Two years in an underground MDMA lab, a conversation with MethylMan

Hello everybody, this is a fascinating discussion with a legend of underground MDMA synthesis, a character those well-versed in the hive may be familiar with named "Methalman". He's best known for a write-up that you can find online, I'll link to it, with the title "Reductive Amination of MDP2P with Aluminum Mercury Amalgam and Nitro Methane". And this happens to be the exact process for synthesizing MDMA that was featured in the Steve Gill MDMA episode in Season 2 of Formacopia. Not only that, I have a vivid memory of sitting in that clandestine MDMA lab and scrolling through the "Methalman" write-up on my phone, watching it be implemented down to the finest details, including the use of a coffee grinder to mill aluminum to a fine powder so that it could be better amalgamated during the reductive amination. The history of all these different techniques is very convoluted and difficult to trace. I actually thought that "Methalman" had created this, but then when I went back through it, I realized that it was "Methalman" modifying a process that was popularized by a different chemist named "Ritter", who was then popularizing a synthesis that I believe was first featured by strike in "Total Synthesis 2". And I imagine that strike was not the first person to employ, obviously he wasn't the first person to employ a whacker oxidation, but I don't think he was the first person to generate "Methalamine" in situ from Nitro Methane. And for those that don't know, I imagine that there's a number of people who are already maybe tuning out a little bit, but I would advise you to maybe not tune out because this is actually not as technical as it might sound. The big innovation here is that this eliminates the need for "Methalamine". Anyone who is watched breaking bad will be very much familiar with the fact that the acquisition of "Methalamine" was a central plot point in that show. It was exaggerated to some extent. I think a lot of chemists rolled their eyes at how this was elevated to an insurmountable task that required train heists in order to secure a supply. But there's a few other aspects of this conversation that I find very interesting. I'm going to keep this introduction brief. There's a certain selection bias in the way that stories about underground chemistry are told. We tend to hear big stories or dramatic stories. Most of the stories on this podcast are people who got in trouble with law enforcement went to prison and are speaking to me in the wake of that because they've effectively served their time and there's no longer any risk associated with discussing it. Many of the people who never got caught are reluctant to talk about it. Many of the people that like to talk about these things have some kind of extreme relationship with chemistry. One thing I really like about this conversation is that it's not that extreme. You have somebody who made a good bit of MDMA, but nothing ridiculous. He estimates a quantity that is somewhere between six and a half and 11 and a half kilos of MDMA. It's quite a lot by a normal person standards or whatever that means, but he was actually doing this on a somewhat small-ish scale. 18 grams per synthesis. One synthesis every 1.5 days for two years and was making a medium amount of money, $10,000 a month and never got caught, never harmed anyone to the best of his knowledge and was able to explore this fascinating chemistry disseminate what he learned on the hive and then left the United States, the statute of limitations expired, and he's talking to me about his experiences. I think this is wonderful. I think it's a really interesting story because you don't really hear stories like this ever. He discusses the impact of 9/11, the different ways that he would acquire chemicals using excuses like his mercuric chloride was being used in water analysis. The dangers associated with doing this type of chemistry, particularly in his bedroom where he was living. Another interesting fact is in the lab that I was filming in where they were using the methyl man synthesis that was also in the bedroom of the person who was doing the chemistry. Another interesting convergence. What is depicted in my show is almost exactly what is described in this interview with the exception that on my show, the oxidation of the iso saprol is being performed with performic acid, but it seems that methyl man was doing a whack oxidation. The final and maybe most interesting thing of all is that all of this is coming from somebody with no formal education in chemistry whatsoever. The conversation is actually very non-technical for the most part, and I think a lot of that is derived from the fact that methyl man is doing most of this entirely on the basis of experience, watching what causes things to heat up, what causes things to develop colored impurities. It's a purely empirical, non-theoretical relationship with synthesis that I always find fascinating to hear about. I hope you enjoy this beautiful historical discussion of underground MDMA chemistry. I hope you enjoyed this discussion with the great methyl man. I'm going to include his write-up that you can read for yourself. And there's a lot more coming out soon. I'm really delighted that you reached out to me because I'm familiar with your work. I actually filmed this whole demonstration of your synthesis. It's probably one of the most famous of the high-vehera syntheses oriented toward clandestine manufacture of MDMA. And I don't really know anything about your work other than this famous synthesis. So I would love to hear the story, your background, how you got into this, anything if you're willing. I'd love to start at the very beginning, how you got interested in chemistry and go way back. You are the man to share this with. I'll knock out the fanboy stuff super fast here. Obviously I'm a huge fan of your work. And I think it's extremely important what you've been doing in terms of journalism and just keeping keeping a hold on this kind of information, this Tychidel culture. Without your kind of efforts, metric could slip away. So, great job. Thank you. I appreciate that. So when I try to think of the very first actress that I had in Phychidelics, I have to think that I was influenced as a little kid. If I grew up in the hippie era, I was born in 1962. So when I stopped and think about it, I was surrounded by hippie people when I was just, you know, seven, eight, nine, ten years old. My older brothers were hippies too. So I had an injection of that culture into my forming mind, even at that age. So I don't somewhere in there, I think there must have been some openness to the Tychidelic experience that just kind of got absorbed. Childhood osmosis, I don't know, and so I remember being in high school and being extremely curious. Is the burning curiosity about this LSD thing I had been hearing about and actually went to, I remember going to a school, like a high school library to see what they might actually let high school kids read about that. And did find a couple of interesting books and they only fueled my curiosity, right? Because they were, the descriptions were very careful and very dramatic sounding of the Trips people had. So that only, you know, heightened my drive to, or my curiosity about these things. So that would have been when I was like 15 years old or something. And then you'll love this one. I do have a memory of reading a pamphlet when I was probably in 10th grade or something. So this would have been about 1977. The title was something like DMT, the Business Man's acid or the Business Man's trip. I think the title was DMT, the Business Man's trip. And it was actually an early attempt to give a DMT synthesis method, you know, a clandestine one, I think. - Oh wow. - That tore my memory down. It was just like a pen pays a little pamphlet or something. And I think I bought it in a hedgehog. I don't expect you to know about this 'cause you're a bit younger than me, but I thought you might find an interesting that it did see some kind of underground pamphlet in Southern California in like 1977. And that was really fascinating to read about what it seemed so beyond the pale. Like I'll never connect to that world, that just, you know, 'cause I was just like a 17 year old kid. So I was like thinking, I'll never meet people connected to that kind of thing, but it was, you know, deeply interesting at that time for me to read. - And you know, first, second, the experiences when I was in high school, which I will admit freely was probably way too young. I should have weighed in 'til I was