Transcript created using Descript and may be subject to misspellings.

Russell: This is the final part of our conversation about Hamilton Morris’s interview on Andrew Callahan’s forecast. We left off discussing Hamilton’s spreading of misinformation about our team members and we’ll jump right back in there. He thinks people are out to assassinate his character. He’s very paranoid about that clearly.

And these next couple of clips are how he describes people, specifically us, our work. And his own sort of attempts at character assassination is. Uh, sort of the theme of these next few clips. So what we’re gonna see first here is him describing us and we can discuss who we think is who here when he, when we finish.

Like, guess

Pace: who,

Russell: because, uh, I, I’m not entirely clear, but this is him describing us at the end of the, uh, channel five interview.

Hamilton Morris: So one of the people is pretending to be indigenous and was outed for lying to the FDA and beating her boyfriend with a broom. Uh, the other one distributed, uh, underage revenge pornography and stalked, uh, ex-girlfriend the other.

Is living with his wife, who is a coworker, which I think is ethically questionable. Um, and having his mother sue journalists that criticize him and the other dedicated her life to trying to destroy an indigenous man who she had consensual sex with, but could only get New York magazine to publish it because every other magazine wanted to speak with.

The person who’s being accused. New York Magazine was the only publication that lacks enough standards to allow this to be published. And one of them, I don’t know, he’s probably just gonna be like a freelance psycho harassing people on Twitter.

Andrew Callaghan: And those are the core symposium members?

Hamilton Morris: Yeah,

Andrew Callaghan: those are the people that stopped MDMA from being legal for use for PTSD therapy.

Hamilton Morris: It’s almost inspiring if it weren’t so horrible.

Pace: I think we’re gonna have to like, update our bio, uh, on, on websites to conform with Hamilton’s characterizations, you know?

Russell: Yeah. And I think there’s a few things to discuss here. I do wanna say regarding the person he says was distributing pornography.

That’s gonna come up in a, in a few clips later, so we don’t have to dwell on that one. We can tackle that in a moment, just to be clear. Not someone involved with our organization off the top here. But he starts that clip saying one of us is pretending to be indigenous. Do you wanna speak to that one Che?

Because he takes that one around a lot

Neşe: so that that’s in reference to me. It’s as if he’s making me out to be what’s referred to as like a pretending or someone who kind of fakes indigenous Native American identity in order to gain. Credibility or access to scholarships or whatever it is. Um, but that does not apply at all to my situation and actually shows a lot of ignorance on his part, if not just fully bad faith, but likely ignorance is involved as well.

Um, so I am half Kurdish, which the Kurds in Turkey. Are an indigenous group that has been treated comparably in that country to Native Americans in the United States. There have been boarding schools and other long, long history of, of cultural and other kinds of genocide going on with the Kurds in, in that region.

And even when I was, the year that I was born. Kurdish was illegal to speak. People could get arrested for having Kurdish language music. Music cassettes, and I have written and published on. Internationalizing the conception of indigeneity in order to think more globally about the problem of colonialism and the groups that are controlled and subjected to the dominant culture.

So, and I’ve been very clear and explicit about exactly what I mean and why I am saying, but that does not figure at all into the way that Hamilton’s talking about this.

Pace: You’re doing identity politics by talking about who you are.

Russell: And then I think the, this series of clips is gonna end on, uh, discussions around the broom thing that he brings up.

So I think we can hit that at the end. I, I can’t speak too much for Dave and Lily who left the group prior to all the FDA stuff, like I said, but they are. A husband and wife, whether that’s an unethical thing that they live and work together is contestable. But I do want to emphasize the way he describes Lily’s experience, which is documented in cover story power trip where he says that she made it her life’s work to discredit an indigenous man she had consensual sex with.

That is well documented in that podcast series as. A very coercive relationship and his comments about New York Magazine are also notable because they have published a piece about one of his former employees dying by suicide, and it doesn’t make him out to look very good. So it’s notable that he has this sort of chip on his shoulder about New York Magazine as well here, and then takes it upon himself to contextualize Lily’s experience.

That’s that’s very well documented.

Pace: Hamilton’s pretty consistent about, um, and, and Callahan, actually, Callahan and Hamilton look utterly like a bunch of, um, callous bros. Every single time. You can go, go back and take a look every single time. Something, uh, related to sexual abuse or sexual assault or sexual misconduct comes up in this interview.

They mock it. They dismiss it. They don’t take it seriously. It’s, it’s a very consistent pattern here that shows, um, well, who they are and what they care about.

Russell: They did this whole like country club smoking cigars, like laughing about all of it too as they discussed.

Normie: It’s very, it’s very daily wire smoking cigar that the, the, the setup that they have.

Russell: Yeah. And I’m curious who the freelance Psycho was. I feel like that could have been, uh, me, you normy, who do you think the Freelance Psycho was? Uh, I think we

Pace: should just all get business cards printed out, you know.

Russell: Um, another thing that was unclear was when they released. Like a super cut of some of these clips through Channel Five’s.

Instagram, they recut a lot of clips and the point where they’re talking about a husband and wife living together. They cut Yeah. My image.

Pace: Yeah.

Russell: Next to Shay. While they were saying really weird. Um, I’ll pop it up on screen here, but just so viewers can see it.

Hamilton Morris: The other is living with his wife, who is a coworker, which I think is ethically questionable,

Russell: but, uh, I just thought that was notable to point out that the quality control around.

The accuracy of their imagery versus what’s actually being said is at odds with one another.

Normie: Just one point on the husband and wife kind of concept here, um, that’s kind of core to maps is therapeutic model is husband and teams where there is actually tons of conflicts of interest and tons of like unethical lapses that have in fact happened.

Um, but yet he chooses to, again, like the more important thing. Is to focus on husband and wife team who were involved in nonprofit work and it’s bizarre stuff like that. Not actually in the. Not actually like in in the therapeutic relationship or in clinical trials. Don’t, don’t worry about that. That’s not important.

Neşe: Yeah. So just just to emphasize, normy is talking about husband, wife, co-therapist teams in psychedelic assisted therapy where there have been abuses. Associated with those conflicts of interest

Russell: in the clinical trials that Hamilton goes to bat for.

Pace: Right, right. And, and you know, just very briefly, like the idea of a co-therapy, uh, model, a dyad in the first place has roots in that there are two people that are both supporting each other and the patient, but also watching out for.

Bad behavior in their, you know, partner and that’s not gonna be happening with a married couple.

Neşe: It was popularized as a supposed stop GA gap against a known problem of abuse occurring during a psychedelic therapy. However, it has been completely a failure at protecting against abuses.

Russell: And so getting back to kind of this clip reel here on his sort of attempts at character assassination of people, I think this kind of relates to the previous clips we had just looked at of.

Hamilton’s description of being confronted or confronted in quotes by Amanda at the psychedelic conference versus what actually happened and and how your understanding changes when you see the context of what’s being discussed. So this next clip was a quick cut in the Channel five interview. Showing pace, asking Hamilton a question.

Pace: Oh, I thought he forgot all about me while he was naming all the, uh, you know, symposium members and their, their bios. Do you remember that?

Russell: Yeah, no, he definitely knows who you are as is evidenced by this clip. And what’s notable here is that Channel five cuts to this. Quickly cuts away before any context is given, and then basically calls you a crazy person.

So we’ll watch that clip first, and then we have the actual full clip in context that I think is worth looking at.

Hamilton Morris: I’ve known a lot of these people for years because they were always part of the psychedelic world. They were kind of like the feckless dumb people who didn’t really have anything to contribute, and then they came together and became immensely destructive.

Pace: Hi Hamilton. Uh, we know each other, but um. My name’s Brian Pace. Oh my God. I’m with the, uh,

Neşe: oh, my, you give the microphone to him of all the people in the audience.

Pace: So I’m, I’m with the, I’m with the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education at, uh, the Ohio State University. I’m also. The politics and ecology editor at Symposia.

Hamilton Morris: I think like one moral of the story is just how much damage a group of psychos can do. Like they really scared everyone because part of it is that people are doing shit, like people that have stuff to do are busy. They don’t want to be in a Twitter war with crazy people.

Russell: So I think we can quickly hop to the next bit, but I just wanna point out how condescending he is here, like the condescension from the stage when Pace identifies himself and the clip following that, he calls us psychos and crazy in like the same breath.

Like this is how you talk about your enemies. It’s just. An interesting dynamic

Neşe: we’re we are not even his enemies, we’re just people who have a different perspective than him. It’s not even like this is a battle outside of his own mind.

Russell: Yeah. And a perspective he doesn’t actually claim to disagree with when confronted about it.

Uh, as we’ll see in the next clip,

Pace: last year’s circumstances prevented me from seeing your talk. Um, but I was surprised to find my work, uh, featured in it, uh, with a couple of slides. But then of course, the.

Russell: As a just quick point, we were banned from the conference in which he talked about Nasha and Pace’s work on Rightwing Psychia and none of us, this is him discussing it.

Neşe: None of us were actually going to that conference. No, it’s important to note. So this became a big point of discourse when. On, on Twitter, there was a picture, Western Pinup most wanted style of us, along with other people that we, you know, do not work with saying, you know, protection. They

Pace: banned from all events.

Neşe: Banned from all events. Yeah. So we were not. You know, there heard about this and so yeah. Just to emphasize ’cause it’s like, it wasn’t like we were thrown out or anything.

Pace: No, I was, I was taking a nap when this, uh, came out on, on Twitter as I like

Normie: to, and this was, this is a conference that he, like a lot of the insiders and researchers understood to be kind of a grifter conference, Wonderland Miami.

Uh, who, like after they realized that the psychedelic bubble had popped, like immediately pivoted to longevity, predictably,

Pace: and I actually clarify because, um, I’m actually, um, asking the question, uh, to Hamilton at the following year, uh, Wonderland. And, um, and by that time it had pivoted to a, um.

Psychedelics and longevity. Confidence. Yeah. You know,

Russell: ever present threat. So this is right

wing

Hamilton Morris: people using,

Russell: yeah. This is Hamilton. The first year when we were banned, and then it’ll cut back to Jesus’s question,

Hamilton Morris: psychedelics, uh, uhoh. How, what are we gonna do? Right? Wing people use the same drugs as left wing people.

I had no idea. And we all know that, uh, Jordan Peterson used a psychedelic blah, blah, blah, blah. So. Peter Thiel something, something, something, something. So we, we’ve all. Gotta be really careful.

Pace: So I actually do have a question. I was wondering first, uh, I was wondering if perhaps my new paper might show up, uh, in your, your talk today.

But, um, if you’d like to talk a little bit about this is, is really my, my question because I, I think that you. You don’t understand the analysis that we put forth and that, um, either that or perhaps you misrepresented it. So I was wondering if you would be open, um, to a conversation, um, about this work in our more recent work.

Uh, I would’ve asked you, but, um, we’ve never interacted on Twitter, but I found that I was actually blocked before I could send you a message. So it was just a church of style. That’s my my question. My question is, would you, like, would you be open to a discussion about these, uh, these things that you’re clearly interested in?

Thank you.

Hamilton Morris: Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. I’ll, no, I’ll answer that. This a fun one. It was a fine, it was a fine question. It’s a fun one. Yes. I would love, I would love to talk about it. And to be clear, I don’t, I don’t disagree with the entirety of that paper that you published. I agree actually, with the majority of it.

I mean, a lot of it is objectively true if you’re describing the fact that. Psychedelic drug use has been associated with all sorts of bad behavior and right wing behavior. I agree completely. That’s objectively true. The, the, uh, argument that I had is with any type of pharmacological determinism in both directions, whether you’re saying that psychedelic drug use.

Goodness, and liberal values and ecological consciousness or conservatism, authoritarianism, fascism, whatever. I think both directions of deterministic thinking are misguided. And that was what I was trying to cr to critique.

Pace: Embarrassing.

Russell: So, so as, as a, as a quick question, why did you guys write that paper?

Pace: Hmm, I, it was a very weird, uh, moment to have a sort of a badly phrased, but still mostly cogent like version of, uh, our thesis quoted back at me in person as somehow representative. Hamilton’s critique of that work. Um, frankly, I was flabbergasted. I did not expect that answer from Hamilton. And also you can kind of hear I was being shouted down at the moment for, you know, being a.

Uh, so impertinent, I thought it was actually pretty polite. You

Normie: almost get A-U-S-A-U-S-A chant going on there.

Pace: Right, right, right. No, I mean, and it was, yeah, it was kind of a weird vibe in the entire conference, but regardless, yeah, I didn’t get a chance to like really rebut him in real time ’cause it was just bizarre.

However, and I, I wanna, I wanna just point this out as like. An an extension of like, well, the sentiment of my question in the first place, Hey, I don’t think you understand our paper or you misrepresented it. Are you willing to talk at this, to talk about this at greater lengths? To unpack, you know, the real perspective and how that perspective’s evolved.

I, uh, had been somebody. Passed me Hamilton’s personal phone number, uh, knowing that I was going to the conference and I followed up a in person with Hamilton, not in a harassing way. I just printed out a copy of, of the latest paper and I said, Hey, you know, here, here you go. And followed up on the, on the question.

Um, I sent him a text, said, here’s my contact info if you’d like to, you know, talk about this, uh, because that’s what he said. So, I mean, that’s the spirit of the way that we sort of interact with people who at that. Point, I wanna just hasten to, uh, remind the viewer had trashed my work that I’d written with, uh, NHE here.

That was a, you know, otherwise well reviewed and regarded paper on stage from a conference that we were banned from. He responds in a very weird way, and then I never heard from him again, uh, directly. He is never reached out despite having, you know, my email, my, my information. That’s

Normie: it. It seems like there’s a pattern of him talking publicly about us and not reaching out.

Pace: So strange.

Normie: Some real alpha energy I get.

Pace: Yeah, I mean, look, I understand that he is got big feelings about things, but I, I, the offer still stands. If you ever wanna unpack some things, we can, we can do that.

Normie: Do you get, do you guys wanna just briefly touch on what inspired you to write that paper? Which I still find?

Yeah, go for it. Like, one of the, please. I, I find it to be one of the most interesting papers that has come out. I, it’s fascinating.

Pace: Why don’t you start Nashay

Neşe: Yeah. I mean, it, it, it has. Fundamentally shift, like had a big, big impact in shifting the discourse in the academic field in which we work. In the sense that before this paper came out, there was a lot of just very uncritical assertions that we just have to kind of get psychedelic medicine out to the world as quickly as possible, and it’s gonna turn people pro-social, pro-environmental, and more democratic and it’ll have this great

Normie: authoritarian,

Neşe: yeah, it’ll have, have this great net effect.

And it was, that argument was being used. Used to silence people with real concerns about the, the way that the field was being developed and rolled out, because people who would say. Hey, I don’t know if this is really safe or ethical to do. People would respond and say, you must just be opposed to global healing.

Mm-hmm. And not want that to move forward. And so we put this out there in order to emphasize that the way that psychedelics are used has a huge effect on how they’re the, the consequences of those experiences are. In, integrated into, into people’s lives, and you can’t just assume the pharmacological determinist perspective that people are just going to be better people after taking these substances.

Pace: And if I can pick up after that, I mean, the, the thing is, is that this work came out of a, a lot of sort of earlier writings and other, uh, sort of observations along these lines, but I think the thing that was most concerning. In, in terms of the need for an intervention in this discourse is you had sort of the authority of like n neuroscience outfits coming out of Imperial College of London, putting together a few small questionnaires and tossing it into their psilocybin studies, and then saying big declarative statements within n equals, you know, 14, uh.

Study set that, like Psilocybins going to cure fascism, or maybe they weren’t saying that themselves directly, but, uh, interacting with the press where that discourse is out there and in their own writing saying, you know, this is particularly important, you know, uh, for, for now, which was in the sort of, uh, Trump, uh, part one era.

And, and it was like, well. Neuroscientists, uh, in their work don’t necessarily engage much with the, the historical record. And there’s just not a lot of acknowledgement of, of the sort of underground and the, the way that the public itself interacts with and experiences, uh, psychedelics. Like, there’s just, you know, they’re talking about a, uh, a few studies and writing them up and then making these big declarative statements.

And so, you know, the, the paper that we wrote together was an intervention in the sense that it was, uh, large in scope and, you know, cross-cutting and, and sort of the, the bodies of literature that it drew from to essentially erode the foundation of somebody making such a, a silly claim with such thin evidence.

And because we. We took both the claims of the people, um, that were promoting the idea that psilocybin is gonna make you more liberal or more environmentalists, you know, seriously enough to, to unpack and cite them. It became a very complete work that is, is impactful today.

Normie: I mean, the subtitle of the piece was Case Studies and Cultural Plasticity in Political.

Pluripotency. It’s like it was the a, it was the opposite of what he was claiming That, that you were claiming. He was saying, I need to push back on them because Nache and Pace, they were saying that, oh, if you do psychedelics, you’re gonna be right wing something, something, blah, blah, blah. But when confronted publicly, oh no, I actually really agreed.

I, I was pushing back on the notion that you guys were saying that you take psychedelics, you’re gonna become. Right wing. Mm-hmm. It’s like entirely not the case. Again, of just a fundamental like lack of literacy, lack of understanding, or just dishonest interpretation.

Pace: That, and that’s the thing I was, I was actually fairly upset, um, with the, the way that Hamilton originally framed our, our work at the Wonder Land that we had been banned from because it was so cynical because he could only say the things.

That he was saying on stage about something we put a lot of work into just sort of counting on the fact that his audience wasn’t going to actually read it and

Neşe: then, which is a friend. Then this is piece of a pattern.

Pace: Right? And then when confronted by the author of that paper, like I thought. Fairly politely.

He does it again, you know, just utterly misrepresents the, the thesis of the work as his critique. Like how cynical, what a, what a, a person who has no respect for the people who come to hear him speak.

Russell: Yeah. And I think that’s a perfect segue into this next series of clips we have, which is him discussing.

