Hamilton Morris - Creating The Future Of Psychedelics | Modern Wisdom Podcast 284

Hamilton Morris is a journalist, documentary producer and a chemist. Hamilton's Pharmacopeia is one of the most interesting documentaries around chemistry, psychoactive drugs, psychedelic culture and traditional uses for plant medicine ever. Sadly Season 3 is the last one, but Hamilton joins me today to talk about his interest in consciousness, why chemistry hasn't captured culture like other sciences, why Mkat failed because of a branding issue, why we should be synthesising DMT ourselves instead of squeezing Bufo Alvarius the psychedelic toad of the Sonoran Desert and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount off perfect teeth at https://www.dwaligners.co.uk (use code WISDOM10) Extra Stuff: Buy Hamilton's New Pamphlet - https://www.psychedelictoadofthesonorandesert.com Hamilton's Pharmacopeia - https://g.co/kgs/ASx1sU Follow Hamilton on Twitter - https://twitter.com/HamiltonMorris Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #hamiltonmorris #psychedelics #bufoalvarius - 00:00 Intro 00:35 What is Hamilton’s Work? 04:38 Why Isn’t Chemistry More Popular? 08:33 Can Science Explain Consciousness? 13:17 Psychedelics in Culture 22:51 Are Psychedelics Spiritual or Scientific? 30:10 The Experience of Using Psychedelics 38:47 Effects of Legalising Drugs 47:03 Ethics of Party Drugs 1:03:29 Hamilton’s Respect for Drugs 1:08:21 The Issue with the Media 1:17:11 Future of Psychedelics 1:19:38 Where to Find Hamilton - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think that there are a lot of dark psychological trends in our society. People are spending all of their time in front of computers. People are, they're not reading, they're detached from certain aspects of reality. They're disconnected from each other. And I think that they're disconnected from the drugs that they use. They're disconnected from the food that they eat. They're disconnected from almost every aspect of their lives. And I think that drugs could have far reaching positive effects.

• 0:35Chris Williamson?

  If you meet someone at a party for the first time and they ask, what do you do? What's your answer?

• 0:42Speaker 00

  It depends on what I'm doing at the time because I do a number of different things. If I'm directing a TV show, then I'll say, I direct a TV show. If I'm writing, I'll say, I'm writing an article or I'm doing research on this story for a magazine piece or something like that. And if I'm primarily doing chemistry, I'll say, I'm doing chemistry right now. I'm doing some chemistry. So that's, it just depends on what I'm doing. Cause I do different, I've tried to balance these three components of my life. And as best I can, not only balance them, but allow them to feed off of each other and integrate them into each other in an interesting way.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  So I think that's actually been very helpful.

• 1:31Chris Williamson?

  What ties those three things together?

• 1:35Speaker 00

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

• 2:16Chris Williamson?

  I think I've heard you say before that a lot of chemistry is in not superbly accessible formats, a lot of it's in quite sort of difficult to understand written words, and that was one of the reasons why you enjoy doing the filmmaking as well, to make it a bit more accessible.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's kind of amazing to me, given how many people have cameras and the existence of YouTube and the existence of this international chemistry community, how many basic chemistry things seem to have never been filmed before. Like, I was talking with a chemist acquaintance in Australia a couple nights ago, who's doing this really cool project of trying to synthesize this substance called cubane. Have you ever heard of this before?

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  No, what is it?

• 3:04Speaker 00

  For chemists, this is like one of the coolest things ever created. It's a cube made of carbon, so it's eight carbon atoms that are connected in a cube, and it's very, very hard to do that because carbon doesn't want to have 90-degree angles. It's a very strained bond for a carbon atom, and this guy is doing it in his garage, which I just think is so cool. But this is like a very famous chemical. It's in most textbooks, and I was thinking, I've never seen a photograph of cubane. I don't know if cubane has ever been photographed before. I don't know if, you know, like, there's a lot of industrially

• 3:47Speaker 00

  important, academically important reactions that basically are visually unknown to people. They have no idea what they actually look like. And so that was another big part of it, is like, one of the, you know, one of the, I think the most amazing things that I have learned from years of doing lab work is that chemistry is beautiful, and having the ability to bring that beauty to people, to show them, you know, well, you might see methamphetamine synthesis as this exclusively negative thing, or you're only thinking about it in terms of its potentially destructive effect on society, but what about the beauty of a solvated electron?

• 4:31Speaker 00

  I mean, it's pretty remarkable.

• 4:33Chris Williamson?

  Some people go to bed thinking about that at night. I do all the time. Um, something that I thought of while I was watching the most recent season of your show and your love for chemistry sort of comes across really strongly in it is there isn't. I don't think there is the same societal, cultural fervor and interest in chemistry as there is perhaps in physics and biology at the moment. I'm not sure whether you get the sense of this, but when we think about all of the, the Large Hadron Collider and we're searching for extraterrestrials and we're messaging extraterrestrials and there's new particles being formed and stuff like that. And then CRISPR gene editing, the side of, I don't know whether that's technically chemistry or biology or somewhere in between the two.

• 5:16Chris Williamson?

  But still, like, I just feel that things like this perhaps don't get the level of public exposure that their rival sciences might do.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  I agree completely. It's absolutely true. And I find it a little bizarre. That physics and astrophysics of all things dominate pop science discourse. This discipline that is more disconnected from our everyday life than almost anything else. And I'm sure there's some astrophysicists listening to this saying like, what the fuck did he just say?

• 5:55Speaker 00

  But that is, that is my feeling. It is, you know, like, black holes are obviously totally fascinating. And I am not going to suggest for a moment that people shouldn't be interested in black holes or neutron stars or anything like that. It's totally, totally fascinating. I'm fascinated by it, but at the same time, it's almost like science fiction. It's almost like fantasy. It has no connection to our lives whatsoever, as remarkable as it is, whereas chemistry.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Is so insanely important to our everyday existence and is happening immediately around us, inside us, in front of us. It's controlling every aspect of our reality all the time, and it's considered boring. So that is something that I do find remarkable. And, you know, and it's not only remarkable, I think it's, I've asked myself, why? How could this have happened? How has big astrophysics destroyed the small interest in chemistry that should be, should be present in every person? And, you know, I think there's a lot of reasons

• 7:07Speaker 00

  for it, but I do think this kind of like safety culture, fear of the power of chemistry, fear of psychoactive drugs, fear of explosives, fear of poisons, fear of toxic wastes, all these different things have just created a culture where we've kind of brushed chemistry to the side and decided that it's boring, dangerous. The word chemical is a bad thing for many people. They, you know, chemophobia is what chemists call it, where someone will say, oh, this food doesn't contain chemicals. And people will say that's a good thing. Of course, all food is made of chemicals. Chemicals are matter. So it's just like, you know, it's all just kind of shows how disconnected we are. And how, you know,

• 7:51Speaker 00

  you can't go to a pharmacy in the United States and get a pH indicator anymore. Like, we're totally disconnected from, I would say, even the most basic aspects of chemistry. And it's really sad because I think it's a science that is one of the most ancient scientific disciplines, maybe the most ancient. And it, especially if you include metallurgy as a form of chemistry, which it is, and something that humans have been connected to for such a long time, so important to who we are, how we are here right now. And yet, it's considered boring.

