Hamilton Morris joins Joe Rogan to explore frog venom-derived psychedelics like 5-MeO-DMT, debunking myths such as spinal fluid releasing LSD or alien communication theories while acknowledging consciousness’s uncharted depths. They critique government drug policies—Joe highlights Romney’s dismissive stance on medical marijuana and its industrial potential—while Hamilton warns of MKUltra’s weaponized LSD experiments, including CIA-linked suicides in France. The episode blends science, ethics (vegetarianism vs. omnivorism), and Rogan’s chaotic tangents, from SOPA protests to cannabis juicing, ending with a bizarre fleshlight promo and praise for Morris’ "cool" yet unpredictable insights. [Automatically generated summary]
I take Alphabrain, but I don't take the other ones.
I take shroom tech when I work out, and I take Alphabrain, and I take the immune shit.
Anyway, what all this stuff is, they're nootropics.
And this is my advice to you if you don't know what we're talking about.
Don't buy anything.
Please, just Google Nootropics.
There's a lot of really interesting articles about the subject, and it's controversial, but I've been experimenting with them for years, and I enjoy them.
And not just the ones that we sell.
There was a football player, I think his name is Romanowski, I'm pretty sure, and he has a company called Neuro One.
And apparently he had dealt with some concussions and stuff.
So he created his own formula, like a nootropic formula to enhance the way his mind worked.
And it was really interesting.
And I enjoy that stuff.
And I have no vested interest in whether you buy it or don't buy it.
If you feel like you don't want to buy it or you feel like it's too expensive, I encourage people to steal the ingredients, copy it, and make your own.
It was the Maiaruna Indians, and they gave me a...
Well, they actually didn't give it to me.
It was sort of a complicated trip to find them.
But they traditionally used the venom of this frog called Philomedusa bicolor that produces a venom that's rich in all these different psychoactive peptides and specifically contains this substance called dermorphin that's a super potent opioid.
But they kind of...
But it doesn't have any sort of like a classical opioid effect.
Like it's not really a sedative.
And people claim that it gives them everlasting energy.
They're able to hunt for days without sleep and to go days without eating and all sorts of supernatural feats.
I don't think it really poses that much of a risk in terms of, I doubt there's very many 5-MeO DMT hospitalizations compared to even things like LSD. It's just such a rare thing, and it lasts for such a short period of time.
Well, I left Chicago and moved to New York, and a friend of a friend worked at Vice magazine and told the editor that I was interested both academically and in terms of writing about all these psychedelic drugs, and they wanted to do more informed drug-related content for the magazine.
So...
So they asked me to start writing a monthly column.
But Vice used to have a totally different attitude towards drugs in terms of, you know, they'd give someone an ounce of mushrooms and put them in a hotel room and just record everything they did while it was happening.
They weren't really interested in the science of it.
So do you think the scientific aspects for the longest time, was it like, I think it was like maybe Hunter S. Thompson that maybe fucked a lot of people up, because his thing was just sort of take them, blast off, and enjoy the ride of it.
No, I think any way that anyone chooses to do it is perfectly fine, as long as they benefit from it and don't hurt, don't, like, stab people in the process or kill a dog or something.
Because Hamilton is doing something on isolation tanks.
And we're going to check out the float lab tomorrow in Venice, where Crash, my friend Craig, aka Crash, is the mad genius, putting together the baddest float tanks in the world.
We're going to go check out his stuff and his crazy cellular influence device.
I think they're pretty fascinating for anyone that's studied the history of psychedelic drugs just because John Lilly And also, at the very beginning of psychedelic research, there were always these attempts to try and isolate the experience from the environment in some way when they were trying to quantify or qualify the different effects of new drugs in the 60s.
And because it's a class that's so much based on the environment, they wanted to try and figure out a way to remove subjects from the environment and test them in some kind of unbiased setting.
And the two ways they had were Sensory deprivation tanks and these Gonsfeld devices.
I think it's really good to have someone be affectionate to you.
Even if it's just someone rubbing you with their fingers, that's really intimate.
We're pretending that it's not sexual because it's not touching your groin.
But when some big, fat, sweaty woman who really knows how to rub a neck When she's getting in there with lotion and everything, that lady's fucking you.
She's giving you affection.
They're giving you affection.
They're rubbing your legs.
When someone's rubbing your feet, they might as well be blowing you.
What if they, like, finished it off with, like, rocking you in a chair where they held you for, like, 20 minutes at the end and they were just, like, playing with your hair at the very end, like a baby or something?
Yeah, that would work.
You should add little bonuses like that, you know?
When you think about how many Wikipedia entries are written by the pharmaceutical companies, how much Wikipedia material is actually advertising in one way or another.
Disney and NBC. Well, yeah, I guess they would be the ones who could benefit from a crackdown.
You've got to think about how much money has been lost.
Now, here's my question.
A lot of people have gotten things that they didn't deserve because they kind of downloaded them illegally maybe, but how much money was lost Was there really any money lost?
I wonder.
I wonder if it didn't exist.
Would those people have gone out and bought it?
Is that what you're saying?
Or would you say maybe they just downloaded it on a whim?
And maybe if they like it, they might tell somebody else and maybe somebody else might buy it.
It's interesting that it's the browning process, and it kind of makes sense because they say that if you eat meat and you eat it well done, like the carbon on the outside, it's really not good.
It's like the black shit that people love, the crispy outside.
There was a couple people that were annoyed that were vegans, and one guy I might have overreacted to, because I just get tired of people with their hashtag, I'm vegan, like they say something, and they go, I'm vegan.
He was saying, because we were talking about animals getting killed in processing plants, and it does happen, you know, groundhogs and all kinds of animals die.
When you buy plants from a store, unless you've got your own organic setup and you're doing it all yourself, chances are in the harvesting of the plants, some animals are going to die, unfortunately.
The area is going to be devastated unless you have some really good setup or it's great composting.
Unless you're doing it all yourself for your own food.