more of an adult probably, but you know, when I was like 16, 17, I took my first couple of heads of acid or rubber. And they were very intriguing, but very sort of scary experiences because I made the class from steak of taking them alone. My first two acid experiences were taking it them home alone. Like I was some kind of scientist or researcher, you know. (laughs) And I had no one to share the experience with. So I went into, you know, some dark places. Even though this was, I'm sure this is a very weak acid we were talking about, we're, that I'm talking about because as you're probably aware from other interviews, at that time, like the late '70s, there was a lot of people making the most money they could off selling LSD by making the hits very weak. But it was still enough to rock my little teenage mind, you know. And so even though those were, first couple of experiences were scary, it wasn't long before I started taking it with friends and band mates and people like that, you know, so are, and I really changed the nature of the experience because I was with other people that were going through it. So it went from those first two being kind of scary to just absolute hilarity, you know, the first, the next several times with people, you know, you can imagine 17, 18 year old guys. I'm sure today they still cackle and laugh. I guess the next forward movement I could tell you about was around 1995 or so. I think it was when I had my first MDMA experience and felt like a spiritual epiphany. It was just very, it was, I was amazed that a drug that had amphetamine and the structure name could possibly feel like that, you know, I mean, and yet it did. And there again, I didn't have at first people to take it with. My curiosity was too powerful to make me, let me wait. So I just took it alone a couple times. And of course, MDMA alone is not scary. The way LSD was, but you know, the last few hours of it, last couple hours of it, you know, I found myself craving, obviously craving. Personal connection was somebody, some physical touch or even just talking to somebody, but it was like three in the morning and I was sitting there, you know, doing a button myself. So I got a taste of how powerful it was in making you want to connect with other people. So it was only a couple times by myself and I realized I had to share that experience with somewhere else. You know well how integral MDMA became in the dancing and the rave scene, right? And were you part of that? What were the circumstances of you trying MDMA? Well, the circumstances were, like I say, I was so after reading about it and hearing about it and having a couple of friends take it and say, "Oh, you got to try this." You know, that looked into the structure of the well, it's an epphetamine derivative. I don't really like speed. And my friend or two friends I was talking to, they were like, no, no, no, don't worry about that. It's not speed, just trust me. And so I didn't know at that time I was naive about chemistry so I didn't understand that a pretty simple alteration on one molecule can result in another molecule with very different propins. So I had my doubts going into it. And so I was just amazed where I took the first one. The effects that it had, a very hard opening. It was very, you know, for me it was very dramatic and I also realized, you know, those first couple trips I realized of this stuff is gonna be amazing for songwriting and it was, I actually got on my gear and started writing some stuff and it was incredible to write music on MDMA because what it did is took all the normal the usual sort of filters and self-doubt and stuff that artists can easily fall into and apply to themselves. MDMA, of course, just weeps those away for a few hours and you're just completely open with yourself. So it made songwriting incredibly different and sort of better experience. And ultimately I, you know, I couldn't, I was kind of naive at the time and I thought, you know, that was one of the things that led to me wanting to make kind of like a book of times apply that is I thought, I need this for songwriting because songwriting was like five times better with it. So I had this sort of naive vision of, well, I can just take this every week or two weeks and just do a lot of songwriting. But at that time I wasn't quite aware yet of how gelatarious the effects are if you keep on hunting the button. You know, if you do it too often, which is a huge mistake for homicologically, a lot of people made, but I learned pretty quick that you have to wait like at least a month. So I made a rule pretty quickly that, okay, I have to wait at least one month before I do this again because I did understand I had a basic understanding of the serotonin chemistry and stuff that I was reading about and that, you know, I didn't have to be told twice that if you abuse this stuff, you're not only gonna get high off it, but you're going to hurt yourself. So that, you know, I took that lesson immediately and was patient and waited, you know, wait a month and it would just be like what I was looking forward to. And, you know, before long I was making the arrangements with ladies to do it with me, you know, and that was, that was that when I realized that this is what this stuff is for. And this is true. So getting back to the dance and the rave question, I never did it in that setting. I did 2CB and a couple of other things in that setting, and I'm, but I never did MDMA in that setting. And I'm glad I didn't because I came to appreciate it and believe that it's real functions, real role was as a sort of a therapeutic agent. And just, like, I intuitive it even at the time. If you did this even with three people and my turn into a three sum of four people, my turn into just a orgy or whatever, just, you know, not out of lust, but just out of pure, you know, good energy or whatever sort of thought. Okay, the way to use this stuff properly is to be with one other person that you either already love. I get emotional just talking about this stuff. - Yeah. - Or somebody that you really want to get to know better. And so, you know, it was experiences I had the ladies that I wanted to get to know better were. It's really amazing. Even if it didn't result in a relationship that came out of that, there were still some beautiful, you know, experiences. So that was around making 95 in Southern California. And I knew it had instantly sort of knew it had changed me because I had a real, you know, tight ass for a father, you know, he was very hard, hard ass kind of guy. You know, I'm free, Bo Gart was his hero when he was growing up. So he was, you know, non-demonstrative and non-loving kind of father. I mean, you know, he loved in his own way, but, you know, just picture the typical, you know, kind of, and closed off hard ass dad. Well, that's when that's your model growing up, it's, you have a harder journey to open up spiritually, you know. So up until that time, I was, what was I, since these were 30, you know, I was in my early 30s and I still hadn't been open, you know, I still had my dad's armor that I had learned from him, you know. So after I think it was a, we received after the first MDMA or the second MDMA experience I had a really eye-opening thing happen, which was like two days after I had dose. And I felt like I'm, you know, pretty much back in baseline. I have to commercial was on TV. You something just some really contrived, stupid commercial with this trying to pull at your heartstrings, like a life insurance commercial or something that I would have laughed at before MDMA said, "That's so fake, oh my God." And I started tearing up looking at this commercial just because they were talking about something like, if you take care of the ones you love, you will never have to worry or something like that. So the insurance commercial and then here's started, you know, rolling down my face and I said, "Whoa, what the hell? What is happening to me?" You know, and you might think, well, that effect, you might see that effect, you know, for a few days after MDMA. And then it fades away, but you know, it turned me, something in me at that time, I changed me. It knocked off a whole bunch of plates of, you know, emotional and psychological armor. And everything that you're saying right now makes complete sense to me. I feel the same way. And I wonder why that impression is somewhat uncommon. I mean, I've even had experiences where I've been at a party and I've been talking to somebody else who's on MDMA. And I can tell that they're having this intensely emotional experience. And I think, why are you even wasting