• 8:31Chris Williamson?

  That's why you're here, man. How much does a intrigue or an interest in consciousness and the phenomenological experience of our day-to-day experience guide what you do?

• 8:43Speaker 00

  I would say it's a huge, a huge motivator. I wouldn't say that I'm especially optimistic about consciousness being understood in the next few years. I mean, what I really think is the case is that, you know, there's a lot of concepts that aren't really scientific concepts, but they're useful. It's like, I think about consciousness the way historically people would look for life. You know, like if you ask a, like, we're aware of life exists. Life is a thing that exists.

• 9:20Speaker 00

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

• 10:03Speaker 00

  the way that we, you know, we're not going to realize, oh, the consciousness is, it's the, it is the clostrum. That is what consciousness, it's this region of the brain and it's, and it's a quantum mechanical interaction in the clostrum and that produces consciousness. No, it's consciousness is going to be many, many things in the way that life is many things. And you can reduce what life is and say, okay, it's homeostasis, it's reproduction, it's metabolic regulation, it's a certain type of organization. And, and we can agree that that, those are useful defining characteristics of life, which of course biologists still to this day argue about constantly what constitutes life. And I don't think consciousness is going to be any simpler.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  So, so I am motivated to understand consciousness, but I'm also doing that with the understanding that I don't think consciousness will be understood in a single way because I don't think it is a thing. I think it is a label that we use to describe the complex experience of being, or the perceived experience of being.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:11Chris Williamson?

  These emergent properties are very difficult to try and wrangle together when you think about the synergy of different cells. When does a particular number of cells become skin? When does it become an arm? When does it become a body? When does it become a human? And I wonder, yeah, man, I mean, we've had a few philosophers on Philip Goff talking about the philosophical schools of consciousness, dualism and his particular belief as well. Given that you seem to have quite a rational, scientific approach to things, it's interesting that you don't think that we're going to find out what consciousness is. I would have

• 11:53Chris Williamson?

  thought that you would have maybe expected it to be able to be explained by science.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Oh, I think that it will be explained by science in the way that life has been explained by science. But in being explained by science, it will be explained away. It will not exist anymore because I don't think it is real. I don't think consciousness exists in the way that DNA exists. I don't think it's a single thing that can be understood and characterized. I think it's a collection of different computational, experiential, perceptual phenomena that in concert create a perceived experience that we call consciousness,

• 12:36Speaker 00

  but it's not a thing. And so we will understand how emotion and memory are regulating aspects of perception and motivation and all these things. But it's very, I mean, it's very complicated, I would think. I imagine. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it turns out that someone is going to find out that it's a really simple thing and it is one thing and everything that I'm saying is wrong. But my intuitive sense is that there will never be a paper published in Nature that's, you know, consciousness explained, here's what it is. It's this one quantum mechanical interaction in a microtubule in the clostrum and that's it.

• 13:16Chris Williamson?

  I get you. What is the place that psychedelics and other mind-altering drugs have in life? Why should anyone take them?

• 13:24Speaker 00

  I don't know that anyone should take them.

• 13:28Chris Williamson?

  Why would anyone want to take them perhaps?

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, uh, why would anyone want to take them? Because they have the potential to dramatically enrich your life in the same way that music and art and love and a lot of other technically unnecessary things have the potential to enrich your life. So if someone is saying, you know, you don't have to do that, you can do it another way. Sure, you don't have to listen to music either. You don't have to do a lot of things, but I don't really see a good reason not to. Assuming that, you know, you're doing it responsibly and you are, you know, I suppose stable enough to benefit from experience in some way.

• 14:12Chris Williamson?

  A lot of people on the most recent season of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia were talking about psychedelics being sacred. You had this debate around the toad venom and you were saying, look, we can save these toads if we synthesize it in a lab as opposed to chasing them down. And they talk about them being sacred and gifts from the God and the universe and stuff like that. How do you feel around this sort of rhetoric to do with psychedelics?

• 14:40Speaker 00

  I feel different ways about it. It kind of depends on what culture I'm interacting with. I would say I feel, it's like everything, you know? If somebody says something is sacred and there's no cost to that perspective, then sure, that's fine. Or if it's part of a multi-generational tradition and I have no place interfering with it, fine. You know, like there's a belief among many Native American church members that peyote is

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Not a drug or a plant that contains a drug. It's a spirit. And to even talk about mescaline as an active principle in the cactus is a sort of sacrilegious reductionist perspective that acknowledges the depth of the spirit of the peyote. And so if you say, hey, come on, come on, guys, you're, you're gonna drive this plant to extinction by overharvesting it, and you can synthesize it in a couple of steps, and then you don't have to interfere with the natural world. You know, that's a, that's a hard argument to make. That's not an argument that I'm, I would, if I made that argument, I'd make it very gently.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  And I would probably instead start with suggesting that the peyote be cultivated. But they don't even like cultivation, and arguably with good reason, because a lot of the cultivation techniques have been focused on growing very large peyote as opposed to growing peyote that has a high alkaloid concentration. And so I think some early attempts to cultivate peyote for the Native American Church produced low potency cacti that they considered inferior. And so they, this is my impression, having reported on this a few years ago, they kind of decided that this cultivation was, was a bad route to go down.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  So that's, that's, you know, a complicated interplay of tradition, indigenous people who have been horrendously discriminated against and marginalized, and something that has had a very positive effect, and then you want to come in and say, hey, I know this is having a really positive effect on you and your family and your community, but it's not good for the sustainable life of this cactus, so you have to change your practices. You know, it's, I can understand why that would be an objectionable thing. With the toad, I think it's different, because we are dealing with something that is not a tradition. It is not something.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  That has been done for generations by a marginalized group. It's a new thing that started in the eighties by a white guy in Texas. And I actually really find that important and interesting because there's a tendency that many people have to, they have to, in order, they feel, I think, some kind of insecurity about their use of these things. And so they need some justification. They need to say that it's therapeutic, or traditional, or spiritual, or something. They can't just say, "I enjoy this." And so you really butt up against that with modern practices. Because there is no tradition.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  There might be no evidence that it's therapeutic. And any spirituality associated with it will be something that is new. And so that doesn't have the same value to people. And so people basically invented a tradition for Bufo alvarius venom. And, you know, my, like, I got so many messages from people saying, like, "You're just another white colonist erasing the history of Native Americans."

• 18:44Chris Williamson?

  This thirty-year-old history.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Yes. And, and it's like, but I am acutely aware of the fact that people very much want this to be a Native American practice. And if anyone produces any evidence that that is the case, I will change my mind. You know, I have no, I'm interested in the truth. So if somebody provides strong evidence, I'll change my perspective on this. But the, the reason that there is this misconception is that there was, there have been a few discoveries of large quantities of toad bones. One was in North Carolina.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  And the anthropologist, whose name was Jeanne Runquist, I believe, she, and this was also a problem in my episode, like, the article that I show in the episode has all these mistakes in it, but what I say in the episode is correct. But then people were criticizing me because there was like a, it wasn't like synchronized, but if you, whatever I say in the episode is correct, for the record. And, and so she found all these toad bones and...

