The Hidden Side of Psychedelic Research ft. Hamilton Morris | Shane Smith Has Questions

DMT, Iaska, Iberine. What's your favorite out of all those three?

>> You're like Burgundy, Bordeaux. I don't really know.

>> Favorite? I don't know. They're all so interesting.

>> I'm just fascinated by stuff. This is Carl Shane Smith asked questions. I love the questions that you asked. I love your scientific approach. I love the fact that you're fearless and you go find these things. These five rotovaps could easily allow the lab to produce kilos or maybe even tons of a given chemical if they wanted to.

>> Things that hold such sway in the human psyche, especially for young people like K and TCB and Molly and all this stuff, nobody knows where it comes from. It's one of the most interesting topics in the world that no one's really talking about except for.

>> Are we speeding?

>> Yeah.

>> You ready, bud?

>> I'm ready. Give me the Okay, let's do it.

>> Bango. Hamilton Morris, journalist, documentarian, scientific researcher, known for his work exploring psychoactive substances.

>> That's right.

>> Born in New York City, son of Errol Morris, one of my heroes growing up. Uh, got me into documentary filmm. 2002 ad. You did an iPod ad. You were in it.

>> Kind of a pain to carry around a whole lot of CDs, so I try and stick all of them inside one case.

>> Oh, I mean, this is like a bad story, but.

>> Yeah. I want to hear I want to hear all the stories.

>> Uh, well, my dad was making iPod ads.

>> Yeah.

>> And so they young people and he cast.

>> a bunch of people from my high school.

>> Okay. So, I'm just going to put scientific researcher Nepo.

>> I know. It's like the worst way you could possibly start the interview.

>> Thank you. I'm a professional. uh studied anthropology and chemistry at University of Chicago. Worked for a littleknown magazine called Vice magazine uh including the piece in 2008, The Magic Jews.

>> Mhm.

>> What was that about, honey?

>> This is one of many early Vice pieces that I did. I started out just writing for the magazine. This was one about hidic Jews who were leaving their Orthodox homes or hidic homes in Brooklyn using psychedelics. early vice piece.

>> that was a fantastic one and led to more and more writing. You've also written for Harpers.

>> but you've done field work in Mexico, Africa, South America, all over the world really, which we're going to get into because a lot of your stories I love and I find crazy. I'm a huge fan and I wanted to get you out here to talk about stuff. And in full disclosure, we talked about a lot of stuff and it breaks my heart because it was all gold. And uh and now I don't know if we can recreate it, but we're going to try today.

>> We only scratched the surface.

>> We only scratched the surface. Hamilton Morris. Here we go. I want to do a springboard because in my brain forever etched with your name is that documentary in the DRC.

>> We're 4 hours outside Kinshasa. We're about to enter a weed field that may contain either Congo Red or Congo Black. Because it's so close to the city, we don't know if the genetics will have been contaminated. But this is our first stop on the journey and will be interesting to see what these fields contain.

>> It's kind of like Heart of Darkness. You're going deeper and deeper. It's getting more and more dangerous. It's getting weirder and weirder.

>> This is a gesture of trust to allow somebody to shave my entire body and possess the hairs afterwards.

>> And you're looking for rare strains of weed.

>> Mhm. It was a particular like that make that doesn't make you hungry. It was an appetite suppressant strain.

>> This was the idea.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. And I remember it because it was a beautiful shoot. Like physically like it looked beautiful and you you were very heroic.

>> The head of the boat keeps looking for potentially deadly hippopotamuses and crocodiles. This is all turning out to be much more difficult and extreme than I expected. And you kept going and you kept going and then you finally find it and it's a great dock and then the guy died. You literally risked your life to find rare strains of weed. Go.

>> That was one of many many many I mean that was the norm. You know very well the norm on.

>> that's a springboard. This is.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So many of these shoots did entail risk of one kind or another. I try not to belabor it because it feels slightly corny to I'm blabbering it.

>> You're talk about the risks that you take to do these sorts of things. But yeah, when we were on this voyage through the DRC, one of the people who was a local almost died from malaria and that during the shoot was frightening. And then one of the major subjects of the piece, this guy Franco, who was a real swashbuckling explorer type ex-military who was a real tough guy and tragically got malaria and died not very long after the shoot.

>> Was it a rare form of malaria? Like why couldn't he get to a hospital?

>> I think it was a combination of things. It had entered his brain, which is how it tends to kill people. And by the time it was caught, it was too late. I think that he didn't go to the hospital until things were very advanced. And it's very tragic.

>> Yeah.

>> So DRC, one of the scariest countries in the world. Where else have we gone in search of psychotropic substances? Give me your top 10.

>> Oh, I mean, South Africa, Gabon.

>> So hold on, hold on. South Africa. What were we doing in the South Africa?

>> Well, this was one of my favorite projects to ever work on with Vice. This was kind of, it wasn't the pilot for Formicopia, but it was one of the first big stories that we did in the first season where in South Africa there was this very insane legacy of chemical and biological weapon development in the apartheid government.

>> Good to meet you. My pleasure. I learned the unique history of the South African quaude is inextricably linked to a secret government program. One of the most bizarre and conspiratorial and strange things that may have occurred was there was a physician named Voter Bassan who was in charge of creating chemical weapons for the apartheid government and a lot of his research was oriented toward attempts to weaponize recreational drugs like MDMA and quaude and they claimed that they were tableting vast quantities of quaude to place in quaude grenades that would be used for crowd control. This is not a joke by the way.

>> Wait, wait, wait, wait. You throw a grenade and it releases quaudes.

>> A grenade full of quaude tablets. Very, very weird. And we actually called the pharmacist who is in charge of the tableting operation and he threatened to kill us while we were working on all of this. Yeah.

>> the quaers don't kill you by ripping you to pieces. You just see a yellow pill that's been thrown at a grenade and eat it.

>> The idea to the best of my understanding was that the quaude grenades would explode quaude vapor or particulate into a crowd and sedate everyone in such a way that it could be used as a crowd control measure.

>> Methylone was one of the substances that was manufactured with the intention of crowd control. Now if you think about it, how can you control an unruly crowd with methacolone? You cannot fly over them and disseminate them over the crowd. But possibly you can start by getting the crowd hooked on methacolan.

>> This was the supposed idea. But there's another reading of all this which is that there were no quaude grenades. that it's exactly as ridiculous as it sounds and that this was all cover for a massive state sponsored drug dealing operation that they were selling the quaude.

>> Have you ever done a quaude?

>> Oh yeah.

>> What is it like? What how.

>> Yeah. I hate to deflate the quaude by being a.

>> you know because it has such a romantic reputation and people are so excited by it and I hate to be a quaude naysayer and say that it's really not that amazing. It's nice. It's a powerful muscle relaxing. It makes you feel very calm. It's an enjoyable effect, but I think part of it has to do with the fact that it doesn't exist anymore. It's rarified. It's special.

>> And why doesn't it exist anymore?

>> There's actually a really a couple really good reasons when you're trying to understand trends in the drug market. You often have to think about the chemistry of the drug. That's the ultimate explanation for why things do or don't exist. So with a drug like LSD, a single chemist working in a single lab can easily produce millions of doses easily if they know what they're doing and it won't take them very long. Something like quaude is a very weak drug by weight. It's a powerful drug if you take a few tablets, but in terms of each milligram of molecule, there is very little drug. So one gram of methylone is only three doses. So, one person can't really make that much quaude. It's not possible. The economics don't work out. So, unless you're selling them for, you know, $40 a tablet or something like that, it doesn't make sense. It made sense when pharmaceutical companies were making them, but from the perspective of illicit underground manufacturer, it's a little weird. Unless there's a huge demand for it like there is in.

>> Why did the pharmaceutical company stop making it?

>> There was a supposedly overprescribing and problems with addiction. It was sort of like its own version of the opioid epidemic where everyone was free. Actually, Ben Stein wrote an early uh quaude scare, a book about the the dangers of quaude, weirdly that it's never talked about.

>> really. And who are they prescribing it to? I like who is over prescription to?

>> Everyone probably. I mean, it's a it's a nice drug. It sedatives of that nature solve a lot of problems for people. They allow you to sleep. They treat muscle pain. They calm you down if you're stressed out. I mean, people like those kinds of drugs.

>> What did it get replaced by Clearance?

>> Effectively, Xanax, Colonopin, Valium, all those things just took the place and they're very similar drugs and they're probably slightly safer. So, that's.

>> why what was the danger of quails?

>> The standard dangers that most of those drugs have if you consume too much, it's a respiratory suppressant. It can cause respiratory arrest. It can cause you to go into a coma. If you become addicted and then rapidly discontinue use, you could have a seizure. Kind of the typical stuff that you encounter with benzoazipines, but a bit more extreme.

>> South Africa grenades that distribute benzo.

>> So, this was the idea that we were investigating and it sounds like one of these uh Gary Web type did the CIA introduce crack into Compton conspiracies, but in South Africa there's really strong evidence that something like that might have happened. I'm not saying that it definitely happened, but the evidence is.

>> the government is dealing quaudes.

>> You had the government pressing enormous quantities of quaude tablets. Like this truly and indisputably was happening and voter Bassan, the person who is the head of this program, was arrested selling drugs himself off of his own person in a park.

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>> That's one. Give me two. You said, well, I want your top 10. That's just one.

>> A top 10.

>> Top 10. I said you've been all around the world.

>> Yeah. Yeah.

>> Number two was South Africa. Then you said Gabon and something else.