this right now? Talking to me, stranger at a party when you could be using this for something else, it seems like you have this very powerful moment and we are using it. for something that strikes me as sort of frivolous. And for me, the answer to that question is, you know, I was very interested in drugs and was aware of Alexander Schulgen and all this sort of stuff. But what do you think made you take these things a bit more seriously at the beginning and not fall into the more conventional patterns of use with these sorts of substances? Well, I think it was like I see that. Those first couple of MDMA experiences changed me. I could tell I had something, it had really moved something in me. I feel like it changed my neurochemistry in a subtle way that removed. And of course, this is an area of science that is still totally unexplored. And I'm talking about the neurochemistry of MDMA, which is quite well explored. I'm talking about the interface between potential alterations in neurochemistry and perceptions of psychological self-perceptions. You know, I feel there's still a lot of room to investigate that stuff. Something, you know, really knocked some of my armor off and I felt different. I felt like a warmer guy. And I had had friends and people tell me I was kind of a hard-ass, you know, which of course resonated with knowing my dad was a hard-ass. And I have, you know, I'm still, I am now and I think I still was then, but just an armored, armored then, but not now, but an empath. So being an empath and just kind of didn't know I was an empath back then, but knowing after the MDMA experience, knowing that some of my friends even thought I was kind of a hard-ass in some ways was a really tough thing too. You know, I had to come to terms with that and show them that, you know, it took some time over time they realized, wow, you're not quite like that anymore. It really changed me in a measurable way I saw. And I think it is lasted to this day. So that was the real kick in pants in terms of interest because seeing that change in myself, this all kind of coincided at the beginning of what I like to call the second psychedelic renaissance. Soren bought some ketamine from a dealer. This is some crazy shit. You f*cking mopping. This ketamine is spiritual. Do you know what I mean? Not knowing what that meant. Soren decided it would be prudent to send the sample off for analysis by Kaikian analytics. He goes to Kaikiananalytics.com and sees that their list of analyzed research chemical samples from vendors around the world shows a dizzying array of different compounds with different degrees of purity, recognizing the danger of consuming an analytically uncharacterized chemical. Soren pays $20 for their simple qualitative analysis, puts the sample in a bag, seals the bag in an envelope, puts three stamps on the envelope, addresses it to Kaikian analytics in Spain, and sends it off. Seven days after receiving the sample, Soren received his results. And now, thanks to Kaikian, he's able to proceed illuminated by the understanding that chemical analysis affords. And you can do the same. Go to Kaikiananalytics.com. I think you were born in '86, '87, right? '87, yeah. '87. So you were only like eight years old when this happened, and I know how you must feel being a little too young for some of these things that you're being told about in all these interviews because it was exactly that same thing. I was that age when the '60s was happening. I was just too young, but I was digging the energy, but I was too young. And so I kind of imagined what I think about you. I imagine that you're hearing about all these things, and you must have had moments where you said, "Damn it, I wish I had been 25 or 23 or wherever when this stuff they were describing was happening." Yeah, I mean, there is a fascinating time. I mean, the thing about the drug culture, is it almost any time in history is a fascinating time, but that was definitely a special time in terms of this emerging underground chemistry movement. Yeah, so from '95 to 2000, in my mind, that's kind of like the fiery run that it had. And so the timing of it was so amazing for me. So I tried NDMA for the first time, all right, when the internet, but I wouldn't went from a youth net to forums. And I was on all drugs psychedelics when it was youth net. And then all of a sudden, we had the forums. This I want to say was '95, '96. And then right at the same time, too, there was a mailing list that got formed, and I was extremely, I'd consider myself extremely fortunate to have been invited. Two, and I was called a visionary plants list, or VPL. And I don't know if you've heard about this. I imagine you must have, because so many key people were on it. It was a private mailing list. Private email list where, you know, the message is being shared. We're only going to the people on the list. It would not out on the open internet at all. A lot of key people were on there. Sasha was on there. And just many figures that later came to be really important. If they're on that list or at a party in Berkeley, that that list, you know, allowed me to go to. And that guy was a chemist, a PhD chemist, who came a friend of mine. And he never actually gave me hand on guidance, like helping me in the lab or anything. But he would allow me to talk to him and scan the emails with him. And kind of ask him any question I wanted. And he was very helpful. I call him Dr. Tim. He's not a leery, of course, to different Tim. But since I haven't checked with him, I won't go out, you know, say his last name. But he was, he was a very important person. And he was good friends with Sasha. And he was, he was another one of those guys who had decided to do the, make his, the focus of his studies, pharmacology, and psychopharmacology. And he was one of those people that realized he had to start taking these things if he was going to actually, you know, be a scientist and study these things, proper of, it was his judgment. He couldn't do that from a, uh, abstaining position, you know. He was a really interesting guy. He's, he's still around. I've just had him talk to him in a few years. And he was making compounds as well. He had made, uh, synthesized MDMA a couple of times, MDA made, he wants to twice. But he had done it sort of as a, just a fun thing, like experiment where he didn't get into. He had a real serious job at a, uh, at a biochemistry, you know, really high, high ranking. I can't remember the name of the company that he told me, but it was, it was a big one, one of the big pharmaceutical companies. So I'm sure he can salsa had many good conversations because they had a lot in common. Dr. Tammy helped me through conversation and sort of counseling, but not, not really training me or anything. And he gave me one of the nicest compliments that I'd ever caught. And which was he said something to the effect that, it's amazing. The you're doing this, you pull this off without ever having a, taking a chemistry class. It was like, I don't, I don't even know how that worked. Like how'd you do that? I told him, well, you know, I, I just, I read for, for a long time. And, and I told him, you know, one of the easiest ones. And just read a lot before doing it. And I had done, before I did the work, I had done some plant extraction. So I already knew I had aptitude because I had extracted DMT from the most host to us and done a couple of masculine extractions from San Pedro that were, you know, very low yielding, but showed me that, okay, you know, I know how to do at least that best. So that was enough to convince me at that time of my life that I should go ahead and try more serious chemistry. But around that same time, or 96, where a young lady that had met on the VPL list found a connection, you know, got kind of romantic and I ended up, she's living in Oregon, I ended up going up to Oregon to have, visit with her and have a couple, you know, have MDMA experiences with her. And we entered into a relationship after that. Second, second time I went up there, we kind of agreed to try living together. And I was, I was really in love with her. So I just kind of tossed everything and went to go live with her. And she was 10 years younger than me. I was 23 and she was 23. And I knew deep down when that was, you know, the risk was high that that was probably not a good idea, you know, how those things go. I mean, you know, so I've kind of naive thinking that if I turn into, you know, lifetime relationship, I kind of love myself to believe that. Moved up to Oregon to be with her and can work out, you know, after three months or something