If you're doing it all yourself for your own food, that's one thing.
But if you're buying some shit from Whole Foods or from wherever, it's coming from a farm somewhere, even if it's organically grown, you don't think some animals are getting jacked?
There's an article about how in Australia, at least, it's a greater total loss of life, but it's a different type of life if you're a vegetarian than if you're an omnivore because of all the mice that are killed in the process of harvesting grains.
If I had known they were treated well, I'd feel much better about it.
But, you know, the reality of, you know, you buy a Kentucky Fried Chicken or you buy any sort of, you know, meat product from any fast food, anything, you're buying something that did not live a happy life.
we can't you're talking about extremeness though most people don't believe that even even most like normal anti-cruelty animal you know companies or whatever they're called charities uh uh even them uh they still believe in you know humane killing of animals you know But what you're talking about is people that are just like nothing.
There's a certain part of town where you can't go anywhere.
During certain migrations, because the elks will just walk down the main street.
It's fucking amazing!
There's like a hundred elk.
There's a photo of them.
And there's like a herd of them.
And they're walking down the middle of the street.
It's like, wow!
What a crazy place where you live, man.
A herd of elk just walked...
If it wasn't for people shooting those elk, the herd would be 200 the next year.
It'd be 300. There's not enough predators.
Unless you want more mountain lions, unless you want to start bringing mountain lions into your daily equation, you've got to do something to get rid of those elk.
They have to shoot those fucking things.
If we want to live there, you're going to have to shoot them.
Deer are fucking terrifying.
Have you ever been in a place where deer are super plentiful and you can't drive safe?
I think it just generally encourages me to be more conscious of what I'm eating, because otherwise I'm more inclined to eat just gross fast food and things like that.
And I think my diet's improved enormously since I became a vegetarian.
You know, people kept writing me saying, oh, you're so lucky, you're so lucky.
But it was incredibly difficult to get that interview with him, and it took years.
So it wasn't like a luck thing.
Like, Vibe was like, hey, we found a kooky guy for you to interview.
Go visit him.
I had to...
I'd actually been to his house a couple times beforehand and I had to be vetted by his family and all these things because a lot of people don't understand what he does and he's harassed by people.
There's this ridiculous idea that inventors are somehow responsible for what is done with their creations so people think that if somebody dies of an MDMA overdose that he is somehow responsible for it which is of course totally ridiculous.
I mean, I think a lot of the stuff that MAPS does is just proving these things that most people understand intuitively, but it has to be demonstrated in a rigorous scientific fashion before any regulatory authorities will accept it.
What if you were working for an insurance company, and you were like one of their top sales guys, but you're running around the office telling everybody they gotta do acid?
I guess I don't even really know what public perceptions...
I mean, I have an idea, but it's so hard for me to go and to really understand what it would be like in middle America or something if you worked at just an insurance office.
Yeah, but then there's all these subscription-only services that are too expensive for people that are individuals to use.
So it's like, if you want to use Factiva or SciFinder or LexisNexis or any of these databases, scientific databases, you have to go to a library to use that.
I mean, I do have one of those things, but if I had to choose between that, like if I had the book and it was on the Kindle, I would take the book with me.
But he, in the book, he goes through all these different mushroom myths, but he talks about the sacred mushroom on the cross and claims that Allegro never even believed that, but that he was just so...
He hated Christianity so much at that point in his career that he just was looking for some way to disprove it or dismiss it or make it look ridiculous in the public eye.
I saw him speak relatively recently, and he said that his new career goal is to go through all of the Old Testament looking for instances of altered states of consciousness that might be indicative of some kind of a DMT-type experience.
Yeah, recently there was some guy, a scholar from Jerusalem that was proposing that about Moses, and Moses' encounter with the burning bush might have been some reference to the acacia bush, which is a very high DMT content.
Yeah, his idea, this guy Crash's idea, is that he's going to develop how-to tutorials for sports and for all sorts of different things, music, language.
They'll be able to teach people languages much quicker, and that in the sensory deprivation environment, with the lack of external stimuli, your brain will be more focused.
See, the thing about the tank is once you do it for a long time, you know, you do it a couple times, like four or five times, once you do it and you know what it is, you can just settle right in.
And once you settle right in, then it's not going to be distracting at all.
It's going to be wild as fuck.
Floating there, watching some just image appear right in front of you because you can't really see.
The light is so dim that all that comes through is the actual image.
Have you ever been to one of those group massages where there's a shitload of people in one room and then they're playing like a movie that's on loop, like on the wall of like a house, you know, in Asia somewhere?
And I have never gotten into the video or audio thing.
This guy crashes thing.
I like to go in and just chill on my own.
But I think it's fascinating.
I'm not opposed to trying it.
It sounds really nuts.
And if he could ever figure out how to really hook it up and do it right, I mean, what a great way to, like, learn a language or something.
What a great way to, like, you know, could you imagine if you took, like, if you found out that you could develop a course specifically for use inside the isolation bank, like, the optimum way to learn things and memorize things and put them to use, and you show that you could make people learn Spanish ten times quicker or something fucking nutty like that.
You watch those video games, like, the graphics are fucking absolutely incredible.
How long is it before they can project that into your head?
How long is it before, instead of looking at that amazing thing, someone figures out how to project it into your head?
That's going to happen.
And when that happens, that's going to be an alternate reality.
They're going to be able to program an alternate reality.
And if your consciousness, if they can figure out a way to lock your consciousness onto that alternate reality, it's almost like putting you in another world.
It's almost like putting you in another dimension.
Isn't it amazing, man, when you stop and think about that so many of the different things that you've talked about are not legal?
You know, different psychoactive substances.
Like when you were talking to that Shulgin guy, the different things that he was talking about, the different tryptamines, and how many of them are legal?
I think a lot of it is all the other shit they put in them to make it even more addictive.
They say that if you smoke cigars, you know, people that smoke cigars, first of all, you're not inhaling it, but you're getting a real pure type of tobacco.