>> Cameroon. Cameroon. Yeah. Ibogga. Something that you know about yourself where you did an early report on Ivagane that was very influential. felt like my family, but nobody I ever seen or recognized.

>> So, you probably heard that there's an entire religion that is oriented around the worship of this.

>> It's a syncritic Christian religion where they conceptualize the aboga tree as the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Genesis. And it's half Christian, half uh other traditions. It involves mermaids. It involves soldiers. Like they have um it's very theatrical. You have like uh soldiers that carry wooden guns to ward off evil like to shoot evil spirits and all this stuff. And they bury people alive with their heads protruding from the ground.

>> This is not in this is real in real life. Not in the drug.

>> Yeah. In real life. Well, but both actually. They they give somebody the drug, bury them, and leave them in the ground overnight with their heads sticking out to look at the stars and contemplate their own mortality.

>> Lord.

>> yeah, pretty amazing stuff.

>> Did you do it?

>> I did do it. I didn't get buried, although I would be open to it. And I what I've heard about Iberine. So Iberane we did a thing on and basically I became fascinated by it because it's one of the only treatments that seemingly can cure addiction to heroin and a lot of people who had just no other they've tried everything and it didn't work and whatever and they would do I gain and like they're they're off it, you know, kind of thing. and and almost 100% success rate for the people we granted it wasn't the huge it was like 10 to 50 people very similar stories which I found interesting which is they go and they see their timeline and they see you know their ancestors and in some cases their I don't know what precesses people that are going to be you know in the future and they're saying they sit you down and sort of give you a very ological explanation of why you shouldn't be doing this stuff which I find to be like wild that it's would be one person's let alone very similar uh trips and then they wake up and they they have no craving. So I thought I thought found that to be magical and we followed it and went to Africa and when and it was a fascinating story. So so you went there and and what did you do?

>> Well, I'm very interested in this idea of how these traditions evolve because it would seem that these this religion has existed for let's say at least a hundred years, probably many hundreds of years. People always say that it started with pygmy people, but there's a distinct lack of anthropological work with actual pygmy people, at least as far as I'm aware of.

>> And so, the origins of it are slightly obscure. It seems that it's evolved over time. And it seems that some of the earlier manifestations of it were much more brutal and involved a lot of scarification and um more uh kind of.

>> ritualistic.

>> rights of suffering that were more challenging and.

>> maybe over time it became more celebratory and full of dance and music. But maybe that was always part of it. It's hard to say because even the way these things are documented changes dramatically over time. But one of the really interesting things about the anti-addictive effects of ibeane is that that's not part of the tradition because there's no tradition of opioid addiction in that region of central west Africa. That was discovered by a dude in New York City and there was a heroin addict in New York City named Howard Loff and he was interested in tripping on an unusual psychedelic. That was pretty much all there was to it. just he was a heroin addict and he wanted to try a weird psychedelic that a friend of his had and he tried it and when he came down he realized that he hadn't used heroin and he hadn't gone into withdrawal and crucially that the way that he even thought about heroin had changed and suddenly it just seemed deathlike and unappealing and he didn't want to use it anymore and realized that this was a miraculous thing and.

>> which it is.

>> which it is and he dedicated the rest of his life to pursuing this medically. He filed a patent. He became the number one Ibegan evangelist. But what's really interesting is as he's doing all of this, gradually opioid problems do develop in central West Africa primarily through the introduction of tramodol from India where they would press ultra potent tablets specifically for this West African market and people became very addicted to this opioid tramodol. And so what I found so interesting is how the tradition in Gabon was evolving to accommodate the introduction of opioids and the new phenomenon of opioid addiction. So this thing that was originally from central west Africa is modified in New York City and then those modifications return to central west Africa. And I find that kind of stuff beautiful.

>> It is and it's fascinating. Now, obviously that begs a lot of new questions because if you have a seemingly I mean there's not a large case here of, you know, data, but if you have a seemingly successful drug that can get you off of one of the most addictive drugs that people can't get off, why wouldn't we? And I get the idea like, okay, schedule one and big far and stuff, but okay, if there's money to be made by getting people off of heroin, you'd think that there'd be some sort of push to make that a a cure, if you will.

>> Oh, absolutely. And there is. And I think a lot of it has to do with shifting the Overton window. And this happens in all sorts of ways in medicine. It used to be the case that the idea of injecting a drug unless it was absolutely 100% necessary was something that a pharmaceutical company would avoid at all costs. They would not needleophobic.

>> Many people are. So the idea was that is a absolute last resort. We might not even want to develop a medicine at all if it needs to be injected. But then suddenly drugs like humira and these biologic medications for inflammatory disorders become massive massive.

>> or what are the uh GLC's or what?

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ompic goi all these sorts of of diet drugs as well. And so now you have more and more drugs. It's gradually becoming normalized. Of course you do an auto injector. And now the idea of getting an auto injector instead of a pill is totally normalized. And that happened in four or five years, something like that. It went from something where it would have been a big deal if you saw someone saying, "Oh yeah, look, I actually have to inject this drug." You think, "Wo!" to, "Of course you inject a drug. Everyone does that. It's not a big deal."

>> Um, and so I think with psychedelics, there was something similar where for so long it was this idea was like, "That's just crazy. That's just too.

>> far. We can't do that. We can't possibly.

>> use those things as medicines.

>> And then.

>> ketamine is approved as an anti-depressant and people are responding pretty well to it.

>> There's some problems, but overall seems like it's working. Seems like patients like it. Seems like our culture is tolerating it. And.

>> well, it's a huge story right now. We were talking about it, but.

>> um for examp are are using ketamine instead of coke. for example, instead of drinking, you know, it's sort of the the the drug of choice for raves and stuff. Maybe give us a little history of because everybody, you know, oh, it's horse tranquilizer, which to me was PCB, but give us a history of a where it came from and b how it got to sort of, you know, the ubiquity that it has now.

>> I mean, I can go deep in you want, you want to go deep. You want to know deep?

>> We got time. Let's go.

>> You want to go deep?

>> I want to go deep. Well, I want to get to the book, but I want to talk to that because that's a great story, but I just technically I want to I'm we're starting with the sort of the overall science of it.

>> Well, I feel like Yeah, I feel like I should go deep because one reason that I know so much is because of you.

>> Oh my lord.

>> It's absolutely because of you. The one reason that I have been able to get so unbelievably deep into this stuff is because you gave me the opportunity to do it. So.

>> I'll I'll go into it. The discovery of PCP was this watershed moment where for the first time there was an anesthetic that didn't cause respiratory depression. This was a huge deal because in the past it was all qualude barbbiterate opioid type things that basically kind of almost put you into a deep sleep coma type state and suddenly there's this new type of drug. It actually seems to increase your blood pressure slightly and yet you lose consciousness and have no sense.

>> So sorry this is PCP or.

>> PCP. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, there's this guy Vic Maddox, and in the pilot of my show, I actually went to this uh graveyard where his body resides in Grand Forks, North Dakota, I believe, and uh lay a bouquet of flowers on his grave to thank him for this discovery. Um, and interviewed his widow who talked about his pride that uh the Queen of England gave her horse PCP. And this was like one of the things that he really cherished.

>> The Queen of England gave the horse PCP.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And um and she gave me some of his poetry. He was a poet. Yeah. So I mean all these things I know because of you. And uh and so.

>> all these things I know because.

>> and so this was a huge discovery, but there was a problem which is that it lasted too long. It worked really well as an anesthetic, but people were out for too long and when they would come out of it, they were all whacked out and it took them too long to recover. And the pharmaceutical company that was developing this Park Davis in Detroit needed something that was rapidly metabolized, right?

>> And there was this chemist named Calvin Stevens at Wayne State University and he was studying this rearrangement reaction with a group of people. Again, I actually reached out to some of these people while working on my show. So again, as a result of you and um I tracked down one of the co-authors on the original scientific publication that led to the discovery of ketamine and.

>> so hold on, ketamine came from PCP.

>> essentially. It's in the same chemical class. It's not directly made from PCP, but it was part of this initiative to create drugs of this nature.

>> And both were tranquilizers.

>> Yeah. And uh and one of the people that discovered ketamine, I was, you know, telling him about it, he'd never heard of ketamine. And I was like, "Oh, you should really look this up." Like, I worked on the discovery of this molecule that is now described by the World Health Organization as the most widely used anesthetic on Earth. And uh and he responds to me and says like, "Oh, wow. That's very interesting." Like, I'll have to look into.

>> How does he not know?

>> I have no idea. I guess you could just be some guy working in a lab and you're just thinking like, "Oh, I'm looking at alpha keto rearrangement reactions or whatever." And you don't know that this chemistry that you were doing would lead to. So they basically rearranged PCP. It became K and he's like great, good work. Goes home to have a beer and then meanwhile it becomes K all over the world.

>> Yeah. So they discover this thing and they develop it and they realize that ketamine solves a lot of the problems that PCP had. It's very rapidly metabolized. So instead of lasting for hours, you're in and out of ketamine in less than an hour. And yeah, so it's and it has a very high therapeutic index. Very few people are allergic to it.

>> I'm going to keep interrupting. What's a therapeutic index?

>> It's the ratio of the dose that has a therapeutic effect to the dose that has a toxic effect.

>> I see.

>> So, some drugs have a very narrow therapeutic index, meaning that the dose that is therapeutic is very close to the toxic dose. An example would be.