Independent researcher named Sasha Cisco, and this has been a consistent refrain in his descriptions of our team since the FDA stuff. His claim has been that Sasha, Cisco, this independent researcher, was a member of symposia and. That they had distributed some kind of pornography and harassed clinical trial participants and consistently conflates this independent researcher who has never been a part of symposia with us.

Normie: This isn’t a conflation. This is an intentional way to smear. And this is what the PSFC crowd and like the operatives and whatnot that are on that side have strategically done since the FDA Advisory Committee Committee, they were digging around for this stuff under the radar. It had come to my attention, like well before the New York Times and Rachel New was doing that.

They were digging around Sasha. They wanted to use that as ammunition to associate Sasha. With us as a, you know, as part of their political agenda. This is very intentional that this was, yeah. That this was done. And, and in the same way that they twisted that symposia are against veterans, it’s the same bullshit nonsense.

The the thing, the thing is this is all they got. This is all they got. So they just have to throw shit at the wall. And for people who are not educated or up to date on this, Hamilton appears to be a trusted source. He says it, so it must be true. There’s no critique, there’s no like looking into the facts of the matter.

And then that just becomes the narrative. And, and they’re so it’s an echo chamber on that side. They all believe that they’re doing God’s work or they’re doing something like really transcendental. So. They all like, kind of just stick to that talking point and it becomes a truth to them. I, I think it, it’s kind of like how JS six is being rewritten now.

There’s just these, these things that they just accept that are reality and then they, they, it’s just, it, it’s a fart, huffing like, uh, exercise for them.

Russell: Yeah. And I think the egregiousness of these claims will be very clear watching these, these clips in context that this person was never a part of symposia in the at at all.

Transfer here.

Hamilton Morris: And the really crazy thing is that one of the main symposia people who had tried to have Rick Dolin canceled

Russell: main symposia people, I just wanna.

Hamilton Morris: So ridiculous. So it turns out this guy who had spent his life attacking people, had distributed underage pornography and had stalked people, broken down their doors, slashed their tires, and was a complete psycho, like I had been harassed by this person as well.

They’d harassed everyone and they had been, actually, I think it’s actually more interesting. Symposia had always been. Careful not to say that they were officially a member of symposia, just an ally of the group, which makes you wonder how much did they know all along? I think it’s almost more suspicious that they arbitrarily made a firewall between themselves and this one ultra psycho person,

Pace: you mean?

All right, so we acknowledged that this person who was frequently tried, others tried to associate us with them, was not a member of our group because they were not a member of our group.

Neşe: Well, that, that is very classic conspiracy logic that, um, absence of evidence is proof of the conspiracy. It’s so sinister that there’s nothing to support it.

I mean that the, the reason why we have emphasized that Sasha is not part of our group and not connected to us is because that is the truth of the situation.

Russell: What I find interesting about this clip is that he starts it describing Sasha as a main symposia person, and by the end. Clarifies that Sasha was not, but problematizes, the fact that we never assimilated them into our group.

And what’s interesting is he says, we only ever described Sasha as an ally, but that’s not our language. That is language that appeared in the New York Times article about us describing Sasha Cisco as an ally of symposia. That is not

Normie: by his friend Rachel Newer, who he fed information to, right? Mm-hmm.

Come up with that story. It’s, it’s a circle jerk, the whole thing.

Pace: Right, and I would just include for completeness sake that Sasha, Cisco actually did attempt to attend the Wonderland that we were banned from. And the band list that that conference had put together had not only everyone from symposia, but also some, you know, some business people that we have no relationship with either.

And so, you know, when that all happens. Sasha being literally the only person on that list, including the business people who were banned, who tried to attend, had been removed like by the police or something. And yes, we, we interviewed them about their experience, identified them as the independent, um, I guess Twitter journalists or journalists on, on these topics that they, you can accurately, that’s, that’s what they were doing at the time.

That’s it.

Normie: One of the reasons that there is so much contempt in the Maps Network, uh, against Sasha is because they were successful with the Journal of Psychopharmacology in getting maps’, three published papers retracted, which came right after the, was that right after Adcom that, that happened? I,

Neşe: it was right after the, the rejection actually of the NDA in August.

Normie: Yeah. And so it was kind of an avalanche

Russell: and, and what they’re discussing are a series of complaints that were filed against Sasha that were never taken through court. And having read them, they don’t sound great. And I would not endorse Sasha’s character based on them. However, the idea that we should have some response to these claims.

That came up in a complaint filed against Sasha. This person who has nothing to do with our group is just bogus to me.

Pace: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. I, I have read through that, that complaint. Uh, that’s, uh, this sounds like terrible behavior. There you go. I, I, I don’t know what else to say, but you know, the idea that this is somebody who, uh, we are responsible for, we collaborated with, like, that’s a absolute falsehood, and it’s slanderous, frankly.

So

Russell: what Hamilton consistently goes on in interviews to describe related to Sasha and Conflates to us is that they harassed clinical trial participants somehow on our behalf. Uh, so these next couple of clips are Hamilton describing that, which has come up in numerous interviews.

Hamilton Morris: And I know one of the women who underwent this kind of like post therapy abuse from symposia where they were trying to convert her to being one of them and saying that she was a victim and it completely fucked with her head.

Andrew Callaghan: Becca is not just a phase

Hamilton Morris: three participant. She’s somebody who has a very interesting experience. Of having been unsuccessfully approached by symposia with the hope that she could be turned against maps. Sasha Cisco sent Becca a series of very creepy voice memos and dms telling her that she was a victim of wackadoodle nonsense therapy.

And forcefully trying to convince her that she had not been helped by this trial. It should go without saying that that is shockingly unethical behavior and should also call into question the conduct that Symposia has had with other maps trial participants.

Normie: It’s hard to even address something when it.

En entirely just made up.

Pace: I mean big if true, but it’s not like it’s not true at all. At all. Again, it’s just not true. So next, let’s move on. Like, this is I all he

Normie: has.

Neşe: I should also say, ’cause I do think, you know, Sasha is ultimately a fan. Of us and our work. I would not want someone who’s following my work to be causing any distress to other people in relation to my work.

After I heard claims that, you know, there was some distressing communications going on. Regardless of the facts of whether that, you know, was actually I, I I, I, I don’t believe that Hamilton’s characterizations of those communications are probably a neutral way of, of looking at the situation. But nonetheless, I did send Sasha a message and identified that, that there were trial participants that were describing unwanted communications and encourage them to.

Stop communicating with trial trial participants as a result. And I don’t see what beyond that I could have done about the situation. ’cause I, I ultimately don’t have any control over Sasha

Russell: and as is kind of here on the screen. I had it blown up a minute ago. I’ll just pull it back up to read really quick.

But this is. An archive post from Sasha saying, announcement. I am not, nor have I ever been a member of symposia. I’ve never held a financial relationship with symposia or its members. This is notable because that’s been out there for a long time. It’s something we’ve published. It’s something we’ve made very clear and so has Sasha, but these people decide to just run with this story again.

Normie: Sasha

Russell: does symposia.

Normie: Yeah, they know that. They know Rachel knew her from the New York Times, Hamilton Morris, our detractors and whatnot. They know that Sasha has never been involved with symposia. This is a propaganda, PR talking point. Yeah. Find someone that’s in their orbit and push them, find trash on them.

This is a talking point, and he is more, I don’t know if he knows this, I, I, I, if I’m charitable, he’s ignorant, but he, this is just a talking point and, and, and. I won’t be charitable. ’cause to say that Sasha is a main member of symposia,

Pace: completely false

Normie: is a lie.

Pace: It’s a lie.

Normie: It’s

Pace: an

Normie: lie, and he knows

Pace: that there’s no evidence for it.

There’s no, it’s not true. Like, uh, one, one thing I just want mention here is, is that, um, you know, ham Hamilton has invented, you know, members of symposia, uh, actually, uh, also in this, in. You know, in this video he was talking about somebody we presume was Travis Kitchens, somebody who wrote for us at one point in time.

Um, even in a case with somebody who, who did contribute to symposia in one way or another, and still was not, uh, this is just an example, you know, but if there was a, a hypothetical. Where, you know, Travis Kitchens did something, you know, punched somebody in the nose. Um, the idea that somehow we’re responsible for that or that that is, you know, reflective of the core doings of this organization is absurd.

Normie: Yeah. I don’t know why I have to explain that to adults. That’s, this is like,

Neşe: well, the other, the other thing that I think people who don’t care about our work or respect our work. Don’t want to discuss here is that like our work, when we are talking about abuses and when we’re talking about patterns of harm, we are talking about, we are analyzing such, uh, dynamics that are systemic and that need to be addressed before problems are scaled.

So identifying systemic harms is not the same as. Holding every single person up to a mirror and evaluating their flaws like that is not what we we do as an organization at at all. There’s a, a big difference, a gulf there between those two things.

Russell: And, uh, I think the, the last clip in this section of clips regarding these kind of attempted character assassinations of symposia.

Relates back to that initial one where Hamilton’s describing one of our members, hitting someone with a broom, um, along those lines. So we’ll see him discuss that with Andrew here, and then I think we’ll have a bit to talk about there.

Andrew Callaghan: So, is it safe to say that symposia kind of really destroyed the fight for legal MDMA?

Hamilton Morris: Well, so it was a kamikaze mission after they had this. Disastrous campaign to destroy MDMA. It came out that the lead woman, uh, was accused of beating her lover with a broom in a very, uh, Tom and Jerry style, domestic abuse Yeah. Um, type situation. So she’d, she’d beaten a man with a brew.

Normie: This is really fucking gross behavior.

Russell: In the more recent publication of this interview, they also blast a Facebook post on screen of where this accusation is coming from. Desha, do you wanna speak to where this is coming from?

Neşe: Yeah, well there is a, you know, the way that Hamilton describes the situation, it’s like, oh, you know, saying that someone was outed, it implies that there was this, uh, you know, some kind of a serious.

Investigation or something, or with evidence or like, you know, that went on in involving that. The what he’s referring to. But in actuality, there was a Facebook post from a former partner of mine who is very un unwell.

Russell: So Hamilton had discovered this post. I don’t know if he was the first person to discover it, but what was really gross about it was there was a screenshot from someone who was clearly in some kind of crisis that was posted on Facebook, and then someone took that.

And posted it on a psychedelic Reddit page about Nasha and completely out of context. And what I did was I went and found this post on the Facebook page to put it in context of what this person was saying as alongside all of this. And so I’m just gonna pull it up here. This is me scrolling through his Facebook page and you can see these large.

Posts of conspiracy theories of, I’m not gonna keep these up on the screen for too long. People can pause and read if they really want to, but there’s a number of things. There’s a number of him talking about the, uh, artist Grimes. The actual post in question is around the 52nd mark, so I’m just gonna scroll up to that so we can kind of read what Hamilton is referring to here.

But this is the post that he found, and it starts with CIA enemy numero uno, an international villain, LMAO. The values are fucked and reversed. LOL The worst thing I ever did in my life was punch my ex-girlfriend in the face one time, amidst years of abuse by women and Nshe Deano beat my ass into a concussion with a broom and hit me multiplicitous times to be frank.

So stop looking for help from leaders who don’t understand re karma. Re Karma alignment with the best possible future for all sentient beings. All beings and forms of life on planet Sophia are sentient and aware in some way. So I just wanted to read that in full context because this is the post that Hamilton is using to claim that Nhe was outed for beating someone with a broom.

Neşe: And it was very clear to even people that saw that, uh, Reddit post, that this individual was in some kind of psychosis. Um, and Russ, you mentioned Grimes. They have a lot of other posts where they clearly kind of believe that they are in a relationship with Grimes. They’ve also posted about, um, other friends and family doing horrific torture to them in ways that are very recognizable as.

Um, things that sometimes people say when they’re in psychosis and so, you know, that context could have been an opportunity for a serious journalist to reach out and get more context about it. And if they had reached out to me to get more context about it, I would’ve been able to explain. That relationship was an extremely abusive relationship to me that involved a tremendous, uh, amount of coercive control, um, that is documented and that other people are, are very aware of.

Russell: And notably, in the first version, they had this Tom and Jerry clip spliced in after they discuss it. Um, in the republished version, Andrew has a screenshot of that Facebook post. That pops up on screen instead of the Tom and Jerry clip. So he was perfectly aware of how disturbed the context of this Facebook post was.

Pace: Yeah. Both Andrew and Hamilton. Had all the information that reasonable per a reasonable person, uh, if they had it would say This is a deeply unwell person, but that’s not what Andrew or Hamilton were interested in spending any time with. That’s not what they were doing. This is not journalism.

Russell: This next clip comes with a huge trigger warning as far as abusive language.

It is a recording that Nhe took after the ex-partner, who Hamilton is using as a source, stole money from their bank account. We are including in discussing this specifically to provide an example of the character of the sources that Hamilton is using to make claims about us and to illustrate exactly the kind of evidence we could have provided had Andrew or Hamilton ever reached out to us about any of the claims that they were making.

Neşe: So why? Why did you say, I should be scared of you?

Neşe’s ex-partner: Because you don’t understand what I am and how important I am in things and how disposable you are,

Neşe: I’m disposable.

Neşe’s ex-partner: Yeah, because you still won’t help. You choose your own selfish desires. You don’t understand things. You fucked with the wrong person.

Neşe: In what sense

Neşe’s ex-partner: of all people You could.

It’s the wrong person

Neşe: in. In what sense?

Neşe’s ex-partner: Because you don’t understand that I have given up my personal desire completely to be with the heart of this thing, the harmony, and I feel it everywhere, and I feel you even now. So if you really wanna fuck with something that’s surrounding you, even now as you speak, watch what happens.

Neşe: So you think that you’re allowed to just help yourself to my money?

Neşe’s ex-partner: I don’t think it matters. Nasha. I think you should get the fuck over it and get over yourself too.

Neşe: Well, unless I can come get my things from you, like I’m gonna need to go to the police and file a police report,

Neşe’s ex-partner: nja, stop trying to fuck with me because you’re lying and I’m not.

I am not fucking around. I’m not going to jail. Okay. Don’t fuck with me. I told you that last time. I don’t give a shit about you after this.

Neşe: You stole over a thousand dollars from me,

Neşe’s ex-partner: Nisha. It is fucking money. You get plenty of money. You fucking idiot. You fucking bitch. You get plenty of money. You’re not in distress, you’re not in scarcity.

Get the fuck over yourself.

Neşe: So I should just give all my money to you.

Neşe’s ex-partner: You should get over yourself. You’re fucking prideful piece of shit. All you can do is stroke your own ego. You never can admit that you are prideful and a piece of shit.

You have a huge fucking pride, huge fucking ego. You shouldn’t be teaching psychedelics. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

Neşe: Is it? Why should you be able to control what I can do with my life?

Neşe’s ex-partner: Nhe, get over it.

Neşe: I told you that you should go. See, you’re lying

Neşe’s ex-partner: to me. So stop.

Neşe: You feel like it’s justified?

Neşe’s ex-partner: Yeah. Nhe. I do. ’cause I have more important of a role than you right now. I don’t care about myself in the same way you do. You’re completely self-involved.

Neşe: But you were taking my money for yourself.

Neşe’s ex-partner: No, it wasn’t for myself. That’s where you don’t understand

Neşe: ’cause you wanted, it

Neşe’s ex-partner: was also for, it was also for you because the reality wants you to see your fucking insanity. You’re fucking insane. Over money.

Neşe: You emptied my bank account.

Neşe’s ex-partner: Nhe. Nhe. You’ll work debt. More money. You know that’s true. Get off your fucking ass and called a bank bitch.

Neşe: And, um, I, I should mention too, that during that timeframe when this recording happened, I have messages to people talking about how he was blackmailing me to try to not get me to report the money as stolen.

And he said, quote, you want to play this game? Don’t fucking play the fear game with me. I am not afraid you will lose everything. And then he told me that people like me de deserve to be shot. Um, I think it’s horrific that Hamilton and Andrew were laughing in the way that they were about. Accounts for my abuser who became very, very unwell and um, I have ultimately.

I mean, I, I don’t even, uh, know if we should include this, but it’s like I feel like I’ve just spent so much of my life just trying to like exist and being told that I don’t deserve anything and that I’m not good enough and I’m terrible and people like hound me and just like won’t stop fixating on all the reasons why I am terrible.

And this, this situation with Hamilton has been. Yet another extension of that where it’s like I have been showing up, applying all of my academic training to try to make the world safer for other people because I understand deeply how destabilizing abuse involving psychedelics can be, and to have been treated the way that I have been for doing this work is profoundly.

Disturbing to me. It is, it is a sign of something deeply, deeply sick with this field that the, the way that we have been treated has been condoned and normalized.

Russell: It’s literally stomach turning to listen to that audio and know the way that he’s using claims by, by that person. I,

Normie: I don’t know what there is to say.

The fact that Hamilton and Andrew go on a major. Have a major platform and they choose to exploit your abuse for their own points to satisfy some, especially for Hamilton, to satisfy some deep insecurity that he has about what I, I have no idea is, is really disgusting in. The fact that people listen to that guy, I don’t, it’s really a shame.

I, I don’t, I’m kind of at a loss for words about what kind of man would go, go and do that. For I, I, it’s like hard to, it’s hard to even articulate why you would do that.

Pace: I can make, uh, articulate, it’s malicious, it’s a

Normie: Sure call.

Pace: I,

Normie: I get that

Pace: aggressive thing. It, it, uh, it speaks to a desire to, you know, bully and, you know, malign the, uh, reputation of a person in public.

But it’s

Normie: pretty clear. There’s a reason why Hamilton’s reputation in this space is beyond toxic. I’ve spoken to lots of people that had used to work with him. Used to associate with him and it’s universal. He’s a toxic guy. He’s a

Pace: toxic. Maybe people should read the New York magazine, uh, article about, uh, some of the people who worked close closely with him.