• 19:58Speaker 00

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

• 20:38Speaker 00

  So a mistaken report, a mistaken interpretation of this Native American practice caused a real discovery to occur. The all current evidence, there's an anthropologist named Matthew Compton who looked into this, points toward the toads having been used as a food source, not as a drug. And there's a lot of reasons for that. There's a lot of evidence. One is that Bufo alvarius, which is the only species that produces five MEODMT, is not present in the Carolinas. And so there's that. There is no plausible psychedelic toad.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Also, there are documented, there's a book, I actually have it, of like traditional Cherokee practices in food preparation. It has infection on the preparation of toads for consumption. And they talk about how to detoxify it. So it's the opposite of using it as a drug. They're trying to remove any potentially toxic principles so that it can be consumed. So, yeah, it's, and toads are a decent source of food. So like, it doesn't really make sense that there would be all these like... Toad skeletons, if it were used as a drug, but it would make a lot of sense, given that there weren't any psychedelic toads in that region, that they were using them as a food.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Okay, so this misconception caused him to get interested in the possibility. And then he independently actually discovered that you could milk the venom of this toad and smoke it based on some research by an Italian biologist named Vittorio or Spamer. Complicated story. I don't blame people for being confused by it. It's very confusing. But that's, that's what happened. So all these people are saying, how dare you? Like you said that he discovered it from a Cherokee midin pile. And then you're saying that a white person discovered it. But the complicated thing is it was a misunderstanding of what that Cherokee midin pile was. Okay. I hope that made sense. I don't know if that, did that make sense?

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  What a mistake, man. Yeah. I mean, it's not bad. As misrepresentations go, that you get to open up an entire new world of psychedelic experience. What's your, what's your opinion on the sacredness coming along for the ride? Do you think there's anything more happening during the experience of taking a psychedelic than just the interaction of the chemicals with your brain? Are we accessing a higher power? Is there someone talking to us? Is there energy in the universe?

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Well, what I find funny is people are constantly invoking the supernatural in places where just simple psychology is sufficient. You don't need to, you don't need to go into the spirit realm to understand that there are non or non-exclusively externally chemical determinants of experience. So this, and this goes back to the 60s. You know, Timothy Leary did experiments at Millbrook where he would put LSD in milk that was dyed red, and then he'd put LSD in milk that was dyed green. And then he'd put LSD in milk that was dyed black. And he would say, this LSD does this, and this LSD does that. And of course, people would have different experiences based on the different colored LSDs

• 23:56Speaker 00

  and the different types of experiences that he'd primed them for. So this is like basic psychology. And of course, Leary was a Psychologist, so it it uh it really makes sense that if you tell someone, hey, this was, you know, harvested from the sacred venom of a sacred toad, the medicine that they they're, you know, they activate in a subterranean den for nine months, just like human gestation and they and they uh create this this chemical that that causes a rebirth and this is their gift to us and to increase our ecological awareness or whatever. You can make a beautiful story and and for the record, I have smoked the venom and had an

• 24:38Speaker 00

  absolutely amazing experience with it. So I get it. I get why. I think it's cool. I'm I'm not one of these people that, you know, like, I understand why people like it. I think it's amazing. I totally get it, but it's not sustainable. And with the popularity increasing at the rate that it currently is, there needs to be a different way of doing it. Um, you know, it hasn't been studied as well as I would like it to. And one of the uh things that I'm doing with this episode is I republished the book that Ken Nelson wrote and um I'm donating all of the profits to charity and it's been this like unexpected,

• 25:19Speaker 00

  insanely successful fundraising effort at like at, as of today, I think it's raised a hundred and thirty thousand dollars for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, but also there's separate money going to uh the Tucson Herpetological Society. And, you know, I really want to get some carefully documented data on how the populations are impacted because most of what I know is anecdotal. It's, you know, I I spoke with a number of the people that uh milk Bufo alvarius for a living and those people, if anyone have incentive to downplay the severity of any ecological disruption because their livelihood depends on it. And even those people were saying, this is not sustainable.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Like, this is not a good uh, this is not a good practice. So.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  So it's not that I'm, I do believe that people can have different experiences based on different substances, but I think that the determining factor is psychological, not chemical, unless you have a reason to believe that it is, and of course, I am aware also that psychology is, you know, biochemically determined, but, but I'm talking about the chemistry of the drug itself, like, that if you, I, I think that with the appropriate tradition and the appropriate packaging, you can get, you can extract that from any substance in the same way that you could make the best LSD in the world feel bad

• 26:46Speaker 00

  to people if you, you know, served it to them in like a pot, in like a brown tar and said that it had been scraped from underneath the toilet and, and that it was like cursed by a serial killer or, or something like that, like these, these, uh, these things impact the experience completely.

• 27:10Chris Williamson?

  That's the fascinating thing about set in settings. I don't need to make sure that I'm in a good place for ibuprofen to do its job properly, or like aspirin to do its job properly, but the environment that you're in and the mindset that you have going into the experience does inherently change the experience of the substance that you're taking when it comes to mind altering stuff.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And, and that's, that is one useful thing to come out of this kind of unusual new tradition. There are these two medical doctors in Mexico who have become toad venom evangelists and they're very controversial in the toad venom community. I was also getting a lot of criticism from people that were saying, why didn't you talk about how bad these guys are? Well, you know, I, I can't fight everyone's fights with these people for them, but it's, they, they have. There's a lot of infighting, a lot of anger in the toad venom community. And I think part of it has to do with the power of this substance.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  I think that, from what I can tell, some of the, they call themselves facilitators, the people that give 5-MEODMT-containing toad venom to people, almost become addicted to the power of the transformation that they are promoting with the administration of the substance. You can imagine being a psychologist or something and, you know, doing talk therapy with people for years and never, you might never see a change. You might never see even the smallest change in someone's behavior. And you can imagine the feeling of futility that that would promote in someone who's dedicated their lives to healing.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  And then you have a substance that will cause absolutely extraordinary change, spiritual experience, transformation, life-changing transformation in people immediately. And how encouraging that could be to someone to think, you know, how could you do anything but that? What else, you know, what else would be worth your time as a healer but to administer the substance? So I see where they get a little lost in it themselves. And to be honest, there's an element of that with me as well, where I, you know, when I had this experience, when I came out of it, I, one of the first thoughts I had was, you

• 29:40Speaker 00

  know, given the skills that I have, how can I help other people have this experience? And for me, that was chemistry. That was, you know, if I can show people that this is a simple molecule that can easily be produced by someone with the undergrad chemistry knowledge. And...

• 30:05Speaker 00

  And made available to anyone that needs it, then that will have a positive effect on the world.

• 30:09Chris Williamson?

  Why would you want other people to experience what you did? What was the benefit that you saw from it?