>> well alcohol isn't exactly therapeutic, but a lot of opioids for example where if you take or aspirin would be another acetaminophen would be probably the best example where you take 10 times the therapeutic dose of acetaminophen and you could severely damage your liver. So, this was a drug that was very well tolerated, kind of like the perfect anesthetic in a lot of ways. And it did cause this weird hallucinatory effect, but so what? Not a big deal. We can ignore that. And for a while, no one really talked about it. It was known that this drug did this thing and that the thing that it did was weird and but it wasn't being exploited by anyone for any non-medical purposes. But then that started to change dramatically in the 1970s.

>> Yeah, I remember it was very fringe. I remember mostly in the UK you go to like you know Glastonbury or whatever and you know E was a big deal and MDMA and then all of a sudden I kept hearing about this K and you know oh the K is very lush man everyone would sort of be in these K holes and you're like yeah I don't I don't want to go into a Khole and it seemed scary and then boom it was everywhere not boom but like in a decade.

>> Yeah.

>> What's the popularity? Why why did it become like the ubiquitous drug?

>> Well, that I don't fully understand because I think that in some sense it's the least social drug that you could possibly imagine. It numbs touch. It makes movement difficult for many people.

>> It makes communication extremely difficult. Uh at higher doses, it makes you completely unconscious and unable to communicate. So, it's not a drug that really makes sense to me as a social drug. It makes a lot of sense to me in our current climate as a sort of pandemic era drug where everybody is isolated and disconnected and atomized and working remotely and afraid of each other and in the middle of uh campaigns of social separation of one kind or another and afraid of everything and you take this drug and go entirely within yourself. It makes huge amount of sense.

>> now but as a.

>> for our psychic.

>> yeah for our current culture it seems like the kind of the perfect.

>> so let's talk about some of the new drug well it's not new but newish K is now become super popular and I want to talk about its use for like treating depression.

>> and then we talked a little bit which I want to get into about um like MDMA for uh PTSD.

>> and you gave me a mindopening a lecture on 2CV.

>> 2CB.

>> 2CB.

>> Yeah.

>> Okay. Let's start. Or do we still have We got to keep We're going more deep on K first.

>> Well, we can talk about whatever.

>> Let's just salt and pepper it, if you will.

>> Okay.

>> Okay. So, we got K. That becomes kind of like the party drug. Uh has some bad uh side. People some dying not good. It's not common for people to die, but it it happens occasionally, especially in poly substance overdoses.

>> The main issue with it is that people become kind of delusional when they're addicted to it.

>> Is it addictive?

>> Not in a classical sense, the way opioids are, but some people develop weird relationships with it where they use it constantly. It's not super common, but it definitely does happen.

>> Okay. So, that gets married. So there's now let's get into this because the rave culture brought about like ecstasy.

>> Mhm.

>> I've got to have a drink of water. Blick over death. M.

>> okay. That's Jake laughing. Not very professional. K becomes popular. Oh yeah. E. So E is big. It's everywhere. And that sort of gets usurped by Molly MDA. MDMA. What what tells us the difference and what happened? Molly E MDMMA.

>> You have this drug MDMA. Yeah. And then it has a bunch of different slang terms.

>> MDMA started as a marital drug. How did it start?

>> The official story of it. It's really weird and is not widely known. The closest the closest thing to it that is published in a publicly available source. A few people know the the true story of it. And it's sort of sensitive. the the chemist involved doesn't wish for their name to be publicly known. I know their name, but the closest version of that story that you will find in the public sphere is in a recent book called I Feel Love by Rachel Newer where she gives a brief interview with the chemist who discovered it. Um, and there's a very very interesting backstory there that I would love to one day tell, but uh, this chemist actually I'm.

>> Why can't we tell it now?

>> because I don't have permission to tell it, but Rachel Newer was able to get a get a good bit of that story out and um and it's interesting. And so this chemist was friends with another chemist named Alexander Schulgan and he was the greatest psychedelic chemist who has ever lived who has ever been the the master of all masters.

>> Yeah.

>> And who invented LSD?

>> Albert Hoffman.

>> Albert Hoffman. And it was like a vegetable alkyoid or something.

>> It's in a fungus called urgot. It was not in a fungus called Urgot, but it contained a related compound that could be converted to LSD.

>> And it was in where? Switzerland or.

>> Yeah, in Switzerland.

>> Basel.

>> Basel. Do you ever make a pilgrimage there?

>> No.

>> Should we?

>> I love Switzerland.

>> I love Switzerland. Let's go to Basel. Okay. So, tell me about San Francisco? So, is this when the hippies adopted? This is uh is this early days? Like 60s?

>> It's more like 70s. I think that this is starting to happen. I think early 70s.

>> And so this guy Alexander Schulligan is the ultimate greatest psychedelic chemistry master.

>> He's a he's a chemist.

>> Yeah. Yeah. He's a chemist who used to work at DAO, leaves DAO and builds a lab in his backyard and starts doing completely independent research partially with money from the profit of a insecticide or a snail killer that he invented called Zectran. And he becomes one of the early investigators of these MDMA type compounds. And he's one of the first people to really realize that there's something special because that in and of itself is actually something that you can't always know with certainty that will happen that someone will try a drug and recognize its potential. Maybe they just don't like it. Maybe they don't take a high enough dose. Maybe it makes them feel weird and they say it's not worth it. But he took it and recognized that there was something really interesting about it. That it was doing something that wasn't like other drugs. It had things that were kind of similar to empetamine and maybe kind of similar to psychedelics in certain ways, but it was also its own thing. It was essentially its own new class of drug.

>> And so he started showing other people this drug and an underground community formed to use it psychotherrapeutically. And there was a therapist named Leo Zeff who came out of retirement after trying it and dedicated the rest of his life to distributing it to other people.

>> Therapeutically for what?

>> Couples therapy, maybe some early versions of PTSD, maybe for the betterment of well people.

>> So now it's I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong anytime I say anything, but they're using it now for PTSD treatment.

>> They were trying. Yeah, they were developing it for that purpose. And.

>> this is a really long story, but the uh they spent 40 years. So the at the beginning, of course, like all drugs, it wasn't illegal, but then people started using it. It gained some popularity. The government decided to place it in schedule one. And there was a campaign to prevent that from happening. There's a guy Rick Doblin who was actually selling MDMMA to pay for the legal defense to prevent it from being prohibited, right? And all the experts came together for this massive battle at the DEA debating whether or not people should be allowed to use MDMA medically. Everyone was more or less in agreement that it should be controlled in some way. does it where there can be no medical use of it of any kind or in a lower schedule or schedule where it's still restricted and controlled by the government but physicians and scientists can access it more easily. This was the idea and the DEA's own administrative law judge ruled that it should not be placed in schedule one and the DEA ignored the ruling of their own judge.

>> Why?

>> Because they're prohibitionists that like to make drugs illegal. So if they schedule one it then you can't even experiment on it or.

>> a physician can no longer prescribe it. It becomes immensely difficult to give it to humans. Immensely difficult. So.

>> this same guy Rick Dolin who was selling MDMMA to pay to prevent it from being made illegal embarks on a lifelong quest to find a way to introduce it into medicine. and he starts essentially a pharmaceutical company, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company, and enters MDMMA into clinical trials and spends decades getting this work to the point where it will be shown to the FDA. And it's this is kind of like the sum of his lifetimes.

>> Yeah.

>> And.

>> and there was a rejection.

>> No.

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>> And so what's the difference between MDMA and MDA and Molly?

>> Difference between MDMMA and MDA is the presence of a methyl group on the nitrogen atom. So it's like analogous to the relationship between empetamine and methamphetamine.

>> Uh.

>> what's the difference between empetamine and methampetamine?

>> Again, a methyl group on the nine.

>> Yeah, but okay. But what's.

>> there's actually much less.

>> methamphetamine to me is stronger than.

>> right. There's a lot but a lot of that is cultural. is slightly stronger, but not I don't I've tried both. I don't know that necessarily I could tell the difference between the two of them. They're very similar drugs. Um, but the issue is that when we talk about drugs, it's so often a product of our cultural associations and the cost and the distribution networks surrounding a certain drug. So empetamine and methamphetamine may be extremely similar.

>> Yeah. pharmacologically and chemically, but culturally you have one that is prescribed to affluent college students and professionals to legally do their jobs better and the other that is used by impoverished people who buy bags containing large quantities of the pure crystallin material and smoke it. So even though they're pharmacological.

>> meth or ice versus.

>> aderall.

>> aderall.

>> that's a big topic too sort of went from 0 to 60 it like it was sort of nowhere it was I aderall rlin like for ADHD and then it was everywhere all a sudden aderall like and it's still I mean it's it's that's got to be up there with oxy is an overprescribed drug now.

>> that's the fear I think but again I think all this stuff is more a function of the anxieties of a culture than people realize. They always talk about these drug usage patterns as if it's a product of the drug as opposed to a product of the culture.

>> What's the anxieties of the culture? For example.

>> lack of productivity, lack of financial security, feelings of procarity, feelings of striving to maintain some semblance of balance.

>> and these drugs affect those fears.

>> Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

>> Yeah. I mean, if you're in a financially precarious position where you're afraid that you don't have healthare, you're afraid that you can't pay the rent, and then this drug will give you the power to hustle a little harder, to do a second job, to have a a side gig.

>> Sure.

>> It makes a lot of sense.

>> Yeah. So.

>> or Aussie where you're just like everything's fine, everything's great. I'm feel delightful.

>> Right. Right. So I think the tendency is always to say that the issue is oxy or aderall as opposed to a culture where people.

>> feel the need to push themselves in this direction.

>> Yeah. Well oxy being highly addictive.

>> Yeah.

