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

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)

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

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."

(laughs)

"I'm doing some chemistry."

(laughs)

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.

What ties those three things together?

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.

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.

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?

No, what is it?

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.