• 30:16Speaker 00

  Um, you know, I would say that it's many of the benefits that people typically associate with a near death experience. Where you feel extreme gratitude for life, you feel an appreciation for the beauty of the world that you can very easily take for granted. You know, I was totally tenderized. I was hypersensitive in the wake of this experience. I hypersensitized in every way. I would, you know, be moved to tears by the beauty of a cute dog walking down the street. Just like totally, totally

• 30:57Speaker 00

  amazed by plants and all life. And I think that that, without even medicalizing it now, like obviously that has a lot of potential for treatment of depression and various diseases, addiction and so on and so forth. But even for a healthy person, that's pretty nice. That's a useful little change of pace to remind you that life is a gift and that it's beautiful and that it should be appreciated because it's really, really unbelievably strange and interesting and cool.

• 31:30Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think it is that people have these religious experiences? Why do you think the phenomenological, and not just with the toad venom, but with many things, many psychedelics induce this sort of sacred religious state, I'm communicating with higher powers. One of the thought experiments I've been playing around with for ages is what would happen to someone? Did you ever see the film Mother? It was made by Netflix. Oh, you don't have a TV?

• 31:57Speaker 00

  The Darren Aronofsky movie?

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  Maybe. Was it about the girl that was raised by a robot?

• 32:04Speaker 00

  Oh, I watched half of it on an airplane.

• 32:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so you know the premise, right?

• 32:10Speaker 00

  I believe so.

• 32:11Chris Williamson?

  You have this human that is raised with essentially no culture. They're given words because they have language, but they're not given any cultural influence. It's just them essentially in a Petri dish. The Petri dish just happens to be a big building that they live in. Have you ever considered what would happen to someone who hadn't been imprinted by culture? If they were to take a psychedelic?

• 32:39Speaker 00

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

• 33:10Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, I think based on my very mild introduction to psychedelics, stuff like the geometric patterns that you seem to see, tends they would be fairly ubiquitous. They don't necessarily require the cultural imprinting. For instance, if you were to take something like psilocybin and you get that sort of hexagonal psychedelic effect in front of you like a kaleidoscope, that I don't think that that requires culture.

• 33:37Chris Williamson?

  It would be so interesting, man. Like, would you, if you don't know what a dragon is, can a dragon chase you down? If you don't know what a snake is, can you be scared of a snake? Like, is it blob? I'm trying to remove the programming from this particular human in the test tube that we're talking about and see what's left when you introduce the psychedelic to them.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I mean, one, one thing that I would imagine is religious experience. I think that, that the psychedelic experience probably is a religious experience. I imagine as someone who is, you know, atheist, agnostic, it's certainly the closest I ever get to what I imagine religious transcendence is like. And so I think that, yeah, it could promote some, some version of that. I mean, the other thing to keep in mind is that, like, and one reason that drug education is so important is the way we think about drugs impacts the experience, as I was saying previously.

• 34:43Speaker 00

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

• 35:28Speaker 00

  You hear that all, have you heard that?

• 35:29Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  At least in the US, people, people will say like, hey, my, my friend told me that when you trip on mushrooms, it's just food poisoning. And, and I think like, wow, there are people that have mushroom experiences who think that what is happening is food poisoning.

• 35:45Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you, I've heard you talk about some of the residual guilt that you get when you sometimes used to smoke weed, because it's kind of associated with this, I'm being a bit of a waste man, I should be working, I should be studying, I should be being productive. And that's almost exclusively because of how you've been socialized. What do other people say about people who take that drug?

• 36:10Speaker 00

  That's true. Well, it's true. It's true and it's not true. It's very complicated, I think, with cannabis. That's one of the more complicated ones because I think that one of the advantages and disadvantages of cannabis is that it allows you, at least allows me, it does different things to everyone. It allows me to take things less seriously, a lot less seriously, and that's great sometimes and not great as a daily alteration of consciousness. So, you know, it's very easy for me to just, you know, I'm receiving like a hundred emails a day

• 36:52Speaker 00

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

• 37:36Speaker 00

  and it has a bit of a dissociative type of fact where I'm not as engaged with the world, which, again, can be beneficial. It really just depends on the context. And I agree with you that you could make a valid argument that this is all conditioning and especially conditioning from a capitalist society that values productivity over everything else, over joy, over relaxation, over camaraderie with friends, over almost anything. So, yes, like, I think that there are many extremely stoned people who are living a beautiful existence that is disconnected from our...

• 38:21Speaker 00

  American, European value system that where if you're not just constantly generating things, you're of no value. And of course, there are also people that get stoned all the time and are immensely productive and are able to, you know, do huge amounts of work. And I have a lot of respect for those people. I'm not one of them. So.

• 38:44Chris Williamson?

  No, me neither. Should, do you think any drugs should be illegal? What's your stance on the legalization of drugs?

• 38:52Speaker 00

  No, I do not think any drugs should be illegal. I think that, and I'm aware that my perspective on this can sound a little bit doctrinaire. And I try to remember that there are people who are just so irresponsible that maybe certain types of regulations are required for public safety, you know. Certainly, I think that it's really good that radioactive materials are regulated. I do. I mean, I think it's, it's, we, we, there is a history spanning like over 100 years of people just doing irresponsible things with radioactive materials.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  And the government is very careful about regulating how radioactive materials are distributed. And I appreciate that. I think that's really useful because, you know, if someone is selling you some flower extract as a treatment for COVID or whatever, fine, you know, let, let, maybe not fine, but it's not, it's not going to kill the person, I hope, most likely. I mean, I suppose there is exceptions for everything. But, you know, radioactive materials routinely make their way into quack medicine. And, and that's, you know, that's really tragic for the people that get caught up in that sort of thing. Same thing with these, these, you know, like nitrile, like what is that compound that's used as a quack cancer treatment, like

• 40:22Speaker 00

  late lat trial or whatever? It's like a base science pro drug. And so like, I think that some, some, some things.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  When they're sold as medicines and are extremely dangerous should be regulated. But I think that if things aren't being sold as medicines, just as chemicals, they should be available. Pretty much everything within reason, but not radioactive things, probably. Probably not radioactive.

• 40:55Chris Williamson?

  So if it's not a radioactive psychedelic, it's fine?

• 40:59Speaker 00

  And there are radioactive. I've actually, like, Tim Ferriss was really nice and he donated some money to the lab that I work at and we used it to synthesize a radioactive psychedelic that we use for experiments.

• 41:12Chris Williamson?

  Did you take it?

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely not, no. It's radioactive.

• 41:20Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 41:21Speaker 00

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

• 42:06Speaker 00

  have regulations where you, there are legal penalties for driving irresponsibly. And I think that it's not much of a stretch to assume that we could have a similar attitude toward chemicals that are potentially dangerous.

• 42:22Chris Williamson?

  I mean, we've seen a big cultural shift with the attitude towards cannabis, right? Over the last sort of 30 years or so. Do you think that model that we're going to see with other drugs moving forward would appear that psilocybin's kind of at the beginning of that threshold, a little bit of legalization, a little bit of therapeutic use, it's starting to get hold of the culture in a way that makes it seem less demonized? Is this just going to continue to expand out and cover the entire mind-altering drug market?

