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

1. 0:00 – 0:35

   Intro

   1. HMHamilton Morris0:00

      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. (rocket ship roaring)

2. 0:35 – 4:38

   What is Hamilton’s Work?

   1. HMHamilton Morris0:35

   2. CWChris Williamson0:35

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

   3. HMHamilton Morris0:42

      It depends on what I'm doing at the time because I, 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."

   4. CWChris Williamson1:08

      (laughs)

   5. HMHamilton Morris1:08

      "I'm doing some chemistry."

   6. CWChris Williamson1:09

      (laughs)

   7. HMHamilton Morris1:09

      So, (laughs) 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. So, I think that's actually been very helpful.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:32

      What ties those three things together?

   9. HMHamilton Morris1:35

      I think curiosity and a desire to investigate the natural world, to understand the world. Um, 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.

   10. CWChris Williamson2:17

       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 mu- as well, to make it a bit more accessible.

   11. HMHamilton Morris2:32

       Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it, 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, uh, a chemist acquaintance in Australia a couple nights ago who's doing this really cool project of trying to synthesize this substance called cubane. Uh, have you ever heard of this before?

   12. CWChris Williamson3:04

       No, what is it?

   13. HMHamilton Morris3:04

       Uh, this, uh, for chemists, this is, like, one of the coolest things ever created. It's a cube made of carbon, so it's, it's, uh, 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, uh, bond for a carbon atom. And this guy is doing it in his garage, which I just think is so cool. And, uh, but this is, like, a very famous chemical. It's in, uh, 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-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, 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 th- 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, the beauty of a solvated electron? I mean, it's pretty remarkable.

   14. CWChris Williamson4:34

       That's, that's, some people go to bed thinking about that at night. I, I, I do all the time.

3. 4:38 – 8:33

   Why Isn’t Chemistry More Popular?

   1. CWChris Williamson4:38

   2. HMHamilton Morris4:38

      (laughs)

   3. CWChris Williamson4:39

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

   4. HMHamilton Morris5:28

      I agree completely. It's absolutely true, and I find it a little bizarre, um, 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, I'm sure there's some astrophysicists listening to this saying like, "What the fuck did he just say?"

   5. CWChris Williamson5:53

      (laughs)

   6. HMHamilton Morris5:54

      But, (laughs) but, but, but that is, that is my feeling. It is, you know, like black holes are obviously totally fascinating and I am not...... uh, 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 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, uh, is something that I, I do find remarkable. And, you know, and, and it's not only remarkable, I think it's, it's ... I've asked myself why. H- how could this have happened? How, 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 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, uh, toxic wastes, all these different things have just, uh, created a culture where we've kind of brushed chemistry to the side and decided that it's, uh, boring, dangerous. The word chemical is a bad thing for many people. They, they, you know, I call ... chemophobia is what chemists call it, where someone will say, "Oh, this food doesn't contain chemicals," and people say that's a good thing. Of course, all food is made of chemicals.

   7. CWChris Williamson7:42

      (laughs)

   8. HMHamilton Morris7:42

      Chemicals are

   9. NANarrator7:42

      (laughs)

   10. HMHamilton Morris7:42

       ... are a factor. So it's just like, you know, it's, it's all just kind of shows how disconnected we are and how, you know, it's, you know, you can't go to a pharmacy in the United States and get a pH indicator anymore. Like, we're, we're, we're totally disconnected from, I would say, even the most basic aspects of chemistry. And, um, it's really sad because I think it's a, a science that is one of the most ancient scientific disciplines, maybe the most ancient. And it, uh, I mean, especially if you include metallurgy as a form of chemistry, which it is, um, 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, and yet it's considered boring.

   11. CWChris Williamson8:31

       That's why you're here, man.

4. 8:33 – 13:17

   Can Science Explain Consciousness?

   1. CWChris Williamson8:33

   2. HMHamilton Morris8:33

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson8:33

      How much does a intrigue or an interest in consciousness and the phenomenological experience of our day-to-day experience guide what you do?