It doesn't have chemicals on it.
And it's supposed to be not nearly as bad for you.
It's not great for you.
It's not the best thing for you.
before you're sucking on a crazy fucking plant that gives you nicotine all day.
But what it is is a better, healthier version of that tobacco and that the 599 different additives that the Food and Drug Administration allows cigarette companies to pump into cigarettes just to mostly make them more addictive, I think.
When that movie he was talking about, and again, I don't know how much that movie is dramatically, I think it's based on a real story though, isn't it?
It was terrifying to think that a company would be so evil that they would go out of their way to try to use chemists to make their shit more addictive.
And you're like, wow.
That's a really nutty choice.
599 is a lot.
You find out they have 599 different chemicals they add to cigarettes.
bad that's all it does as far as i know and in the quantities that they would be using it i can't i mean maybe it's like a in a really you know in the same way that like indole and very very very small quantities smells like jasmine but then in large quantities smells like shit so some of these things that smell bad it's probably used for smell to to sell a cigarette like when a smoker doesn't smoke and they smell a cigarette you want a cigarette bad what's Yeah.
Like I said, according to the Russell Crowe movie that I can't even remember the title, they've done some deep research on hooking people in deeper and deeper with all these different 599 chemicals.
I'd have to look through the list of all the additives, but I don't know.
It could just be even things like any candy that any child eats probably has an equivalent number of different chemicals in it.
The word chemical always sounds bad.
There's 599 chemicals, but there's, I guarantee, 599 chemicals in everything.
It depends on how you want to phrase it.
I'm sure the majority of those chemicals are benign, but maybe 11 of them do have some malevolent I really do think that nicotine in and of itself would be enough.
What most people smoke, I would say, is Marlboro Lights or Camel Lights or a light cigarette.
And it's more like having a Diet Coke.
You just want a little taste of the chemical and a little smoke, but then you get these guys that are smoking Marlboro Reds where it's like having your little cigars.
Yeah, and he even said, I'm not for legalizing it for anybody.
He goes, not for everybody, but for people that you can use it for medical purposes, it works.
Then, Hank, you can just walk away from a guy like that.
It's just disturbing that anybody would be so flippant with the idea that it's so preposterous, it's so gross to them for some fucking reason.
I don't know what it is, but the idea of altering your consciousness any way other than the sanctioned ways that we've prescribed to for the last several decades, anything that steps outside of that becomes a danger.
I think it had to do with a few people who, you know, when you think about it, it only takes a few people to make these enormous changes in drug policy.
Like, I don't know all that much about the history of marijuana specifically, but it was like that one guy primarily.
And then with the psychedelics, it's the same kind of deal.
It takes one person to die at the wrong time, and, you know, one person...
He dies after smoking salvia, the guy Brett Chidester, and then it's illegal over ten states.
I mean, there was a teenager named Brett Chidester who wrote in his diary, I love salvia, but I also understand that life has no meaning now, or something like that.
And then a few days later, he killed himself, and his mother looked in his diary and said, oh, it was the salvia that made him suicidal and went on this crusade to have it banned in every state that she could and was...
I mean, that was the official idea that was written in the news.
But then when I was in Holland recently working on this new project for VBS, we were at this place called Magic Truffles, which is the largest mushroom, or was the largest mushroom farm in Holland.
They make metric tons of mushrooms in this factory.
But then mushrooms became legal, so they converted their entire operation to producing psychedelic sclerotia.
But they say the whole thing is a scam.
They think that she wasn't even on mushrooms, that the entire thing is based on a friend seeing her with a box of mushrooms in her hand on the day of the death.
And then they put two and two together and decided that she must have been on mushrooms when she died.
I mean, it also has to do with fashion and science and medicine.
You know, it became very unfashionable in the 80s to do psychedelic psychotherapy.
And there were only a number, even in places, like I think there were certain parts of Germany where any psychiatrist that wanted to could.
And they chose not to just because most people weren't interested in it for a while.
They thought it had limited potential.
And now I think the potential is, you know, there's the...
Renewal of all the psychedelic research.
But in the 80s, people didn't think it was, even people that were pro-psychedelic drugs, a lot of them didn't necessarily think that it was a viable road to producing important neuroscientific research or in terms of psychotherapeutic drugs.
Yeah, I recall hearing a McKenna interview where he was talking about that, about how scientists were often discouraged from going down those paths because people would say, you know, there's really nothing there for you.
It's difficult to quantify the benefits of psychedelic drugs.
There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that they have lasting effects on people's lives and that they have relief from depression or alcoholism or things like that.
But when it comes down to really, really putting it down on paper, it's Yeah, they said they'd improve their personalities.
But even that is kind of slippery.
It's mystical experience.
All these terms are slippery.
When you look at a nootropic, there are these very defined studies of how something...
Does it aid rodents in navigating a maze?
Does it allow them to...
Does it prevent the formation of certain types of tangled proteins in the brain or things that are indicative of neurodegenerative diseases?
But there isn't anything like that for psychedelics.
There's no single benefit that can be quantified.
And I think that's one reason that it's difficult for researchers.
And there's ways around it.
Now a lot of people try to emphasize the positive effects that are not necessarily psychoactive.
So maybe they have some kind of an immunosuppressant effect that would be useful for arthritis or some kind of inflammatory disease or something like that.
That's funny that you said that because there was something I was reading just a couple of days ago about people juicing cannabis and that it doesn't have any psychoactive effects but there's a lot of great health benefits for juicing it.
Oh, I don't know about this specific technique, but CBD is not psychoactive and has all kinds of medicinal effects.
Like it's currently undergoing clinical trials as a treatment for schizophrenia.
So, I mean, in addition to the psychedelic effect, there may be all kinds of things we can't, you know, maybe neuroregenerative, maybe synaptogenic, maybe all sorts of different things.
The marijuana one is the biggest trip because it's got so many excellent properties, yet It makes the best paper.
It makes the best clothes.
The fiber is excellent.