• 42:51Speaker 00

  I think it will, yeah, because these are good things. These are things that will have a good effect on many people's lives and that could really help a lot of people. Like, I genuinely believe that some of these things, you know, I try to be very balanced and sober in my thinking about the subject and not get into, you know, say cannabis cures all diseases or psilocybin is going to, you know, cure all of society's ills or whatever. But, you know, I think that there are a lot of dark psychological trends in our society. People are spending all of their time in front of computers. People are very, they're not reading.

• 43:36Speaker 00

  They're detached from certain aspects of reality. They're disconnected from each other. And I think that they're disconnected from the drugs that they use. They're disconnected from the food that they eat. They're disconnected from almost every aspect of their lives. And I think that drugs could have, like, far-reaching positive effects. Like, I was even thinking, like, yesterday, like, what if there were cannabis community gardens and people could just garden cannabis? Like, how much fun that would be for a community? And you could go and people would just hang out and it would be fun for young people and old people. And people could gather and play music or things like that. You know, these things bring people together.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  We're so used to talking about how drugs tear apart families that we never, or tear apart relationships or people's careers or whatever, that we forget that they're also extremely social. I mean, that's the main thing that people use them for most of the time is to be with other people, to bond with people, to socialize. And I think that, you know, a lot of people would get interested in growing plants and fungi if they were able to do it. Whatever they wanted, if they had freedom. And I think that, like, what are the downstream effects? People become more interested in drugs, then they become more interested in therapy. They become more interested in art. They become more interested in science. They've become more interested in helping their community.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  I think like, I think that the responsibility associated with the liberalization of drug laws will actually help mature the world, like, in a, in a good, very beneficial way. Because this idea that they're bad and they're dangerous and anyone who uses them deserves what they get, like, it's amazing how little empathy people have. And, and these are all just unfortunate vestiges of the war on drugs. Like, I've, I've heard people say things like, uh, you know, like, like junkies should get one shot of Narcan, and then after that, it's up to them, let them die. You know, things, it's like, what are you talking about?

• 45:45Speaker 00

  Why do you, why would you want to regulate how often someone gets a life-saving intervention? Why do you hate these people? Where is your, like, what did they ever, what did someone who's dependent on opioids ever do to you? And why don't you just see it as a medical problem that should be treated with empathy and care and science, like anything else?

• 46:05Chris Williamson?

  I mean, meanwhile, that person's having half a bottle of wine per night and a few cans on a weekend.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Right, right. I mean, it's, it's our whole, our concept of what constitutes addiction is so bizarre and distorted. I, I can't tell you how many people I've met who are sober, like, pub, like, on Instagram, like, five months sober, yeah, who are more addicted to drugs than, like, than certainly I have ever been. I mean, I, because, but they will say, oh, I, yeah, I'm a dependent on opioids, but they're prescribed by a physician for pain, so it's not, and it's like, okay, well, then you have a very disturbed, and nothing against people that do that, but it's, you know, it's like, if you need to do that while simultaneously declaring that you are sober and that drug

• 46:57Speaker 00

  abuse is a problem, then you have a very confused attitude toward your drug use.

• 47:03Chris Williamson?

  I think this...

• 47:06Chris Williamson?

  There's so much pleasure that we can all take from highlighting hypocrisy. And my other favorite one that's happened over the last couple of years has been people adopting the veganism movement, but still sniffing cocaine. I run nightclubs. I run a lot of nightclubs and I obviously see quite a lot of party drugs and people who are outwardly very concerned about the suffering of animals, but not so outwardly concerned about the suffering of people in Medellin or other like humans that have been trafficked or caught or shot or killed or tortured or in any other way mistreated so that they can get a buzz on on a Friday or a Saturday night.

• 47:47Speaker 00

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

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Maybe.

• 48:21Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's not the cocaine, cocaine's not the issue. It's the externality of the process that we have to go through to get it at the moment, right?

• 48:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the fact that it's all that is a product of it being illegal, not a product of people using cocaine or cocaine as a plant alkaloid. That's exclusively what happens in a black market economy. And so I don't know that I think that using cocaine is unethical as much as I would maybe hope that anyone that really enjoys cocaine also cares about drug policy a little bit. And maybe they are, you know, thinking about what needs to be done to reform drug policy in the regions where coca is grown to minimize the negative impact that it can have on those communities, which is, you know, it's not easy.

• 49:09Chris Williamson?

  Fair trade cocaine.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Well, you're joking, but people actually, I've heard people talk about that of like, you know, yeah, people do things like that, actually. And I've heard people talk about it.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  And, uh, and yeah, so, but again, this is, you know, this is like, all this stuff is just a product of the illegality of these substances. It doesn't need to be that way at all. It could be an uplifting plant that provides a source of income for many people, which it is. I mean, it's, you know, it's also, there's a huge, uh, market for coca that is not illegal. Coca-Cola, of course, still uses coca in its formulation and you have, although it's de-coconutized, and you have, um, you know, you have an enormous

• 50:05Speaker 00

  coca tea industry, all sorts of coca candies, coca products that are used in South America. So, um, it's, you know, it is, I think, a very positive plant and the only negative aspects of it come from its illegality.

• 50:23Chris Williamson?

  Do you ever wish that you could have tried some of the original Coca-Cola?

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that would have been, I think, yeah, I mean, I actually think, like, I, I'm not a big, I, I, you couldn't pay me to sniff the sort of cocaine that, uh, that exists. Seriously. I mean, I wouldn't and I don't. Uh, and, but as a teenager, I used it a few times and, um, and I've analyzed a decent bit of cocaine and of course, it's all horrendously impure. And, um, and, but when it's taken orally in a tea, it's very nice. It's really very, very, and that's already like, I, I think that's actually the best way to do it. Like, this is another kind of aspect of the way black markets shape

• 51:11Speaker 00

  drug usage trends is you have, um, like a risk premium that's paid. So you have to, you know, you're, you're transporting the substance. You have to transport it in the most potent, most concentrated form possible because it's sometimes, you know, coming on drones, in submarines, smuggled in airplanes, smuggled in people's bodies. You know, this is, this is incredibly diff- Difficult and dangerous, so you want the absolute most potent form of the substance that you're bringing into the country. Well, that's the best for black market smuggling of an illegal commodity, but is that the best way to use cocaine? Almost certainly not. It's probably the absolute worst way to use cocaine. The best way to use cocaine is coca leaves

• 51:55Speaker 00

  in a warm tea in the morning and as you, you know, read the news or whatever. That's the best way to use cocaine. That is nice. It feels very similar to caffeine. It does not seem to produce any negative physiological effects for users. It does seem to produce positive effects for many people, and that is the way that people use it traditionally. In everywhere that there is a tradition where it's not illegal, it's only, it's really like all of these horrible things that we associate with cocaine are really horrible things associated with cocaine's illegality.

• 52:28Chris Williamson?

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

• 53:11Chris Williamson?

  like heroin in the UK or something like that. And he's like, really? You want that? And what it turned out was that because it's so cheap to get a hold of cocaine, wherever the guys were, that was seen as a really scummy drug. The branding for cocaine down there was awful. Whereas 2CB, which if you were to take that in the UK would be like, what are you, why are you taking 2CB on a night out? But because 2CB over there is a hundred pounds a hit or fifty pounds a hit or something like that. That is the drug which is put on a pedestal. That's the one that's all about status. And because cocaine's so cheap, that's the one that's seen as a, a really sort of scummy, awful drug that people shouldn't take.