like that, it was pretty hot and fast and didn't work out after about three months. And I ended up coming back to Southern California with my tail between my legs, kind of lost, some kind of crest. But then quickly went up to the bay area, because I had heard some really good things about Sonoma County. And you know, everything that I knew, of course, already about the San Francisco area and how the general bay area was just an absolute nucleus for all the psychedolists. So my decision was like, and what were you doing for money during this period when you had the scientist girlfriend or up until now? How were you supporting yourself? I was actually a proffin investigator for about five years between 1990 and 1995. I worked as a fraud and churns fraud investigator in LA. I was interviewing people, you know, like you have fun interviewing people for living. I had interview people that hated me because I was probably going to get their claim denied, you know, I had interview hostile people for like five years. So that was also, you know, I was picking up that energy, just so much bad energy from LA is in California. If you want, if you want to have shared a nice vibe with people, don't work in the lead to industry kids, not work. I thought I was really good at being in adversarial situations, but, you know, since especially, as soon as I took the first MDMA, I was like, okay, I see my train nature and it is not this hard-ass proffin investigator kind of person. That was, you know, so I was learning a lot of stuff about myself. Anyway, so yeah, when I got up to Sonoma County, Good things finally started happening there. I found a job at Hydro Farm, which is Pog growers will know all the weed growers listening will know that that was the first and foundational company that was selling hydroponics and lights for indoor cultivation all the way back in that time, 1996, 1997, 1998. I think that was 99 when I got there and got a job there. So now the vibes are very nice. I was up in Bay Area. I was around Pog growers like everybody that I worked with were Pog growers and they were around me, Pog growers. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Now I'm away from the lawyers and the criminals and I'm in the trees with POT people. So I'm very much starting to improve at that point. I mean, I can't believe my unfortunate, when I think about the times, I was being invited to Stascha and Anne's dinners. I'm sure you've heard about the panel later. I'm sure you went to go. Well, I'm from the East Coast so that part of it, but also I think that they had ended by the time that I first visited. Yeah, okay. So I was going to these parties where I was just absolutely in the middle of all of the most important people in the scene and just having conversations with people and and soaking up knowledge and and he was fantastic. I got to meet people like soft and Anne, earth and fire, arrowwood, John Hannah, Kate route and 20 other names that I'm just like forgetting. I actually thought it was the lady. I think it was a lady named Julia. I think her name was Julia Carter and she never committed any crimes. I mean, it wasn't a crime, but I mean, I can say her name because she was also she was like the center of social networking for all these people. She was extremely instrumental in getting a lot of these people together and they can see and happen because she was doing these parties in areas near Berkeley. I think she lived in an area called El Serito, which was a suburb of Berkeley or Oakland. And these parties were just legendary. You know, in my mind and to some of the people I'm sure that if you pass them now. So around this time, I was also still so fast in your band. I started just reading everything that could get my hands on a bowler. And before long, I found the high. I for a year, I read all the NDMA really opposed on the high just because just like as reading, you know what I mean, as entertainment and picture reading all the synthesis information on the high is entertaining. That's what I was doing. And I ignored all the amphetamine of the meth inflammation because I had to be sure I was interested in meth. So I was ignoring all that. I just reading all the stuff about NDMA. And the trippy thing was after I had been doing that for about a year, I realized I was starting to understand the processes they were talking about and the chemistry turns. I was starting to understand it all. I was like, this can't be happening. I have never studied chemistry before. But and of course, this was only one percent of how you can how great you can get a chemistry. I was I was only picking up the bare minimum, but it was and I didn't even study fundamentals. There was no time. I mean, I was I felt this rushed to once I once I got interested in the synthesis and started feeling like I could do it. Then I just got real focused on the doing of it, but I didn't I didn't actually so at no point did I do what I should have done that was you know study study chemistry properly for months through a year or something. But I never did that. And so when you say that you didn't, did you look at anything? Did you know what a key tone was? Did you I mean, I feel like you must have had to have read at least in a some kind of chemistry textbook. There is no or was there educational information on the internet that you were consulting? Well, yeah, the hive is just this forum with just hundreds and hundreds of threads of people posting their trial and error and all their activities doing clandestine synthesis. You know, and so I was just reading all that and then when people, you know, people with way more knowledge than me would discuss a little bit about things like key tones and other, you know, classes of all key roles or whatever. I was very interested in it, but I never I never once cracked open like a chemistry 101 textbook from a college, you know, and said, okay, let me dig down. What are they talking about? You know, I try, I never tried to understand rupture. I don't want to call myself lazy, but it was just at the time it felt like there's no time for that. I just want to to do. So I just said something once that something like orbitals are for help me out here if I say it wrong orbitals are for scholars, but chemistry for those who like to cook. He said something like that. And I think what he meant was, you know, the study, the study can only be so fun, but then the real fun is in the cooking, you know, the actual, the actual synthesis, the lab work. That's kind of that's the why I interpreted it. And that was kind of how it was for me is I didn't feel like I had time for formal study. I just I had to do this and I felt like I was getting close to a point where I could do it. I did not understand how I could get to a point where I could just follow these things. And then, of course, now the key thing now is the book, Total Synthesis by Strike, which landed again at the Zath right time for me. I mean, I found that book shortly after I found the hive. I found a few of the hive. And soon as I started reading that book, he the way he wrote in that book, he did this on purpose. He made everybody feel like, you know, this is like baking cookies and you just got to apply yourself a little bit more than with baking, but basically, you know, he phrased everything. Here's the connection. Hello, my sweet little bee. I'm Hamilton Morris, your pharmacological advisor. And you can relax or can you? You're experiencing reckless caffeination, tired eyes, jittery hands, nervous perspiration. Regular coffee will do that to you, but mud water with a fraction of the caffeine and 2,250 milligrams of functional mushrooms is leaving me calm, alert, and ready to help you. So put down the cup and pick up the phone, dial 1-844 fix your fix to break the cycle of reckless caffeination. Going forward from there was ready to begin synthesizing MDMA. I was convinced from my study, such as it was, you know, that I could do it. And so I was basically ready, but I didn't have the money for the glass and the reactants and everything. And I was working at HydroFarm and Petaluma, I think this is 1999. That's an old company, a legacy company that sells hydroponics and lights. You know, they were one of the first ones. And there's a guy there that I worked with who I learned was a pretty big weed grower in Oakland. So I never really understood why he was working like a $12 an hour job at HydroFarm because he was making a lot of money selling weed in Oakland. But I think it may have been something so he could get a good connection on the equipment or something. But anyway, I was discovered