You can make wallboard out of it that's four times stronger than plywood.
It's a really incredible plant because it's super strong.
Have you ever picked up a hemp stalk?
It's really weird, man.
It's from another planet because it's really fucking strong, but it's light as shit.
Like, you pick it up and it's like, this is a weird kind of wood.
It seems strange.
And it has so much fucking potential as far as, like, you can grow, like, a massive forest full of it, chop it all down, and then have another massive forest, like, six months later or a year later.
I mean, it's renewable.
You can do it over and over again.
And all the health benefits.
It's like it's from another planet.
It's really a crazy drug when you think about all the good things it does.
It's great.
The seeds are an awesome source of protein.
It has all the essential amino acids.
It's actually good for you if you juice it.
If you smoke it, you get high, you feel amazing.
It's like it couldn't do any more for you.
Come on, man.
You can make paper out of me.
You want to make clothes out of me.
Dude, you can eat my oil.
My oil is really good for you.
Ooh, it can power cars too.
It's like I'm renewable every six months.
I mean, it's like it couldn't be any nicer to you.
It couldn't be any more of a productive plant, as far as society uses as a quantity, uses as something that you could sell.
They have so many benefits beyond just being vessels for carrying these psychoactive drugs.
I think Paul Stamets did a lot of experiments with the Defense Department using either P-cyanescins or azorescins and using them to dephosphorylate sarin to break down nerve gases.
Because in the same way that all these enzymes in the mycelium that are able to break down The cellular components of the substrate, whether it's wood or grass or some kind of seed, it's able to break it down and extract all these amino acids and then biosynthesize chemicals out of it.
But it can also break down all other kinds of substrates.
There's all this bioremediation where they use mushrooms to clean up oil spills because the mushroom mycelium is able to break down the aromatic hydrocarbons in the oil.
And to totally detoxify it, you can even eat the mushrooms afterwards.
Yeah, they wanted to do it in Japan as well to clean up radioactive waste because you can use the mushrooms to bioaccumulate radioactive fallout and then pick the mushrooms and slowly decontaminate an area.
I mean, it's an extremely slow way to do it, but also effective.
We were talking about Stephen Hawking and how Stephen Hawking has this idea that if we ever do make contact with aliens, the best move would be to ignore them.
Because if they ever come to our planet, the chances are they're not only going to exploit us, but destroy us.
I mean, he didn't say exactly those words, but he generally has a pessimistic view.
And I think that that's a well-informed, intelligent view.
There's no reason to have an optimistic view about that.
But Daniel Pitchback seems to have this idea that we'll all be friends.
We, but with animals that we don't understand, intelligent animals we understand, we regularly enslave them for people's enjoyment to watch on television.
And then we believe somehow or another that some super intelligent organism is going to show different behavior than what every single organism on this earth, including the highest us, the most aware us.
It was kind of cool because you put yourself back in that sort of old-school comic book style of storytelling they did in the 50s and the innocent days when they made that movie.
But the other thing was like, how naive.
The portrait of an alien, what it would be, and just how naive the situation was in the military and the obvious bad guys and good guys.
Well, even now, there's really no impressive concept of aliens.
I don't know if you're familiar with the science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, but he wrote Solaris and His Master's Voice and all these books, and his main idea is that humans can't conceive of anything that is truly alien.
We're only looking for ourselves in the universe, and anything that was truly unlike us, we couldn't even imagine.
That's always been a fascinating idea that everything has some sort of consciousness, you know, whether or not it expresses pain or even feels it or can't communicate, that everything has some sort of a type of consciousness.
Well, definitely our idea of life is generally very narrow.
You know, there's like a budding field of astrobiology, which is just a speculative science.
But even in astrobiology textbooks from a couple years ago, there would be no mention of the possibility that arsenic could replace phosphorus in biomolecules.
It didn't even seem like a possibility, and now we know that that can happen.
There was like a lake, I think it's in Nevada, that had extremely, extremely high levels of arsenic in the water and this researcher, his last name was Felice, I think, collected bacteria from the lake and found that they were Producing DNA and amino acids where the phosphorus atom that's present in a lot of these molecules was replaced by arsenic.
Well, they don't feed on heavy metal, but they feed at the bottom of the ocean, and that's where a lot of pollution is, a lot of heavy metal pollution.
And they get a concentration of arsenic, not enough really to make you sick, but enough that it shows up on tests.
So you get your blood checked, and you say, holy shit, there's some arsenic in there.
When I first saw Alexander Shulgin's work and saw P. Call, I was discouraged by it because I thought that it had all been done, that every single possible psychoactive Tryptamine and phenethylamine had already been synthesized.
If you type Hamilton's Pharmacopia, that's the name of my show, on VBS, you can find it on vice.com through the video section if you just look for Hamilton's Pharmacopia.
But yeah, I mean, he's in it.
And I've seen him quite a few times since then, and it really is a privilege because...
His entire methodology is one that's not followed anymore.
It seems very antiquated to most young people, and even pharmaceutical researchers.
The idea that anyone would take a drug that they synthesized is ridiculous, but that used to be totally normal.
That used to be the way drugs were developed.
The chemist who invented Ritalin.
He took it after he synthesized it and tried it and didn't really get much from it.
Then he gave it to his wife, Rita, and she loved it and said that it improved her tennis game, and so he named it after her, Rita Lynn.
That's always been, I've met a couple kids that are on Ritalin, and it's always been a very dark sort of a moment when you realize that these people are drugging their kid.
I don't know if some people need it, but I know some people don't need it.
I've seen some kids that are just a little bit rowdy and they need attention, they're not getting it, and then all of a sudden they're pilled up.
It's like watching, if you, you know, turned monkeys loose and let them live amongst people, how would they live?
They would live like these people.
These people are wild.
They're fucking wild.
They're like a different breed of human being.
You're in here, rattling off all this scientific knowledge of neurochemistry and pharmacopoeia, and there's people that could breed with you, and they're like, My name's Sue Bob.