>> And aderall being I mean my only real experience with aderall is everybody I knew was taking for and everybody at various points has some sort of mental breakdown that's like sort of maybe aderall fueled or not. I don't know. Maybe it was just always there and it was released. Listen, we still haven't gotten to three. So, we've got a great story in in DRC. We've got a good story in South Africa. Oh, no, we've got it. We're in three. We're in four. So, we got the great I gain, which I love. Uh, let's do five.

>> Okay, five.

>> Next one.

>> China.

>> China.

>> Yeah.

>> Oof. I I can see it in my brain right now. Tell go into China. And by the way, Tim, we've got to pull up the old documentary foot. I remember the just the vats in dirty Chinese factories of making chemicals and you going in and baking your own chemical.

>> to get a firstirhand look at the massive scope of production. We headed to China, the manufacturing hub for everything from iPhones to acne medication to synthetic cannabonoids. I think I went to China for various vice stories at least three times or four times and from a chemistry perspective, China is the ultimate place to visit. I mean, it's the birthplace of all chemicals. It's the the womb of the chemical world.

>> Also pre like old school, you know, uh, Chinese medicine, etc., etc.

>> There's that, too. Yeah. Which but that's often more naturally oriented.

>> Yeah. But I'm just saying like both sides of the scale. Keep going. Yeah. And so I just love Chinese manufacturing. It's so interesting.

>> So So tell me about that. So you go to a chemical manufacturing plant in industrial China and said, "I'd like you to make me a chemical, please."

>> Yeah.

>> Whether it was an amphetamine, psychedelic, or cannabonoid, they were eager to synthesize whatever compound I requested.

>> They can make it if you want. I mean, we went to a big thing, you know, again, I like to talk more about the kind of freedoms that were afforded advice to do certain things is with a lot of these drug trends like synthetic cannabonoids or spice, you'd look at the way that they were being reported in most media outlets and it was so distorted from reality. Yeah.

>> it was so distorted that if like a hypothetical.

>> extraterrestrial were to read this reporting, they would have no way of even figuring out what was going on. It's so distorted. It's so non-representative of reality that all about people overdosing and how bad these drugs are, but then why are people using them? Why are people buying them? What's even going on? All these fundamental aspects of it were never addressed. And that was, I think, a big part of wanting to cover that was acknowledging that there were a lot of people that liked those drugs. They were a lot of fun. The reason people were using them was prohibition and drug testing. And this was a way to get high without having your.

>> drug use show up on a urine drug screen.

>> Yeah.

>> And also because they were being made by brilliant chemists in China who were pumping them out. And the chemistry of that was fascinating. and changing like to get by the DEA or like changing the molecules or something was.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> So you go there.

>> Yeah.

>> Give me the the to give me the process. I love this.

>> Well, so I felt that most of the reporting had been extremely cheesy and negative and would always talk about how dirty these labs are. Oh, these filthy Chinese labs. They're making these evil designer drugs and I do remember one and no one.

>> I do remember one because.

>> well it's kind of like going into like a a kitchen and starting to criticize the chef because he's a little sauce spatter on the.

>> and um and I thought well that's kind of lame and it's not really their fault that they're making these things and they're actually doing a pretty good job most of the time. And what are they making?

>> Everything.

>> UR 144 AM Fubinica, MDMBB, Fubinica, JW8.

>> Illegal, non-legal, anything. Doesn't matter.

>> Oh, they'll make anything. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's that's what all chemicals come. Pretty much all chemicals are coming from these parts of China. So the lab that is making a synthetic cannabonoid might simultaneously be making some kind of additive for a hair cream or.

>> and sorry to be clear synthetic cannabonoid is bath salts or.

>> related yeah bath salts tended to be more stimulant compounds but there was a.

>> fake weed or whatever.

>> fake weed/fake coke fake MDMA/ whatever yeah.

>> which was a massive industry.

>> yeah and what happened.

>> to the industry Sure.

>> there were it evolved as all these things do. There were crackdowns in both the United States and China that interfered somewhat with the industry. Of course, people will always find new ways of doing these things. Then there was uh a legal change with the farm bill in the United States that actually allowed hemp derived cannabonoids to be sold more openly. And so there was a shift from entirely synthetic cannabonoids to compounds that were supposedly isolated from hemp.

>> Right?

>> This was the.

>> So why did you like China so much and what did you do? And tell me what like what chemical or what did you make there? Like what did you come up with to make when you were there?

>> I don't know that I came up with any.

>> You come up with a you came up with like.

>> Oh yeah. I yeah I was asking them to make I think um 5 mAPB or something like that but I didn't come up with that. I mean I've come up with many many drugs just not uh I don't think during that trip I was asking them to make anything particular.

>> But what what would that be?

>> It would be an MDMA type compound.

>> MDMA. So an MDMA kind of thing.

>> I think one really crucial part of the story is that all of the reporting had been so negative during this period and had made these chemists look bad and had made them look sketchy or incompetent or unconcerned about health. and I wanted to do the first thing that was sympathetic to them. Yeah.

>> Which was unheard of. And it was so hard. First of all, they didn't trust anyone. So, I would contact them and I'd say, you know, I actually don't think what you're doing is bad. I I don't think there's anything wrong with making or selling drugs and I think you're doing a really good job. And I'd like to talk with you about it openly. And they would say absolutely not.

>> Why?

>> They're afraid. because they would have no reason to trust journalists because journalists have done such a terrible job describing all these things. They always make things worse.

>> Why do you think that is?

>> This is like a question that I struggle with constantly and it was something that I would think about a lot when I was at Vice uh because it was the the first time that I was able to really probe the limits of what could be done, what you could actually do, what was allowed. And I think maybe people just don't know how to talk about these things any other way. They're so conditioned to talk about drugs in a negative manner that they can't even think of telling a story about how the chemists making synthetic cannabonoids in China are actually pretty good at their job. You know, I never thought about this until recently, but uh there was a lot made of if you look at like football or TV in general or whatever, like seven out of 10 ads are big pharma ads.

>> Mhm.

>> And I never really thought about like they spend so much money, the majority of all ads now, newspapers.

TV, radio are farm ads. And and it's like, well, if you own the advertising, advertising is the modern day censorship. If you own the advertising, then you're not going to say, "Hey, there's a drug out there that's better than big pharma's drug that that you can make for little or no money in China and fixes all the same problems."

>> Well, that's a really interesting idea. I mean, you would know as well as anyone.

>> Advertisers are the modern day sensors for sure.

>> So, could you give me some examples?

>> Everything. No, like for for Vice for example, we did a thing on words because there's a whole thing in advertising of like we can't have our brand next to these words and like the words would be like gay, black, like you know, and you're like, so we did this whole thing on redoing the the the lexicon and we won a a big award for it because they hadn't been changed since the 50s. And what they do is if you do something that they don't like, they just say, "Okay, we're going to hold. We're just going to wait and see." meaning hold their money which in which case you go bankrupt. So, I mean, any thing that they don't like. Now, we never got big pharma advertising. But if you're NBC and your 70% of your money is coming from something or other, you know, a different whatever, big pharma, whatever, and then all of a sudden you do a thing on ibeane and say, "By the way, we figured out how to cure heroin addiction." They're going to say, "We don't think that's true. We're going to hold our advertising." So, that thing's never going to see the light of day.

>> Do you think that are you aware of evidence that that has happened?

>> I think it happens every day.

>> Interesting.

>> Yeah. I mean, we never got um drug money. So, that's probably why you existed was because was because uh I'm just fascinated by stuff. Just as Shane Smith asked questions. I love the questions that you asked. I love your scientific approach.

>> You know, I love the fact that you're fearless and you would go find these things and you would you would actually look at things and say, "I'm just going to go find out about it." which is why I wanted to talk to you today is tell me about this stuff because I guarantee you things that hold such sway in the human psyche especially for young people like Kay and and TCB and Molly and all this stuff nobody knows where it comes from nobody knows how just like the good things the bad things and that's why it's one of the most interesting uh topics in the world that no one's really talking about except for and a few other people so that's why I want to talk about it

>> and I think this idea that big pharma would prevent people from talking about it. It's very interesting. I've usually been resistant to that sort of interpretation.

>> For example, with the MDMA rejection, this was a thing that a lot of people brought up. They were like, "Of course, of course, big pharma wouldn't allow MDMA to be approved because they don't allow cures to exist. They just need treatments. The >> Fiser Prozac lobby is going to come in and prevent MDMA from being approved."

>> There wasn't really strong evidence for that at all. Um, and the pattern that I've observed has been that as soon as there is an opportunity to make money, the pharmaceutical company will just make money off of it. Why destroy competition?

>> Why not make MDMA then? It seems like everybody wants it.

>> The reasons were extremely bizarre.

>> Oh,

>> I mean, I'm being threatened with a lawsuit right now.

>> Oh, sorry. Well, I don't want to get you in any trouble.

>> Well, I mean, I can

>> just say allegedly a lot.

>> I'll say alleged that

>> maybe a scorpus.

>> Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, allegedly, it has been alleged.

>> Yeah.

>> Um, that there was a very rich hedge fund owner who had survived the Holocaust and was elderly.

>> Going to do the math here. Okay. Okay. Go.

>> And estranged from his daughters. And allegedly he met a nice lady named Vicki who was on the board of directors of the nonprofit developer of MDMA Maps. And he really liked Vicki. He had no strong relationship with his daughters. He liked this Vicky lady quite a lot and he had a lot of money and he was an older man and he decided he's going to buy Vicki a house and buy Vicki a car and donate millions of dollars to M.