   4. HMHamilton Morris8:43

      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, I, what I really think is the case is that, um, you know, the- there's a lot of concepts that aren't really scientific concepts, but they're useful. It's like, uh, I think about consciousness the way historically people would look for life. You know, like if, if you ask a, um ... Like, we are aware life exists. Life is a thing that exists. And if you ask a biologist, "Can you show me where life is in a cell," uh, 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, uh, that isn't one thing. And I think consciousness is like life in that sense, that it doesn't actually exist the way that we ... There's, you know, we're not gonna realize, oh, the consciousness is ... It's the, it is the claustrum. That is what consciousness ... It's this region of the brain, and it's, and it's a quantum mechanical interaction in the claustrum and that produces consciousness. No, it's, consciousness is gonna 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, uh, useful defining characteristics of life, which of course biologists still to this day argue about constantly what constitutes life. Um, and I, I don't think consciousness is gonna be any simpler. So, uh, so I am motivated to understand consciousness, but I'm also doing that with the, uh, 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, uh, describe the complex experience of being or the perceived experience of being. Um, yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson11:12

      These emergent properties are very difficult to try and, try and wrangle together when you think about the synergy of different cells. When does a particular number of sk- 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, uh, we, we've had a few philosophers on, Philip Goff talking about the philosophical schools of consciousness, dualism, and, uh, the-

   6. HMHamilton Morris11:38

      Right.

   7. CWChris Williamson11:38

      ... his, his particular, um, 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 thought that you would have maybe expected it to be able to be explained by science.

   8. HMHamilton Morris11:58

      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, um, DNA exists. It, I don't think it's a single thing that can be understood and characterized. I think it's a, a collection of different computational, experiential, perceptual phenomena that, in concert, create a perceived experience that we call consciousness. 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- it's very, I mean, it's very complicated, I would think.

   9. CWChris Williamson12:53

      (laughs)

   10. HMHamilton Morris12:53

       I imagine. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it turns out that someone is gonna find out that it's a really simple thing, and, uh, and it is one thing, and everything that I'm saying is wrong. But, uh, 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 Claustrum, and That's It."

5. 13:17 – 22:51

   Psychedelics in Culture

   1. CWChris Williamson13:17

      I get you.

   2. HMHamilton Morris13:17

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson13:17

      What is the place that psychedelics and other mind-altering drugs have in life? Like, why should anyone take them?

   4. HMHamilton Morris13:24

      Hm. I don't know that anyone should take them in s- in the same-

   5. CWChris Williamson13:28

      Why would anyone want to take them, perhaps?

   6. HMHamilton Morris13:31

      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, um, assuming that, you know, you're doing it responsibly and you are, you know, I suppose, stable enough to benefit f- from the experience in some way.

   7. CWChris Williamson14:13

      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, uh, 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?

   8. HMHamilton Morris14:40

      Hm. I feel different ways about it. It, it kind of depends on what culture I'm, I'm interacting with. Um, I would say I feel... It, 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 n- not a drug or a plant that contains a drug. It's a, a spirit, and to even talk about mescaline as an active principle in the cactus is a sort of sacrilegious, reductionist perspective that doesn't acknowledge the depth of the spirit of the peyote. Um, and so if you say, "Hey, come on, come on, guys. You're, you're gonna drive this plant to extinction by over-harvesting 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 w- well, I would, if I made that argument, I'd make it very gently, and I would probably instead start with, um, suggesting that the peyote be cultivated. But they don't even like cultivation, and, and arguably with good reason, because, um, a lot of the cultivation techniques have been focused on growing very large peyote as opposed to, um, 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, uh... This is my impression, having r- reported on this a, a few years ago, uh, they kind of decided that this cultivation was a, was a bad route to go down. So that's a, 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, uh, you wanna 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, uh, 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. Um, with the toad, I think it's different, because we are dealing with something that is not a tradition. It is not (clears throat) something (clears throat) that has been done for generations by a marginalized group. It's a new thing that started in the '80s by, uh, a white guy in Texas, and I actually really find that important and interesting, because there's a, a tendency that many people have, um, 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 need to, they can't just say, "I enjoy this." And so you really butt up against that with-... modern practices because there is no tradition, 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, uh, 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." And...