a coworker of mine. And he had a very strong interest in MDMA too. And he was kind of flabbergasted. When one day at work, I told him about this that I had been studying it and I was absolutely ready to do it. And I was very confident I could do it. The only thing I didn't have was the money for everything, you know, the glass and everything. And to this day, I am amazed by this. The guy reached into his pocket and pulled out a water money and said, "How much do you need?" And I said, "I need about like $3,500." And he peeled $3,500 out of this walled in his pocket and handed it to me. And this is another thing I feel was so many aspects of the story seem sort of synchronicity or, you know, kind of like the universe was laying it out for me to make it easy. I don't know. But he handed me this wand and said, "All I want is for you to pay me back on this is just give me the first $3,500 worth that you make." Like just basically just pay me first out of in product. So he just wanted like the first $3,500 worth of MDMA that I made. And I said, "Absolutely, that's a wonderful deal." And so I started buying the glass and everything and rented a house in the semi-rural Sebastian Bowl, which is a real tiny town about 40 minutes north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. Again, very much the kind of environment I wanted to be in and wanted to, you know, I really wanted that sort of woodsy Sonoma County feel. That was the, that was the escape from Southern California for me. I really loved that area and had rented this little two bedroom granny cottage on a road in Sebastopol where there weren't very many houses. But the land lords, the man and his wife that were renting me this house lived on the same lot. So they were literally 30 feet away from this cottage and owned it, you know. That was crazy. I mean, most people would agree. I think that was really crazy of me to do that. Just to take a step back. So when I first became aware of all this stuff, I was a freshman in high school post 9/11. There was a pervasive feeling in the United States that things were being monitored, that there were lists and even talking about chemistry or explosives. or weapons would inevitably invite some wrath from the government. It seemed not just dangerous, it seemed untouchably dangerous. Was this something that felt extremely, extremely, extremely dangerous or something that felt like, you know, growing mushrooms? I can get away with it if I'm not an idiot, just take some basic precautions. I was doing this MDMA cooking between, basically, between the beginning of the year 2000 or maybe late, very late, 1999 and 2002. So the years 2000 and 2001 were the ones that I was active doing this. So 9/11 happened in September of 2001. So I was almost all the way through my little career run through it at that time. And so absolutely after 9/11 happened, I said to myself, wait a minute, I think this changes everything. They're going to be looking at mail much harder. So when that happened, I thought, yeah, the game is different now. It's the risks have to be higher. And that definitely also contributed to my decision, which was only about maybe three, four, five at the most months later to stop. But I did continue for a little while between September 11, 2001 and I think I quit like early 2002. So I think I did it for about three months following 9/11. Yes, I was very nervous about that. But yeah, so what I was using at the time for communication was, I don't know if you'll remember this. I mean, you won't remember it because you were. I don't know if it was around long enough for you to know about later, but Hushmail was a site that was allegedly PGP encrypted. There was a website that you could use to send messages. So it was like PGP email. Sure. I used it. Yeah. I had been using that. And so the question became after 9/11, the question became, so is this going to be cracked now? Or I was reasonably confident at the time because all the information was, no, PGP can't be cracked. Don't worry about it. You can use PGP. And all the psychedelic people, you know, all the drug people in general were using PGP at that in that era. So I was like, OK, I don't think they can overnight just crack PGP just because of 9/11. But there was definitely a feeling of a wet blanket just got thrown on everything. And, you know, that, OK, it can't be taken for granted anymore. But one thing I did want to tell you, there was also a little crazy is the way that I was selling this stuff to people was kind of crazy on its own as well, which was I was just mailing it. I was using, you know, US mail is using priority mail. And I was just putting, you know, like 80 grams of MDMA in a zip heavy duty, zip lock sandwich bag, you know, one of those court bags and then into another court bag and then putting that in a padded mailer that you could get at the post office. And it wasn't, it wasn't the ones with the bubble, the bubble wrap stuff in them. It was these other ones that were kind of corrugated, kind of compressed cardboard fiber type of material. Yes. It was kind of a heavier duty. You couldn't quite tell what was in there as easily. The intention at the beginning was, was pure. I was like, I just want to make like 20, 30 grams at the most, just what I would consider a lifetime supply of it because my main motivation was, I love this stuff so much that I want to, and it was naive. You know, I was being very naive. I was thinking, I love this stuff so much. I just want to have a lifetime supply. You know, I don't think I'll be doing it when I'm 80 years old. But, I mean, I want to have, you know, enough to not worry about where I'm going to get MDMA for the next 20 years. So I did a little math and thought, well, 20 or 30 grams, I'll never do that in five years or whatever. So I just had a small amount in mind I was going to make for myself. But of course, I had to make the guy that's front of me the money. I had to make his first. So I had to make enough to pay him back. And that happened pretty quick. And then he became a buyer after that. So he was coming to me saying, we'll kind of get more, now that you pay me back, can I get more and more? Well, you did me such a huge favor. I, you know, how can I say no? And then a couple other select friends, people from the VPL, you know, people wanted it. And before I knew it, I was, you know, completely a small commercial operation, you know, I mean, I was making as much as I could and it was all pre-bought before it was reserved before it was even finished. And I was shipping it in the US mail by dropping it in mailboxes. Oh, oh, and then when I would go to get the stamps, the priority mail stamps and the envelopes and all that stuff. I had a way of grabbing everything so that I didn't have fingerprints on them. So in the colder months of the year, I just went in with my outdoor gloves, my winter gloves, I just did my business in the post office with my gloves on. Like, I forgot to take my gloves off. I was just doing. And then in the warmer months, it would be weird to have gloves on. I had a way of grabbing like she'd hand the stamps, sell the stamps to me. I'd grab them between my fingers, you're not using my fingertips. You know, I'd kind of grab with my knuckles as if I had a disability with my hand or whatever. So I was extremely conscious not to put fingerprints on anything. And I had a whole routine for that. You know, and then I would drop them in mailboxes. And before 9/11, you could do this immediately after 9/11, you could not do this. So I'm curious. So you've been reading the hive. You were fronted $3,500 by this colleague of yours. So tell me about the first synthesis and all the things that how you use the 3,500, how you went about it, what synthesis you chose, taking me through that. So the main thing that was amazing was my first synthesis work. I nailed it on the first time. That was mind-blowing. It was crazy how easy some of these things were to buy at that time. The precursor oil was Ocatilla Symbarum, which is a sassafrasse relative, I think. And that was being, that was Brazilian sassafrasse oil, is what they were calling it. I think it was just a plant in the sassafrasse family very, very close to the regular sassafrasse. And I bought a five liter, I think it was a five liter pail of that from the place in Canada. And you know, at that time the hive had a subfor, at a forum called acquisition. It was crazy. There's a forum on the hive saying acquisition, people discussing where they were acquiring is today is insane to do that on the open internet. The hive was in invitation only, but I cannot