Uh, I think we mentioned that in the last video, but I think it’s worth people reading about, um, some of those things.

Russell: And to the clip at hand, I just wanna say you show up in this audio in personal situation, like you’ve shown up to the people coming at you so aggressively at like professionally as well, which is calm matter of fact.

And you are clearly the one in the right there. Like, I, I just, I just can’t stress enough that. I don’t know. You appear resilient in these, like personal and professional situations in which people are, are coming at you and it’s

Normie: Yeah. And, and Andrew using a Tom and Jerry cartoon clip to do that, he can go fuck himself.

Russell: Mm-hmm.

Neşe: But, and the la the laughter is genuinely chilling to me at that point, whereas I just find it so. Yeah, just, I don’t even have, I honestly don’t even have words for it. It’s, it’s very, there’s

Russell: no words. It’s, it’s so dis and they’re gonna, of course, somebody is gonna share this with them, and they’re gonna say, well, how would I have known that?

And it’s like, well, dude,

Pace: you didn’t ask,

Russell: did

Pace: you,

Russell: you didn’t ask, you didn’t look into this at all. You just took the Facebook post of this clearly unwell person and blasted it to the entire, to

Normie: score some points for himself.

Pace: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, how, how would I, you know, know such a thing? Well, you know, the.

The story that they wanted to tell, they, they already knew, um, what story they wanted to tell. These, these are all just interchangeable pieces, but like, what I would like to say is that, you know, these are a lot of absurd claims. Um, some of them are, are, you know, silly others. Quite a bit more serious and mean-spirited.

Um, this is definitely one of them. I, it should go without saying that no one should have to provide, and many people don’t have receipts like you have just done. It’s just not, this isn’t the way civilized people behave, but the kinds of. Behavior that Hamilton has displayed over months to his own, you know, audience and admission across many platforms, many hours spent, um, in these efforts.

Like there has to be some reply. You should not be expected to provide this kind of reply. Um, but this is our attempt to address in a broad way the many. Garbage claims and you know, at a certain point, you, you stop listening as a person has been, you know, discredited as a reliable source of information.

And in this case as, uh, two people. Have been discredited through their deeds and the quality of their work and the lack thereof. They’re no longer credible sources and they have not been credible sources for a long time. Those people have other people out there criticizing their work. It’s the way these things play out all too often is that somebody turns the lights on and pulls the curtain back to see the, the small man behind the, behind there in front of the, the, the controls and, and then suddenly it was always shoddy.

It was always mean-spirited because people can see no. Thanks for your bravery, NHE. You shouldn’t have to be like this.

Neşe: Yeah. Well thanks, thanks for listening to it with me. Um, and ultimately, yeah, like I, I don’t want people going after him, you know, like my ex for example. He, he genuinely is I think very unwell.

But the reason I shared it was to be instructive about the nature of these narratives and what they’re leaving out.

Russell: That’s kind of a, a good place to wrap this on. It’s, this has been a demonstration in poor journalism, in my opinion, the conversation between Andrew and Hamilton. Two people who consider themselves journalists, who the public generally considers journalists.

Doing the worst possible job at, at relaying facts and correct narratives about these things. I do have some clips we can end on of Hamilton discussing his journalistic education if we’re interested, or his lack thereof. So this is kind of just a super cut of him discussing it.

Hamilton Morris: I never studied

Normie: journalism or anything like that.

I’ve never taken a journalism

Russell: class. I’m completely untrained as a journalist. Uh.

Hamilton Morris: I’ve never studied journalism in any way. Yeah. My sense of journalistic ethics is entirely self-constructed. I don’t even really know what is, like, I know that I have to tell the truth, but I don’t know what is taught to a, a student.

I, I know that a lot of the people that I see that do have like, uh, graduate degrees in journalism and things like that tend to be some of the worst. Uh,

Russell: and yeah, he, I mean, he’s just demonstrated the issue of having no journalistic,

Normie: it’s all, it’s, it’s like, dude, it’s obvious to anyone. We, we believe you.

Yeah.

Neşe: Like, after having watched all of the clips that we showed today, it just seems like he’s like extremely manipulative. You know? It’s like that, that clip with pace, uh, with that, you know. Telling pace from stage, the argument from our own own paper as his rebuttal. I mean, he knew that that like, it’s like to, to me, it comes across as like he’s performing respectability to the audience with a known lie that’s designed to maintain his own narrative, you know?

And so it’s like for someone who does that to also emphasize how honest they are and how they correct mistakes. At a certain point, it seems very intentional and very malicious, and the fact that those patterns are so transparent on the record should be a sign about who this person is and where they’re coming from.

Normie: I feel just feel bad for the young guys that listen, that sign up, listen to him, and just thinking, thinks he knows what he’s talking about.

Pace: It’s often been sort of a point of wisdom to, um. You know, not as scribe, uh, malevolence to simple ignorance. That’s usually a, a good place to start. But you do have to recognize that there are people with mal-intent.

There are people out in the world who take pleasure in hurting other people or who have self-interested reasons to try to harm and destroy others. And once you gather enough data, you may be dealing with. That sort of person, if, if that pattern continues long enough.

Russell: Mm-hmm.

Normie: Yeah. I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me just saying like, what, why is he doing this?

Like, I don’t understand why, why is he going, like, why is he doing this? Is what is wrong with him? People speculate, is he being paid? Like, because they just don’t understand. It’s so obvious to everybody like that he’s unhinged. That he’s unwell, like this is an unwell person. And I, I don’t have an answer.

I don’t, I don’t have an exact answer. It’s, it’s, it’s, um, it’s a fixation. Yeah. I don’t know.

Russell: This response to these claims I think was a long time coming and I’m glad we did it, but. I will be excited to not have to engage with some of this stuff, uh, for a little while now that it’s all out on the table.

Neşe: To return to something that we started with, he has been very open about the fact that he wanted to prevent us from reporting acknowledged crimes to federal agencies, and just to emphasize. The issues that we were in communication with those agencies about, we’re about people being harmed. There was harm.

We are not talking about, we’re not reporting people’s drug use to get people in trouble the way that he is representing it. And so the fact that that is the case, I think I just wanted to end with that, to emphasize it, that that’s very in line with everything else we have seen.

Russell: Hugely important point.

And for those who have stuck around through all of this, we appreciate it. If there’s any fans of Hamilton’s or Andrews watching this, we genuinely appreciate it. Um, we don’t think less of you for being a fan of theirs. There’s a huge community that lifts these people up as legitimate sources of information.

Hopefully, after seeing our engagement with this misinformation, you might think differently, and we appreciate that you’ve stuck around. More than either of them have ever done.

Transcript created using Descript and may be subject to misspellings.

Russell: This is part three of a four part series discussing the claims made by Hamilton Morris on Andrew Callahan’s five cast. In this episode, we’ll be discussing further claims about our funding, as well as a number of claims from Hamilton

Pace: about the company Usona.

Russell: So the next couple of clips are focused specifically on that ANA funding, which.

Normie emphasized was something like maybe $500 or

Normie: it wasn’t Usona funding. It was, like I said, it was Bob, Jesse, I think six plus years ago to 2020. It personal donations. It was a personal donation for $500. Yeah, I he, he did it maybe once or twice

Russell: when we had the initial conversation for these recordings.

We were fairly sure that Jesse had been responsible for two donations in the past that were somewhere below a thousand dollars in total. After we had the conversation, we went back and checked the details and the specifics are that we received two donations at the recommendation of Bob Jesse from the San Francisco Foundation for a total of $700.

Normie: And then that combined with the silo, meth and defense to which you, Sona, provided for everyone. This has been spun up into this conspiracy narrative that we’re, this is a, a, a source of funding for us, so let’s continue.

Andrew Callaghan: So there’s what, what are some of the other reasons that could possibly be in the, in the shadows here?

Hamilton Morris: I, I think also ANA funding. Symposia played a role as well. A SA funded lawyer was representing Symposia during the time of the FDA advisory committee hearing, but I don’t know that they directly wanted that outcome. They were very happy when MDMA was rejected. The founder of SA was, um, absolutely delighted by the rejection.

Andrew Callaghan: What’s Ana’s Deeper agenda?

Hamilton Morris: Vengeance

Andrew Callaghan: against Compass.

Hamilton Morris: Yeah. Compass Vengeance was a big one. I think one of the weird things about journalism and storytelling is when his story gets complicated enough, it just starts to sound like the gibberish of a conspiracy theorist.

Normie: Yeah. Because he, he’s basing this narrative on like a, an initial piece, a kernel that is false, and so it doesn’t make sense to him because as that little.

Colonel fractals out. It creates confusion in his mind. And he doesn’t, he doesn’t know what’s real anymore.

Andrew Callaghan: Anymore. No, no, no. I’m following

Hamilton Morris: you. Okay. Okay. It’s like, but you know, when you talk to someone, they’re like, oh, Alan Dulles and, uh, Sidney Gottlieb, and they were working with the Operation Paperclip and, and, and you just.

Andrew Callaghan: We’re gonna have visual aid for this

Hamilton Morris: interview, okay? Okay. Okay. Alright. Okay, so I’ll, I’ll go into it.

Andrew Callaghan: So at the juncture we’re at right now is that you have this pharmaceutical company making it seem like the rival pharmaceutical company is trying to block the legalization of psychedelics, but it’s actually them that are trying to block legal of psychedelics.

They’re using vice to disseminate negative press about this company while simultaneously encouraging terroristic action. So this is all like pretty fascinating because this idea of like pay.

Normie: W while simultaneously en encouraging terroristic actions, what is going on? I just wanna pause this for a second and I’ll be, the first to admit is that there is competition and there is bad blood that exists between the Usona camp and the Compass Camp.

This is a long s. Standing issue that goes back to something like 20 17, 20 18, compass moved in rapidly. They were very well capitalized. The SNA camp felt that Compass people were encroaching on their turf. And in Hamilton’s mind, he thinks that we’re, that we are just slotted into the SNA camp and that we have no critiques against some of the big UNA plays.

This is a long, ongoing thing that Hamilton’s had. The one point of agreement is that I do think that there is standard business competition and there is bad blood between executives to some degree, uh, from Compass and Usona. But he spun this into a, like a very complex conspiracy narrative where we are seen as the vanguard of Bill Linton with Usona that’s going out to slay, uh, their enemies, which is nonsense

Andrew Callaghan: aid, protest, and controlled opposition oftentimes gets like thrown around, especially in the conservative media sphere to like.

Delegitimize anger and outrage when it comes to things that are happening.

Andrew Callaghan Interviewee (clip): The Tesla rally, some of these guys are paid agitators and paid protesters.

Hamilton Morris: It’s typically not true,

Andrew Callaghan: but I find it really interesting here that the company Usona is using this sort of like anti-capitalist, anti-fascist language to do their bidding and kind of mobilize, like gullible people against the people that are actually doing the, uh, the good, the good thing.

Hamilton Morris: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Andrew Callaghan: yeah. This is, as

Hamilton Morris: far as I know, this is the only example of this that I knew about.

Pace: The slop on display here. I challenge any five cast viewer to find any Usona personnel talking about how they are, you know, using or amplifying symposia or engaging in anti-fascist, anti-capitalist narratives at all.

The, the idea that both of these so-called journalists just go, yeah, that’s what they’re doing is. Bananas to me,

Normie: it gives me Candace Owens, like French Legion trying to assassinate her vibes. It’s the only thing that I can like, that I can I, that I can only draw

Pace: from. Well, I actually,

Normie: that’s,

Pace: so I wanna say something because, you know, the conspiracy theorizing, there’s, there’s the one side of it that’s like, and ignorant.

Ignorant and or desperate plea to, uh, you know, IM impose order on a, on a chaotic and scary world, right? But then there’s this sort of actor. That is out there on, on purpose, kicking up dust and complexifying. A rather simple story that they don’t like, they don’t want to be told. You know, symposia is a group of principled actors that have relevance and, and incisive critiques on on many front.

Of the psychedelic industry, and I don’t want them to listen to be listened to because you know, I mean, as, as Hamilton has said multiple times in his public, uh, appearances, he was a, a former employee of Compass. And we have, you know, speaking of transparency, no. Understanding of what Hamilton’s, you know, personal stock portfolio is in the, the psychedelic space.

Russell: And for what it’s worth, one of the founders of the Church of Psilomethoxin Ian, Ben Weis did publish that. Hamilton had shares in Compass Pathways. We did some digging and it does appear that according to SEC filings from the year that Hamilton was employed by Compass as a full-time consultant, that consultants of Compass Pathways.

We’re approved to receive compensation in shares. We’ve requested confirmation from Morris on whether he received share-based compensation from Compass for his time with them, but we have not received comment back,

Pace: but he has got a lot of potential motives for wanting people to not understand our position in an accurate way, and every time he does it, he displays contempt for his audience.

The audience

Normie: a hundred

Pace: of the podcast, you know, or, or show that he is, you know, a guest on. And he abuses his status as a sort of quasi celebrity psychedelic expert. Um, however, you know, dull and, uh, in the distance that, uh, you know, reputation may be today.

Russell: So this clip that’s coming up now is something that was debuted on this five cast interview.

Which is Hamilton confronting Bob Jesse at a conference. This is was previously unreleased footage that he kind of like seeded to five cast.

Bob Jesse: Hi.

Hamilton Morris: Hey, I dunno if we’ve met, maybe we met a long time ago.

Bob Jesse: I think we might’ve been on stage once a long time ago, but didn’t actually say hi.

Hamilton Morris: Yeah,

Bob Jesse: but your reputation procedure,

Hamilton Morris: you could be good to see you.

So I feel like this is sort of an aggressive question. I feel bad asking, but a couple of X symposia. Members have contacted me and they told me that you had been providing them with money and intel in what they felt was a effort to destroy compass.

Russell: I just wanna pause it here to address what he’s saying.

A couple of ex symposia employees approached him in an interview prior to this. He discussed that he was approached by someone named Travis Kitchens, who once wrote an article for us and we edited.

Andrew Callaghan: In fact, Travis just went on the Danny Jones podcast explaining the

Russell: extent of his relationship with us.

Danny Jones: So this symposia group is specifically doing like, uh, counter operations against all this stuff, like they’re reporting on all the negative aspects of it.

And trying to debunk it.

Travis Kitchens: Uh, they, yeah, I would say they were providing a critical perspective. Some of which was much of which was legitimate. Mm-hmm. I mean, these were just, it’s just reporting into the psychedelic field. It’s a group of people. Yeah. Pull it up. Like if you put Yeah, there you go. There you go.

It’s a website. Yeah. Basically

Danny Jones: about psychedelic.

Travis Kitchens: Yes, that publishes like, um, Hey Steve, would you put in, put in, uh, in the search bar, put in Travis Kitchens and you’ll see an article they published to mine.

Danny Jones: Oh, you work for ’em?

Travis Kitchens: No, um, no, in 2019, um, I, I wrote a very long article there. It is a channel for magic.

This is an 8,000 word article. Oh, okay. It’s very long. Uh, you know, they have a, if you go to a bout or something, you’ll see, you can submit an article. We could write an article on psychedelics right now. We could submit it to them and if they like it, they’ll publish it. So I submitted to them, I didn’t know ’em.

Mm-hmm. And they said, this is great. We will publish it. So they published it. They don’t pay, but they published it. And, you know, subsequently it was featured in the New York Times, it was featured in some books that, uh, you know, right. Ivy League University press books. And so it’s go, it’s been widely read and I’m, I’m, I’m as proud of it as anything I’ve ever written.

Russell: If that’s what he’s talking about, that is not an ex symposia employee. And that is not someone who has extensive knowledge of our. Funding and anything about the internal organization of our nonprofit.

Normie: This, this gives me like Project Veritas big

Russell: time.

Normie: Yeah.

Hamilton Morris: You had been providing them with money and intel in what they felt was a effort to destroy Compass.

Bob Jesse: No.

Hamilton Morris: No.

Bob Jesse: Um, let’s see.

Amanda Pratt: Yeah.

Bob Jesse: Not directly my money, but I’m responsible for having sent to symposia before things really blew up and got nasty. Two separate donations. Mm-hmm. Small amounts of money.

Hamilton Morris: Mm-hmm.

Bob Jesse: And not for the purpose of getting to do anything.

Hamilton Morris: Mm-hmm.

Normie: That’s a hundred percent correct. Yeah, that’s actually more correct.

I do have the check in my stash. Um, it was through, uh, an account that, that he has, yeah.

Neşe: That money came in during that period of time where we weren’t paying ourselves at all. We weren’t getting money for doing the work that we were doing. So donations that came in, like small donations would go towards, like, as I said, the website or whatever else we were using to, in order to do our work.

Normie: Yeah.

Hamilton Morris: So why do you think they said that? Yeah. And why were you giving them money?

Bob Jesse: Well, because for a little while they were saying things no one else would say.

Hamilton Morris: Mm-hmm.

Bob Jesse: You know, the same reason you would give.

Normie: By the way, Bob, we are still saying things that nobody else would say just to

Bob Jesse: lucid news, money I, inappropriate

Hamilton Morris: action.

And then because they know that you were involved with this Harlow Family Foundation and they’ve, you know, paid an enormous amount of money to Nasha and to symposia to are so. Run this campaign against Maps. $185,000 reported. Oh, I didn’t

Andrew Callaghan: know

Bob Jesse: that.

Russell: See, this is, this is what he has been doing this whole time.

That’s what I’m talking about. This narrative around the Sarlow donation to us, which was a completely unrestricted donation. He continually, in interviews, frames it as this money that was like slipped to us to run a campaign against maps, which is. Fully incorrect.

Neşe: And anyone who’s been in the field knows that everything we did and said during that period was completely in line with what we’d been doing and saying for years.

Right? So we were not hired guns and people who know anything about nonprofits and all that goes into it, looking at that amount of money that is not a large amount of money for a nonprofit and certainly not in, in comparison to the amount of pharma funding that was on the other side of the clinical trials

Bob Jesse: remains on the other side.