   9. CWChris Williamson18:45

      (laughs) This 30-year-old history? (laughs)

   10. HMHamilton Morris18:48

       Yes, and, uh, and it's, and it's like, uh, eh, 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, I have no... I am interested in the truth, so if somebody provides strong evidence, I'll change my perspective on this. But the, um, the reason that there is this misconception is that there was a, there have been a few discoveries of large quantities of toad bones. One was in, uh, North Carolina, and the anthropologist whose name was, uh, Je- Janet Runquist, I believe, um, she... And, 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, uh, it wasn't, like, synchronized, but if you, whatever I say in the episode is correct, for the record. And, uh, and so she found all these toad bones and 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, uh, and so it got written up a little bit in the popular press, in Omni Magazine, which was a big magazine at that time, and, um, and, uh, 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. So a mistaken report, a mistaken interpretation of this Native American practice caused a real discovery to occur. The, all current evidence, uh, there's a, an anthropologist named Matthew Compton who looked into this, uh, points toward the toads having been used as a food source, not as a drug, and there's a lot of reasons for that.

   11. CWChris Williamson21:03

       (laughs)

   12. HMHamilton Morris21:05

       (laughs) There's a lot of evidence. One, one is that Bufo alvarius, which is the only species that produces 5-MeO-DMT, is not present in the Carolinas, and, uh, and so there's that. There is no plausible psychedelic toad. Also, um, there are documented... uh, there's a book, I actually have it, of, like, traditional Cherokee practices in food preparation, and it has a section 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. Um, so yeah, you, it's... And toads are a, a decent source of food, so, like, it doesn't really make sense that there would be all these, like, uh, 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. 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, uh, and smoke it based on some research by an Italian, uh, biologist named Vittorio Irsch Beimer. Complicated story. I don't blame people for being confused by it. It's very confusing. Um, but that's, that's what happened. So all these people were saying, "How dare you? Like, you said that he discovered it from a Cherokee, uh, midden 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 midden pile was, okay? I hope that made sense. I don't know if that... Did that make sense?

   13. CWChris Williamson22:42

       What a mistake, man. Yeah, I mean-

   14. HMHamilton Morris22:44

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson22:44

       ... uh, it- it's not bad as misrepresentations go that you get to open up an entire new world of psychedelic experience.

6. 22:51 – 30:10

   Are Psychedelics Spiritual or Scientific?

   1. CWChris Williamson22:52

      What's your-

   2. HMHamilton Morris22:52

      Right.

   3. CWChris Williamson22:53

      ... uh, 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 it energy in the universe?

   4. HMHamilton Morris23:11

      Well, what, what I find funny is people are constantly invoking the supernatural in places where just simple psychology is sufficient. You don't need to, uh, you don't need to go into the spirit realm to understand that there are non, or, 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 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..."... is a medicine that they, they're, you know, they estivate 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 a 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, insanely successful fundraising effort. Uh, like at, as of today, I think it's raised $130,000 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." Like, "This is not a good, uh, this is not a good practice." So, so it's not that I'm... I, 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 to people if you, you know, served it to them in like a po- in like a brown tar and said that it had been scraped from underneath the toilet, and, uh, and that it was, like, cursed by a serial killer or, or something like that. Like, these, these, uh, these things impact the experience, um, completely.

   5. CWChris Williamson27:10

      That's the fascinating thing about set and settings, 'cause I, 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.

   6. HMHamilton Morris27:31

      Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And, and that's, that is one useful thing to come out of this, um, 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. Um, I was also getting a lot of criticism from people that were saying, "Well, why didn't you talk about how bad these guys are?" Well, you know, I, like, I can't fight everyone's fights with these people for them, but it's, they, they have... There's a lot of, um, infighting, a lot of anger in the toad venom community, and I think part of it has to do with the power of the substance, you know? I think that, um, from what I can tell, some of the, they call themselves facilitators, the people that ad- that give 5-MeO-DMT-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 know, you can't- 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, the feeling of futility that that would promote in someone who's dedicated their lives to healing. 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, th- how couldn't 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, um, lost in it themselves, and, 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 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... I, if I can show people that this is a simple molecule that can easily be produced by someone with an undergrad chemistry knowledge, um, and, uh, and, and made available to anyone that needs it, and that will have a positive effect on the world.

