more viable as a career path for researchers and scientists. Yes, me too. Is there anything else that you'd like to say to my audience, request of my audience, a haiku that you'd like to read, anything at all? No, it's just great talking to you. Yeah, you too, man. It's good to see you. And special thanks to the Red Baron,

• 1:45:23Tim Ferriss?

  who did many flybys in our Audio Verite conversation here in downtown Austin. And for everybody listening, we will put show notes at Tim'dUpLog forward slash podcast with links to everything that we've discussed. And until next time, be safe, be open-minded, and try the Hippocratic Oath when it comes to psychedelics. First, do no harm, or at the very least, do as little harm as possible. And thanks for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday?

• 1:46:06Tim Ferriss?

  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. 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.

• 1:46:51Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:47:33Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:48:17Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:49:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:49:35Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:51:05Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:51:50Tim Ferriss?

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