>> He was taken advantage of. They say,

>> "Well,

>> allegedly

>> then the daughter finds out about these donations and is very displeased and starts saying that this is elder abuse and that her father was manipulated and given drugs by these nefarious board members at MAPS and

>> the use of MDMA by her father may have even given him Alzheimer's disease." This is another claim,

>> but that can't stop MDMA globally over the because it's it's a it's like I mean MDMA is everywhere. No.

>> So there's a nasty series of legal fights, right,

>> between the daughter Susie Sarlo and the MAPS board member and the associated people. There's arguments over the money. Things get very very dark.

>> Yeah. And they start to introduce journalists into the mix. It has been alleged. And the journalists,

>> paid journalist.

>> Oh, no. I don't know. Paid. You don't This is the funny thing about journalists is you can I mean, they'll get paid for their stories. You But you don't need to pay them often. You just kind of give them the story. Leave them.

>> And so there was a journalist who was close to this who wrote a big story very much siding with the grievances of the daughter. Um and this kept growing. It was like a metastasizing cancer in the development of MDMA where the money

>> was being paid to in some instances I think it was just influencing journalists but in other instances there was actually money being exchanged demonst.

>> Yes. Yes.

>> To to vilify it.

>> Yes. Yeah. So in the two confirmed instances there was and continues to be a blogger and occasional writer who's being paid who they get very legally sensitive about any kind of causality in these discussions. So he was paid money and incidentally his reporting concerns the dangers of psychedelics and they gave $185,000 to a group and those people went on a wild campaign that involved meeting with the FDA during

>> sorry who who gave the money again

>> the daughter Susie Sarlo. Yeah. and um and they dedicated themselves entirely to doing everything. And they did everything. They um worked with a stalker who was able to intimidate participants in the MDMA trial, trying to convince the subjects of the MDMA therapy that they had been brainwashed by a cult in order to try to convert people against MAPS. And they told the FDA that MAPS was a cult and that and they falsely accused a therapist of assault and made all kinds of extremely extremely bizarre accusations that complicated the regulatory process. I mean this was so extreme that the same person who um was this stalker who had admitted to police that he had distributed underage revenge pornography very unsaavory fellow that was um closely connected to this group was responsible for the scientific journal psychopharmarmacology retracting all of the medical phase 2 trial data.

>> Um, so this was an enormous

>> this is the most up story. It's one of the most and what's amazing is this is a it's a really up story. It's also a really good story and

>> we should make a movie about it.

>> Well, so you wonder why am I talking with you about this on a podcast? Why haven't you already heard about this? Why aren't lots of people talking about this crazy story?

>> I've just first time I've heard that.

>> It's a wild wild story and the answer is extremely dark. So people, you know, if you say, "Oh, big pharma is preventing people from talking about drugs or whatever." I think probably the vast majority of people that hear that will unquestioningly believe that and it may be the case but

>> that is not something I've observed. What I have observed is what is going on here and it's very

>> interesting how much can be achieved with two basic strategies. One is give a little bit of money to the people that are going to say the things you want them to say.

>> 185 rand doesn't seem like enough.

>> Well, maybe not for you. And this is and what you this is lots and lots of people have said that say they say only 185 one of these guys was an Uber driver, right? He quit his job driving an Uber to work on this full-time. This was life-changing for him and it's a lot of money for some people

>> and especially if you can frame it the right way, $185,000 to protect victims, to protect children from danger, that's a great deal. So what they did was a combination of two things. Intimidate people like me, so send people like me that talk about it, legal threats to silence them, and give money to people that will tell the other side of the story. And

>> what's the other side of the story?

>> Psychedelics are dangerous. Um, we Nobody's talking about the dangers of psychedelics. We need to talk about uh bad trips.

>> Is MDMA a psychedelic? It it's debatable. It's not really a classical psychedelic. No. But it gets lumped in the psychedelics loosely.

>> Yeah.

>> So that's pretty dark and crazy. And so they sort of corrupted or with the the trials. So I'm assuming the trials didn't go well.

>> The trials were extraordinarily positive.

>> Oh, okay. Yeah.

>> Yeah. Yeah.

>> And so where where are we at with it now? So the FDA as of less than a week ago finally released their letter to the developer of MDMA explaining their reasons for the rejection and they gave a number of reasons. They're not ranked in terms of their weight or anything like that. And some of the reasons are I think kind of bull. Uh, one was that the pharmaceutical company supposedly had failed to record so-called positive adverse events, which is feeling good while under the influence of the drug.

>> So, what's wrong with it? They they failed to

>> you're not supposed to enjoy it or not.

>> They failed to record whether or not MDMMA causes euphoria,

>> which everyone always laughs, but this is this is actually like one of the this is a serious uh like a reason that they

>> claim to have rejected it. Um, as obvious as that might be, and they and I agree, why not record it? But this seems like a very weird reason to uh the other was that the trial population, many of them had used MDMA previously. This was something that the FDA knew about and were okay with. Um, and I actually think a strong argument can be made that having a trial population with previous use of MDMA is going to be more representative of the actual patient population because people with PTSD have a much higher incidence of substance use disorder. So, it's not weird to think that somebody who would uh qualify for this therapy would have used drugs previously. In fact, it's very likely that they would have. How many people because it seems like I don't know a lot of people are getting PTSD therapy using MDMA but if it's a schedule one how like how is it happening?

>> Oh they're not not above ground maybe either with underground therapists or

>> investigationally as part of a clinical trial.

>> I see. Now let's go to that. So like uh mushrooms I don't want to say acid as much as mushroom but a little bit acid. mushrooms, MDMA, there seems to be a micro doing wave like that seems to be accepted and whatever. Maybe explain a little bit about micro doing versus like what what is a micro dose? Like how like how do you determine what a micro dose is and it seems like a lot of people are using them self-medicating or doing these therapies. That's all illegal. Is that is that right?

>> For the most part, yeah, with mushrooms or alasty, it would be because they're federally schedule one controlled substances. In some regions, there's some uh state legal changes that decriminalize possession of mushrooms. So,

>> do you think that that's going to be the next weed?

>> I think it would be great if it were decriminalized and legalized and people could have access to it without fear of being arrested. I think

>> Do you think mushrooms is the next one? Are you talking about from like a legal perspective or commercial

>> weed like how it's you know obviously weed is going to be sort of it's it's legal in a lot of places but soon they'll be everywhere.

>> I hope so. I mean I I do have some degree of optimism about these things but it's also shocking to me how easily people are manipulated and how the work of journalists can cause people to fight against their own interests or academics as well actually are also I think exacerbating a lot of these problems. go back to journalists. Why are journalists going against mushrooms?

>> The big counterargument was actually um that it's like would battle capitalism. I think

>> I don't understand

>> that because if people are selling psychedelics that is bad and so in order to end capitalism people can't sell psychedelics. I think this is basically um some version

>> we want to sell psychedelics for capitalism. We want everyone to buy them. No,

>> I see nothing wrong with people buying them. No,

>> if you're goal is to end capitalism, I don't think preventing people from selling psychedelics is going to be the most expedient way of achieving that.

>> Hold on. I don't understand. They're saying that if you sell psychedelics, it ends capitalism. They are fighting capitalism by preventing people from selling psychedelics supposedly.

>> Whose argument is that?

>> Some kind of fringe academics, the group of people paid by the daughter of the hedge fund guy. So it's there's special interests that are keeping a real sort of thing at this

>> partially, but it also has to do with bizarre types of thinking in the humanities and how certain stances have become ubiquitous in academia as well.

>> Like what? like that it's very bad for people to profit off of psychedelics and that it represents some harm to indigenous people. I mean, one of the most insane pieces of reporting on this actually came from Vice. Yeah. Yeah. It's something I' I've been obsessed with. I mean, this was one of the really weird things that happened and it's something that I don't think a lot of people know about. Wow.

>> It was a piece. There was one journalist uh right at the very end uh probably 2021 2022ish.

>> The dark period.

>> Yeah. The dark period where I would see these things and I think I don't even know who was even involved with this.

>> Me neither sadly.

>> And um there was this pharmaceutical company in Wisconsin that was framing itself as the ethical pharmaceutical company. They're the good guys. they're the pharmaceutical company dedicated to really good capitalism. Um, and in order for them to be the good pharmaceutical company, there needs to be

>> an evil pharmaceutical company.

>> And that was this company, Compass. And Compass was actually funding the research that I was doing at this university in Philadelphia. So, I was kind of uh you know, I just left the public sphere entirely for years and was just doing chemistry and watching this unfold and thinking, "Wow, this is really unfortunate. I like I I hope someone else is going to mention that there's something really bizarre about this moral binary that's being promoted in all of the reporting on this issue because it doesn't make sense. Especially because the nonprofit is owned by billionaires who are funding it with for-profit initiatives that are connected to the nonprofit and probably using the nonprofit status as some kind of a tax loophole to fund development for their for-profit companies would be the obvious interpretation of what's going on. I would allege.

>> Yet, everyone was taking all of this at face value. Like, oh, this guy that was trading futures for Exxon and Shell just really cares about my freedom a lot with his pharmaceutical company and he he really wants to make sure that uh everyone has access to psilocybin through his pharmaceutical company that is oriented toward freedom.

>> I mean, it's just

>> And we wrote about that.

>> Oh, yeah.

>> Oh, dear. Well, only only one journalist was was doing this.