• 53:54Chris Williamson?

  I thought that was really hilarious to see how cultural interpretations of drugs completely change how they're positioned.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  That's absolutely true. I actually wanted to dedicate an entire episode to that in the third season and I was going to do 2CB labs in South America, but I wasn't able to find a chemist who was making it. I really tried. We had a team scouting, really trying to make... If anyone listening to this is associated with the synthesis of 2CB in South America, please do contact me. I'd love to have a conversation about it because I think it's totally fascinating and I completely agree with what you said, that a lot of the way we perceive these drugs is a product of the way they're marketed, their cost, their social

• 54:42Speaker 00

  connotations. There was a drug in the UK called Mefodron. Are you familiar with that?

• 54:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that one, MCAT or Meow.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which had a very, as I understand it, as a American, very, very bad reputation in the UK. It was considered like really disgusting.

• 55:00Chris Williamson?

  Of course, because it doesn't smell very nice. It smelled really strong and it was basically the poor person's version of taking cocaine. But dude, there was a period, I shit you not, there was a period in UK nightlife where people would rack that up on a bar, on a bar, because it wasn't a controlled substance yet. And if the door staff would come over and quite rightly say, "Excuse me, what the fuck are you doing?" They would just be like, "Mate, not illegal." And obviously they'd get thrown out for being a dick, but the police could come up and there was nothing, there was nothing to be done. It didn't last very long. There wasn't a big period of time. I remember, man, once I got a broadcast message on WhatsApp, and it must have been a couple of weeks before this stuff became illegal,

• 55:43Chris Williamson?

  and someone was trying to sell kilos of it. They were like, "Oh, we're trying to shift a couple of... Does anyone want a couple of kilos of MCAT before the new legislation comes in?" Like, no, no. Who wants that? But yeah, very much so. That was exactly the same. Like, I mean, the, the effects of it, it's very speedy. Have you ever tried it?

• 56:04Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've tried. I think it's one of the greatest drugs ever discovered. I am a huge fan.

• 56:10Chris Williamson?

  MCAT? Really?

• 56:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 56:12Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 56:13Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah. Yeah.

• 56:14Chris Williamson?

  It's very...

• 56:15Speaker 00

  And I think that it's a perfect...

• 56:16Chris Williamson?

  Rushy.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  And I think it's a perfect example of it was considered disgusting garbage. It was the grimiest stuff out there. And so no one cared. They just, it was junk. No one cared about it. No one appreciated it. But I guarantee if someone had carefully presented you with methadone and said, you know, there's a brilliant biochemist who spent his entire life studying the serotonin transporter and the dopamine transporter and the balance of dopamine reuptake inhibition to serotonin release is optimized for maximum euphoria with no neurotoxic effect, then you would have had a totally different experience.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  And, and I think that, yeah, that it was, it was like not appreciated at all as a substance when in fact, I think that it was, um, in terms of like a, what people are looking for in a recreational drug, I think that it represented almost like the perfect recreational drug.

• 57:21Chris Williamson?

  Have you considered, have you considered going into branding? You could rebrand, you could rebrand some of these drugs and give them a new name, give them a new, honestly, I genuinely think the price was a big part of it. The fact it was so cheap and price is seen as an indicator of quality. If it had been 50 pounds a gram as opposed to, there was a period where you could get it for between five and 10 pounds a gram. You're talking like one twentieth to one tenth of what it should be for cocaine.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, um, it's really, really interesting. And the other thing that you mentioned that I think is also really interesting is that when a drug is made illegal, it causes people to panic by enormous quantities of it. So this guy that's selling you a kilo or trying to sell you a kilo, that was not uncommon. That was happening to people all over the UK and similar things have happened in the United States. So the government announces their plan to make kratom illegal. What is the first thing I do? I don't even like kratom at all. I never use it. And. And and the first thing I do is buy a kilo of it because I think uh well, you know,

• 58:30Speaker 00

  maybe maybe they'll just regulate it in like on a state level and it's better to and maybe it'll be hard to get and I might want to use it in scientific research and who knows? And so suddenly I have like a massive quantity of this substance I don't even like or want to use. It's just like gathering dust in my closet and uh and and that would have never happened if they DEA hadn't announced their intention to prevent people from accessing it. So this panic buying is a reality with psychoactive drugs. I mean, it is, you could hardly think of a worse way to regulate use of psychoactive drugs in the way that the government currently does it. It is, it is, it would be funny if it weren't so horrendously tragic.

• 59:12Chris Williamson?

  They have the Streisand effect as well with this, right? It's like, don't bother looking about this and then everybody wants to know what the hot new shit is. Oh, wow. Oh, God, like, schedule one. Like, that that must be some strong shit. Got to get me, got to get me some of that.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And and because of the totally warranted distrust of the media, um, you know, like, no journalist, every journalist is writing these sensational stories about illegal drug teen tears their scrotum off from Meow Meow. That's that's a real, that's, I, that's almost

• 59:45Chris Williamson?

  I remember the story.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  Verbatim headline from the Sun, I believe. And uh, and, you know, oh, I mean, here's a funny story. The the reporting was so insane at that time that they were just publishing anything. And I started to think, like, what is, what are the barriers for entry here? Like, can I just contact one of these journalists and just say some insane thing and we'll end up in the Sun? So I, uh, like, at the beginning of this conversation, I was talking about Cuban. So I was thinking, like, wouldn't it be hilarious to chemists if I said that, like, four cubanal methcathenone, like, this just like absurd molecule that has never been synthesized, were like a new methadone derivative that was taking the uh, the UK

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  by storm? So I wrote A journalist at the Sun and said like, you know, I'm a chemist. I've done a lot of work with substituted Cubains. And, uh, and you know, you really need to be aware of this for Cubain old methcathinone. It's a serious problem. And, and I hope that you care enough about, you know, your readers at the Sun to raise awareness. And they immediately contacted me. They got my phone number. They called me on the phone. And then when they were doing the interview, I was like, ah, I can't, I can't go through with this. This is too.

• 1:01:02Chris Williamson?

  Too much journalistic integrity, man. You should have just done it.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I should have done it as like, as, but then I just started, started to think like, you know, it's, it's really horrifying. We don't live in a mature enough society for, for pranks like that, because it's like, what then, then what? Are they going to make Cubain illegal as a result of my stupid joke? Like, you know, it's, it's something, something like that is not out of the question. So, um, so I just started to think, okay, this is, this is too much, but they would write, they would report anything. And so people don't trust anything that they say justifiably. And so the, the, like any potential public health interventions that could, in an ideal world, come through the media are totally meaningless because no one trusts anything that they say.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  And, and if anything, serve as, as you said, like Streisand effect, like advertisements for these substances that people know, whether they're good or bad, the media would never, uh, represent them accurately. So you might as well give it a shot.

• 1:02:01Chris Williamson?

  Are there any drugs that you haven't taken or any substances that you still want to?

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

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

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

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

• 1:03:30Chris Williamson?