7. 30:10 – 38:47

   The Experience of Using Psychedelics

   1. HMHamilton Morris30:10

   2. CWChris Williamson30:10

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

   3. HMHamilton Morris30:16

      Um, you know, I, I would say that it's many of the benefits that people typically associate with a near-death experience, um, where you feel extreme gratitude for life. Uh, you feel, um, an appreciation for the beauty of the world that you can very easily take for granted. You know, I was totally tenderized. I was hyper-sensitive in the wake of this experience. I, uh, hyper-sensitized in every way. I would, you know, be moved to tears by the beauty of a cute dog walking down the street. Um, just, like, totally, totally amazed by plants and all life. And, um, 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. (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson31:30

      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?

   5. HMHamilton Morris31:57

      I don't ... uh, the Darren Aronofsky movie?

   6. CWChris Williamson32:00

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

   7. HMHamilton Morris32:05

      Uh, oh, I d- ... I watched half of it on an airplane.

   8. CWChris Williamson32:08

      Okay, so you know the premise. Right, so-

   9. HMHamilton Morris32:11

      I believe so, yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson32:12

       You ha- you have this, um, human that is raised with essentially no culture. They're given words 'cause 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?

   11. HMHamilton Morris32:37

       (sighs) Y- well, yeah, I mean, I consider it all the time, uh, I, because I'm very interested in the way animals respond to psychedelics and, uh, and what a psychedelic experience is for a rodent, or if there even is a psychedelic experience for a rodent. And, um, 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, what do you think? What is, uh-

   12. CWChris Williamson33:10

       Oh, man.

   13. HMHamilton Morris33:10

       What do you think would happen in those-

   14. CWChris Williamson33:11

       Well, I mean, I think, uh, based on my very mild introduction to psychedelics, stuff like the geometric patterns that you seem to see, tents, 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, a kaleidoscope, that-

   15. HMHamilton Morris33:32

       Mm-hmm.

   16. CWChris Williamson33:32

       I don't think that that requires culture. Um, (sighs) 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 j- 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 this, the psychedelic to them.

   17. HMHamilton Morris33:59

       Yeah, well, I mean, one, one thing that I would imagine is religious experience. I think that, that, um, 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 p- 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 experiences, as I was saying previously. So little things, like, you know, just even the way people talk about drugs or they ... people are burnt out, they're acid burned, they're frying on acid, all this ... you know, there's people that think that dr- 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 n- if they think that this is, they're frying on a- 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. You hear that all ... have you heard that?

   18. CWChris Williamson35:30

       No.

   19. HMHamilton Morris35:30

       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, uh, and I think, like, "Wow, there are people that have mushroom experiences who think that what is happening is food poisoning." Um, and, uh-

   20. CWChris Williamson35:46

       (laughs) I've, I've heard you, I've heard you talk about, um, some of the residual guilt that you get when you sometimes used to smoke weed.

   21. HMHamilton Morris35:54

       Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson35:54

       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?

   23. HMHamilton Morris36:10

       It's true. It ... well, it's true, it's true and it's not true. It's, it's very, uh, it's very complicated, I think, with cannabis. That's one of the more complicated ones, because, um, 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. Um, and that's great sometimes and not great, uh, not great as a daily alteration of consciousness. So, you know, it's very easy for me to just, you know, I'm, I'm receiving like 100 emails a day from disgruntled weirdos and I think, uh, 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, "Uh, all right, well, I don't know. I guess, I guess people think strange things and that's just, uh, the way it's gonna be for that guy." (laughs) But, but, um, and so that's, that can be extremely, extremely beneficial, uh, in a, if you're living a frustrating life or you're just totally occupied with your professional responsibilities or your studies or whatever, um, but too much of it, at least for me, and i- it has a bit of a dissociative type of effect where I, 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, 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, uh, y- 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 American, European value system that where if you're not just constantly generating things, you're of no value. Um, and, 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. Uh, so... (laughs)

   24. CWChris Williamson38:46

       No,

8. 38:47 – 47:03

   Effects of Legalising Drugs

   1. CWChris Williamson38:47

      me neither. Sh- do you think any drugs should be illegal? What's your stance on the legalization of drugs?