imagine that the DEA couldn't look at the hive. You know what I mean? But I said, yet I was getting some of the information from there. Some of it was more from other sources. I can't remember a word of mouth or whatever, but basically I got the oil from some online business in Canada. I was getting some of the other reactants from reagents and stuff from some sort of edgy chemical houses online. Like I think I bought from the science alliance maybe one time, one or two times. I got the nitro methane from racing supply business in Sonoma County. Like as far as he knew, I was buying it for my funny car or whatever. You know, people did nitro racing that over there. So I found a source and that nitro methane was it set on the can. There was like 95 or 99 or somewhere in between sand. So I felt like that was pretty clean stuff. I knew there was something else in there. Something can, what would be a contaminant, but I didn't know what it was, but if it was 98 or 99, I wasn't. I was just hoping it would come out in the wash, you know. I think Benzacquino and the lady in chloride two came from a photography site. Have you ever heard anything about that people buying it from? Because a site was called like photographers, formulary or something like that. And at that time many people were buying there. And most people were buying the plaguing chloride from that place and maybe one or two other photography places. And I think what happened was in time the DEA got hip to these things. Maybe three to six months after the main rush of activity. So the word would go out eventually. Okay, that's not a safe place to get that anymore. Or the place would stop selling it because the DEA had called them and said, "What are you doing? Don't sell palladium chloride every Tom Dick and Harry that's ordering it from you." You know, and the DEA would pressure something that was absolutely not restricted. In some cases not scheduled to be restricted items. And DEA was just pressuring these businesses not to sell them. And some were immune to that kind of pressure and others weren't. I mean, I even went so far in the clandestine thing as I was buying my methanol in the form of this gasoline dryer stuff that was 99% methanol called heat, H-E-T. Heat was a brand of, I'm sure it's still around, the brand of methanol. That you would pour bottle of that new gas tank and you would assure that your gas line didn't freeze up in the winter. So that was 99% methanol, but it had some anti-rust something in it that would have been a contaminant. And again, I was just like, "Well, I think this stuff's just going to come out in the wash." And I didn't understand at that time that I could have been ordering methanol safely. I was thinking the dogma at the time was anything you can order over the counter and not use chemical houses is a win. Don't buy. So my thinking was don't buy methanol online if I can go down to the hardware store and buy methanol. That's what I was doing, even though it was kind of, you know, there were just going to be contaminants in there, but they were small. They were very little, but they were in there. And then I got glass from various places. I got some glass from some, some, there were a couple of places in Berkeley that were in there. that were still wild, you know, and they would let just, I mean, glass wasn't illegal, but just imagine Hamilton, the people that were walking, the kinds of people that were walking all day long into chemistry supply houses in places like Berkeley and Oakland and behind glass. I mean, do you think those were, do you think those were like hobbyists and students? No, my friend, those are drug chemists all day long going there. I didn't know if they were being surveilled or whatever I did my best to make sure that I wasn't being followed or anything. And I wasn't, I mean, I would pull up to the place and there were no surveillance vehicles, there were no, as far as I could tell, there was no surveillance or anything. I thought, this is crazy, they're just like selling things openly to anybody that walks in. So, and there was one in particular, I've been trying to remember the name, I don't know if anybody's ever told you, but there was a really classic place. I mean, it was like, it could have been straight out of breaking bad or something. It was so corny that it could have been a character in a TV show. I literally walked into the place one time and the sort of crazy looking guy who was working the front counter. I walked in a little too silently and I turned the corner before he knew I was there and the hive was up on his computer. This was the owner's son or something working there, okay? And as soon as he heard me saw me walk in around the corner, he quickly grabbed his mouse and took the hive off of his monitor, but it was too late. I had seen it. But from that store about Mercuric Chloride and the owner lady had, I think maybe had had enough by that point of people like me and she kind of came up as her son was selling me the stuff and she said, wait a minute, Mercuric Chloride. She's like, what are you doing with Mercuric Chloride? You don't look like a professional chemistry. I couldn't believe she was kind of confronting me though because their whole business was based like 80% on landest and stuff, but for some reason that day, she said to me, what are you buying Mercuric Chloride for? That's dangerous stuff. And I had done my homework and I found that it could be used in a water testing test method. I didn't know, you know, I didn't know then. I don't know now like how was used, but it was a reagent testing for heavy metals in water. And I tried to play the student chemist and I said, oh well, I take chemistry lessons from a guy and my homework today is to do a test, Mercury contamination in water and Mercuric Chloride is the controlled part of the control that we compare against. I said something bullshit like that to her and she just looked at me with a look, it was like she just, you know, disapproval and disappointment. She looked at me like my mother, like she was my mother and I just told her a lie. She knew I was lying, but she didn't stop the sale, but she just kind of looked at me like, oh my God, this is my life and she walked away. This podcast is also brought to you by Lucy Nicotine, a company that makes nicotine pouches, nicotine gum and nicotine lozenges. I particularly enjoy the Apple Ice Flavored nicotine pouch. It is a refreshing and well formulated product. If you don't already use nicotine products, I recommend you don't begin their habit forming. But if you do, I think this is the finest nicotine product on the market. Thank you, Lucy. In case this isn't already obvious, warning this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. - And so in this first synthesis, do you recall the process that you used to make the MDMA? - Yeah, it was only ever the two. I did the Benz Aquino Wacker on the Brazilian Sassafrasse to get the MDPTP. And then I did the Ritter Nitro Methane Illuminum Amination from the strike book because remember, I had read the strike book 30 times in a row and I was just, everything was geared toward what can I, which one of these could I do? And which one of these would work the best with the resources that I have? Like that, you know, it was kind of a customized thing. I couldn't do just any of them. I had to do the one that had the least, the least potential for explosion, the least stress when trying to get the chemicals, you know, and everything just pointed to that Ritter synth. - Who is it that first developed the in situ generation of methylamine by using nitro methane with the amalgam? - I had heard of it. I looked around for my, my Soral Synthesis book so I could be on the case when I was talking to you, but I can't find it right now. But basically that was a guy named Ritter who was on the, on the hive. And of course he was using a write up from the literature, from the academic literature. He'd found something that did that, but he did it and wrote up his experience on the forum, you know, the hive forum. So when I first heard of it, I didn't know anything about the original, you know, serious synthesis that came from the literature. I just knew, I was reading the strike book and I saw that in there and immediately gravitated toward that amination route because it was, it just fit everything I was looking for, the least dangerous, the least dangerous to get the chemicals, you know, just, I didn't want, I couldn't get methylamine. That was the main thing I was, I did not want to have, I was reading about making methylamine and it sounded like