Yeah, but that was long after I left that foundation.

Hamilton Morris: Yeah,

Bob Jesse: long after.

Hamilton Morris: And they’re suing me now or attempting to.

Bob Jesse: Why?

Hamilton Morris: Because I said that they had done this.

Neşe: Like that’s not the dean thing.

Pace: I’d love to see the lawsuit. Was that,

Neşe: could I, I’d like to say something else about the funding. ’cause it’s like we had the choice of how to apply those fines based on our nonprofit’s mission, and he’s acting like we just paid ourselves out with this huge amount of money.

But there were a lot of other things that we needed to use funds for. Getting, uh, legal protections for our ability to publish the psychedelic syndicate, which especially at this moment in time when, you know, there’s all of this attacking journalism. In order to be able to publish, you know, to speak against powerful interests, it’s important to have protections there.

And so it’s just a complete misunderstanding of everything that we’ve been been doing in order to get information out to the public that the public deserves to know.

Normie: Yeah, I think, I think saying that it’s a misunderstanding is you’re being charitable there. I don’t think this is a misunderstanding fair.

I think this is a lie and I think this is just propaganda that he’s more than happy to spew

Bob Jesse: suing you for something like defamation or dashing damage

Hamilton Morris: defamation.

Bob Jesse: Well, guess what? My understanding not a lawyer is the truth is an absolute defense against defamation.

Hamilton Morris: Well, they’re actually, unfortunately.

They got me on a technicality. I said it was the Sarlow Family Foundation, whereas it was Su sarrow

Normie: who is, they got me on a technicality. The is the, this is the Conspiracy Mind Bay.

Russell: And I wanna say too, I thought about including both clips, but I didn’t, this the timeline of this interview, when it came out, it was released like three separate times.

First it came out in August. Yeah, this interview between Hamilton and Andrew. And about 48 hours later, it was taken off the internet. Between that time it came out that Hamilton had been, uh, Andrew had forwarded Hamilton the entire video file to review and re-release. They re-released it in September and this clip, that entire point where Hamilton admits they got beyond a technicality is cut.

That’s no longer in the interview. That is public.

Hamilton Morris: I did an interview with Andrew Callahan. His team reached out to me. They were filming at the Maps conference and wanted to collaborate on something, so we recorded a podcast together. I’d made it very clear to everyone that the podcast discussed, billionaires, multimillionaires, lots and lots of people who’d conceivably be angry, and that I needed to have it reviewed before anything went out.

Somehow that got lost in translation. They released it without me realizing, and then I asked for them to take it down. The reason it was taken down is because I wanted to see it before it went out publicly.

Russell: This video that we have is from the original release.

Pace: I think one of the funniest things about this is that, you know, this particular phrase being removed, uh, sort of after an initial release is that it’d be very interesting to see if there actually was a lawsuit.

I don’t think there is a, a lawsuit to be had here, but had such a lawsuit gone forward. You know, admitting on camera that your, the opposing, uh, team has got you on a, on a technicality might not. Be very great for your lawsuit.

Neşe: I, I do wanna speak to the lawsuit claim because the only things that I have heard of being circulated are cease and desist that are requesting that people, you know, be careful about how they’re representing the facts because misrepresentations are actually dangerous under the current conditions of where the field is at.

There are a lot of threats, death threats, circulating a lot of very. Dangerous rhetoric and legally I think a lot of people don’t understand that. Like if something happens, if someone is, is whipped up and inflamed by this demonizing rhetoric and comes and. Tries to get vengeance at your house, you know, for whatever reason connected to this kind of in, in inciting rhetoric, having a cease and desist is a form of protection for you because you can then show that you tried to set the records straight so that if anything happens, god forbid.

You’re able to then show that and say, look, I, I tried my best to stop this. And then it makes it easier if you need to get a decision about something to, to make things whole after something horrible happens. And so I find it very interesting that everyone’s representing this, you know, these cease and desist letters.

When people are pumping, misin, disinformation out into the, uh, media landscape, because it’s another form of vo, it’s a abusive tactic where the, you know, people who are being abusive act like their victims are the abusers. And this is representative of that. ’cause when you say someone asking me to please be careful because things are dangerous right now is an act of aggression that deserves further retaliation.

You are admitting to the attentive viewer that you are actually the one who is causing the harassment.

Pace: Yeah, I, I think that. Those distinctions are, you know, important to make, make all, all great points. And I think that the thing though is, is that, yeah, it’s still not a lawsuit that, um, Hamilton is representing.

Oh, they’re, they’re suing me. No, no, they aren’t.

Neşe: Well, that, that, that’s why I mentioned that is that there have been no lawsuits. Right. And a lot of people have talked about like these. Lawsuits and legal threats as evidence of our or the, that foundation’s, uh, you know, evilness and I, I just wanted to set the record straight that actually no.

The fact that they’re representing at most, uh, requests to stop lying in dangerous ways as further evidence that these groups or people need to be put in their place and, and demonized is itself a red flag.

Russell: This actually comes up in Travis Kitchen’s recent interview with Danny Jones, where Danny’s under the impression that we tried to sue Hamilton over something and Travis Hamilton’s alleged source on a lot of this stuff has to actually go on and contradict him.

Travis Kitchens: I

Danny Jones: don’t know. Did he get the cease and desist from symposia or sarlow?

Travis Kitchens: Uh, no n neither a letter, uh, a law, a law firm, big time law firm in San Francisco that represents the Sarlow Foundation. Okay? So it was a Sarlow Uhhuh, and they said, actually, it wasn’t this Sarlow group, it was this other sarlow group that gave him the money, so technically you’re wrong.

And also they accused him of spending conspiracy theories and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, he has a rather complex, maybe even convoluted narrative around this.

Russell: The clip we’ve been watching is about to end here and then it’s gonna cut over into a later clip from Hamilton’s podcast of him discussing this confrontation, uh, that I just think is interesting.

Hamilton Morris: Harlow not the foundation. Yeah. So,

Bob Jesse: so three or some, I hope that’s not too much of a pain in the butt for you.

Hamilton Morris: People contacted me to say it’s very unfair of you to blame USA for everything and. I don’t believe that I did

Andrew Callaghan: just one crazy lady and one pharmaceutical company, Usona.

Hamilton Morris: I feel bad for what it’s worth about calling out Bob, Jesse.

It doesn’t bring me any pleasure. I’ve heard from many people that Bob, Jesse is a really nice guy. You know, I have no desire to go to war with these people and. I think that all of this fear and fighting,

Normie: I have no desire to go to war with these people, but I’m gonna call, call them terrorists and spend all of my time obsessing over unfounded claims.

Russell: Yeah, wait for it. You’re gonna love how he, he, he finishes this clip

Hamilton Morris: in the psychedelic world. It just been a a miserable experience that I really wish to avoid. For the people that are new subscribers who don’t know about this, I have several podcasts dedicated to it, and I could honestly probably talk about it for 10 more hours.

Russell: It’s just so disingenuous to hear him. Say he doesn’t wanna get involved and then immediately cut to, by the way, I have several podcasts on this issue and could talk about it for 10 more hours.

Pace: He is going out of his way. He tries, you know, the, the reason, the other reason why we’re responding to Andrew is that, um, the, the sheer level of irresponsibility at a journalistic level on display with, with Callahan’s five cast here is.

Something that we can compare to other, uh, commentators and podcasters who have hosted Hamilton. Hamilton has on these other platforms. People are like, you know, Hamilton, like you’re here to talk about, like, you know, the good old days when you used to be on Vice, like doing things in other countries and taking drugs.

Like, what do you think today? That’s what we want you to hear. And then he’s shoehorning in these conspiracy theories about. Symposia and, and then they drag him back into, you know, his lane, but not Callahan.

Russell: The next post that we review is a comment that Hamilton made on his subreddit walking back his assertions about Bob, Jesse providing

Andrew Callaghan: us funding.

This post was made less than a month after the interview with Andrew that was framed around this funding came out.

Russell: If you look in the second paragraph there, he says. I think the amount that Bob Jesse paid them is relatively small, and I’ve heard it to be less than a thousand dollars and was likely paid around 2018.

Like we’ve been saying, we didn’t receive some crazy amount of money from you, Usonaor Bob. Jesse and Hamilton knows that this whole time. Yet he framed the entire interview with Andrew around the fact that we were funded by some malevolent pharmaceutical company.

Neşe: This post came out like not long after the video, so it’s not like he.

You know, looked into it months later and found this like correction, like he was aware.

Russell: The post that was just on screen from Hamilton was from October 5th, 2025, which was less, like you said, less than a month after this interview was publicly rereleased on YouTube.

Normie: Can you even imagine like. Focusing on, I mean, he didn’t know this because he doesn’t do his homework, but can you even imagine on focusing on like a thousand dollars donation versus the fire hose of billionaire money and rich like corrupt money that is.

Coming into this space that is silencing Any, any criticism that is like totally twisting this sort of, what was a grassroots movement into this corporate monster? Like, and this is what he focuses his time on. It, it, it’s really delusional. Yeah.

Russell: The last clip I have of this section around like the claims on our funding is I just think an illustrative clip of Hamilton discussing another psychedelic media outlet where he is wildly speculating on their funding, uh, almost in the exact same way the

Hamilton Morris: who funded Psilocybin Alpha at the beginning.

I actually don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were Bill Linton or Carrie Turnbull or maybe the Sarlow family. Those seem to be I, if I had to guess, I’d probably say Linton or Turnbull. ’cause it has that kind of nonsense air that you get from people associated with that group.

Normie: Why would you go on your why?

I just don’t understand what the speculation is all about. Oh, I understand what it’s about, but I, I just don’t understand the, I don’t understand having contempt for your audience to the extent that you’re willing to just spew the conspiracy bullshit. I, I don’t get it. It’s, it’s, it’s, it,

Russell: people seem to kind of eat it up, and he’s allowed to go on stages where he’s platformed as the voice of psychedelic journalistic ethics, and the community itself promotes him.

As an ethical voice while he goes around speculating to his audience in this way.

Normie: I mean, it fits perfectly in like the post-truth world of Grifting on your audience.

Pace: The pattern with Hamilton is a consistent attack, you know, an anti-intellectual way of any journalism or scholarship. That, you know, questions, the, the, the most positive light that psychedelics and uh, and sort of psychedelic industry could be painted in.

Russell: That was a dissection of Hamilton’s claims in Andrew’s interview with him about our funding in particular, uh, you heard come up I think at least once in those last couple clips, Hamilton, claiming that we encourage terrorism or terrorist actions. The next couple clips I have lined up are more on that subject because I think it’s worth discussing and kind of dissecting what he’s actually talking about there because it’s something that’s been bandied about and used against us.

In our last video, we discussed the environment that this interview was released into, which was post Charlie Kirk killing, when leftist groups were being labeled terrorists worthy of attack or prosecution by uh, the right wing. And I think. We need to dispel some of the claims that they’re discussing here.

So the next clip we’re gonna see is a super cut of every time Hamilton in this interview discusses us as terrorists, uh, encouraging terrorist action or doing or terrorizing the field.

Andrew Callaghan: So at the juncture we’re at right now is that you have this pharmaceutical company encouraging terroristic action,

Hamilton Morris: paying activists to terrorize their competitors.

So this group were terrorizing everyone in the psychedelic world. They were called symposia.

Andrew Callaghan: So symposia is a useless group of paid activists trying to throw a wrench in the game for no reason.

Hamilton Morris: Yes. And began to advocate terrorist action, advise people to start. Terrorizing and engaging in terrorist tactics.

Bob Jesse: Actual terrorist action.

Hamilton Morris: Yeah. The problem was that these people were uncontrollable. They were seriously insane. Dangerously insane. This is why funding terrorist organizations to do your bidding is usually a bad idea. Historically, yeah.

Every

Andrew Callaghan: time we do it, it always backfires.

Hamilton Morris: It just hasn’t ended well.

Russell: And so that’s actual footage from the interview that was not. I didn’t cut in the Wikipedia article about Israeli funding of Hamas. That was Channel Five’s team that put that in at that point of the interview.

Normie: This sounds like, like, this sounds like Stephen Miller, like it actually sounds like Stephen Miller shit that he, that he’s saying,

Russell: and so that’s just a preface on how often he was describing us as terrorizing terrorists.

A terrorist group terrorizing the industry.

Normie: At what point have you lost the argument so much that you have to label like the people you disagree with as terrorists? Like that’s where we have. That’s where he’s gone in his own mind. It’s kind of wild.

Pace: He’s just hysteria and I mean, I don’t know, maybe, you know, at what point, um, well there, there are other patterns in the media sphere.

You know, if you become discredited enough, you can always, uh, find yourself a, a spot on a, you know, right wing conspiracy podcast. Or maybe, you know, convert to a,

Normie: that’s where he is going,

Pace: a religion or something, you know,

Normie: that’s certainly the trajectory he is on. As he, as he gets like more irrelevant, he has to go further into like the rage baiting into the grifting, into the lies, into the conspiracies.

Russell: The next part of the clip that I have lined up is Hamilton actually discussing the terrorist actions. He’s saying we encouraged and I want viewers to hear how he describes it, and then we’re gonna come in afterward and contextualize what he’s actually talking about.

Andrew Callaghan: When you said terroristic, do you mean like car bombs and stuff?

Hamilton Morris: I can read you exactly what they, they wrote

Andrew Callaghan: actually, they, they call for violent action against a rival pharmaceutical company.

Hamilton Morris: Yeah.

Andrew Callaghan: Yeah. I definitely wanna see it.

Hamilton Morris: Yeah. Yeah. I can pull it up right now.

Andrew Callaghan: Yeah, for sure.

Hamilton Morris: Okay. This is, and there’s actually a lawsuit right now. This is pretty funny.

Andrew Callaghan: You can’t just tell people to go terrorize others, right?

That’s not free speech.

Hamilton Morris: Oh, yeah, you’re right. Well, well, so now the guy that wrote this, the. The shitty David Nichols is, uh, having his mother, who’s a lawyer, Sue the New York Times journalist who mentioned that this had occurred.

Andrew Callaghan: Oh man, they’re gonna sue the fuck out of us. You gonna get

a

Hamilton Morris: lawsuit from David?

Andrew Callaghan: Mom? I NI’s. I’m already getting sued. I’m ready to declare bankruptcy

Hamilton Morris: here. Okay. Least if I can pull this up. This is the. This screen grab support Usona Absolutely. Exclamation point is the first line. But no, I mean shutting down Compass independently fucking with their business operations in ways designed to raise the cost of operating.

Hey. They want to exist according to the logic of capitalism. Let’s leverage that logic to make it too expensive to operate. Here’s a post I made over on Kat’s earlier Compass Post Kat being another person who is, uh, paid by the CEO of Usona. Reportedly, although I have not been able to, I’ve heard that from two people, but I haven’t been able to verify it, but I.

Suspect that it’s the case. Um, what do we do? Shut it down. There are plenty of strategies that could be developed to make that happen. Ranging from milk toast to militant. Facebook isn’t really the best place to discuss some of those tactics. A Facebook post was public. Yeah. Uh, but some spur of the moment ideas I could imagine right now might be.

Organizing call-ins to Compass and or associated research institutions such as maps to express disgust, and result in tying up the lines, thereby making some aspects of general operations untenable or at least frustrating. The same could be applied to the individuals involved. Two, continued writing slash coverage of how the for-profit commodified approach puts us all in jeopardy and threatens more.

Open access models of medical treatment. Three, check out the strategies some folks use to oppose Huntington life science. This is where this is like threatening people with weapons. I’m not necessarily advocating any of those strategies. I’m not necessarily advocating any of those strategies, but there’s a good precedent for relatively small groups of people tanking major corporations through utilization of militant tactics, and it just goes on.

It’s multiple paragraphs.

Russell: Okay, so. A couple of contextual points up top here. Dave was a former member of Symposia who left well prior to any of the FDA stuff that Hamilton’s been talking about this whole time. He was an early critic of Compass Pathways. The Facebook post that they’re discussing there, that they do like a little, um, they do their own recreation of the typing.

I have the still of the actual post, which we can look at in a minute to show how different it actually is than the way they rewrote it there. And Huntington Life Sciences was, I believe, a pharmaceutical company that was accused of all of this animal abuse. Right? And what Dave’s talking about there is citizen push.

On pharmaceutical companies that they’ve deemed abusive. He’s encouraging people to go look into the history of civilian action and resistance to abuse. Essentially,

Neşe: it’s like telling people to learn the history of like the history of labor and labor organizing.

Russell: Exactly. It

Pace: specifically describes a, like a broad swath from what?

Milk toast to militant. Yeah.

Russell: Yes. Milk toast to militant, and that is the reality of the pushback to Huntington Life sciences. There was calling campaigns up to. That someone called in like a fake bomb threat on them. That is true, but I don’t think that’s what Dave’s talking about. And Dave, in his post specifically says, I don’t endorse any of these tactics.

Hamilton Morris: I’m not necessarily advocating any of those strategies.

Russell: So at the point that Hamilton is going around saying that Symposia was encouraging their viewers to engage in terrorist tactics, the Post he’s literally referring to says, I do not endorse these tactics.

Pace: Nor were any of us actually even aware of this post that happened on Facebook in a comment thread until it was dug up by, you know, uh, the likes of Hamilton and his, his ilk.

And, you know, the thing that I think is really the towel here is the sort of juvenile way that Hamilton giggles his way through this, um, that Hamilton doesn’t actually take this as seriously as usually when he references it. That he, you know, wants his audience to believe, like last time I checked terrorists, cause mass violence events, they kill innocent, you know, civilians and such.

None of that has been evidenced in this, in this post as something that anybody has specifically advocated for. And then for it to be one, you know, former member who’s years gone, who made this years ago to, as he introduces it. Conflates it with they symposia. There’s a difference between an individual and what they say and do, and a difference between what an organization says and does.