   2. HMHamilton Morris38:53

      No, I do not think any drugs should be illegal. Um, I think that ... And I, I'm aware that my perspective on this can sound a little bit doctrinaire and I try to remember that, that there are people who are just so irresponsible that maybe certain types of regulations are required for public safety, you know. Um, certainly I think that it's really good that radioactive materials are regulated. I, I do. I mean, I think it's, it's we, we ... There is a history spanning, uh, like over 100 years of people just doing irresponsible things with radioactive materials 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, le- maybe not fine, but it's not, it's not gonna kill the person, I hope, most likely. I mean, I suppose there is (laughs) exceptions for everything, but you know, radioactive materials routinely make their way into quack medicine and, uh, 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, um, these, you know, like nitrile, uh, like what is that compound that's used as a, a quack cancer treatment? Like, late- la trial or whatever it's like a base science pro drug. And so like I think that some, um, some, some things 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 things.

   3. CWChris Williamson40:55

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

   4. HMHamilton Morris40:58

      (laughs)

   5. CWChris Williamson40:59

      (laughs)

   6. HMHamilton Morris41:00

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

   7. CWChris Williamson41:13

      Did you take it?

   8. HMHamilton Morris41:13

      Uh, oh, absolutely not. No. No.

   9. CWChris Williamson41:16

      (laughs)

   10. HMHamilton Morris41:17

       It's, it's, it's radioactive.

   11. CWChris Williamson41:18

       God for that. Yeah. Wow.

   12. HMHamilton Morris41:21

       (laughs) But, uh, but, um, but yeah. It's, you know, drug policy is, is really complicated and I wish I had a, a simple answer to what people should do because, um, because I ... But 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 have regulations where, uh, 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.

   13. CWChris Williamson42:22

       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 a model that we're going to see with other drugs moving forward, it would appear that psilocybin's kind of at the beginning of that threshold of 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 gonna continue to expand out and cover the entire mind-altering drug market?

   14. HMHamilton Morris42:52

       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, 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, uh, 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, they're detached from certain aspects of reality, they're disconnected from each other, and I think that, um, 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, as a, for a community, and you could go and people would, 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. 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 f- 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, uh, 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. Um, 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 become more interested in helping their community. 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. Um, because this idea that they're bad and they're dangerous and anyone who uses them deserves what they get, like, th- it's amazing how little empathy people have. Um, and, and I ... th- 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, p- like, "Junkies should get one shot of Narcan, and then after that, it's up to them. Let them die." You know, I think it was like, what are you talking about? (laughs) 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? Uh-

   15. CWChris Williamson46:05

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

   16. HMHamilton Morris46:13

       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, uh, like, "Five months sober, yeah" who are more addicted to drugs than, like (laughs) than certainly I have ever been. I mean, I ... because, but they will say, "Oh, uh, yeah, I'm, uh, uh, 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 dist- um, 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 abuse is a problem, then you have a very confused attitude toward your

9. 47:03 – 1:03:29

   Ethics of Party Drugs

   1. HMHamilton Morris47:03

      drug use.

   2. CWChris Williamson47:04

      I think there's, (sighs) 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, um, people adopting the veganism movement, but still sniffing cocaine. I run nightclubs.

   3. HMHamilton Morris47:20

      Ah.

   4. CWChris Williamson47:20

      I run a lot of nightclubs and, um, 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.

   5. HMHamilton Morris47:48

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

   6. CWChris Williamson48:22

      Well, it's not the cocaine. The cocaine is not the issue.

   7. HMHamilton Morris48:24

      Right.

   8. CWChris Williamson48:24

      It's the externality of the process that we have to go through to get it at the moment, right?