  The interesting thing that I find about your work is that although you're obviously engaged in the substances that you take and you're very inquisitive about what does this feel like, you're pretty good at describing the phenomenological experience of it as well. But I've never seen you cross the line into someone who's just kind of recreationally being very blasé around the drugs. It seems like there's quite a lot of respect for them. Obviously, you come at this from the side of a chemist as well. I know that you always talk about knowing dosages correctly, like super, super anal around when it comes to what's the dosage exactly? What am I taking? What's the level of purity and stuff like that? But yeah, I think it's, from my perspective, as someone who's been around a lot of drugs

• 1:04:13Chris Williamson?

  for a long time, especially in the party scene, where people are taking, they literally have no idea what it is. Like, it could be a caffeine pill, it could be an aspirin, it could be a gram of MDMA. You just don't know. And seeing that, I'd just call it respect for drugs, I suppose, I think is a really good example to be set. Is that something that you consciously try and do to come across in an overly responsible way?

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is because, I mean, there's a number of reasons for it. But one is that having that respect, it's not some abstract thing. You know, this directly impacts the experience and has a very positive effect. So when people will say these things to me like, what's the craziest thing you've ever done? Aren't you afraid that you're gonna go, like, you're never gonna come back? It's like, well, I'm extremely cautious, so I don't know what to tell you. I'm very careful. And so I would be much, people, like, I, yeah, some woman came up to me at Whole Foods and was like, how are you still alive? It's like, how am I still alive? On my walk home from work, I see people dead drunk on the street,

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  who are more intoxicated than I've ever been every day. So like, why is it, like, this is, we're so confused by anyone that is like, open about their occasional responsible use of substances, that we assume that that person must be a maniac. And so even when I'm very cautious, people have that attitude. The other thing is that even at the times when I was, like, the first piece I ever made, I was 21.

• 1:05:48Chris Williamson?

  What was that?

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  It was a trip down the Amazon to, to find this frog, Philomedusa bicolor, that produces a-

• 1:06:00Chris Williamson?

  Is it the one where you got burned?

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I was, yeah, I was-

• 1:06:03Chris Williamson?

  I have seen that, yeah.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was 21, I was a college student. I was deeply unaware of many things. And in particular, I was unaware of the way my actions would be perceived by other people. Because it's not until you make things for public consumption that you start to even think about that. Because you're, you know, you're with your friends, you're with people that know you. People basically get what you're doing and who you are. And so you don't have to think too much about ways we'll be perceived. And one of the things that I did- Is I took Ritalin with ayahuasca and I to this day am criticized by people robotically. It's like if people are criticizing me, they'll be like, that guy?

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  You're talking about the guy who took Ritalin with ayahuasca? Quite frankly, I wouldn't trust him at all. And they don't understand, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter that for the record, it is not dangerous to combine Ritalin with ayahuasca. I, maybe I shouldn't say that publicly, but for the record, it is, you know, Ritalin is metabolized by hepatic hydrolyzes. So it's not metabolized by MAO, the enzyme that is inhibited by the beta carbolines in the ayahuasca vine. So there is no potentiation of Ritalin by monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Okay, that's just the way it is. So you can talk about how it's dangerous all day,

• 1:07:31Speaker 00

  but it's simply, I mean, I'm not going to recommend other people do it, but Ritalin is not metabolized by MAO. So, and, and, and so, you know, all these, but I have to deal with, it doesn't matter that what I did wasn't dangerous. What matters is that people say that it's dangerous and then they harass me about it and they write it on forums and then they robotically repeat it uncritically and never actually learn about the metabolism of Ritalin. And so like, just that is an example. It's like, you have to think about what is, what is going to be the like decade-long fallout of some little action, you know, like, and there's part of me that thinks like, well, I guess, maybe, okay, good,

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  because I showed that I was honest about something, but you know, there's a price for that type of honesty and it's, it can be very obnoxious.

• 1:08:21Chris Williamson?

  I think that the main problem we're coming up here is this singular thread, which is through a lot of things, not just your work, but almost everybody else. When you talk about child YouTubers or people who've been on Twitter for a decade. Society and civilization just isn't meant to have all of the things that we did or said, like encased in stone and able to be re-accessed perfectly for the rest of time. Like, that's just not the way that it's supposed to happen. It's supposed to be that a thing happens and then maybe it was right, maybe it was wrong, but after 10 years or so, people can't remember it in any case and half of them have died. And that's how our society grew over time. But now sadly, the things that you did or said when you were 13 or 17 or 21,

• 1:09:07Chris Williamson?

  they're just enshrined for the rest of your days. And that's going to be, you know, potentially that could be the thing. Now that's, oh, you're the, you're the Rittlin and ayahuasca guy. And, you know, you've got to spend the rest of your life trying to constantly wipe this slime off you.

• 1:09:21Speaker 00

  Right, and, and it's especially annoying because there is nothing wrong with it. It's like you're also battling against people's bizarre misinterpretations of things. That's the, really the biggest issue is not actual problems. It's things that people have decided are problems and their critical thinking skills aren't good enough to recognize that whatever it is that they're angry about isn't actually an issue. Yeah, there's that. And then there's another problem that I think about a lot, which is I think people have become so disconnected from the act of creation. Many people, they're, that they confuse consumption with creation. And they think that the order that they view things is the order that those things exist in reality.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

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

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  when things are created or where they're created or the context. I mean, a lot of websites now have to put a notice on articles that say this article is five years old because people won't even look at the date that things are made because they don't seem to even care. And it's not those people's fault entirely. Like, we are being disconnected from the act of creation. Like, in all sorts of different ways. Like, on most streaming web services, they cut out the credits entirely now. Why would you want to look at the credits? That's just names of people that made it. That's not important. It's like, that is who made it. That is the information. That is extremely important. You should, maybe you don't recognize the names, but if you care about it, you should look at them. And maybe you can learn more about, if that episode is particularly beautiful,

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  maybe you should look into who photographed it. Who is the director of photography in that episode? What else have they done? Maybe that explains it. Maybe it wasn't the overarching media corporation that distributed it. Maybe it was a human being who should be appreciated, or whatever. So, like, I don't know. That's like a complicated, like, overarching issue I have with contemporary media literacy. But it's a rough time, and I agree. We did not evolve to have, like, these lasting records. And we have not culturally evolved to maturely recognize that fact. Like, all of this, you know, offense, archaeology, all this stuff where people spend enormous amounts of time

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  trying to dig up evidence that somebody said something that was bad 15 years ago. It's, that is not integrating this understanding that you just described, that, like, people change, that we didn't evolve to be, to have this timeless record of every single thing that we had said. And I don't know. I don't know what the solution to this is other than, you know, like, improved cultural literacy, or improved media literacy culturally, and kind of like empathy for that fact and empathy for people in general. I don't know.

• 1:12:47Chris Williamson?

  I don't know what the solution is either, man. Like... Nick Bostrom has this idea about pulling different types of technology out of an urn. And he says that there is a temptation to pull out a black ball and the black ball is an existential risk. But I am really, really concerned that social media and ubiquitous communication that stores everything that everyone's ever said or done forever is a slowly transforming black ball. It might only be grey at the moment, but it's getting darker grey and darker grey and darker grey all the time. And the reason for that is that it causes us to increasingly look at what other people are doing as opposed to trying to create something ourselves. Perfect example of this is, are you familiar with Lindy? Do you know what Lindy is?