Symposia has, has had many organizational statements and jointly authored pieces. This is none of that. It’s, it’s absolutely flimsy and to himself. Well, laughable. I think it’s ridiculous.

Russell: And I think the other point I wanna make about the way that Hamilton Bandies about with this post of Dave’s, I’m just gonna bring it up here.

I want it to be clear. This is a Facebook response to someone in the conversation saying, okay, you are, again, you, you have these critiques of Compass pathways, right? Should we be supporting Usona who has similar ambitions but is a nonprofit organization that is putting its manufacturing stuff out into the open science kind of database for people to see their manufacturing practices and stuff like that.

And Dave says, support you, Sona. Absolutely. But no, that’s what he’s responding to. He’s, he’s responding to someone saying, should we re, should we support you, Sona? And Dave’s saying, sure. Support you. Usonanot pledging his absolute support to sna. The way that Hamilton frames it

Andrew Callaghan: support sna ab, absolutely exclamation point is the first line.

Hamilton Morris: This group started out very vocally. Pledging their absolute support for a pharmaceutical company called Usona. He, he had announced his absolute support for the U Pharmaceutical company, Usona at the time that he announced his absolute support for Usona

Pace: utterly dishonest.

Normie: And just for some additional context here, at the time, compass Pathways was accused and likely engaged in anti-competitive tactics.

They had secured a psilocybin manufacturer for GMP psilocybin that was required. It was a new requirement from the FDA going into the clinical trials and that that was a cause for concern of a lot of researchers now that they would have to rely. On Compasses supply and some of the Una people and, you know, US based researchers, were, were concerned about what this new dynamic looked like in the space.

Uh, a space that had not had these sort of anti-competitive practices before.

Russell: Yeah, and regarding companies like Compass and Usona, getting back into the kind of schism between the two of them. This next video starts with a super cut of Hamilton discussing his own relationship with Compass Pathways, just for some context, and then gets into descriptions throughout the Andrew Hamilton interview of him saying he was harassed by Usona funded employees.

Hamilton Morris: I was doing work at a university that was being funded by one of these pharmaceutical companies. Working in a lab that’s receiving money from Compass.

Andrew Callaghan: I do. I work in this lab that receives funding from Compass. It’s, you know, it’s really, it’s really cool, you know, we’re making all these new psychedelic drugs.

It’s really good. Um, I was part of a group creating new psychedelics for Compass.

Hamilton Morris: If somebody says, Hey, Hamilton, you know, uh, you’re, you’re, you’re going kind of easy on Compass. All the time. Right. Wouldn’t it be useful to know that they used to pay me, that I used to make drugs for them for years? Right.

It would be useful to know. You should know that it’s a legitimate conflict of interest on my part.

Russell: And so I just wanted to show that upfront because Hamilton, as he goes on here, is going to talk a lot about claims of Usona funding people who they didn’t fund, just like he does about us. And he kind of gets away with saying he worked for Compass Pathways, and people take that as like a, oh, he’s so honest and puts his conflicts of interest on the table.

He gets away with this and then just doesn’t take it into account in the rest of the way. He reports anything and people don’t take it into account when he discusses, encompasses rivals and competitors and things like that in his own, quote unquote journalistic coverage of these things.

Hamilton Morris: Um, and I started seeing this more and more with SNA employees harassing me at talks that I gave, um.

It’s like a couple stories, but you know, just weird stuff. There’s one where a ana employee who never identified herself as such was like, I want you to explain what you’re giving back to the indigenous people of the world, or something like that. Right. In the audience wraps into applause

Andrew Callaghan: and to applause.

Hamilton Morris: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh,

Andrew Callaghan: that must have been a bad feeling.

Hamilton Morris: Oh, it was a horrible feeling.

Andrew Callaghan: Yeah. Yeah. You, you can feel the weight of the indigenous ancestors on you at that moment.

Hamilton Morris: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. They were.

Andrew Callaghan: What? What do they want you to do exactly? And why do they think you owe something to the natives in that moment?

Hamilton Morris: I mean, it was nonsense.

Andrew Callaghan: So someone’s tripping on you at a conference about not giving back to indigenous people. They’re a paid plant from a pharmaceutical corporation. Yes. How does that make you feel?

Hamilton Morris: It makes me, it makes me feel sad. It makes me feel hurt. It makes me feel, uh, vaguely disgusted by all of this.

Russell: So again, you just have Andrew here giving him these like layups as if everything he’s saying is true, saying you have a paid plant from a pharmaceutical company in the audience lobbying, like lobbying these questions at you. We know for a fact this person who asked the question was not a S Usonaemployee.

Pace: Well, also the context was, you know, he says it like it’s out of nowhere. But this was a panel discussion that was highlighting many. Representatives and and voices from indigenous communities to speak on psychedelics.

Russell: And the next clip we have is the actual question that was posed to him. So as this next clip plays, I think viewers should just think to themselves about the way he characterized this question and the tone with which he said this question was posed to him.

And ask for yourselves if that really seems the case. And also when you watch this take into account. The text that Channel five included on this video when they reposted it to their Instagram.

Amanda Pratt: Thank you. I have a two part question about the psilocybin Polymorph, a compound that Compass has recently patented.

And so from your perspective as an obviously very accomplished chemist Hamilton, um, who has, as I understand recently made a career transition to work with that company, I wonder what your thoughts on the legitimacy of that patent as a new innovation. First, and if you’re able to speak to that and two, how you think that patent impacts the supply chain, and particularly in the context of the issues of indigenous reciprocity that we’ve been talking about this afternoon.

Neşe: So just to return to our pace was saying many of the other speakers on that stage had been talking about. Indigenous reciprocity and connections between indigenous groups and the psychedelic pharmaceutical industry. So that question was not some random dart that was just put in there. It was actually completely connected to the conversations that had been happening outside of that frame and that that a question was asked by Amanda Pratt, who was a graduate student.

At the University of Wisconsin and was, was working on a dis dissertation project about rhetoric and psychedelics. This was directly connected to, and this exchange is also, uh, written about in Amanda’s dissertation. So it, you know, it was completely misrepresented and how it was discussed, um, on five cast.

Russell: Yeah. And for anyone who is, um. Consuming this through audio, the what they put on the screen while that question was being played was that this Usona employee was secretly recording herself asking this question, exploiting indigenous people to the benefit of her billionaire employer, Usona.

Normie: Indus,

Russell: I just

Normie: industrial sabotage

Pace: a prepared statement too, and it really seems be to be difficult to have predicted how, you know, a panel discussion between a bunch of speakers at the end of a conference.

Like, uh, how that might go to then show up with that particular question prepared by what Una like, uh, it’s, it’s quite stretch.

Russell: It’s just another representation of Hamilton completely speculating on. What s has the power to do or not do We know, again, like I said, Amanda was not a Usona employee.

Pace: We do also know that he felt very bad, sad, horrible about it.

And so, you know, this is his sort of retrospective, uh, conspiracy theorizing and why bad things happened to Hamilton Morris, you know?

Neşe: Well, and he, he even acknowledges that at some point, I, I, maybe we can try to find that clip. He, he straight up says something along the lines of, well. You know, she attacked me, so I wanted to Oh, to get her back or whatever.

So it’s like it’s the next,

Russell: uh

Neşe: oh, you have that? Okay, perfect.

Hamilton Morris: When the Usona employee called me out at the conference for not giving back to indigenous people, the point of what she was doing was to publicly humiliate me. It had nothing to do with helping indigenous people, and that was clear to me before I realized that she was employed by Usona and friends with symposia.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that she really did care about indigenous people. How would you communicate that? If she’d simply come up to me and said, Hey, I’m working with Ana. I heard that you’re working with Compass. Both of these companies are developing psilocybin as a treatment for depression, and I was thinking it would be interesting to speak with Mazda Tech people to see how they feel about it, and maybe we could work together and figure out a way to help them if they feel like they want some kind of help.

Maybe the two companies could collaborate on an initiative to provide some kind of nice gesture to the people in Wela. So that their history of work with psilocybin containing mushrooms is acknowledged in some way. Right? Imagine if she had said that to me, how different the results might have been.

Completely different, completely different

Normie: history would have been changed.

Pace: I, I mean, like, I didn’t know that there was so much protocol for approaching, uh, could you

Normie: imagine how the butterfly effects would’ve changed the course of the universe?

Neşe: Well, it’s, I mean, it, this is how abusers talk, you know? It’s like if you had.

Done this in this other way. I wouldn’t have needed to do that to you.

Normie: Can

Neşe: you know, like this is, imagine if she

Normie: had said, please sir,

Neşe: this is, this is like a normal academic conference type of question that he could have responded thoughtfully and normally to, but instead he had this big emotional reaction and then needed to.

Pace: Right, and it’s not an exaggeration. He described it as a big emotional reaction that he had to this. And, and now he’s, uh, sort of thinking back and reflecting on this moment on other podcasts with other people. It’s, um, quite a lot of thinking about this moment for, for Hamilton,

Hamilton Morris: like something good could have come out of that if it had been well-intentioned.

But the point was not to help indigenous people. The point was to attempt to publicly humiliate me. And so what did this do? By attacking me for the interest of her pharmaceutical company, she led to me attacking her. There was a mutual polarizing effect that made everyone miserable, and this is how these things tend to play out, right?

It’s a, you know, sort of cliche Nietzsche quote, but it’s the reality. You can become the monster that you’re fighting. Look what you

Pace: maybe do

Neşe: Truly.

Normie: Can you imagine like broadcasting this publicly? Like broadcasting your like emotional instability like this, it’s wild

Neşe: that that is ultimately so much of what is going on all throughout this retaliation against us is that it’s there’s, you know, as much as the psychedelic field loves to talk a big game about how everyone is healed and psychedelics are gonna fix the world, there’s a lot of people who are at a very juvenile level around.

Taking responsibility for their own emotions and like people wanting to lash out and blame people for how they feel. And oftentimes that’s because a true thing is raised that makes someone uncomfy. And rather than face that people would rather lash out.

Russell: Uh, and then the last clip I have here is just the last instance he relays in the.

In, in the interview with Andrew about, uh, him being quote, unquote confronted by a Usona employee.

Hamilton Morris: And, you know, it was, it was not even just this woman. There was another Usona employee who, uh, hit me with one of my least favorite, actually. It’s like, this is like my true achilles heel. I made multiple pieces about psychedelic toad, venom.

Andrew Callaghan: Mm-hmm.

Hamilton Morris: But like. One of the most pedantic, irritating criticisms is people will say, oh, it’s not really a venom. Technically it’s a poison.

Andrew Callaghan: Like many

Hamilton Morris: amphibians, Buffo Alvar possesses a powerful defense against predators when bitten. The toad secretes a milky white fluid from its oid glands that can poison its attacker, making them extremely ill, and sometimes causing cardiac arrest

Andrew Callaghan: That makes your blood boil.

Hamilton Morris: Yeah, it makes my blood boil.

Andrew Callaghan: Do you start yelling.

Hamilton Morris: Ah,

Andrew Callaghan: I can’t picture you yelling.

Hamilton Morris: No,

Andrew Callaghan: I’m sure you’ve done it before.

Hamilton Morris: There’s a video recording of this. I actually was able, I was able to contain Nice. My volcanic rage.

Andrew Callaghan: So you weren’t like, shut the fuck up. So what did you say?

Hamilton Morris: I, I said, you know, I don’t, something like, oh, that’s a teleological distinction, and it’s really not a recognized one by anyone in the toxicology community.

Russell: I am like not familiar enough with the toxicology community to know if he’s being truthful here, but based on his statements. In other regards, I have to assume that there’s a distinction for a reason, right?

Pace: The, the test would be like to ask Hamilton how he feels about these powerful narcotics psychedelic drugs, you know?

He would react similarly as specialists do when you misspeak outside of your area of expertise. It’s just, it’s ridiculous that this is,

Russell: so, we’ll wrap this one real quick. It’s just a couple more

Hamilton Morris: stuff. The like, there’s a hyper restrictive definition of the word venom, that it has to be injected by a fang.

This is not the dictionary definition of venom. I think a better one is to think about venoms as something that are actively delivered defensively as opposed to like a passive uh, substance, which would be a poison anyway. It is a venom all. I am

Russell: sorry. He’s just like created his own thing there. But all

Hamilton Morris: scholars who have ever studied this have called it a venom.

Anyway, so the Usona employee, after I gave a talk about this, corrected me saying that it’s not a venom

Andrew Callaghan: and they’re coming and tripping the they’re be.

Normie: That’s what this was about. I was wondering what this whole clip was about

Russell: and wait for why he says, why, why? He says This person came up and died. And said that to him

Andrew Callaghan: and interrupting your talks because of your association with Compass, or just because they feel like you’re a leading figure in the pro psychedelic legalization movement Because of the compass stuff.

Okay. Specifically ’cause of your chemistry work with Compass. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the reason. Yeah,

Pace: because I work with Compass. Somebody corrected me when I was incorrect once.

Russell: It’s so paranoid.

Pace: Very thin skinned. It might be thinner skinned than the bfu VARs, uh, uh, glands containing the five Oxy dimethyl.

Normie: Oh, this is so painful watching these. It’s truly painful for me. It hurts my soul. What do we got next, Russ?

Russell: So, yeah, that I just think is illustrative of the level of conspiracy he’s acting on. Is, is he’s. He’s making up these people who are coming at him because he was a Compass employee acting on behalf of Usona to to trip him up and make him look silly in public.

And it’s like you watch the actual thing he’s talking about. It was. Completely, but

Pace: he thinks about quite a bit. He thinks about it a lot.

Russell: He thinks people are out to assassinate his character. He’s very paranoid about that, clearly. And these next couple of clips are how he describes people, specifically us, our work.

And his own sort of attempts at character assassination.

Pace: That’s where we’ll pick back up for the final part of our conversation.

Transcript created using Descript and may be subject to misspellings.

Russell: This is episode two of a four-part series on the misinformation spread by Hamilton Morris on Andrew Callahan’s five cast. Last episode, we left off on the fact that Hamilton had begun claiming that we were being funded by a pharmaceutical company called Usona. We’ll jump in there, take a little detour through our history with the Church of Psilomethoxin and Martin Ball, and then get back to Hamilton’s theories about our funding.

This interview with Andrew was an escalation for Hamilton, in that Hamilton had been spreading a number of rumors about our funding. He’d been involved as kind of a background source on these articles like we discussed. Um, but up until this point. I hadn’t heard the claim that we were funded by another pharmaceutical company.

He had been discussing things about our funding by other people up until this point. But in this interview, he rolled out this whole new theory that we were funded by a pharmaceutical company called SA, their psilocybin manufacturer, who is allegedly kind of in competition with Compass Pathways and other psilocybin manufacturer who, who had funded the lab where Hamilton worked for years.

Pace: You know, it is just bizarre to listen to and, and watch claims about us that seem to be, you know, cut from whole cloth that have no grounding in, in reality like. You know, some of the things that we were talking about earlier might have a, a fun house view of, of some actual event. But, uh, or, or ba telephone game of telephone version of it.

But there’s just our interactions with Una proper are actually, you know, identical to Hamilton’s in some respect. Uh, they, they did, you know, cover some legal fees when it came to the asylum methin. They covered all, all defendants under one. Umbrella.

Russell: Yeah. Which was like over 15 defendants they offered to cover because they published, one of their researchers published an analysis of this church of PS, Methin Sacrament, saying it was just psilocybin, not something novel.

And

Greg Lake: they, they sued anyone who republished those results, including us. That was the story.

Russell: All right? The whole Psilomethoxin saga comes up multiple times in this conversation, and it’s genuinely too weird and interesting of a story to leave under explained, and it also provides a clear lens into previous smear campaigns against us for our reporting on abusive practices and practitioners in the psychedelic space.

So I’m gonna catch you up to speed real quick. The Church of Psilomethoxin was a psychedelic church allegedly operating legally above ground in Texas. They basically claimed to have developed a novel tryptamine psychedelic that was like an oral version of five M-E-O-D-M-T, which is like the smokeable psychedelic.

You hear people discuss getting from like a toad. They basically claim that they discovered a way to make an oral. Five M-E-O-D-M-T experience by soaking the substrate of psilocybin mushrooms in five M-E-O-D-M-T, therefore making mushrooms that produced Ps Methin, which produced a five MEO. DMT experience

Greg Lake: in 2007, Alexander Shulgin, uh, on his website, you know, he noted that there were people in Germany who at the time were feeding other synthetic tryptamines to mushroom substrates and getting four hydroxylated versions of it, uh, in, in the mushroom fruiting body.

He said, I theorized that if you throw or were to mix in, uh, five DMT salt to a, to a growing mushroom substrate, um, that it would produce silo methin. Ian, my law partner, um, stumbled across it and Ian being the person he is, had access to the resources, uh, to, to try this. And so, yeah, so it was tried. Um, as far as we know it was successful on the very first run.

Obviously we’ve tweaked the process and are continuing to tweak the process as we move forward. But yeah,

Russell: so. They have this claim and because they say it’s a novel tryptamine, it’s like kind of a gray market product that they begin selling on their website for $300 an ounce cut to 2023 to Usona chemists Samuel Williamson and Alexander Sherwood.

Publish a pre-print analysis of the sacrament that is being sold Assam Methin by the Church of Psilomethoxin, right? Their Preprint alleges that their analysis finds nos methin, no novel tryptamine in what the church is selling to its members, but they do find all of the ingredients and chemicals you would normally find in a psilocybin mushroom.

So we go ahead and report on these findings at symposia. And essentially say according to this chemical analysis, it looks like the Church of PS Methin is selling regular psilocybin mushrooms under a different name and shipping them across the country to its members. And a number of other independent analyses were released basically finding the same thing, or at least the fact that no Cyl Methin was detected in the sacrament.