   9. HMHamilton Morris48:29

      ... yeah, and the fact that it's a l- all of that is a product of it being illegal, not a product of people using cocaine or cocaine in, as a plant alkaloid. That's exclusively what happens in a black market economy. Um, and so I don't know that I think that using cocaine is unethical, uh, 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, uh, to minimize the negative impact that it can have on those communities, which is, you know, it's not easy.

   10. CWChris Williamson49:09

       Fair trade cocaine, that's what we need. Fair trade-

   11. HMHamilton Morris49:12

       Fair tra- I, I ... Well, there, you, I, uh, you're joking, but people actually ... I've heard people talk about that of, of, like, you know, the, uh ... Yeah, people do things like that, actually. It, I've s- heard people talk about it. Um, (laughs) 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, 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-coconized, and you have, um, you know, you have an enormous 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, a very positive plant, and the only negative aspects of it come from its illegality.

   12. CWChris Williamson50:23

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

   13. HMHamilton Morris50:27

       Yeah, I think that would've been ... I think, yeah. I, I, I mean, I actually think, like I, I'm not a big ... I, I, uh, how you couldn't pay me to, to sniff the sort of cocaine that, uh-

   14. CWChris Williamson50:39

       (laughs)

   15. HMHamilton Morris50:39

       ... that exists. Seriously, I mean, I, I wouldn't, and I don't. Uh, and, but I, as a teenager, I used it a, a few times, and, um, and I've analyzed a decent bit of, of cocaine. And of course, it's all horrendously impure. And, um, and (clears throat) but when it's taken orally, in a tea, it's very nice. It's really very, very s- ... 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 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 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 in a warm tea in the morning, and, uh, 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.

   16. CWChris Williamson52:28

       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, um, conspicuous consumption, it would be called by the sociologists. And, um, he was down in Argentina or Mexico or wherever it was, and, uh, he was asking the promoter, uh, there was someone in his entourage asked the promoter if they could get ahold of some cocaine. And the promoter looked at them like they'd asked for, I don't know, 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 ahold of cocaine wherever the guys were, that was seen as a really scummy drug. The branding for cocaine down there was awful. Whereas 2C-B, which if you were to take that in the UK it would be like, "What are you, why are you taking 2C-B on a night out?" But because 2C-B over there is 100 pounds a hit or 50 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, a really sort of scummy, awful drug that people shouldn't take. I thought that was really hilarious-

   17. HMHamilton Morris53:56

       Mm-hmm.

   18. CWChris Williamson53:56

       ... to see how cultural interpretations of drugs completely change how they're positioned.

   19. HMHamilton Morris54:02

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

   20. CWChris Williamson54:49

       Yeah, the one, MCAT or meow.

   21. HMHamilton Morris54:51

       Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, which had a very, as I understand it, as a American, a very, very bad reputation in the UK. It was considered-

   22. CWChris Williamson54:59

       Well, it was-

   23. HMHamilton Morris55:00

       ... like really disgusting.

   24. CWChris Williamson55:01

       ... 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'd just be like, "Mate, not illegal." And obviously they'd get thrown out for being a dick, but the police-

   25. HMHamilton Morris55:31

       (laughs)

   26. CWChris Williamson55:31

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

   27. HMHamilton Morris56:06

       Oh, have you... Yeah, I've tried it. I think it's one of the greatest drugs ever discovered. I am-

   28. CWChris Williamson56:10

       MCAT?

   29. HMHamilton Morris56:10

       ... a huge fan of it.

   30. CWChris Williamson56:11

       Really?
10. 1:03:29 – 1:08:21

    Hamilton’s Respect for Drugs

    1. HMHamilton Morris1:03:29

       into our culture.

    2. CWChris Williamson1:03:30

       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 de- 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 blase 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, um, yeah, I think it's ... From my perspective as someone who's been around a lot of drugs for a long time, especially in the party scene, where people are taking ... They, 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. Um, and seeing that ... I, I'd just call it respect for drugs, I suppose, um, I think is a really good example to be set. Is that something that you consciously try and do to come across in a overly responsible way?

    3. HMHamilton Morris1:04:40

       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 blah, 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 who are more intoxicated than I've ever been every day. So, like, why is it, like, this is h- ... 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, the times when I was ... Like, the first piece I ever made, I was 21 and I was making it-

    4. CWChris Williamson1:05:50

       What was that?