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  The gas company?

• 1:13:33Chris Williamson?

  No, it's a particular heuristic. It's a model for how long something has been around. If something has been around for a while, the classics have been around for a long time. So you read 1984, which has been around for 50 years. It's probably going to be around for another 50 years. It basically is a heuristic that says the most recent stuff isn't necessarily the best. Read the classics for a reason. But if you think about what most people have spent today consuming, almost all of the content that everyone listening to this show has consumed today will have been created within the last 24 hours. And that should fucking terrify almost everybody. If you think that's the opposite of Lindy, that isn't the classics, that isn't stuff

• 1:14:13Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's really, it's very tricky. It's very troubling. And I just hope that people can.

• 1:14:53Speaker 00

  Be as kind to each other as possible because it's there is definitely a a culture of meanness that I see on the internet that is slightly disturbing to me and it's not even that people are mean because everyone is mean I mean we're I'm not trying to pretend that I'm like a very good person who's never thinks mean thoughts about people I think mean thoughts all the time but the difference is that I don't feel comfortable being publicly mean even just that little rant that I just gave about the guy writing the the uh uh story where he confused the chronology of my work and used it to criticize me immediately afterwards I was like oh that's not a good thing to talk about publicly that's weird

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  like because you know you if you are publicly mean it just like poisons you a little bit and it has this uh I I've experienced this I've made little tiny mean remarks and I've seen how it comes back to get you and then I look at these people who are so insanely mean like as their whole identity on the internet and I think like what is that doing to that person's consciousness they've just created an ecosystem of meanness that is going to make them so miserable and and they're not interested in appreciating anything they're not interested in like everything is hating people for who they're not instead of loving

• 1:16:12Speaker 00

  them for who they are and uh and it's like it's just not gonna make people happy like I I'm not even talking about the effect on of the target of their meanness I'm talking about the effect on the person who is being mean like they are not going to be happy if they are that way so I don't know I I just hope that and yeah I think like Facebook and all these social media companies had an interesting idea that if people's faces were attached to things and their real names were attached to things maybe they would be at the very least embarrassed to be publicly cruel but that doesn't seem to have worked so I don't know what the I don't know what the solution is other than I don't know.

• 1:16:55Chris Williamson?

  Huge dose of psychedelics.

• 1:16:57Speaker 00

  Maybe, maybe. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I mean, I think that I think it could help. I, you know, well, I guess we'll see. If it doesn't help, it was definitely worth trying.

• 1:17:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and everyone had a great time. What should we expect from the next decade of psychedelics?

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  I think it's going to be a really interesting decade. I'm very excited. I'm so excited that I'm, you know,

• 1:17:19Speaker 00

  probably leaving most of the work that I've done for the last decade to dedicate myself entirely to psychedelic research. Like, you know, scientific research. That's my plan right now.

• 1:17:29Chris Williamson?

  You're so, so well positioned, man. When you think about the background that you've got yourself to, the platform you have, the audience you have, the ability to be like the Brian Cox of psychedelics.

• 1:17:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's surreal having all these companies contact me, asking me to be on their advisory board or to do this or that type of research. And it's really a dream come true because for the last years I have self-funded the research or there's been small amounts of money that come from the university that I work at and or did this research at. And it's, and it was, you know, it was, there wasn't, there were no resources. And now there are tremendous resources. So that's so exciting because you think about the history of psychedelic research post 60s, when there was no funding. Like, as much as the politics of the war on drugs interfered with psychedelic research, another big factor that isn't talked about as much is lack of funding.

• 1:18:23Speaker 00

  You know, there were, there were, there were people doing psychedelic research, I think, up until the, until the, at the very least, late 70s. And, and they just didn't have money. They weren't shut down by the government. They didn't have money to do it. So now that all these resources are available, I think that some really, really interesting things might come out of this sphere that could really help people. And that's, that's very exciting. In 10 years from now, yeah, I mean, I hope that there is growth in every direction. I hope that there is. Growth in the basic scientific understanding of the pharmacological mechanism of psychedelics. I hope there's growth in the pharmaceutical implementation of psychedelic medicines that are

• 1:19:06Speaker 00

  made available to people that don't want to buy them via an unregulated black or gray market. And I also hope that there is a decriminalization that allows people to cultivate psychoactive plants and fungi on their own, create their own rituals, their own communities to do it in the way that best suits them. Like, I hope that there's just an expansion of knowledge and freedom. And I think that, yeah, I think it could be great. I hope. I'm not usually a very optimistic person, but it does force me to feel a tiny bit optimistic.

• 1:19:36Chris Williamson?

  That's good enough for me, man.

• 1:19:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:19:39Chris Williamson?

  Honestly, that's good enough for me. Look, Hamilton, it's been awesome today. If people want to watch the show in the UK or in the US, where should they go?

• 1:19:48Speaker 00

  It's a hard show to watch. You can, in the UK, you might be able to get it on Amazon, iTunes. You can watch it Hulu Live. You can watch it on Hulu at some point, although I don't know when. People have been ripping it and putting it on YouTube, which I'm actually really happy about, except for they seem to cut off the end of episodes, which I'm...

• 1:20:06Chris Williamson?

  Has it got like Spanish, Spanish overdubbed music? Has it got like Spanish Hamilton or something on it?

• 1:20:11Speaker 00

  They put in actually like soccer games into it. So that kind of stuff I don't really like very much. But, but it's, you know, I search for it, you'll find it, it's out there. It's not that easy to find, but it's available. I watch it on, or would watch it on Amazon. And then I also have a podcast, which you can check out at patreon.com/hamiltonmorris. It's largely chemistry oriented, but it has some other stuff that people might find interesting. And it's very psychoactive drug oriented, as you might imagine. And, and then this pamphlet, if anyone wants to buy this, this book, which has a, you know, it's a great historical document about Bufo alvarius.

• 1:20:52Speaker 00

  It also contains a new foreword and synthesis section that is really, you know, useful for anyone that's interested in the chemistry of five M O D M T. You can get that at www.sycodalectoadofthesunoranddesert.com.

• 1:21:07Chris Williamson?

  So are there any of those left? I know you had to do a bunch of different runs, right?

• 1:21:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, the first one sold out in an hour. That was pretty wild. Then the second one sold out in a day. And then there's a third, very larger final printing that has not sold out. So if anyone wants to preorder it, as of this discussion, it's there's still a good number of them left and 100% of the profit goes to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research. So

• 1:21:34Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. I'll link that in the show notes below if anyone wants to pick one up along with wherever I can find Hamilton's Pharmacopeia. Dude, I'm really excited to see what your work has in store for you. I know it's the final season of your show and you're now dedicating yourself fully to the chemistry. So it's like white lab coat as opposed to that sun hat and like white shirt and jeans for the for the next few years. But it's gonna be it's gonna be exciting to watch.

• 1:21:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, thank you. I enjoyed the conversation and I'll talk to you later.