such a pain in the ass. So later I learned that it's probably, it's really pretty easy with the, a couple of those methods are really pretty easy. But at the time I was like, nope, I don't, I can't make methylamine so this is the way. So I gravitated toward that one and I did it the way he was written in the strike book but what the core of all this, the sort of the cremques of the matter with me writing up the write-ups was that I felt that the guy, and basically if I'm gonna be honest with you, almost everybody that wrote, every high member that wrote up their exploits in a thread on the high, almost all of them were, you know, I'm sorry, guys, if any of you were listening but most of them were bad writers. So they didn't convey a lot of the important detail and they weren't leaving things out because they were afraid, you know, they weren't leaving things out because they were afraid people would try it. They were leaving things out because they just weren't very good writers and they weren't including details in their write-ups. So as I did my first, you know, Ritter Amination, I was like, oh, well why didn't you say that, you know, this happens and you know that it's, it's the drip rate with the addition funnel should be like this, this, exactly this, you know, would be good and you know, there were just so many details that I observed that I thought, well these deserve to be in there. And of course, I'm very verbose and this is a big part of it. I'm just a verbose talker and a verbose writer. So my instinct was, let's fill this thing out. Let's make this like more like a set of instructions, you know, like I'm kind of a technical writer. So I wanted to, I took it from the realm of just a sloppy post on the hive to what a technical writer would write. If they really wanted to convey all of the details and give everybody the best shot at success with that synthesis. And after I did that, and I had people coming up for me for years afterwards saying, you know, man, the way you wrote that up made it so easy. I just breathed right through it. It was amazing. So it really made a difference, I think, too. It made a difference for me. I mean, I did those write-ups in the beginning for myself. I needed, when I went to do it again and again and again, I wanted to refer to those details. I didn't want to be trying to just use only the kind of fast and sloppy write-up that was in the total synthesis book. So that was the beginning of all that. I just wrote it up and posted it and people loved it. And I think I might have done the amination first. And then when I saw how popular that was, I did the Benz Aquino and Wacker the same way. Because there were many details in that that I felt were left out of strikes, you know, rendering. So I don't know if I went off on a tangent again, but that was-- - No, no, this is fast. So you succeeded the first time you tried. Do you have a sense of how long it took? I mean, what, and your first experience taking your own product? I mean, it's a pretty awesome feeling, I'm sure, to endeavor into something this complicated and risky and to succeed. - Yeah, it was an amazing feeling. It was all never forget it. And the girlfriend I had at the time, she didn't really have faith. And she thought I was like, was gonna screw it up. I don't blame her a bit because I was a guy with no chemistry background. I told her, like, despite having no chemistry background, I've been studying this and I can do it. And she was like, yeah, well, right. And then she took it with me. And I'll never forget her as she came onto it, just grinning and saying, you did do it. So yeah, that was an amazing feeling. I was just like flabbergast. I synthesized a drug, you know, a drug this beautiful and this powerful without four years of chemistry. Like, how did that happen? It still blows my mind today, but I think it was just when you get passionate enough about a subject, that auto, and you're not trained in it formally, that auto, a Died Act thing can kick in to a degree where you kind of become your own professor, you know? - Right. And so you mentioned that when you were first getting into this, you had this basic plan. I wanna make a lifetime supply. So they were never have to worry about it or get it from somebody else. And I wanna pay back this guy that gave me $3,500. but then after you succeeded, did. Did anything change? Did you think, oh, maybe I want to go deeper into this? Or what was the, how did the feeling develop after the first success? Well, so yeah, after having my mind blown by just actually nailing it on the first time, then the synthesis got a bit easier because I could relax and okay, I know how to do this. And then it was just a matter of refining it. So I probably worked for about, I don't know, I might have worked for about three, four months just to pay the guy back his money and start making it for other people. This is 25 years ago, so my memory of some aspect chronologically are getting a bit hazy because it's 25 years ago. But basically I did it for two years like I said between 2000 and 2002 and it just kind of became my job like an entrepreneurial venture, but still one of those things where it's like a small, small business and you just wake up in the morning thinking, well, I've got a lot of work to do today. And there was nobody, and the thing that drove me in terms of that was just knowing that there were people waiting. People were pre-ordering the stuff. So they, you know, they wanted the next 10 grams or whatever and they would send me the money ahead of time and just wait for it. So I was getting reserve orders. I don't, I don't think there was one time that I made it and then it was like, well, who do I sell this to? It was pretty sold all of it. So as time went on between, I'd say through 2001, it just kind of got steadily more and more routine. I was happy for the income and by the way, by the peak of this, I was making like 10,000 a month, which was of course, that was more money than I'd ever seen at that time, especially in terms of a payback for an effort like a business or a job or whatever. Yeah, sort of that the peak I was making 10 grand a month and that's what I walked away from when I did walk away. But yeah, like anything else, it got more and more like the passion or the, the, yeah, I guess that's the word for it. The passion for it just kind of steadily eroded and got, and it kind of got replaced by a little bit of a feeling of, well, this is, this is my job now, you know? And I'd say that came kicked in after about the first year. So, so then yeah, in first year, I had a lot of feelings about, I'm just loving getting this stuff out to everybody who enjoys it. And I did have a few of those, I've heard you talk to other people in interviews about that sort of Pauliana view of I'm going to make the world a better place with this stuff and spread the love and everything. I had a little bit of that, but I wasn't real. I wasn't real. I hadn't really, you know, gone that far into the, I knew it was a great thing to make. I knew that people were getting their hearts opened by that stuff as well, like, like, happened to me. So, I knew that was good. I knew I was selling something that was not going to be dangerous for people unless they abused it. Of course, I couldn't control any of that. And I did hear stories later with people taking too much of my stuff because it was so good or whatever, but I, I had hoped that most people would approach it like I did and kind of take it responsibly. Of course, over time, I learned that that is very rare. People use it that way very rarely. And over time, I realized, okay, I'm just feeling the rave thing. Yeah, I felt very strongly that the real weird, the smart way to use this stuff was to use it in a sort of sacramental setting with one other person. You turn off the phones, you light the candles, you put on perfectly chosen music. You put a sign on the door that no one should even knock on the door. You know, you just make sure that every, there were many times when I took a girlfriend to like houses on the, on the coast, we'd rent a house for a weekend on the coast of Sonoma County, like in Jenner, Guilalla, places like that, which is like an isolated mansion on the coast, you know, just so we could have a totally sort of ceremonial and sacramental setting where we knew absolutely nobody was going to knock on the door. Nobody was going to call on the phone. We had from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., all on our own, you know, and, you know, the whole weekend on our own. Nobody was going to bother us. That was how I