>> Well, that's sad,

>> but it's also really interesting. It's sad, but it's I find all this stuff totally fascinating because you watch in real time the power to sculpt public opinion that emerges from these whims of vice blog entry. I mean, there's so much going into all of this and you don't even know about it. You don't even notice it. Not a single person that I've talked to who is involved with advice has ever even heard of what I'm talking about. Not one. No one has been like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I saw that stuff." No one noticed it. But for the people at that pharmaceutical company in Wisconsin, this was like they had an entire website dedicated to reposting the vice blog entries. They were in a state of oceanic boundless euphoria due to the credility of this one vice blogger.

>> Well, on that depressing note, what about what about Iaska? What about South America? What about number five or six? Let's get it. Keep on with the beautiful stories.

>> Yeah,

>> I can do this for vice. I

>> I'm not I'm not a vice hater. In fact, I and I um

>> But there were dark periods and I get it. I get what you're saying.

>> Well, there's a huge amount of responsibility. That's that's kind of the the thing is it's like you have so many ways that you can harm a culture. Mhm.

>> There's so many things you can do that are totally wrong that wouldn't even be noticed. They could be totally factual technically. I mean, I find that to be the most interesting is that some of this reporting that I'm describing during this period of vice was technically speaking completely factual. It wasn't what you think of if you thought of bad vice reporting like, oh, some guy's just making some up and it's uh and it's really offensive. It wasn't like that at all. It was um superficially perfectly responsible reporting that was entirely factual. But when you start to deconstruct it, you realize that they'd use this factual and responsible reporting to promote ideas that were completely false and totally irresponsible. It's interesting though. It's worth checking out. Anyway,

>> in my defense, I was not in day-to-day since 17. But uh the other thing people used to always say to me, "Oh, this piece or that piece or that piece." At its peak, we were doing like 7,000 pieces a day. And I'd see like four. But that's not me running for the hills. I'm just saying like Vice put out a lot of stuff that was fantastic, a lot of stuff that was, you know. There you go.

>> Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing.

>> Anywh who, I want to talk about exciting, delicious Oiawasa.

>> Again, early piece Santiago Santiago Sy the Great. He um and I went to the Brazilian border and traveled down a river and we met with people. There was someone who's making iaska in a village and I

>> sorry how do you make iaska?

>> It's a tea. So you boil plants in water. I mean the traditions often involve an enormous number of plants and you can certainly make very complicated intricate forms of iawaska and in some of the ceremonial ritualistic processes the very preparation is like a dance where as they're cutting the vine everyone is chopping it and pounding it in rhythm and it's a song. So every aspect of it, it's like uh like elves working in a in like a fairy tale um like

>> Santa's workshop.

>> Yeah. Santa's workshop kind of situation. Like my friend is a a member of

>> a Iaska church in Hawaii, Santa Da. And he's sent me videos that he takes and it's it's really like that. Everyone is singing as they pound the vine. And so for them it's not just a tea. It's like every aspect, the growing, the harvesting, the breaking of the vine. How many elements are there? Two. Oh, just two.

>> Yeah. Well, two

>> main

>> for someone like me, too. But if you're part of a tradition, it might be an enormous number of other little things. But the main

>> And what are the two?

>> One is usually a DMT containing plant called psychotria. It's also called shakruna that was uh car first collected and brought for botanical analysis by William S. Burroughs. And

>> No.

>> Yes.

>> Really? Yeah.

>> Wow.

>> Yeah.

>> William S. Burrows found DMT.

>> This is like an amazing Andrew Gallammore, this DMT researcher, actually just conveyed this to me recently. I was kind of amazed by it as well. Yeah. He wasn't the person that discovered the molecule DMT, but he was the first person to collect samples of the DMT containing plant and bring it to uh

>> how did he find them?

>> In South America. He he was IA. I mean he didn't invent this is a indigenous tradition but he was the first outsider to go and collect a sample for

>> so he went and did an Iawaska ceremony.

>> Yeah. Yeah. He did he tried the vine. He tried these compounds

>> and then he brought it back.

>> Brought it back.

>> Wow.

>> Yeah.

>> And what's the difference between DMT and ICO? DMTs like like like well, it it again hit the sub culture like crazy and everyone was doing DMT but it was like fast and but super strong like the strongest drug ever.

>> Yeah. So DMT is extremely strong but one of the interesting things about it one reason that people have this these ideas about it is because it's ultra short acting. So the experience is like being rocketed to the peak of a mushroom trip to the very very peak

>> in a matter of seconds and then coming back down in a couple minutes.

>> Yeah.

>> And because you can go so far and come back down, people tend to take really high doses of it. You could use a lower dose and just have a mild effect from it. But what people are excited by is that you can take a level that if you were doing it with mushrooms, you would be

>> gone for the entire day. It would be a big deal. But you can do this. And because it's only a couple minutes, it's not necessarily a huge deal. But the reason that the duration is so short is because there's an enzyme in your body called monomine oxidase that is able to break down DMT very rapidly. And so the kind of amazing innovation of Iawasa is the introduction of a second non-DMT containing plant that contains an enzyme inhibitor. So when you combine the DMT with the enzyme inhibitor, suddenly you can drink DMT and it isn't broken down. It becomes orally active and the experience is much longer.

>> DMT, ISA, Iberine, all lots of barfing and I talk to you. I barfing scares me because I don't like it. Um, what's your favorite out of all those three?

>> Favorite? I don't know. I mean, TMT Iwasa, TMT I was I began. They're all so interesting. I don't really know that I have a a favorite of these things.

>> You're like Burgundy, Bordeaux. I don't really know. Uh, what's Do you have a favorite drug at all?

>> No.

>> No.

>> I mean, there's things like caffeine that are extremely useful.

>> Yeah.

>> It's hard not to love them, but it's also a boring answer to favorite drug. No, it isn't.

>> Okay,

>> fine with me. Why has ICA or Iaska ceremonies become so popular? Do you think

>> it's a few reasons, spiritual reasons? It creates a framework where people are supervised using psychedelics, which is also something that doesn't otherwise really exist. There are, you know, mushroom ceremonies or maybe LSD ceremonies somewhere, but this is for somebody that wants to go deep, a way to do it without just sitting in their apartment or something like that and having someone who's sort of expert on the experience to watch over them and a framework where it's permissible to go really really deep. um you conceivably could do something like that by yourself in your apartment, but most people wouldn't feel comfortable. So that's part of it is this is like a a framework where it's okay to take a really high dose of a psychedelic and go really really deep. And also I think that people are attracted to the idea that the pain associated with the experience differentiates it from typical drug experience patterns.

>> What's the pain? vomiting, potential emotional turmoil, crying, but the idea is that you in this pain you may process some trauma and you may um

>> Okay. Why? Like are you doing it is this recreation? Are you doing it for therapy? Is it uh you know it's dep for depression, anxiety? Like what's the general idea of I'm going to go to Peru and do Iaska?

>> I think a lot of people are depressed or suffering from some kind of existential malaise missing some

>> that's going to be fixed by Iawaska.

>> That's the hope I think is it will give you some inspiration or some kick. It's maybe a variation of the same reasons that people use any drug.

>> Has it fixed anything in your brain?

>> Maybe a little.

>> Like what?

>> Well, it's hard to say. Well, actually the last time I used Iwasa, it was um I was thinking about Louis CK and I was thinking like, "Oh, he's he's really great." Like that's exactly how a human being should be. Be completely transparent about who you are and your grotesque compulsions and everyone will understand you and forgive you and no one could ever hate you and no one could ever hold anything against you and you will be accepted because of your truth. And then like maybe a couple months after this experience, he was uh me too and the revelations of that particular Iawaska experience were demonstrated to be profoundly wrong.

>> Yeah, I was wondering the time. Okay. After all these years and all these different substances we've tried, anything we have no interest in trying?

>> Uh absolutely no interest whatsoever. I mean things like data seem pretty challenging or scapolamine.

>> Okay. So, so that's another thing I wanted to bring.

>> This is one of the things Vice really built its video brand on.

>> Welcome to Bogota, Columbia. We're here chasing after the most dangerous drug in the world, Burunda. Bundaganga is the source of scapoleamine, which is basically like the worst ruy you can ever imagine.

>> Yeah, scapoleamine. So, let's talk about that. What is it and why? Like, how does it even work?

>> It is a chemical that's present in a number of plants in the nightshade family that interferes with signaling at colonergic receptors and it's an anticolinergic drug. It's kind of like benadryil dyenhydramine. It's a drug that causes a weird type of anticolinergic delirium.

>> I don't know what anticolinergic means.

>> Interfering with acetylcholine signaling or acetyloline receptors. And it is characterized by people having total amnesia, getting very hot but having sort of dry skin, unslakable thirst, uh becoming

>> auto suggestive or whatever.

>> Well, that's that's one of the claims as well is that you can get people to do your bidding when they're in this state, which maybe you can. And I don't know if there's any like real direct pharmacological justification for that but people are going to be totally up discombobulated out of it like so you could conceivably get them to do all kinds of stuff.

>> Yeah. Just to be clear, like so we've found found Scapoleine went like when like sort of in in Colombia and stuff when you'd get a a a lady of the evening and they'd sort of you know blow it or do whatever and uh and then you know you would find you emptied out your bank account and you know all the and they would they would have video footage of the guy like taking out the money

>> and he he's either doesn't remember or was like I was just told to do and I was like a zombie. So, uh, funny drug, weird, freaky. It was the, wasn't it the ton makoots that they said that they were all on scapoleamine? Do you remember that? Do you ever hear about that?

>> I didn't hear about that, but it's not totally surprising.