Throughout this whole debacle, the church basically fell back on saying, well, we never claimed thats Methin was positively detected in our sacrament. We operate based on faith that this is a novel tryptamine, just not completely true. As we discuss in our article with a number of citations in which they discuss how psilocybin and.

Normal things you’d find in mushrooms actually were not found in their sacrament and and things like that. But yeah, we produce a four-part series on this whole debacle and the fallout from it. And for this series, I interviewed church co-founder Greg Lake about some of the questions that we had and accusations flying around about their church.

I’ll play a couple highlights from that interview here.

Greg Lake: Given the

Russell: current stuff that has come out about the sacrament and sort of the questions around whether Sima Oin is actually present, were participants informed that they, that there hasn’t been a positive identification of So Methin in the Sacrament, or was it presented as,

Greg Lake: I think that’s, that’s.

Ever since we started, that’s been abundantly clear.

Russell: And you feel like the way that the church has sort of messaged about the sacrament has made that clear?

Greg Lake: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, there’s been several different articles and conversations that have made that abundantly clear from day one.

Russell: Gotcha.

I guess to me there, there does feel like a little bit of, um, a reasonable. Expectation that people when getting the sacrament from the church would be receivings. Methin. I mean, given everything that I’ve heard in conversations, but also just the idea that you’re the church ofs Methin, right?

Greg Lake: Yeah. I mean, again.

I I, we’ve been abundantly clear many, many, many times, I’m guessing. Yeah, we’re a church. People are allowed to operate on faith. If people have taken a sacrament and they feel truly that this is new novel, and in their opinion, Solomon boxing, they have perfect right to do it. Now that this article’s been published, people can make up their own mind and we’re good with it.

Either way, it, it would, to me, I would be more hurt by not. Giving people continued access to it than, than to just like cut it off. I’m just, again, people, I think people have a right to say. I don’t wanna, I don’t believe the science a hundred percent here.

Russell: I guess in, in light of the article that was published and the GCMS testing that you’ve done, do you think there is the potential that there isn’t PS methin in your sacrament?

I mean, do you make space for that potential that maybe it, it, it is just powdered psilocybin, psilocin Bay system.

Greg Lake: I mean, I, I firmly believe it is, but like, if someone else has room for, for some doubt, that’s fine.

Russell: After all of this had like seemingly blown over a letter, arrived in our inbox. That was an initial letter saying that we would be sued unless we settled out of court with the Church of Sacred Synthesis now, and that if they were to take it to court, the church would be seeking $500 million in damages.

The list of defendants on this included us, Usona, other publishers like psychedelics today, um, and Gordo Tech, who published the results of this analysis, basically suing. Anyone who republished the results of Sherwood and Williamson’s analysis, what they deemed defamatory analysis results. The original letter of notice from the church, which was being represented by Greg Lake, the co-founder who I interviewed, who stepped down from his church leadership position to.

Single-handedly represent the church in court. It included notice of defamation on behalf of a psychedelic practitioner named Martin Ball as well, who we had previously reported on for his role in the publication of. Maps, Canada’s executive director’s psychedelic guidebook, uh, that was gonna come out.

He was a publisher. He wrote the forward to it.

Martin Ball: I didn’t just design the cover for a Hayden in his book. I was actually a contributor. I was the editor. I wrote the forward to that. I edited, I formatted, I produced that book.

Russell: We’d reported on Ball and his involvement with this book, not because he was just some random guy with wacky ideas.

But because he was kind of paraded around as a respected underground facilitator with a number of very problematic practices, these practices have been detailed in past books by ball, including psychedelic integration guides and facilitator guides, mostly around the psychedelic five M-E-O-D-M-T.

However, ball has asserted in the past that his practices could be applied across the board. There’s a consistent attempt by mainstream psychedelic outlets to uplift practitioners from the underground space and their practices into mainstream psychedelic therapy Contexts. Maps Canada affiliated with the maps, taking MDMA through clinical trials.

Their executive director was producing a book. With Martin Ball, who was on record in publicly available content, discussing touching client’s genitals while they were under the influence, throwing up on client’s heads and putting his tongue in the mouth of unresponsive clients

Martin Ball: sometimes. It just happens where I throw up on the person because that’s what they need.

He did need someone to lick his heart, so he’s lying down and I’ve got my tongue on his heart and then I can feel it coming and then right on his chest, and then he like smeared it all over himself. But she’s on the mat. I’m on top of her and my tongue is on her forehead. I’m growling and then all of a sudden I can feel it.

It’s coming. It’s coming. And I threw up all over her head. This is what I’ve learned about throwing up on people. They’re usually like, oh yeah. Oh. My job as a facilitator here is simply to follow the energy and to embody it fully. And if it means I need to throw up on someone, throw up on ’em, just do it because they’re going to appreciate it.

As odd as it may seem, I’ll tell you, there was one time I had this woman who was 79 years old because she, she wasn’t breathing and she was just lying there. What happened was is I ended up lying down on top of her, so I put my tongue in her mouth. And I pushed against her tongue and there was no pushback.

And I was like, okay, you know, this is, this is serious. And so then I just waited with my tongue up against the tip of her tongue, and after a while she suddenly pushed my tongue out of her mouth.

Russell: And these practices weren’t even just spur of the moment riffs. He essentially wrote the exact same practices in his book and Theo liberation writing in a chapter called Being a Non-Dual Energy Practitioner.

When the energy is ready to release, it may come out of either you or your client’s body. This can take the form of dry heaving and gagging, or full purging and vomiting. In rare cases, the energy may be so demanding that you’re required to purge directly onto the client. Though this sounds perfectly awful, you can trust that if it occurs, it is what the client needs in that moment and will be appreciated.

When we reported on this, Mark Hayden really tried to backpedal and distance himself from Martin Ball saying he wasn’t familiar with Ball’s techniques. However, his own book, the Manual for Psychedelic Guides listed Entheogenic Liberation as suggested reading. In another book of balls all is one. He also asserts that morality and ethics are purely products of the ego, and as such are imaginary constructs.

This comes up repeatedly in the reporting that we do at symposia around the psychedelic therapy teachings of facilitators. This idea that you know what your client needs best, that your intuition, even if it’s throwing up on your client’s head, will be appreciated and is what the client needs. Because you have done the work and your intuition essentially operates as some kind of voice of the divine.

These practices can manufacture consent for many harmful practices. The response to our reporting on this collaboration between Mark Hayden and Martin Ball on a new guide for psychedelic practitioners was emblematic of how much of the space reacts when called out for abusive practitioners, legacies, and practices within the space.

A particularly emblematic conversation happened just recently between a writer named Tom Hatis and a podcaster named James Jesso, retroactively discussing the situation, mischaracterizing and misremembering the whole situation, what was reported and why.

Tom Hatsis: The tearing down of an innocent man like Martin Ball.

Uh, they just decided that he was this evil person. Um, even though he’s actually a good friend of mine, he one of the kindest, most you, um. And they went after him over some absolute nonsense. They accused Martin Ball, who used to be a five M-E-O-D-M-T facilitator of abusing his clients. And not only could they not find anybody who reported Martin or felt like he had abused them, but his clients actively.

I got in touch with symposia and said he didn’t abuse us. This is what we wanted. He cured me. He, you know, he was great.

Russell: So I helped report that story and what he’s saying there is actually completely false. We didn’t have people reaching out saying Martin was great or that they got what they asked for.

What we did have was people reach out saying, in context of our reporting, they were disturbed by previous interactions with Martin. But what Hatis is getting at here completely misses the point, which is that we didn’t need to hear from Martin’s clients. He was out here in public YouTube videos describing his practices in a way that.

Was perfectly fair game to criticize. And there was a lot of this misinformation around the Martin Ball situation where people either weren’t reading the source material, why we were reporting it in the first place, or sprinkling their own misinformation in, and this is consistent across the field of our reporting on abuse.

We have consistently called out people for consent violations and abusive practices. People turn that around in. Podcasts and propaganda misinforming their audience and expecting them not to go look at the source material. And then they say there should be a place for watchdogs like symposia in the space.

We just don’t like how they do things or what they report.

Tom Hatsis: Look there. There are people that are abusive. Um, facilitators who do cross the line, and it’s a good thing to have somebody watch dogs like symposia out there, making sure that these abuses are brought to light. But what I’ve realized from symposia is that guard dogs need watch kitties.

Russell: And there are plenty of, as Hatis describes them, watch kitties out there who are ready to attack our reporting on people they’re either friends with or met one time and thought we’re very nice people.

Tom Hatsis: He’s actually a good friend of mine. He’s one of the kindest, most generous and genuine human beings you’ll ever meet.

Hamilton Morris: I actually met the woman who is accused of elder abuse at the Mass conference, and she seemed like a nice lady to me.

Russell: Their function seems less making the space any safer and more providing apologetics for abusive practices and practitioners in the space. Since our reporting on Ball, he has largely retained his status as a five M-E-O-D-M-T guru in the underground space.

And in this role, he found himself promoting and reviewing the church of Sli Methin sacramental substance.

Martin Ball: For me personally, all of my experiences with the SLI Methin so far is, you know, people ask me like, is it really edible five M-E-O-D-M-T? And I was like, yeah, to the best of my way of describing it, that.

It seems like a totally legit way to describe what this molecule is.

Russell: We covered these endorsements in our reporting on the Church of Psilomethoxin, and this was one of the reasons alongside our previous reporting on ball’s collaboration with Mark Hayden. That ball was included in that initial letter sent by the church.

When the official lawsuit was filed, however, ball was not included and Usona offered to defend all of the republishers of their chemist’s analysis in court. So they took that to court and it was ultimately dismissed under an antis slapp judgment. Along the way, though, an interaction between our legal representation and Greg Lake from the church was discussed on a legal YouTube channel.

Matt Zorn: More concerning. Um, and in effect, it, it is as part of what appears to be a fact gathering operation to complete service, plaintiff’s counsel impersonated a fake individual and contacted the Usona, one of the Usona defendants, Usona. And, and this is beyond dispute, your Honor, because there’s a recorded voicemail of plaintiff’s counsel purporting to be a person named G.

But this was one day after plaintiff sent a demand letter to Usona. Plaintiff’s counsel calls impersonating an individual named G, and then also sends a written communication where plaintiff’s counsel purports to be a Roger growing. Um, and then when we confronted plaintiff’s counsel with frankly, these unimpeachable facts, plaintiff’s counsel floated conspiracy theories like his phone number, phone being hacked, and then simply stated, he never misidentified himself.

Greg Lake: Unfortunately, this has caused me a lot of stress, my normal work, plus taking on this litigation, and I had a couple seizures over the course of about three weeks, and I, I honestly do not remember placing these two phone calls. Two, uh, s Usona, my wife tells me that I did, did make the one with, with, and identified myself as g.

Um, you know why I did that, where I. Where I was mentally when I did that, I, I do not know.

Russell: In case that wasn’t clear, that was Greg Lake, one of the founders of the church of Psilomethoxin, who was representing the church in court, saying that he impersonated people while attempting to contact Usona. But doesn’t remember it due to some state of mind around the time of this lawsuit.

We were leaked text messages from Greg discussing other instances in which his state of mind has conflicted with court cases that he was involved in. Um, in one instance he texted this group saying he sued someone MRV and Star Magazine in 2013 for defamation in state court in Texas. I was a year out of law school on my own, so strung out on drugs.

I was living in a 150 per week hotel room and didn’t have an office. Stayed high and drunk all day every day, and lost the case on a slap motion. In the following text he wrote, symposia probably won’t survive this suit, but they need to go also in these text messages. Lake wrote more about his intentions of suing us and Usona writing.

I have no reservations about shutting down entire entities. We never did a thing to hurt anyone and only had the best of intentions. We all suffered greatly, and now it’s time to let them feel what I felt, let them struggle to pay bills and feed their kids. Nothing I do in this space has anything to do with money, but this lawsuit, it does.

And it should because people like Usona Symposia. Promega psychedelics today. That’s the only way they will learn. The case was initially dismissed on that Antis Slapp defense, but has remained in appeals court since 2024. The church ofs Methin is still around today under the Church of Sacred Synthesis name.

Still sellings Methin on their website, as well as products like five M-E-O-D-M-T, nasal Spray and Light Wands, and an upcoming cacao product as sacraments. Greg Lake, who was featured heavily in this video and who was a co-founder of the church no longer appears in leadership. And that’s gonna kinda wrap this Postscript editor’s note on the Church of Sila Methane and Martin Ball.

Thanks for bearing with me here. We thought it was important to cue the audience into some of these past smear campaigns that have been run against us and the nature of the misinformation that had been spreading about our organization even prior to all of this Hamilton Morris FDA nonsense.

Normie: And to just clarify how this works, the Church of Silo Methin sued UNA and then sued all anyone who had commented on that in a publication Una, since they were the biggest players in that, they offered to defend everybody on that.

And, and Hamilton knows this ’cause he was on that, he withdrew from that eventually. And, and I don’t, I don’t have, I, I don’t know why he wasn’t on the final thing. I don’t know if he worked out something with Greg Lake from the Church of Settlement with Oxon. I’m not sure. But this conspiracy theory, uh, that symposia was funded or supported by you, Sono, if.

We could have withdrawn from that, that lawsuit that would require us petitioning the courts and everything. And then getting our own separate legal representation. Now, the legal bills in that case, uh, the Church of Asylum Meth, and they were hit with an anti slapp. I’m not gonna get into all of that, but it, it’s, it’s essentially to prevent, um, the chilling of free speech from publications and whatnot.

And so they were hit with an antis slapp. And they, they lost that case and then they had to, the judgment against them was, uh, to pay the lawyers’ fees. We never saw any of the money. None of the, none of the public publishers saw any of the money. So essentially, Usona and Bill Linton step in. They defended everybody.

They paid for the legal team. They got the judgment in their favor. And that case the last I checked, was in in appeal right now. So spinning that out into that we’re secretly funded by Usona. Hamilton knows that’s a lie. He knows that that wasn’t true. He was dealing with the legal teams on his own privately.

So it’s just complete bullshit.

Russell: So yeah, we’ve talked through some of the details around. This game of telephone that led to Hamilton claiming that were funded by Una or something along those lines. The next round of clips we have, we’re gonna start with Hamilton describing a situation between George Sarlo and Vicki Doula.

George Sarlo being a major psychedelic funder. Vicki Doula being a board member of Maps. The two of them were involved. You’ll hear Hamilton describe it, and then we can make some clarifications afterward. He started his sort of round of conspiracies about us regarding this. Sarlo providing us money to tank an MDMA application and then gets into the SA funding after that.

So we’re gonna start by discussing some of the Sarlo funding claims, and then we’ll jump back into his claims around us being funded by this pharmaceutical company, Ana. So this first clip is gonna be about the Sarlo Foundation.

Normie: And so, by the way, this next clip is such a fire hose of bullshit. We’re gonna have to pause it multiple times to address all of the just like raging conspiracy theories that Hamilton is about to share with Andrew and his audience.

Andrew Callaghan: So the stoner theory here is like, oh fuck this corporation who, who stopped MDMA from being legal, from being legalized? That’s just like big pharma and the Sackler family and the SSRI lobby, like trying to stop acid from healing the world, bro, MDMA, obviously we know it’s not that simple.

Hamilton Morris: Yeah.

Andrew Callaghan: So what is the deeper agenda of, of the, the other side?

Hamilton Morris: There’s multiple agendas. And the deeper agenda is, is a complicated story, but it’s because a very rich Holocaust survivor was befriended by a board member of Maps who gave him MDMA. He had a cathartic release of his emotional trauma related to surviving the Holocaust. Decided to leave his fortune to maps his estranged daughter.

Susie was horrified that she was going to lose part of her inheritance and then funded. The opposition campaign.

Pace: A Pause it. Pause it. If we could pause it. Actually on that, uh, Olivia Goldhill piece, I think it’s worth pointing out because this is an interesting dynamic between Andrew and Hamilton and, um, speaks to both of their.

A literacy on this topic that they’re presenting to their audience. You know, Olivia Gold Hill’s piece on George Sarlo and the elder abuse that he endured, allegedly from Vicki Dulai, who is now the board chair and treasurer of Maps. That this relationship was core to the facilitation of vast sums of money being committed to maps, projects and other, other sort of things that, um, that were directed by, by Ms.

Ulai. Now, the thing is, is that this is a good piece that if either of them really thought about it, I don’t think Hamilton had much, uh, say in the editing choices at Channel five. Putting it in front of the audience is giving them the information to not believe anything that they’re saying right here.

Like that is a very concerning article of a a sorted stain. On the, the behavior of, of maps in their current, uh, organizational structure, they would be involved in any, anything like that is, is wild. But it, it represents a kind of contempt for their audience because here right in front of you is the thing that they’re utterly misrepresenting.

Russell: Yeah. And for anyone who’s new to this situation, who ha should go read this article. If you’re not familiar with the psychedelic space, the Mul Maps is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. They were the nonprofit who started in the eighties trying to take MDMA through clinical trials, spun themselves off into LICOs Pharmaceuticals, and that’s what we were talking about up top as the FDA application that was rejected.

Normie: Yeah. And everybody who’s aware of this story this whole time, like. Kind of, you know, privately has been like, what is Hamilton even doing with this? Anyone, anyone who understands what happened to George Charlow is like, understands that this is really dirty, really gnarly, and he’s just bringing more attention.

To what actually happened in the abuse, in the predatory behaviors that the psychedelic industry, the funders, the investors, George Sarlo had a lot of money and he attracted a lot of maps. The Maps orbit, the Maps network, he, they were attracted to him, and it wasn’t just. Like a lot of abuse that occurred because he had money, and for him to just dismiss this, it’s, it’s really apparent to me that he either has not read or familiarized himself with this story, or he doesn’t give a fuck about it at all, because the behavior, those could be trues that are in it are horrific.