People are getting too fucking fat, you know, and it's been going on for a long time.
There's an image once that I saw online from the early 1900s, and it was one of those carnivals, and it was the fat man in the carnival.
Like, there would be a guy that was the fat man, and he was barely fat.
I mean, in comparison to what we consider fat today, like some of these people that you see that have to get moved out of their house, they have to cut a hole out and they're attached to the couch because they haven't gotten up, they've been shitting where they sit, and their fiber, their skin has like melted into the fucking chair.
This is not just one person.
This is many, many, many people have done this.
It's been a bunch of people that had to cut their fucking house open so they could pull them out attached to their couch.
You know, and this was just, you know, 1900s, 1903 or something.
It's amazing that that's one of the number one concerns that people have, getting rid of fat.
It's a very strange statement when you think about how a society becomes so successful that even when people are down in the dumps, they're still fat.
They're still fucking...
It's like normal.
It's normal to have excess energy stored away under your skin.
It's normal to be prepared for...
You're fucking stocked up, you know?
In the wild days, it's so rare to become a fat person, you know?
It's a fucking terrible conversation.
You guys checked out a long time ago.
I smelled it.
All this talk about fat...
You know, when you have friends that are overweight and you worry, you know, after Patrice died, especially our friend Patrice O'Neal is a stand-up comedian, just died recently.
You know, you have friends that are overweight and it's just, it's like a bomb, man.
You know, it's going to go off eventually.
You don't know what you can do.
You got to try to diffuse it, try to lead them in the right direction, or just enjoy them until they blow up.
Now when you say fat-soluble, somebody said that once for someone who got caught taking a performance-enhancing drug, and one of the people that was in his camp said one of the things that fucked him up was that he's too fat, and so he can't get it out of his system as quick.
Like, if you were a lean person, you would get it out of your system, whereas if you were a person that had a high percentage of body weight, it would remain for longer?
I mean, that's one of the main physical properties of any molecule, is that it has different solubilities and different chemicals, and some things are lipid-soluble.
And if it's something like THC, and you have a huge amount of fat tissue on your body that the THC can...
I have one friend who had a girl that he knew that was a friend of his that he actually went on a trip with her.
They were actually just platonic friends, but they would travel together occasionally.
And she was into serious kundalini yoga, where she would get up every morning at a very specific time, and she would have to face a very specific angle.
I don't remember what it was.
It was I don't know what she was doing, but she would do these very intense kundalini exercises for like an hour, an hour and 15 minutes, an hour and 20 minutes, and she did it every day.
And she claimed that when she did it for long periods of time, because she did it so much, she could get into like an astral traveling sort of dimension traveling state of consciousness, where she would have psychedelic experiences.
You have to follow these different breathing techniques and then hold yourself in some kind of a weird stress position that's extremely exhausting and then all of your muscles start to vibrate like I was on that Oh, the turbosonic.
Yeah, like the turbosonic.
So it's like a turbosonic type effect.
I would compare it more to the turbosonic than to LSD. Wow.
But I think drugs like, there certainly are drugs that are more friendly than others, and I think 5-MeoDMT would be an example of something that has the capacity to be extremely unpleasant if you take it under the wrong circumstances.
I had a friend completely flip out, taking it, because he had eaten, and so he had to throw up, and he got up to throw up, and he got to the sink just in time to throw up, but then he was just going crazy.
And little bubbles were coming out of the corner of his mouth and I'm like, shit.
And I'm hanging out with Doug and I'm just thinking all the chemicals that Doug throws into his body, cigarettes and beer and fucking, I mean, Doug shits on multivitamins.
He's not taking a multivitamins.
Get the fuck out of here.
So I'm like, we might have redlined his body with this shit.
I was like, he just took a big hit and he might be a goner.
I mean, there's also just isolated experiences that you can't necessarily connect with this substance.
You know, in Picall, there's like...
Ann Shulgin takes this oxygen-less mescaline derivative called desoxy and goes into a fugue state where she has a prevailing sense of unreality that lasts for months or something.
It just totally feels like she's in a dream...
But then I've had friends who also have used unusual substances that haven't been tested very much and have weird reactions.
But even if you ingest the same substance over and over and over again, you really don't know exactly what's going to happen with the psychedelics.
Taking the exact same quantity of synthetic psilocybin over and over and over again a year apart every year will feel completely different every time.
So I'm always skeptical of people that feel as if they really know the effects of any substance because it's always completely different.
You know, I mean, to say that you know that experience, my God, you'd have to do that experience so many times.
Just to get a general sense of just looking around and just relaxing and trying to absorb it all.
Trying to like figure out what the fuck is this.
Can I move this around myself?
Like what is this?
Is this an organism?
Is this the universe?
Is this the wiring of love?
What the fuck is going on here?
It takes so long.
Like you do it and every time you do it you come back and then you go what the fuck was that?
And then you go back in again and it's still the same thing for 15 minutes.
It's just like it's too alien and too crazy.
There's no way you can ever really truly get a grip on it.
It's not like you can Go on a vacation to DMT land.
You know, if you could take a trip, you know, or you could go somewhere for two weeks, and in that two-week time, you would, the entire time, you would be going through a DMT trip.
And if you haven't read that, this is a must-read.
The other thing where you were interviewing Shulgin was amazing as well, but you have to see this.
This girl was a stripper, and she meets this dude who's like this big-time LSD manufacturer who has a fucking house in a silo and millions of dollars, right?
He's rich as fuck, and he's like the number one LSD guy in the country.
And this is another example of a story where a lot of people talk about it with an enormous amount of confidence, as if they have an understanding of what happened.
They say, oh, it's all Crystal Cole's fault, or it's all X's fault, or Y's fault.
But if I've learned anything from researching it over the course of years, it's that absolutely nothing is certain about the story.
It's incredibly complicated, and there's so much conflicting information for absolutely every element of the story that you have to be very careful about talking about what happened with certainty.
But...