>> Yeah. What else we got? So, Scapoamine, what have you, what you ever look into scapole? What are your thoughts on scapolamine?

>> I'm friends with this neuroscientist named Jack Aaka who's like far more so than me the ultimate selfexperiment guy

>> then you know he'll drink nothing but his own urine for two weeks

>> why not

>> to understand what it does to him he really likes to do weird self-experiments and

>> if anyone I know would have enjoyed scapoamine it would have been this guy like if I had to rank everyone I've ever met who could potentially extract some benefit from the experience, he would have probably been the number one contender and he didn't enjoy it. So, after hearing him talk about how harrowing the experience was, it made me think, all right, if I ever do this, it will be done with the understanding that it will be a very painful experience, but maybe it'll be psychopharmarmacologically interesting and worthwhile just to basically be able to say that I

>> How many drugs have you done? Would you say roughly?

>> A lot. Like a a lot. I was watching this morning one of like fish heads when you went into like a tumor or like a tum not a tumor a coma kind of thing. What happened with the fish heads?

>> We caught three different species that these fishermen claim produce some kind of inebriating effect. They say that it makes you drunk or that it increases the vividness of your dreams. Well, this is another one of these um bizarre pharmacological mysteries that I was not able to solve in a satisfactory way, but I dedicated an episode to it. It's one of these things that people constantly talk about because there's these scattered medical and journalistic reports of people consuming fish and entering some kind of hallucinatory state. There's a weird medical term for it. Ichthioenotoxism, that's what it's called.

>> There you go. And um the question was could we figure out what was responsible for this? Could we identify the fish? Is it always that fish? Is it something the fish is eating? Is it something that we could extract and chemically characterize? Is it something that's already known about? Is it people doing a weird job of describing symptoms of food poisoning or something else that's familiar, which is always a possibility as well. Um, in the same way that people will have radically different descriptions of the same drug experience, if you look at, for example, Thomas Dquincy's descriptions of opium in Confessions of an English opium meter, he's describing it almost as if it were a psychedelic hallucinagen type drug. And if you hear reports of people taking oxycodone, it doesn't sound like Thomas to Quincy, but they're describing pharmacologically very similar substances.

>> So,

>> could it be the case that certain people are just really sick and it kind of sounds like a hallucination and the way that it's described by a doctor? Also, one of the major medical case reports related to this turned out to be semifraudulent. This was another implicating species Sarpa.

>> So

>> it's like a fugu fish or something like

>> well that's a a real thing cuz with with fugu you have a very well characterized poison TTX tetrototoxin but with this hallucinogenic fish it's not quite clear.

>> And so what did you do? went to Madagascar, went to uh neighboring island Reunion and ate supposedly hallucinogenic fish and did not have any kind of a clear response and took fish samples back to the United States and chemically analyzed them and didn't find anything. It was a bust.

>> I mean, it's such a fascinating thing. It would be a lot of fun. It's one of these things where, you know, is making this show and you have whatever it is, 10 days or something like that to solve a mystery that people have been debating scientifically and medically for the better part of a century. And it's ambitious to do it, but we tried. Um, you know, it's actually something that I think about. I wish we'd spent more time just at fish markets just talking to fishermen all day.

>> What about frogs?

>> Frogs? Yeah, tree frogs and licking tree frogs and poison.

>> There's no licking of the frogs.

>> No,

>> but yeah, frogs. I mean,

>> had you ever do any frog business?

>> Oh, yeah. Yeah.

>> Well, like what?

>> The waxy monkey tree frog in in uh Brazil?

>> What's this frog?

>> It was one of the early ones. Yeah.

>> Hello, I'm Hamilton Mars. We're currently boating through a flooded forest on our way to meet the Mayauna Indians who use a strange frog derived drug they call sapo.

>> Sapo diaries. Yeah, it was um weird.

>> Some mild closed eye visuals. It does feel

>> slightly psychedelic. I think it might be best for me to lay in my hammock now. I'm feeling extremely woozy. Not really classically psychedelic, more of a kind of but definitely psychoactive. not really my vibe, but I remember, you know, this was Vice was launching the Brazil issue and I remember Santiago calling me and saying, "Hey, uh, do you want to go to to Brazil?" And, uh, do you know of any weird drug stuff there? And is there anything we could do? And I told him, "Yeah, yeah, there's uh this weird frog that we could try to find this film Medusa byolor species and we could see what happens." And he said, "Okay, yeah, yeah, let's do that." And then we did.

>> Does he do something?

>> I don't think he did actually. Yeah.

>> You're more courageous with your your frontal lobe. Uh what's the highest you've ever been?

>> The highest I've ever been. Like when you say high, like on any substance ever. pain any

>> I mean some doses of something like ketamine you just lose consciousness which is maybe the highest I don't know but

>> like what about Iaska like okay I gain like have you you seen your relatives and have you seen time

>> oh sure yeah yeah yeah

>> I mean I've definitely not known who I was and where I was in what year I was I've lost all sense of any contextual information about my identity

>> and do you worry about that like you not being coming back to reality.

>> Not well at that time there was no coming back because I didn't know who I was. So coming back to even have a fear of not coming back to reality, you'd have to have some sense of where you were before and who

>> and what was that on? Sorry.

>> This is actually synthetic DMT with a pharmaceutical MOI. It was so-called pharma.

>> Lord, the pharma was so you made it. In this instance, I didn't make the DMT. Someone else had made it.

>> But you do make drugs that are just like you're kind of like a I don't know. It's on the periphery of my conscious, but like a guy who would make things and then like take in like he would sort of like some wizard. You're like a wizard. You're a wizard.

>> Speaking of dark and weird stories, I don't know if we're allowed to talk about it. If we aren't, that's fine. You don't have to talk about it. But you told me a story and I think uh you're you're trying to make a movie out of it which I think is a great idea about a woman who who got into Ketamine and uh was an ARS and then disappeared but might be a time traveler.

>> Oh yeah, I would love to talk about this. Not only would I love to talk about this. I've never talked about this publicly.

>> Okay, breaking news. Breaking news. Breaking news. This is an incredible story and

>> strategically I've never talked about it. And this again is a story that I know so much about because of you in part where there's a few of these really weird books about drugs that exist. Some of which people don't seem to know about very much but they have a cult following. I mean the chemist Alexander Scholan wrote these two books with his wife Pecall and Tall that are their experiences testing all these different drugs on themselves and often having sex and describing the sexual response for these different drugs and these books peol and te call are amazing and are really really

>> Did you ever do that? So experiment with sex and drugs. I think probably most people that uh have tried these things has have tried that. But

>> so

>> so these books are fascinating and there's a number of these kind of underground texts, but there was one that I'd always been obsessed with that was particularly mysterious. You couldn't actually even get a physical copy of this book because reportedly the family of the author had all of them destroyed. The book

>> Did you get Do you have one?

>> I eventually I eventually did get my hands on one, but almost nobody even has a physical. It's not even something you can see.

>> Who published that?

>> A computer company called Perah Research

>> in Massachusetts. Again, another odd detail of this story. Um, so this book is something that no one ever even gets to see themselves, but a Xerox copy of it is distributed as PDFs or bootlegs or also bootlegs that people distribute. And this is part of the strange appeal of this mysterious book. And

>> superficially, when you read this book, it's a kind of love story. It's about this woman who's studying past life regression who meets a handsome anesthesiologist named Dr. Howard Alunian and the two fall in love and they use ketamine together and find that not only are they in love in this particular incarnation but in fact their love has spanned all of time in human history and they have been lovers in many many different lifetimes. The book is really bizarre and as she's describing their relationship, it's all very positive about how wonderful it is, but there is even in her own description creepy strange stuff emerging like arguments between her and Howard. So that a lot of the book is based on tape recordings that she made of them injecting ketamine together. And so in the transcribed recordings, Howard will be saying these things like, "I don't know what I'm going to do when this book comes out. I'm gonna lose my medical license. I worked my whole life to get this medical license, and it's all going to be over." And she's saying, "Well, you shouldn't think about yourself. You should think about humanity." And this is really a small price to pay. But there's obviously strange tension emerging between these two people. And as the book progresses, it also appears as if Marcia Moore is becoming increasingly delusional. She's starting to believe that she is a reincarnation of Cleopatra and the tone of the book is very mysterious. She toward the end goes to visit the ketamine researcher John C. Lily and he actually warns her because he's just come out of a delusional state himself where he was concerned that an extraterrestrial computer that he called solid state intelligence um that was operating something called Echo, the Earth coincidence control office, which was uh like a a extraterrestrial computerized coincidence monitoring system that would eventually invade our planet. And the only weapon that mankind would have in this war against this extraterrestrial computer would be dolphins because dolphins could survive in saltwater but computers can't.

>> I'm going to do that just in case it happens.

>> Need dolphin army. And he also thought that this computer had stolen his penis at one point at it does.

>> Yeah. So this researcher John Cilly cautions Marcia Moore against going deeper but she continues the book

>> going deeper i.e. taking more K.

>> Yeah. And she but she believes that ketamine is going to save humanity that to discontinue her experiments would risk the future of mankind and that one day throughout the land people will have ketamine clinics where they can use ketamine and this will usher in a new dawn of humanity. So there's something very preient about many of the predictions that she makes. But immediately after this book was published, she disappeared without a trace. And to this day, nobody knows exactly what happened to Marcia Moore. So I was obsessed with Marcia Moore. After the second season of Pharmacopia, Vice Films had a huge infusion of cash and you all offered to help me develop it as a film. This is 2018. That's how far back this goes. So,

>> the first step was getting the film rights to this book. And for one year, I worked with vice producer Mimi Packer and a few.