Russell: Yeah. Had he familiarized himself with the story, it’s the, the major claims revolve around the fact that George. As an aging man had like memory issues and Vicki was pumping him full of psychedelic drugs. Not just MDMA, but ketamine regimens. All, all this stuff. At the time that he was donating, I think over a million dollars to maps over multiple years, and these behaviors were concerning enough that the conservator of George Star’s estate sued Vicki July for elder abuse, which Hamilton completely mischaracterizes in what he puts forward here about Susie Sarlo.

And he’s also completely projecting an assumption about the Sarlo family’s views on maps or MDMA or anything along those lines in general.

Andrew Callaghan: Oops. That’s what happened, and that’s why MDMA was banned from being legalized.

Hamilton Morris: That’s a potential major reason. Yes.

Andrew Callaghan: So symposia is a useless group of paid activists trying to throw a wrench in the game for no reason.

Hamilton Morris: Yes.

Andrew Callaghan: What’s their reason? Just money.

Hamilton Morris: Uh, to prevent sexual abuse would be, no, no,

Andrew Callaghan: that’s a smoke screen.

Hamilton Morris: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What is there real reason they got paid? Reportedly, we can censor this, but reportedly $185,000 by Susie Sarlo.

Russell: I kind of think we should pause it here. I. I just want to say from a journalistic standpoint, what was that like?

Right. The, the idea that Andrew acting in the role of a journalist here describes us as a useless group of paid activists trying to throw a wrench in the game for no reason. What journalist would say that without contacting the source, without anything,

Neşe: with a real journalist that would pique their spidey senses to say like.

That doesn’t sound, that doesn’t sound realistic. Maybe I should look into this further, but that’s, yeah, that doesn’t happen.

Normie: What’s kind of funny is in, in, in all of this media circus that Hamilton has been doing when he did the vice episode with Shane Smith, like Shane was one of the guys that was like, what did he say?

Something like, oh, I’d be really interested in what their side of the story was or what they have to, to say about this. What’s the other side of the story? 185 grand

Hamilton Morris: doesn’t seem like enough. Well, maybe not for you.

Normie: Andrew. Doesn’t even

Pace: real basic question.

Normie: There’s no, it, it’s just, it’s just absolutely.

Pace: Of course, Shane Smith, um, you know, who ran.

An, a media empire also does not answer his own question, which he’s fully capable of doing. There’s a lot of bad actors here.

Normie: It’s just very bizarre to claim that we are doing the bidding of our, of our donors or we’re doing this because this was, we were getting paid to, to do this like. We were doing this regardless if we get a donation or not.

Yes. Anyone that knows us understands this, so it, it’s just really goofy.

Neşe: Yeah. And so just as a point of fact, we did receive a donation for, from the Sarlo Charitable Trust for our harm reduction nonprofit, but that was not for. Targeting the FDA hearings and the Sarlo Foundation has funded a broad swath of harm reduction efforts in the field with an eye towards making the field safer, not for destroying it.

And my, my first communications with the foundation only occurred after. Our, uh, citizen petition was already written, so we were already, we already had developed our, our plan for the civic engagement organizing to go forward and present our concerns at the FDA before we ever received funding and symposia operated on a purely.

Volunteer basis before that where we had some, um, we had some Patreon money coming in that helped keep the lights on and keep our website up, but we were not making any money. We do this work because we understand the seriousness of. The field moving forward without addressing the, the, the problems that are going on and trying to make this field less dangerous for people to enter into.

Normie: And just for anyone really not familiar with, like how this space is funded, if there’s a money geyser that exists in this space, and if we got along with, if we just wanted money from this and we went with the program. There’s endless, you know, Kimball Musk, David Bronner, PSFC money out there. You just gotta get in line with the program and like it, it’s Charlatan V out there.

So as long as you just come up with some nonsense course or say the right things to the donors, or tell Graham Boyd who runs PSFC, that you are in alignment with his views for the psychedelic revolution. PSC, you will get funded

Neşe: PFC being the psychedelic science. Uh, funded collaborative that we wrote about in the psychedelic

syndicate.

Neşe: Yeah.

Pace: A group. Yeah.

Normie: Yeah. They’re the groups that’s, uh, the group of, uh, financiers behind Maps and most of the university programs in the smaller nonprofits and all of the, uh, ballot initiatives, um, in Oregon, Colorado, Massachusetts, and legislation in California.

Russell: You can read about those PSFC. And so much more in our psychedelic syndicate reporting where we meticulously detail their influence on the psychedelic field.

Normie: Alright, let’s get back to the clip.

Hamilton Morris: And that’s not including the money that Bob Ja paid them while he was part of the board of directors of Usona. So, and that’s just what I know about,

Normie: I gotta pause this quickly. Daily, um, uh, six to seven years ago, uh, unsolicited, Bob Jesse donated $500. I think two times to symposia.

So that’s the basis of this, again, this like ridiculous claim that we’re funded by who? Whatever he is saying, it’s not

Hamilton Morris: from people telling me it’s possible. There was more.

Andrew Callaghan: And why did Susie Sarlo pay them?

Hamilton Morris: Because. She wanted to get revenge on maps because she lost a portion of her inheritance.

Andrew Callaghan: She is the sister or daughter of the Holocaust.

Robert? Yes.

Hamilton Morris: Yeah, yeah,

yeah,

Andrew Callaghan: yeah. Oh my God.

Hamilton Morris: Yeah.

Normie: Oh my God. Like, and just,

he

Russell: can’t even, so moving like Andrew’s, Andrew’s veracity here, he just can’t even keep straight Who Susie Sarlo is.

Normie: This is like two conspiracy theorists talking to one another right now.

Andrew Callaghan: Wow. Yeah, so this has nothing to do with anything but a personal vendetta.

And they’re using identity politics on a grassroots paid activist level. To prohibit the rival pharmaceutical organization from getting legal MDMA approved so that she can have a better chance at getting her settlement in the future?

Hamilton Morris: Yeah. I don’t think she’s even getting that money, but it’s very close.

I don’t think she’s even getting the money. I think it’s just a personal vendetta at this point. I don’t think she’s getting the money that she donated to maps back, although they did create some kind of civil lawsuit for elder abuse, claiming that they’d given him drugs and that he was. Uh, had Alzheimer’s disease and couldn’t consent to consuming the drugs or giving this money to maps.

I actually met the woman who is accused of elder abuse at the MAPS conference, and she seemed like a nice lady to me.

Andrew Callaghan: There’s no George Soros involvement?

Hamilton Morris: No. Just one crazy lady and one pharmaceutical company, USona.

Pace: So this is Hamilton’s journalism and Callahan’s journalism on full display. You know, Hamilton says, I met the person accused of, uh, you know, major.

Abuse and, you know, exploitation. She seemed like a nice lady to me. And that is good enough for the both of them.

Neşe: Well, and it’s not, it’s not just about them there. I mean that’s a lot how a lot of the psychedelic industry works where, you know, they’ve really glossed over that, not able to consent and given a bunch of drugs moment where it’s like, you know, that’s a big theme throughout all of the work that we’re being targeted for, for doing is calling out when people are.

Put in situations where they’re not able to consent to what’s going on. Um, so the fact that they don’t care about that and the fact that they go into this, you know, vibes based assessment of who, you know, the most charismatic people in the room get the most credibility, like it’s more systemic than just them.

Russell: Yeah. So that’s sort of the basis of what Hamilton has been spreading about us. Since the FDA Adcom stuff, what came during this interview specifically? That was a level that he hadn’t gone to yet was all the stuff about us. A funding. So the next couple of clips are focused specifically on that UA funding, which Normie emphasized was something like maybe $500 or

Normie: it wasn’t us a funding.

It was, like I said, it was Bob Jesse’s, I think six plus years ago, Dean, 2020 personal donations. It was a personal donation for $500. Yeah, I he, he did it maybe once or twice

Russell: when we had the initial conversation for these recordings. We were fairly sure that Jesse had been responsible for two donations in the past that were somewhere below a thousand dollars in total.

After we had the conversation, we went back and checked the details and the specifics are that we received two donations at the recommendation of Bob Jesse from the San Francisco Foundation for a total of $700.

Normie: And then that combined with the silo, meth and defense to which Yu Sona provided for everyone.

This has been spun up into this conspiracy narrative that we’re, this is a, a, a source of funding for us.

Russell: And that’s where we’ll pick back up for part three.

Transcript created using Descript and may be subject to misspellings.

Russell: This is the first episode of a four-part conversation between our team discussing the many false claims made about us by Hamilton Morris on Andrew Callahan’s forecast. If you’re familiar with our content, chances are you’re familiar with Hamilton Morris, but in case you’re not up to date with your psychedelic influencers, or you miss that sweet spot of vice journalism between 2010 and 2020, it’ll definitely help to have a basic understanding of who Hamilton is.

He’s the son of renowned documentarian, Errol Morris, who is famous for documentaries like The Thin Blue Line and Fog of War. Hamilton’s father also has some of his own psychedelic bonafide, including the documentary miniseries Wormwood about government experimentation with psychedelics and the story of Joanna Harcourt Smith, Timothy Leary’s ex-partner in my psychedelic love story.

Hamilton Morris started his career following in his father’s footsteps as a documentarian working for Vice News. The media Empire would send him all around the world for his show, Hamilton’s Pharmacopia to discuss and try drugs on camera.

Hamilton Morris: Feel high or sort of a little bit dissociated.

Thank you very much. Oh, it’s coming over me.

Oh,

oh.

Russell: This earned him a spot as a fairly well known psychedelic influencer. His career with Vice ended in 2021 when he took up a position as a full-time consultant with Compass Pathways, the psychedelic pharmaceutical company. That was trying to patent and bring to market a psilocybin formulation. And during his time at Compass Pathways, he worked in the lab of Jason Wallick, which has had a hand in filing over 200 other psychedelic patent applications.

He has since left this position with Compass Pathways and now produces what can reasonably be described as pro-industry content. Feigning is journalism. To a community of about 5,000 paying members on Patreon and gives the occasional interview on the good old days of vice misinformation about Psymposia or occasionally appearing for media stunts like the Livestreamed Psilocybin Trip of Longevity Guru Bryan Johnson,

Host of Bryan Johnson Livestream: I guess Brian Harris.

So, so Hamilton, um, gosh, I don’t even know how to fully. Introduce you. I, I first, you know, got introduced to your work as a documentarian and, and Hamilton’s Pharmacopia. And then, and I think, I don’t know, I I was gonna ask you what exactly you’re doing these days. The last thing I read, I mean, I think you were actually working at a, at a company these days,

Hamilton Morris: I’m not doing it full-time anymore, so I made the documentary series.

Then switch to full-time chemistry, and now I am still doing some chemistry, but I make a podcast the Hamilton Morris Podcast about chemistry and psychedelics.

Russell: Now that you’re all caught up back to the task at hand, this episode will explore Hamilton’s longstanding fixation with us, the setup to his conversation with Andrew Calla.

Recent allegations from Hamilton about our involvement with the DEA and claims about our conduct at the FDA Advisory Committee Meeting. Part two of this conversation dives into previous smear campaigns against us around our reporting on Martin Ball and the Church of Seth Oxen, as well as false claims about who funds us and why.

Part three, we’ll continue the conversation about our funding and explore Hamilton’s wild claims about the company Sana. In part four, we’ll explore numerous attempts that Hamilton has made to attack the work integrity and character of the members of our team. Let’s dive in. Hi, I am Russell with the Psymposia podcast, and today I’m here with Pace Normy and NSHE to discuss Hamilton Morris’ recent interview on Andrew Callahan’s five.

We put out a recent primer video on this interview and Andrew Callahan’s journalism in general. But during that video, we said we would be doing a full rebuttal to the claims made during that interview. That’s what we’re here to do today as some context. We’ve been targeted for nearly two years since the FDA’s rejection of MDMA assisted therapy.

During the FDA approval process, we reported to the FDA on a number of unreported harms that occurred during the clinical trial process. These were later proven through FDA investigations. After presenting these, we were targeted kind of on a large scale basis by a lot of people in the psychedelic industry, a lot of the funders behind the Lycos trials.

This is all detailed in our psychedelic syndicate reporting, which you can find on our website, and kind of a main person pushing some of these theories about us was Hamilton Morris. He’s done. Over 13 YouTube interviews and Patreon podcasts to his audience on what amount to conspiracy theories about Psymposia.

Normie: Yeah, he’s been having just an, an absolute crash out, uh, for the last year or so. It’s an, it’s an obsession with us that he’s had I, at this point, we’ve like broken his brain.

Hamilton Morris: I haven’t really talked about Psymposia for maybe even one entire podcast, so I apologize.

Russell: Yeah. And he has been escalating his theories about us from.

Uh, talking about our funding to being funded by another pharmaceutical company to his most recent podcast that he put out, speculating on whether we’re DEA informants,

Pace: both, um, Andrew and Hamilton have. Talked at length about the value of their journalism, and we have not been contacted in any of these exchanges where, uh, wild claims that are easily disprovable, um, have been made and, you know, credulously amplified to their various audiences.

So in many ways, we’re here to address the quality of that journalism.

Russell: What we have next to kind of start this episode is a clip from that most recent podcast.

Hamilton Morris: On August 17th and 18th, 2024, Johns Hopkins University hosted a conference in conjunction with Oxford on psychedelic ethics that was attended by many people in the psychedelic community.

The conference was bound by Chatham House rule. Which means that people could discuss items that were discussed in the meeting but couldn’t attribute it to anyone. This put people who were attending in a difficult position because a certain person at this conference who technically could not be named, who was at Johns Hopkins, who cannot be named, announced their intention to out a list.

Of 12 underground MDMA therapists. Supposedly this unnamed person also said that they had acquired a gun to protect themselves from disgruntled veterans who might wish to get revenge on them. This claim was independently conveyed to me by multiple people. I was so horrified. When I learned this, that I immediately started doing everything I could to try to prevent the unnamed individual from going forward.

And as you can imagine, this spread like wildfire throughout the underground psychedelic community. I reached out to a respected elder who I imagine will wish to remain unnamed, who I thought was. The only person who could talk sense into Nhe to prevent this from happening. We’re now not talking about the conference anymore, so I’ve just incidentally moved on to using the name.

Apparently the elder tried to intervene and it was of no use. It was utterly horrifying, and to everyone who knew about it seemed like. Unspeakable psychedelic McCarthyism of the most literal type. Announcing that you have a list of people who you will publicly disgrace is textbook Joseph McCarthy Behavior.

It inspires fear, paranoia, distrust, and had the intended effect of putting everyone very much on edge.

Russell: So, uh, I just wanna say off the top, what a failure of the Chatham House rules at the point where he’s tossing that out on a podcast. Um, but Nhe, do you wanna respond to that since he called you out by name there and kind of discussed his intentions of what he’s been doing for the last year?

Neşe: Yeah, well, it was really interesting to, you know, hear about this podcast coming out because we, we knew that we had been. Targeted by on the sustained and obsessive campaign by Hamilton for, uh, it’s been o over a year and a half now. Uh, with this, you know, MDMA, uh, assisted therapy specific focus, people would ask me, why is he so?

I like this with you guys. Like what happened? Yeah, like where does this obsession come from? And I, maybe this is a good place to mention the Wonderland situation ’cause I think, you know, this dislike of us proceeded the specific FDA circumstances, but it definitely, uh, accelerated to quite a large extent after that happened last or in 20 20, 24.

Russell: And in particular, he has been assaulting your and pace’s work. For a long time in at the Wonder Band thing, which will come up in some later clips. He specifically talks about

Andrew Callaghan: your work.

Pace: Yeah, back in 2022, um, was the first Wonderland interaction.

Russell: Yeah. The gist, which will come up later is essentially that in 2022, we were banned from a conference called Wonderland Miami that none of us had planned to even attend, and Hamilton Morris took to stage to basically mischaracterize a bunch of our research and reporting.

Pace: Um, it was pretty one-sided. Um, we, we do have a pretty full, um, video on that that people can revisit if they’re interested. Um, Hamilton did not come out of that situation looking. Very good at all. And I think that fueled, um, a lot of, sort of impotent rage towards us. And then the lycos, um, failure at FDA happened, um, which we were broadly scapegoated for.

Neşe: So, so I knew that he didn’t like us from that point. And it, it, it is worth mentioning as well though, that we did move in parallel circles years ago and we’re not. Always on this like terrible footing, uh, with him or, or viewed, viewed poorly by him. I, many years ago, co-chaired a panel at an art gallery in New York City with him.

So we had personal interactions in the past that were not hostile the way things have been recently. But what was helpful to, at least, what was helpful to hear about this most recent podcast was an actual. Motive for this sustained, targeted, har, essentially harassment of us over this long period of time, since 2024 as regards to the MDMA clinical trials.

And he’s very explicit in this podcast about saying that he is doing everything that he can to prevent. Me from communicating crimes to federal agencies, which is a bizarre thing to admit on a podcast. And just as some additional context about that, I’ve been very open about the fact that I presented to the FDA.

With the hope of getting through to investigators. I was in touch with sources that had experienced things of concern to public health, and some of those things were sensitive and they did not want it to be public. So I came forward explicitly trying to get through to investigators who could look into this, and there was a, an article in the Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2024.

That discussed how FDA investigators had reached out to me and I, I participated in a multi-agency investigation and ultimately the DEA was involved, but that’s because they were investigating clinical trials and clinical trials rely on DEA authorization. They were one of the federal agencies that participated in those conversations.

So none of this has been a secret. It has been very explicit the entire time, and yet Hamilton is warping it in a way to direct hate and justify retaliation against us.

Russell: And to, to be clear, the way he’s framing the involvement in a multi-agency investigation is that he’s, he’s essentially operating on rumors.

That we are taking all of our tips, emails and like relaying them to the DEA and stuff like that, which is completely false and we, that is not something we’ve ever done.

Neşe: The issues that we were in communication with those agencies about we’re about people being harmed. There was harm We are not talking about, we’re not reporting people’s drug use to get people in trouble the way that he is representing it.