There was this lab, and they did lure Crystal Cole into it, and she did become a part of it.
For people who don't know, Whitey Bulger was the head of the Irish Mob, and he was also working for the FBI. So if you turned Whitey Bulger in, Whitey Bulger would know from the FBI, first of all, they wouldn't arrest him, and then he would go kill you.
And that's really how it ran.
I mean, they really did run it like that.
And you find that out, and you go, that is amazing.
And things like this have been happening for a long time, both in the US and internationally.
You know, there's the Iran-Contras with this whole scandal about them pumping cocaine into ghettos in America to create the crack problem.
I don't know that it's necessarily true, but it's a theory that a lot of people have.
The same thing happened in South Africa with methaqualone, with Quaaludes.
There was this whole project called Project Coast, where they were synthesizing massive quantities of MDMA and Quaaludes in order to weaponize them for crowd control, supposedly.
Holy shit!
So then they were pumping them all into the streets, and now the only...
The problem is also that there are physical properties of these different drugs that limit their...
Their ability to travel through the air, to maintain their potency when they're laid on surfaces or on the soil.
LSD is not a stable molecule.
So when they were trying to weaponize it, one of the problems is just it didn't aerosolize well, it didn't last on surfaces well, and then they settled on BZ because they thought it was a better chemical weapon.
BZ. What is BZ? It's an anti-cholinergic drug, like Jacob's Ladder.
Well, yeah, I mean, can you imagine if you discovered, if you didn't know anything about psychedelics at all, and you discovered LSD, and they tried absolutely everything they could with it.
They tried to see if they could use it as a truth serum.
They tried to see if they could use it to, you know, they tried both good and bad uses.
There were scientists using it to increase their intelligence, and then there were people trying to, yeah, use it to make people insane, to reprogram people's brains.
That was the large part of MKUltra.
It was about...
You know, manipulating people's minds using psychedelics and sensory deprivation and things like that.
The scariest thing that I ever heard connected to any psychedelic experience was that Timothy Leary was connected, or not Timothy Leary, the Unabobber, Ted Kaczynski, was connected to some studies at Harvard, and he had done some classified LSD studies, and they tweaked a lot of people's fucking heads.
Then he went back to Berkeley, taught math for a few years until he got enough money to buy that cab and take on the technology.
So it's all about different experiences that they tried to impart on people with LSD? It's about, yeah, all these attempts to weaponize LSD and to use it as a truth serum and MKUltra.
Yeah, I'd read it, and then I'd read a counterpoint that said it was bullshit because you can't even get acid to work in bread like that, that it wouldn't maintain itself.
I mean, you could spray bread with LSD. Yeah, it was an interesting argument when I heard it.
Because I had assumed that it was true.
And I was like saying, like, wow, look what they found.
And then I saw this counterpoint to it, and I was like, oh, okay.
Is it possible that they could have created a more stable form of LSD, or could it be some other psychedelic that would have similar effects that would be stable?
I mean, there's plenty of psychedelics that they were testing at that time that are more stable than LSD. LSD is unusually unstable.
But yeah, I think that, you know, they recovered some communication between two operatives and they said, like, did you finish the mission with the diethylamide or something?
They didn't specifically say LSD, but they used some abbreviated form.
So it's not conclusive, but I think that there's strong evidence that that happened.
You would think that if they knew that it would have monstrous effects, they would have to know whether or not there's something that they can monetarily get out of it.
I mean, they probably had an idea, but there was these anthropological reports of what Indians do when they take peyote, but they had no idea how just some businessman...
I would imagine they would have had volunteers, especially later on in these programs, and they were becoming publicly known substances.
But yeah, a lot of the early research, there's a book called Drugs and Fantasy, where it's just people being dosed with PCP. I think the France one was like 51 or something like that, wasn't it?
Yeah, they thought it could have been responsible for people that thought they were experiencing magic, and they were hallucinating, and they were getting fucked up.
And they could have started blaming it on women, which is what you do when you can't get laid.
So you're all fucked up on this crazy bread, this ergot.
Apparently, you've never heard of ergot being psychoactive?
Well, it contains just a variety of these different ergoline substances, but there's lysergic acid, amide, and they were used medicinally for a very long time.
That was the reason that LSD was discovered, is because they were using these isolating different alkaloids from ergot, sclerotia, and trying to see if they had some use in preventing postpartum bleeding in pregnant women.
women.
Wow.
Yeah.
So they weren't investigating psychoactive drugs.
They had some interest in using them as potential analeptics, like drugs to reduce fatigue, and that was this one, nootropic hydrogene, was produced by Albert Hoffman in the course of that study.
But they certainly weren't looking for anything like LSD.
Let me ask you this, because you're a rational guy that does this stuff.
You're obviously very well read.
You know what you're talking about clearly.
When you have an intense psychedelic experience, and when you experience what seems to be something that is not you, something that you're interacting with that does not appear to be the imagination, It could be.
I don't know.
But a lot of people have interesting opinions.
A lot of people that have seen real intense psychedelic visions have very interesting opinions.
And you might be the most psychedelically traveled person I've ever met in my life.
So, that's a perfect combination for you to be the guy that answers that question.
What the fuck is going on?
When you have an intense psychedelic experience, is it just...
Is it chemicals perturbing your natural brain state?
Yeah, I think it is, but saying just chemicals is already kind of problematic because everything is just chemicals.
And just chemicals is absolutely everything you ever experience and remember and have ever lived.
So everything is a chemical phenomenon.
Consciousness is a chemical phenomenon.
The fact that we're able to perceive any of this, that we're able to have this conversation right now, it's all an amazing chemical interaction.
I don't see the need to bring in any kind of supernatural interpretation of the phenomena, because it just is not necessary, and the same reason that I don't see the need to bring in a supernatural interpretation of the universe, or of anything else, or even ghosts.
If you look at a ghost phenomenon, You can look at it two ways.