>> Sure. He's great. We worked together trying to figure out a way to get the rights to this book, but both of the authors were dead and the rights had defaulted to their

>> Who are the authors?

>> This woman, Marcia Moore, and her husband, Howard Alton.

>> So, it was them.

>> Yeah. Yeah. They wrote they It was a book. And wasn't he under suspicion if she disappeared?

>> Yeah, he was. He was very much under suspicion. Yeah,

>> cuz it's either two crazy drug freaks murdering their wives, which is boring, but a great story. Or it's time travel and aliens, and we know how the world ends. It's pretty good.

>> Or there's another possibility. There's a I mean, one really weird possibility.

>> Yeah, I like it. One strange thing that was going on when you look at the history of computer research is that there was an enormous disproportionate puzzlingly large amount of early computer research on astrology computers

>> on astrology.

>> Astrology computers. This was a huge emphasis of early computer research in a way that is something that no one would ever expect. Before you could get word processors, there were commercially available astrology computers. And one of the strange ideas is that the military was funding some of this research on astrology computers. And a CIA whistleblower named Miles Copeland claimed that the CIA was building compromised astrology computers for distribution to foreign heads of state to give astrological readings that would be favorable to US interests. This was the

>> which is bonkers.

>> Bonkers, but maybe true.

>> Maybe true. Okay, keep

>> I mean maybe true. This is especially interesting because during the Reagan administration, there's very solid evidence corroborated by many different people that the Reagan family astrologer Joan Quibler was making fundamental decisions. And so again, using

>> an astrology computer to do these calculations. I don't I don't know that the what an astrology computer is.

>> It's exactly what it sounds like because doing doing the actual mathematical calculation of the positions of the planets is very labor intensive.

>> I have computers for astrology.

>> But what if you had a computer that could just automatically calculate the position of all the planets? Something that you can now effortlessly do with an app on your phone. But this was a huge innovation. It saved so much time. But the issue is I think this is actually like one of the early iterations of the one of the major issues that we're currently facing is can you trust the computer?

>> Sure.

>> Who programmed the computer? Whose code is giving you these readings? And what are their interests in providing this information?

>> So bring us to number three. So, we've got either the husband murdered the wife or the whatever the lover murdered her for because she was going to drop diamond him for being a K user or they figured out how to travel through time and figured out that the aliens are on us. And what's the third one? The some kind of strange interaction with government astrology computer researchers and political astroanalysis which she was an early proponent of. She'd actually written an entire book on political astroanalysis. So this idea of harnessing the power of astrologers to influence politicians. Maybe she

>> which sounds crazy until Reagan

>> which sounds crazy until Reagan and also her brother is doing stuff with the CIA. The entire family is connected to Manhattan project scientists. There's all this weirdness surround.

>> And who put out the book again?

>> A computer company.

>> That's like a severance type thing. Like it's like the computer company and they put out the book and the book is just like them being taped and that's the that's weird.

>> It's really weird.

>> Got to make that movie.

>> I have to. So then 2018 we spent the whole year trying to get the rights to it. We couldn't do it. We kept trying. Couldn't get the rights. Eventually we did get the film rights to

>> from who?

>> in a very convoluted arrangement that maybe I shouldn't even characterize entirely, but it happened. Wow. And we now have the rights to this and

>> got to get some money to make this movie. It's one of the greatest stories ever told.

>> We got to make it. That is so that's our mission this week is to is to try to get funding

For the greatest story that's never been told.

"Didn't Pulse Films just get a bunch of money? Let's go talk to them."

"I wanted to bring up that on the like CIA. You were bringing up the CIA, like how many drug programs have the CIA funded? Like acid and smuggling heroin and coke and crack and Iran Contra. Like, like the CIA seems intertwined, if you want to use the clinical term, with drug research, distribution, manufacturing, etc."

"Yeah. And of course, these are hard answers to question because there isn't always the best transparency with CIA. They don't have the best."

"Well, heroin we know during World War Oh, sorry, Vietnam that they that they smuggled in. Iran Contra we know working with the cartels. Crack we know. What about the LSD and the crazy psycho psychotropic?"

"Oh, definitely. I mean, they definitely were doing psychedelic drug experiments without question. There's the death of Frank Olsen. There's the death of a guy named Harold Blau. I don't know if you know that story."

"No."

"He was a tennis player who got a divorce, was depressed post divorce, checked himself into a psychiatric hospital to deal with his post divorce depression. They started doing drug experiments on this guy who's just like a normal dude. And, um, they injected him with so much MDA that he died. They gave him a fatal overdose of MDA. And it was a really high dose. It wasn't like he was sensitive or had a congenital heart defect or something that killed him with MDA. That's known. Um, they were involved in a lot of weird drug experiments and the exact boundaries of what they were and weren't involved with is to this day unclear. I just actually, um, uncovered a new one recently that isn't publicly known."

"It's very strange. Um, and it's kind of a..."

"As opposed to everything else we were talking about today."

"It's, uh, and it's kind of a long story, but it's actually it comes back to Alexander Scholan, this chemist that I was talking about previously."

"And then you worked with him at some point, didn't you?"

"I visited him many times before he died. I mean, he's my hero. He's someone who I really love and he, um, created an enormous number of drugs, but because they were all psychedelics, back to what we were talking about previously, no one ever thought you can develop these as medicine. But there was one exception."

"Did he think that that you could?"

"He thought they had medical value, but he was also a realist and understood the..."

"He's a chemist, but was he kind of like a hippie?"

"He definitely believed in the psychedelics, um, and thought they had medical value. I think he was, yeah, more scientifically medically oriented than counterculturally oriented, but he was part of both. And he had created this one compound that was a psychedelic that wasn't quite psychedelic. It was almost like a micro dose intrinsically. It never became psychedelic. It was kind of, but there was something there. And it was developed through phase 2 clinical trials and then clinical development was discontinued and nobody ever knew why, including Scholan himself. And I may have well, I did recently find some..."

"Wow."

"Reason to believe that there was CIA involvement. Yes."

"Yeah. And can we know about it or are you going to keep that for? That's that's film number two."

"It's a good project. Yeah."

"All right. I love all of this. And, uh, our our job now is to get the, uh, the story never told about potentially aliens and and computers and time travel and at least murder and heirs and weirdness and disappearance. We got to do it. Before we go, what are your thoughts on RFK? What are your thoughts on his like, cuz he comes across as a lunatic, but then a lot of people come across as lunatics and then you talk to them, you're like, 'Yeah, that makes total sense.' So like what's like obviously I'm a layman. I don't you're as a scientist. What's your what do you think about it all?"

"Well, there's it's a mixed bag I would say. So you have certain things that I very much disagree with. I think it's kind of horrifying that you have to get a prescription to get a COVID vaccine unless you're over 65 now. I don't think that's going to help Americans. I think it's going to probably cause a lot of problems. I think the antiback stuff is very dangerous. I think some of the concerns about food additives are valid and I'm in favor of removing dyes from..."

"Or at least let's just check into it."

"Yeah, that seems like a good idea. I think having an emphasis on dietary health is a good thing. Promoting saturated fat seems like not a great idea. Seems pretty..."

"I didn't know he did that."

"Like beef also. Need you needed a prescription for co. Is that a new thing?"

"Yeah, it's a new thing. It's as of August."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"Which again, this is the sort of stuff that frightens me. I think there's a really big difference between not wanting to get a vaccine yourself and limiting access to it. It's kind of like if you don't want to get an abortion, that's fine, but you shouldn't prevent other people from getting abortions. This is the, uh, the issue for me. Um, when it comes to opioids, he has been opposed to seven hydroxy metroine and and seems to support its prohibition. I don't know what that means."

"It's a kratom alkaloid that is on the chopping block at the moment. And his reasoning was that the heroin that was seized in the bust that was described in the French Connection, which was written by Marcia Moore's brother, Robin Moore."

"No, that the heroin that was seized in the..."

"Hold on, hold on. The French Connection was written by the ARS's who disappears and predicts the world's end by supercomputers. Was that's her brother?"

"Robin Moore, who was also involved with the CIA. So he wrote the French Connection and the busted heroin that was collected, uh, in this investigation was stolen from a crime locker in New York City. And..."

"Is that true or this made up? I looked it up and it apparently is true or was reported in the New York Times. RFK Jr. claims that the theft of the heroin that was confiscated in the investigation that was described in the French connection resulted in widespread availability of heroin at a lower cost which resulted in him becoming addicted to heroin. Therefore, heroin and opioids should not be available because it will make people more likely to become addicted. Therefore, he opposes the continued availability of seven hydroxy tragedy..."

"Because he got addicted?"

"Because he believed that the, uh, theft of the French Connection heroin resulted in heroin prices dropping and increased access to heroin that resulted in him becoming addicted to heroin. That is some convoluted. I've got to say. I've got to say when any when anytime you you mess with the, what is it, m the Marcia case family gets all done really quick. That's the the timeline and the intertwangledness of that. We've got to delve more into that. We're going to save that for podcast number two. When we sell this film, which could be the greatest film ever made, then we're going to have podcast number two, and we're going to talk not only about, uh, time travel, uh, deadly super, uh, alien computers, and a ketamine. We're going to add in French Connection, heroin, and, uh, RFK."

"For number two, might be tomorrow. Might We might travel in time and do it tomorrow."

"All right, buddy. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, bud. Exciting. Exciting stuff. Thanks for the time."

"We have to go eat, otherwise we're going to die."