    5. HMHamilton Morris1:05:50

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

    6. CWChris Williamson1:06:00

       Is it the one where you got burned?

    7. HMHamilton Morris1:06:02

       Yeah. So, I was ... Yeah, I was-

    8. CWChris Williamson1:06:03

       I've seen, I have seen that, yeah.

    9. HMHamilton Morris1:06:05

       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 ... ... way this will 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, i- like, if people are criticizing me, they'll be like, "That guy? 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 hydrolases. So it's, it's not metabolized by MAO, the enzyme that, uh, is inhibited by the beta carboline 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, 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, uh, and, and so I, 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 loo- learn about the metabolism of Ritalin, and so like j- 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 th- and there's part of me that thinks like, well, I guess maybe okay, good, because I showed that I was honest about something, but, you know, there, there's a price for that type of honesty and it's, it can be very obnoxious.

11. 1:08:21 – 1:17:11

    The Issue with the Media

    1. HMHamilton Morris1:08:21

    2. CWChris Williamson1:08:21

       I think that the main problem we're coming up here is this, uh, 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, they're just enshrined for the rest of your days and that's going to be, uh, you know, potentially that could be the thing. Th- that's, "Oh, you're the, you're the Ritalin and ayahuasca guy," and, you know, you've got to spend the rest of your life trying to constantly wipe this slime off you.

    3. HMHamilton Morris1:09:22

       Right, and, and f- and, uh, 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. Um, 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, th- 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. So like some, you know, some, like, some cultural critic was writing a, uh, snotty review of my show recently and he's talking about how, you know, he, he, y- 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 of 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 tha- 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 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, 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 str- most streaming, uh, 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 was particularly beautiful, maybe you should look into who photographed it, who's the director of photography in that episode? What else have they done? Maybe that explains it, maybe it wasn't the like over-arching media corporation that distributed it, maybe it was a human being who should be appreciated or whatever. So like I don't know, tha- that's like a complicated like over-arching issue I have with contemporary media literacy but, uh, it's, it's a rough time and I agree we did not evolve to have like these, uh, these lasting records and we have not culturally evolved to maturely recognize that fact. Like all of this, uh, you know, offense archeology, all this stuff where people spend enormous amounts of time trying to dig up evidence that somebody said something that was bad 15 years ago, it's, 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, uh, and I don't know. I don't know wha- what the solution to this is other than, you know, uh, like improved cultural literacy, uh, or improved media literacy culturally and, uh, and kind of like empathy for that fact and empathy for people in general. I don't know.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:12:47

       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 ev- w- y- 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 gray at the moment, but it's getting darker gray and darker gray and darker gray 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, you, are you familiar with Lindy? Do you know what Lindy is?

    5. HMHamilton Morris1:13:31

       Uh, the gas company?

    6. CWChris Williamson1:13:33

       (laughs) No. Um, 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 gonna 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-

    7. HMHamilton Morris1:13:54

       Yeah.

    8. CWChris Williamson1:13:54

       ... 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 that's stood, stood the test of time. That is just someone's m- someone's meandering thoughts whilst they're wiping dog poo off their shoe, like, this morning on an Instagram story, or even, like, someone's annoyed tweet when they couldn't sleep at 2:00 AM. That is what we're feeding ourselves. I think it's, that's definitely leading us towards more of a black, a black ball.

    9. HMHamilton Morris1:14:40

       Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, it's really, it's very tricky. It's very troubling. Um, and I just hope that people can, huh, be as kind to each other as possible, because it, 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 all, I'm not trying to pretend that I'm, like, a, 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 cr- talk about publicly. That's weird." Like, because, you know, you, if, if you are publicly mean, it just, like, poisons you a little bit, and it, uh, it has this, uh, I, I, and 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 (laughs) 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 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, uh, of th- the target of their meanness. I'm talking about the effect on the person who's 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 it, yeah. I think, like, Facebook and all of these social media companies had an in- 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 (laughs) , I don't know what the solution is other than, I don't know.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:16:55

        Huge dose of psychedelics.