You can say, oh, this was a weird supernatural experience, or you can say this was a really weird moment of psychopathology and what psychological mechanism made this person so afraid that they hallucinated and thought they heard something or thought they saw another being, which is equally fascinating, if not more fascinating.
Yeah, I mean, I almost feel like that's the lesser interpretation.
It's the easy way.
It's much easier to say, oh, they're aliens.
That's very simple.
Whereas if you actually wonder what is the true biochemical basis of this phenomenon, it's an incredibly complicated question and it won't have a simple answer.
Do you believe that it's possible that taking something along the lines of DMT or any really intense psychedelic actually opens up some sort of a door to another dimension, another place, another existence, something you can't experience, another frequency, another station on the dial?
And I've had that argument with people that are really almost like, they almost proselytize about the experience to the point where they're talking about it as if it's a religious definite.
You know, this is what happens, this is what happens.
And I've always said, you know, maybe it's possible, but it's also possible it's just crazy chemicals.
If the interaction is beautiful, it doesn't have to be otherworldly for it to be divine.
You know, the interaction is beautiful.
It could set you off on another direction.
Rewire your board.
I mean, how many people have you ever talked to that have had a big psychedelic experience and totally stopped doing pills or totally stopped smoking cigarettes or just completely rewired their life because of one, like, emphatic psychedelic rewiring?
I'm too dumb to be talking about any of this in the first place, so I'm just trying to skate by with what limited knowledge I have, but I want to pick your brain.
So when you experience really profound wisdom in psychedelic states, where you have this almost feeling of being analyzed and seen through and shown all your flaws and all your craziness...
And then you have this sort of like a reset thing where you kind of get a new, fresh perspective of your place in the world and what kind of an energy and what kind of vibe you're putting out.
You think that that's all maybe internal?
That's all maybe imagination?
Or is there the potential that there is some sort of a...
There's another intelligence out there.
There's some sort of a thing that you can tune into.
Some sort of a...
that we're connected to, but we don't have access on a regular basis.
There's no reason for me to believe that that is possible.
But I think that there's all kinds of things within us that we don't currently acknowledge and understand.
I mean, both Shulgin and Timothy Leary talked about this idea.
There's all this non-coding DNA that's sometimes called junk DNA or intronal DNA. And although it doesn't, they were probably wrong about this, it doesn't contain any kind of...
Like, instinctual evolutionary knowledge, but they were using it as an example.
Like, what if all this non-coding DNA contains instinctual ancient knowledge they were able to access while we were on psychedelics?
But maybe not specifically with the non-coding DNA, but with parts of the brain.
Who knows what sorts of things are stored within us that we don't know how to access?
I think that this is actually a Scientologist idea, but I think that there's some truth to the idea that we remember absolutely everything that we experience, that it's all in there somewhere.
You just need the right catalyst to remove that piece of information.
Like, she can tell you, like, you can tell her, you know, June 13th, 1976, what were you wearing?
She's like, I was wearing a blue dress, and because I was on my way to this and that, it was, and she can tell you, like, what temperature it was outside.
Yeah, and there's lots of these mnemonists that are capable of those sorts of...
Just mind feats.
And one interesting thing about the pneumonists is they all seem to have synesthesia, at least the ones that I've read about.
And so when they remember something, it's a visual memory and an auditory memory, and all their memories are cross-linked over multiple sensory modalities.
So it's like...
And then there's a lot of research in the 70s about potentially using psychedelics as cognitive enhancers.
And I think that's one way that they could function is by encouraging this type of synesthetic thinking where you're experiencing everything through multiple senses and indexing information through multiple senses simultaneously.
I don't think there's any evidence that primates eat mushrooms.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
I don't know.
I think the evidence that he was relying on for that theory that either it was LSD or psilocybin increases visual acuity, I don't think that that's been definitively proven.
Science, even though it was published in a prestigious journal at the time, I'm not sure that all that research was methodologically sound.
They had like two sticks that were in parallel lines and then they would have someone turning one stick on the other side extremely slowly to the point where they would no longer be parallel and it was who could recognize it the first and the stone people recognized it more than the non-stone people.
And so his joke was that maybe being stoned you see the world better than it really is, or better than you can when you're sober, rather.
Or maybe they didn't even know that you could blast out for a while.
It's the same thing with salvia.
People didn't realize until the 90s, until they started extracting it and making those extracts publicly available.
People didn't really know.
They'd chew it and say, oh yeah, it is active, but they couldn't really characterize the effect until they had concentrated the It is a trip that they look like dinner plates.
His theory was that that had come from an asteroidal impact, that spores could survive in a vacuum, and we know the building blocks of life and amino acids possibly came here from outer space.
Again, I mean, all these things, there just isn't enough evidence either way.
And I know that's like a boring answer in some ways, but I just, you know, people say, like, it's always huge news when they find an extrasolar planet that might be able to support Earth-like life.
But so far, they've never found anywhere in the known universe a single planet that we could live on without a suit for a minute.
So that's not really that encouraging, ultimately.
But then when you also factor in the enormity of the universe, then, of course, I think it's possible.
Absolutely, I think it's possible.
I just don't see at this specific moment in history any reason to think that in the part of the universe that we've observed, there's any life.
The idea that there's knowledge and information out there and you just tune into it and that there's a record of information that literally exists that you can just tune into, and this is where creativity comes from.
In creativity, when you achieve the Zen state of being completely in the moment, these ideas will just come to you.
The idea is that these ideas are not just the firing of your synapses and the accumulation of your life experiences, but in fact you are pulling from a well of information that's out there that you can't quite recognize on a regular basis.
and that there's knowledge inherent to the world.
And I think it's called the Akashic or Akashic Records is the idea behind it.
It's almost like taking account, it's almost like a crude way of explaining why we don't understand creativity.
We don't understand.
The state of mind to achieve the proper creativity is like this zen, accepting, sort of like...
When I'm in the zone, when you're writing something, you have great writing.
I've read a bunch of your shit.
You write some really beautiful lines.