The other significant thing about Hamilton’s admission that he’s been on this intimidation campaign and harassment campaign against us and me specifically, is that he has also acknowledged being a major source. For both the New York Times article and the Wired article, um, that have talked about Psymposia and been characterized, um, by others as hit pieces.

And it’s significant. I think that there are claims published in the New York Times article like that we have attacked veterans or that we have attacked researchers, psychedelic researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Neither of which are true. It’s completely fabricated and yet published in the paper of record and when those types of falsehoods are published in the paper of record and major newspapers.

It’s a sign that there are very powerful forces at work in trying to advance a, a certain narrative.

Pace: I mean, Hamilton being a major source for these publications Sure does explain, uh, you know, misinformation, taking root,

Neşe: his characterization of that conference.

Hamilton Morris: A certain person at this conference announced their intention to out a list of 12 underground MDMA therapists.

Neşe: Is completely false. So Pace was there as well. And can say, I I did not, I can confirm

Pace: big if true,

Neşe: not true. Big if true. And it’s so, it’s so fascinating though, ’cause it’s like, oh, this completely made up story has justified his, his harassment and he’s so, he wasn’t there about it.

Pace: He just wasn’t there. I was.

You were, you know, I think it’s important to address this specific claim. You know, that there was a, a dozen or more people that you were hell bent on threatening the community, or specifically outing or doxing. Um, that was something that was, you know, presented to me through my own networks. And I was like, what?

Because that, that’s just so far from our priorities and interests and, and what we do at Psymposia, that it was absurd and I, it literally took me a little while to have any sense of, of what game, of

Neşe: what they were talking

Pace: about could have gotten someone to that place.

Neşe: Yeah. Well it’s, it’s interesting ’cause it’s like we, we’ve been, we’ve never like run to the DEA about our enemies.

Like that just has never happened.

Russell: We’ve been targeted by people doing pretty shady underground stuff before, uh, to the point where we’ve been sued by people we’ve reported on for what amounts to like a one star review on Yelp. Essentially, uh, the church ofs Methin sued us and we never went to the DEA about them

Pace: if we were interested in putting drug users or even distributors, you know, in jail.

Um, when one of those very prominent. International Drug distributors, uh, is suing us for defamation for what amounted to like a single star Google Review about the quality and, and, you know, purity of their, their product. Uh, you know, that was found to not have any, uh, mythical asylum methin. This is, this is actually something that Hamilton weighed in on and uh, was also a co-defendant.

The asylum, the Church of Asylum, Methin later Sacred Synthesis, uh, you know, sued for, for defamation, for reporting chemical analysis. You know, and, and so if, if, if it was our interest to somehow retaliate, uh, against people that we, we didn’t like, if it was our MO to go to dropping a dime on them.

Normie: Yeah. You think we would’ve done that when we were sued for a hundred million dollars?

Right?

Russell: Yeah. There was no intention of, Hey, we’re gonna go narc on you to the DEA. It’s just they oversee schedule one substance, clinical trials and things like that.

Neşe: There is a, there is a, a longstanding trope in the psychedelic community of. The evil DEA informant as a type of person that everyone ostracizes.

And so Hamilton, I would argue, is very intentionally invoking that historical cultural connotation and using it to desperately try to cleave us away. From, um, c, C community re relevance.

Pace: This is exactly what’s happening. And I mean, the thing is, is that we do have to back up for a second and talk about, you know, the quality of the clinical trials.

It was rejected by the FDA for a variety of reasons that you can go read about in the complete response letter and the kinds of things that were. Happening in those trials were enough to, you know, cause doubt about the quality of the data, about the reliability of, of those data, and talking about that kind of, uh.

Th those kinds of activities to, uh, essentially regulators who are responsible for evaluating quality of clinical trials to, you know, sign off on a experimental protocol, a treatment protocol that will be then implemented at the national scale. This is not the same as like talking to the local police about your friend’s jansport full of weed.

It’s just not, these aren’t, it’s a false equivalency.

Neşe: When it’s also, it’s like my job as someone who studies like psychedelic bioethics, that if I in my research identify a flaw in a treatment that is on the cusp of mainstream approval, it is my job to say, you know, I have discovered this thing that I think we need to address in order to prevent these harms from scaling.

There is nothing controversial or sinister about doing so.

Pace: I mean, Psymposia is a watchdog. We are a research organization. We are often the people who receive, uh, stories of misconduct in both sort of the business world and the underground world, including inclusive of the world of FDA clinical trials.

We’re often people who are willing to hop on a call and listen to. These accounts from people who have otherwise been, you know, shut out or shut down, um, by multiple parties. And so a lot of this is documented in previous work that symposiums put out through a variety of formats and ultimately the kinds of things that Nhe was talking about with investigators.

These sorts of things were independently found in the FDA’s own postmortem of these clinical trials and this new drug application. They found these adverse events. When they looked and they said that they are ordering a full, a full review, uh, with the expectation that more will be found.

Neşe: Hamilton’s admission about why he’s been targeting us also explains why the narrative that Andrew, uh, put on his, you know, uh, five cast is so false and so extreme, and that ultimately means that.

Andrew Callahan, while claiming to be this truth telling journalist is amplifying a retaliation campaign against people who were speaking up in the interest of. Public health and safety.

Russell: Yeah, and to that point, our involvement, pre-approval or disapproval of lycos therapy application has been framed as this act of corruption that we somehow colluded with icer, this agency that gave it a bad review that we colluded with the FDA adcom, the advisory committee.

And in reality, what we did was an act of like civic engagement in a time where that is hugely discouraged. Public civic engagement is like, I mean hopefully it’s ramping up right now, but has been at an all time low. Is discouraged, is almost like criminalized in this era.

Freedom

Pace: of speech is under attack right now.

Freedom of speech.

Russell: Yeah, and we participated in a public process. What did we do? Nhe and PACE were involved in writing a petition that expanded the ad comms public comment period, which benefited us to be able to speak, but also a whole bunch of people that were pro MDMA pro Lycos. As well to be able to speak in this Adcom period.

We participated in the process with three minute. Talks to the advisory committee and we participated in a bunch of civic projects that none of this was corrupt. None of it was the way that they’re framing it.

Neşe: And, and there were three Psymposia members that were participating, but we were not part participating as Psymposia.

I was. Presenting my research that I’ve carried out for years at Universities PACE as well, describing university research. And Russ was talking about his journalism across multiple outlets, including truth digs. So we were not there representing Psymposia whatsoever, and there were only three of us.

Russell: And the reason we’re stressing this is because the number of people affiliated with Psymposia who participated in the advisory committee meeting.

Has been inflated and misreported by numerous sources since the meeting took place. First, the documentary filmmaker, NAND Molik, put out a short film associating numerous people with our organization. As undisclosed Psymposia activists, this number was then misreported in the New York Times, and the paper has refused to make any corrections.

The incorrect number has subsequently stuck in our Wikipedia page, even though it has been correctly reported in other sources and outlets since the original misreporting.

Pace: Right, like my day job is, uh, you know, in part teaching about psychedelics to college students, uh, a demographic that is, you know, among the most likely to have their first psychedelic experience.

What this weekend and. You know, harm reduction and presenting clearly in an evidence backed manner, the benefits, potential, and drawbacks or harms risks, potential of these substances is my duty. And introducing myself as being affiliated with the university that I am actually affiliated with, was met with claims that I am misrepresenting, uh, myself or, or that we all concealed our relationship with each other or with, uh, Psymposia.

And none of this was something that we, a, had a, like a duty, uh, legally or otherwise morally to report. And second of all, as we detail all of this. In the, the psychedelic syndicate with, you know, at adequate sourcing, uh, for the, for the topic.

Neşe: Adequate is an understatement,

Pace: right?

Neşe: Copious, copious

Pace: evidence.

Copious more than you might want to know. Um, but I mean, we, we also put out a press release before, uh, the FDA advisory committee even met, announcing that

Andrew Callaghan: we

Pace: were gonna be meeting. It was that a federal agency responded to a citizen petition at all, in which we announced before. The entire thing began that we would be participating in our relationship with Psymposia.

Uh, it was picked up by ap. What do you do? Okay.

Russell: Another claim about the advisory committee meeting that is consistently brought up by people like Hamilton is that Nhe supposedly lied to the FDA about a clinical trial therapist who was involved in the maps MDMA trials

Hamilton Morris: and was outed for lying to the FDA to serious crime about lying to the FDA, or at the very least.

Dramatically manipulating the FDA because there was clear misrepresentation and there was, there were clear conflicts of interest among many of the critics. And they were lying

Russell: in Morris’ Telling Nhe quoted a passage from an unrelated text about ketamine therapy.

Neşe: In this book, Veronica Gold Akos supervisor, trainer, and phase three therapist describes pinning down a patient as their distress escalated to the point of shouting, quote, go away, get your effing hands away from me.

End, but gold did not stop. As demonstrated by the the many Lycos therapists who endorse this abusive practice. This is an accepted component of the intervention that Lycos presented to this committee as necessary for positive patient outcomes.

Russell: But the quote was actually directly relevant to the MDMA clinical trials.

Neşe: Two of its three editors will Lycos trainers and phase three therapists, and it was endorsed by prominent members of Lycos Inner Circle,

Russell: although the quote was describing a ketamine therapy session. By Veronica Gold, a Maps Lycos therapist in her private practice, gold has acknowledged that these practices that Nshe described were drawn directly from the MDMA clinical trial protocol.

Neşe: Dolin admits that Lycos entire therapeutic approach is based on Stanislav Gros spiritual teachings.

Veronika Gold: So in the in, in the MDMA clinical trials, we use more of the same body work as, as Stan, uh, taught.

Neşe: Although this specific intervention isn’t in any of the briefing documents that were submitted to the committee.

It is associated with identifiable patterns of harm across lycos clinical trials

Russell: based on a belief that trauma can be healed by re-experiencing the traumatic event. The MDMA protocol allowed therapists to physically reenact assaults while the patient was in an altered state and begging for it to stop.

Other researchers had missed this fact. Since the protocol described these dangerous practices in euphemistic terms, few people were aware that they were even occurring. At the time of the FDA meeting, NHE was in direct contact with a patient of Veronica Gold’s from the phase 3M DMA clinical trials. And these methods had already enabled an on-camera abuse of another clinical trial participant.

In phase two, the pharmaceutical company, Lycos Therapeutics, or its predecessor maps, had never acknowledged the connection between their practices and the assaults on camera. This was the point, being stressed during the FDA’s advisory Committee meeting.

Neşe: This is yet another anti-intellectual kind of argument that, uh, Hamilton’s been making in the sense that I have very extensively explained that I did not lie to the FDA Board of Bioethicists has investigated claims that I was wrong and, and found my argument to be valid and important to the extent that they gave me another opportunity to go further into my analysis.

It’s a mischaracterization that people who haven’t read deeply into the situation don’t understand what’s actually been said. It doesn’t make sense that a top bioethics journal would publish my, my work about this matter in particular if it was just made up and false.

Pace: Yeah, ridiculous. Like, uh, these are people who actually evaluate claims, not vibes based like podcasters, uh, with a ax to grind like it’s, uh, yeah.

Next.

Normie: We’re dealing with a super culty new age, MDMA pharmaceutical company. There’s absolutely no reason to lie to the FDA, like, it’s right, not ne it’s unnecessary,

Neşe: but this, this is something that like, you know, no matter what we did. They would’ve found something to say that, that we were ill illegitimate for doing.

Like, this is not about us in our behavior. This is about, the outcome was different than a lot of people wanted and a lot of people are behaving like children. As a result of that. There,

Normie: there was an absolute necessity for there to be a scapegoat. They had to have that. They had ra, they had spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars and they, and maps that crew.

Got so deep in bed with Silicon Valley, various investors, it was so deeply shocking and embarrassing what happened to them. There was an absolute necessity from a PR perspective to save their own asses, to cast blame, to distract and say it was all Psymposia and this. This rolled out in a public relations campaign.

It picked up steam Hamilton Morris was. Only too happy to like join in on that and to push that,

Russell: we extensively detail this PR campaign in a chapter of our psychedelic syndicate report called Flood the Zone. In this chapter, we review a number of emails that were leaked to us from people involved in this campaign.

For instance, Robin Thomas, who is involved with the psychedelic communications hub notes. Here I think a plan needs to include the coordination of the Com firm’s breakwater, who works with Lycos Therapeutics. Precision who works with the psychedelic science funders, collaborative, vitamin D, who works with healing, breakthrough and as much specificity as possible in the holding statements.

Here you can see another email that was leaked to us that was sent by the PR firm, vitamin D, who Robin mentions in that last email. This was sent out to journalists with an open letter from Heroic Hearts and Healing Breakthroughs, who the firm was representing. Which wildly mischaracterizes us and our intentions.

And in this video that was leaked to us of a meeting with the psychedelic communications hub who was part of this coordinated campaign, and you can hear them discussing the coordination.

Psychedelic Communication Hub Leaked Audio: Different folks have been hired for different, um, lanes of work, different, different areas of focus that the communications firms are aware of one another’s areas of focus, and that there is.

Um, intention for those folks to be, um, coordinated and each, as I said, each firm has their own charge and that we are in coordination.

Russell: And what’s been really disturbing is that what’s been focused on, by wired, by New York Times, and especially by Hamilton Morris, is the fact that we did. Hire the help of a PR firm in the midst of all these attacks on us from this coordinated campaign to help get our perspective out there around the FDA clinical trials and to help defend ourselves in this wave of misinformation.

What they did was help us write a few statements in response to some of these attacks and put out a few emails promoting our perspectives around these trials, and instead of contextualizing our reaching out to a PR firm for support in this time while we were being attacked. The New York Times has characterized it this way.

Writing concerns about the organization, Psymposias ability to disrupt the field have mounted in recent months after a public relations firm began amplifying Psymposias and Dr. DEOs allegations of malpractice against Leicas Wired S spotlighted. The fact that the group, us commissioned a PR firm without any kind of context that.

The industry had a coordinated campaign that was attacking us, and Hamilton multiple times went on his podcast To paint this in the most conspiratorial light possible, speculating on how specifically Nhe had the funding to hire a PR firm.

Hamilton Morris: She’s represented by an expensive PR agency. Just for some context, I can’t afford a PR agency.

I’ve never had a PR agent in my entire life. How the fuck does Nhe have a PR agent? Uh, let me give you a hint. Someone is paying for it. She’s not paying out of pocket for herself to have a PR agent to publicize the fact that she lied to the FDA. How dumb does she think everybody is? And there’s more, oh my God, there’s more.

There’s so much more, I don’t wanna say this in an uh, kind of Psymposia way, like more evidence will come out just you eight. Just you eight. The worst is yet to come.

Russell: So all of this is to say that there’s just been an enormous amount of attention spent on the fact that we briefly hired PR help. In the midst of being attacked by an industry funded, coordinated PR campaign on behalf of funders and organizations that wanted to see MDMA approved against scientific evidence.

Yeah, across multiple platforms. Hamilton has laid out all of his theories about us and Andrew Callahan’s Channel five platform gave him one of the biggest platforms to date to spread this misinformation. And I think the next clip we have of Andrew introducing their interview together gives a very clear picture of the narrative that they wanted to spread.

Um, so we can jump into that. Uh, Andrew describing this interview

Andrew Callaghan: today, we’re sitting down with the illustrious Hamilton Morris, as you guys have seen, and we’re gonna discuss many complicated and intricate things before ultimately diving into how and why a paid activist group called Psymposia, who were funded by an allegedly nefarious pharmaceutical company called Ussna, successfully interfered with the FDA’s plans to legalize MDMA after a series of highly successful clinical trials, in which it was proven that MDMA helped.

Many patients, including US Army veterans, cope and heal from their PTSD anxiety and depression.

Russell: All right. We are here right now with an

Andrew Callaghan: extremely special guest, Mr. Hamilton Morris, thank you so much for joining the five test today. Thank you for having me. For having me. We’re gonna get into some super spicy, potentially lawsuit inducing conversation.

Pace: I think it’s really apt that, um, this introduction is, uh, you know, Andrew Callahan in a, a sports jersey because he’s talking about these pharmaceutical companies because, you know, as Hamilton goes into, he’s, uh, had, uh, attachment to Compass as if they are, you know, competing sports teams where one is villainized and the other is given a pass.

Normie: I love, I just love how he says allegedly. He, he’s, Andrew comes in possession of all of this, this, this trove of controversy, and, and he frames it, that it’s potentially lawsuit inducing. Allegedly. Allegedly. And, and no contact. If you came into possession of this secret, wouldn’t you like reach out to them as a journalist?

Wouldn’t you reach out to them to get a comment, to try to find out like, what’s going on here? Nothing. ’cause that wasn’t the point. The point was attention. Uh, the point was he got Hamilton on there and just, just trusts everything. It, it’s his hero. So

Neşe: we’d also been very like, you know, demonized and so I’m sure there’s also an aspect of like, don’t trust them.

Like they’ll just lie to you. They’ll try to manipulate you like that. That has been happening a lot. Where it’s like we’re represented as like not worth engaging with. As we mentioned at the outset of this video, we could have easily refuted many of the claims that come up. And one of the reasons we wanted to put this together, this video today, is to show what we were able.

Back then to show Andrew, had he reached out responsibly to us,

Pace: it would’ve made for a much more interesting video actually, um, the kind of journalism that probably would’ve guarded a significant audience for Andrew, had he done it, but he’s not that kind of journalist.

Russell: This interview with Andrew was an escalation for Hamilton in that Hamilton had been spreading a number of rumors about our funding.

He’d been involved as kind of a background source on these articles like we discussed. Um, but up until this point, I hadn’t heard the claim that we were funded by another pharmaceutical company. He had been discussing things about our funding by other people up until this point. But in this interview, he rolled out this whole new theory that we were funded by a pharmaceutical company called Usona, and that’s where we’ll jump back in for part two.