    11. HMHamilton Morris1:16:57

        Maybe.

    12. CWChris Williamson1:16:57

        Globally.

    13. HMHamilton Morris1:16:58

        Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I mean, I, 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.

    14. CWChris Williamson1:17:07

        Yeah.

    15. HMHamilton Morris1:17:07

        If we, yeah.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:17:07

        And everyone had, and everyone had a great time.

    17. HMHamilton Morris1:17:09

        (laughs)

    18. CWChris Williamson1:17:09

        What should we expect from the next

12. 1:17:11 – 1:19:38

    Future of Psychedelics

    1. CWChris Williamson1:17:11

       decade of psychedelics?

    2. HMHamilton Morris1:17:13

       I think it's gonna be a really interesting decade. I'm very excited. I'm so excited that I'm, you know, probably leaving most of the work that I've done for the last decade to dedicate myself entirely to psychedelic research. Um, like, uh, you know, scientific research. That's my plan right now. Um-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:17:30

       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 Bri- the Brian Cox of psychedelics. Um-

    4. HMHamilton Morris1:17:40

       Ye- yeah, and it's, it's surreal having all of these companies contact me asking me to be on their, you know, 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, uh, or did this research at. And it's, uh, and it was, you know, it was, there wasn't, there were no resources. And now there are tremendous resources. So it's, that's so exciting because you think about the history of, of psychedelic research post-'60s when there was no funding. Like, as, 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, you know? There were, there were, uh, there were people doing psychedelic research I think up until the, until the, at the very least late '70s, and, uh, 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. And 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 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 a expansion of knowledge and freedom, and I think that, yeah, I think it could be great. I hope. Um, I am, I'm not a usually very optimistic person, but it does force me to feel a tiny bit optimistic.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:19:37

       That's good enough for

13. 1:19:38 – 1:22:20

    Where to Find Hamilton

    1. CWChris Williamson1:19:38

       me, man. (laughs)

    2. HMHamilton Morris1:19:39

       (laughs) Yes.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:19:39

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

    4. HMHamilton Morris1:19:48

       Whew. It's a hard show to watch. You can, uh, in the UK you might be able to get it on Amazon, iTunes, um, you can watch it on 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 not happy about.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:20:06

       Has it got, like, Spanish, Spanish overdubbed music? Has it got, like, s-

    6. HMHamilton Morris1:20:09

       (laughs)

    7. CWChris Williamson1:20:10

       ... Spanish Hamilton or something on it?

    8. HMHamilton Morris1:20:11

       They, they put in, uh, actually, like, soccer games into it, so that kind of stuff I don't really like very much. But, but, it's, you know, uh, 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, uh, Amazon. And then I also have a, uh, a podcast which you can check out at patreon.com/hamiltonmorris. It's largely chemistry oriented, but it has, uh, some other stuff that people might find interesting, uh, and it's very psychoactive drug oriented, as you might imagine, um, and, uh, and then this pamphlet, if anyone wants to buy this, this book which has a, uh, you know, it's a great historical document about Bufo alvarius. It also contains a new, uh, forward and synthesis section that is really, you know, useful for anyone that's interested in the chemistry of 5-MEO DMT. Uh, you can get that at www.psychedelictoadofthesonorandesert.com. So... (laughs)

    9. CWChris Williamson1:21:08

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

    10. HMHamilton Morris1:21:12

        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, a larger final printing that has not sold out, so, uh, if anyone wants to preorder it as of this discussion, um, it's, uh, 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...

    11. CWChris Williamson1:21:35

        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 Pharmacopia. Dude, I'm r- 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, the chemistry, so it's like white lab coat as opposed to, like, sun hat and, like, white shirt and jeans for the, for the next few years, but-

    12. HMHamilton Morris1:21:56

        Yeah.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:21:57

        ... it's gonna be, it's gonna be exciting to watch.

    14. HMHamilton Morris1:21:59

        Yeah, yeah, thank you. I enjoyed the conversation and, uh, I'll talk to you later. (instrumental music) << Love hands <<

Episode duration: 1:22:20