You know how sometimes they just...
Sometimes you're banging them out, but sometimes they're just flowing.
It's almost like they're coming out of you.
You go into this zen state and like, oh, that just came to me.
Here's this thing.
Some people believe that What you're doing is by being really creative, you're tuning in to intelligence, you're tuning in to ideas, and that the human body and its managing its consciousness is really just managing a radio.
Well, just ultimately disempowering, because they de-emphasize the agency that human beings have in creating things.
We can't create.
Our brains are not sufficient to create.
We need to tune into some kind of a record that creates for us.
It's sort of a religious idea as well, that there's a god that gives us some kind of power.
I think that's a pattern in a lot of these ideas, is that they try to remove power from the individual and place it in some kind of intangible realm that we can access through being pious or through following some set of rules.
I find that I completely agree with you, and that I think that a big part of it is that people do better with creative endeavors when they're humble, and so it's sort of a way of not taking credit for what they're doing and just tuning into the right creative frequency, and sometimes that creative frequency, the best way to do it is just give it up to a higher power.
Well, I've always said that it's a great operating system for a lot of people, and it really does enhance their life.
There's a lot of people that, for whatever reason, I don't know whether it's they're uninspired or whether they have brains that don't function at the right RPMs or whatever it is, but if you give them some sort of an ideology, they can live a happy life.
But if you left them alone in the sea of doubt and the unknown, they could go down any path.
They could wind up a mess.
They could wind up depressed.
They could wind up fucked up.
They could wind up in a cult.
Give them a happy religion.
They'll just live 70 happy years, die, be happy that they know they're going to go to heaven, and everything's cool.
It's almost like it's an effective operating system.
And at the end, we're really not exactly sure how much of this fucking thing we're controlling with our mind.
We're really not.
There's a lot of doubt on that.
There's a lot of doubt as to how much of life is truly random and how much of it is really created by the energy you put out, your imagination, your actions and your deeds.
What the fuck is really going on?
Is it 100% physical?
Or is there some manifestation that the imagination takes part in?
We don't really necessarily know.
There's people that always good things are constantly happening to them.
I've had close friends that dropped out of society for whatever reason, because they started to find it pointless, and it's difficult to argue with that if someone really genuinely feels that way.
But I think there's sort of an infantilizing, generally disempowering idea in psychiatry and throughout society that we are not in control of ourselves.
We see a doctor, the doctor is the expert on our mind and our body, and they tell us what's wrong.
They know us better than we know ourselves, even after only talking to us for five minutes.
So if you go to a psychiatrist and you say, I'm having trouble working.
I may be depressed.
I may have ADHD. What do you think I should do?
I think that Adderall would help me.
That's immediately suspicious because you already know too much about what you need.
They want you to go in as an infant so they can tell you what you need.
I believe that there's some impact that the imagination and your thinking and your energy has on life.
But I also believe there's a lot of random shit, too.
I don't think it's an either-or.
I think it's a combination of you interacting with all these other people that are also creating their own realities at the same time.
And that you can all...
Tune into a good frequency and perhaps create a good community, and I think that's what people try to do in tribes and shit like that.
But at the end of the day, you're still dealing with random shit.
Like the idea that you blame people for fucking diseases or for being attacked by barbarians.
Was that the secret?
Did the secret work back then?
Did they manifest these barbarians to come over the hills and chop people up with swords back in the Conan days?
No, right?
You can't say it's completely...
Nobody would ask for that.
Nobody would create that in their own imagination for themselves.
So it's not that you are completely in control of your destiny, but it seems like you have at least some sort of influence with energy and with your imagination and with the things that you create and the environment that you set up.
I think that's one of the most important things that I've ever learned from psychedelics.
I mean, I've had a few slippery ones in my day, but...
I think a lot of the really potent psychedelics have the ability to induce terror if you're too high of a dose.
I've had that happen with both DMT and psilocybin.
So, just so many different occasions.
I've never had anything where I... Well, actually I have.
Yes, I have.
I've had a few kind of close to what I would consider overdose of psychedelics where the dose is just so high that I think there might be some physical toxicity.
But with those sorts of cases, it's very difficult to differentiate between what is motivated by fear.
You know, a lot of people, even when they're sober, they'll...
I don't think they're having a heart attack, but it's just a panic attack, or it's not even a panic attack.
The mind is so informed by the body, especially in a psychedelic state, that it's very difficult to say if you're drinking ayahuasca and suddenly your heart starts beating fast.
Is your heart beating fast because you're scared, or are you scared because your heart is beating fast?
Do you concentrate on the heart or the fear first in order to calm yourself down?
I've noticed something recently doing shrooms, and it happened for some reason with Molly this last time, so it makes me wonder how much of it was really Molly.
But I can see so much better when I'm on a psychedelic.
Like, it seems like my eyes work, you know, because your pupils are bigger, so you're probably looking more...
Yeah, and it makes me, and I had this thing I was thinking of, like, it would be weird if, like, all the shit that you see when you're shrooming is there all the time, but your eyes adjust to this certain lightness or this certain level of being open that you see it more when you're on shrooms.
So, like, when you're seeing, like, you're looking at your hand and you're seeing, like, this crazy shit all around it, like these, like, vines that are growing over it, what if, like, that shit's there all the time, but you're just, like, focusing in on that layer of Hamilton Morris, we throw to you.
Well, I mean, there's this issue of linguistic relativity and color naming.
There's been a lot of scholarly research into the issue where certain primitive societies have fewer names for colors, and so they'll only have black and white, and black will encompass red and blue, and white will be green.
You take your wife to Hawaii, you sit on the beach, and you do two each, and you just sit there, and you will fucking have the most beautiful time in the whole entire world, and you're going to have a reset.
You're going to be so...
You and your wife are going to connect in a way that you've never had since you started dating, and it's going to be amazing.
The idea that they can just come in and take down your site at their discretion, and this is right after the NDAA, National Defense Authorization Act, passed, which is another terrifying thing.