felt and still feel MDMA is best used. But you know, people do what they do. And if it fuels a huge party, then people are, you know, just, another thing was that it's unsafe. In my mind, it's unsafe to the physical parameters of MDMA, or they get dangerous when you're jumping up and down, sweating, not drinking enough water. Those, those things can turn into a dangerous situation on that stuff. So just on that basis, I used to feel like you got your doing it all wrong. You want to, you want to, you know, stay very, you know, you want to stretch out like a cat on a sofa and you just want to take it easy and get spiritual. You don't want to be sweating in a room with a thousand other people. This is just my view, you know, but the rave culture was, you know, so powerful. It was not to be denied, you know, and I played a part in fueling all that. But if I, anytime I had somebody's ear, I said, please don't do that. Try or at least try it this way. I met people that had not ever taken it in a quiet sort of Sacramento setting. The only thing that ever done was take it and go into a sweaty, you know, rave with a thousand other people. And I was like, you have to try it this other way. Please, please try it this other way. I got through it through to a few people on that, but most I didn't. Right. And do you have an approximate idea of how much you made during your run? I've thought about that. I could get kind of close, but let's say, let me try to remember the scale. I think I was using it. First, at least I use the scale that's in the total synthesis book. So that was, help me out if you remember. But I think, I think the optimal yield off of that once you cleaned it up and salted it was 27 grams supposed to be like in an optimal situation. Was it something like that? I think it was like, if you absolutely had a beautiful one and everything went perfectly, you were going to get like theoretical yield of like 26 grams. So I would get 18, 17 to 18 every time. This is after after re-crystallization. The crude yield from the first salting was up around 25, 24. But that was yellow and orange and full of HCL, you know, so there was a lot of weight from contaminant. So once I did the re-crystallization, which I was a little bit, I kind of thought I felt like I could kind of an artist with that. I really loved re-crystallization because that's the voila moment. That's the moment. Like if you're a sculptor and you spend a bunch of times making a sculpture and you throw a sheet over it and then you have a, you have friends over and you say, okay, here's my sculpture that I've just been working on for a long time. And both the sheet off and everyone goes, wow, you know, to me re-crystallization was the moment when you open the freezer and you saw what you had in that frozen acetone. That was like, voila, you know, so I was very careful with re-crystallization because I wanted that snow-white crunchy look at the end. And also I was very cognizant of that re-crystallization as your last chance to get rid of anything bad that's in there. I had beautiful product after the re-crystallization. But I never knew that I had something really pure until a friend of mine who had access to a university lab. Actually, I'll just say it was that ex-girlfriend of mine that worked in Oregon. She had access to a lab and she said somebody ran it up on GCMS and it was like a perfect spike at MDMA and like no contaminants. And that was a huge moment for me because of validation that all the hair that I took at this that I saw like a lot of people didn't take. It was all good. It was all for a very good reason. Like all that care and the try to keep contaminants out paid off. I was proud of that. I was very proud of that. Still am really. Wow. I just got to the top of a 5-11B and I'm trying to brag. I think I did it with the help of this matcha-infused electrolyte beverage, matcha-aid. Not something that immediately would sound appealing. I will admit when I was first told about matcha-aid, I thought the combination of matcha-green tea and electrolytes sounded slightly disgusting and then I drank a whole box and then I drank another. Maybe you feel that we've reached peak matcha. Maybe you're tired of matcha. Maybe you think the matcha latte has gone too far. I personally, I'm okay with it. I think we can go deeper. And now I'm a convert. I'm a big fan of matcha-aid. It's strange as it may sound. I would demonstrate by pouring it at the top of this wall but I'm afraid that I would drop a bottle and give somebody a traumatic brain injury. Matcha.com was created by psychedelic pioneer Dr. Andrew Wile. They are a premier source of Japanese imported heavy metal-tested, delicious matcha. I use it when I'm climbing. I use it when I'm doing sporty things. I use it when I'm dangling 45 feet off the ground doing a podcast advertisement offering you a discount code if you use Hamilton at matcha.com. Matcha.com. Thank you. Would you ask me kilos or how much do you think you made? Yes, thank you. Sorry, I have a bad habit of digressing. So I was doing like a batch of, I was getting about 18 grams, 17. 18 grams of recrystallized part that I could sell about every day to day and a half. That's about how long it took me to work that up from oil to recrystallization. I mean, from, you know, from the whacker to the recrystallization, I could do it in a single day if I worked real hard from like 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. at night. But most times I split it and I would stop. Let's just say 18 grams every 20, every 48 hours, almost for two years straight. I mean, I would take some days off here and there, but like, can you work that up? What is that? Let's say, let's say 320 days a year and I made 18 grams every two days on that. Yeah, so that would be well over six kilos. If you're doing 18 grams every other day for two years, that would be over 6.5 kilos. So that was, you know, still very much in the realm, over that period of time, that's still very much in the realm of a small artisan, which is how I saw myself. And were you running all these reactions simultaneously where you'd have, you know, oxidation one part of a room and you'd be doing the reductive amination another part or what was your setup like? I mean, it was just a, it was where you lived, right? Yeah, and I had, you know, my lab was a little bedroom, like a little 10 by 10 bedroom in a small house. So I was limited on, limited on what I could do and no, I never did simultaneous concurrent stuff. I mean, I would do the whacker and get as much mdp2p as I could get. And, and let me remember what I was getting out of that because I, what I recall is I could get about three, whatever the scale was, I could get about three, maybe sometimes only two, but usually I was hoping for three aminations per, per yield of a single whacker process. I remember I could at least go back for one to the vial for a, for another go, you know, maybe sometimes I would run out, I wouldn't have enough to do a third one, but I, you know, it's been 25 years, so I can't remember all the scales, but I got, I know I got more than one ridder amination out of, out of a whacker for sure. Like I, I think I want to say three, I could get three and a little bit of change out of worth of mdp2p out of each whacker. And so you're doing all of this in the place where you're living, the fumes are entering your living space. You made a comment that maybe this caused cancer, am I reading that correctly? Yeah, well, I, so yeah, I was, I was being pretty stupid because I was scared about the owners living as close as they did. And my, my first inclination is, well, the smart thing to do here is to get a, a fireproof, an explosion proof exhaust band. Like I didn't have a hood. You know, I was operating on a very small, you know, the, the $3,500 the guy led me was not enough to like get a fume hood. And I, I wasn't really handy enough, I didn't feel handy enough to make my own, I probably could have, but I didn't. And so what I did was I just kind of opened the window in the bedroom, opened other windows in the house, and then tried to be as quick as I could about anything where there were fumes. Like if I were to open a can of solvent or or measure some solvent to your beaker, then port into something, I would do everything really quick. I wouldn't like sit around with something fuming into the space. You know, I would, I was very mindful of the fumes, but I did not wear a mask most of the time. That was, that was done. And because I was, I didn't know how to make an explosion proof exhaust setup that would be run through activated carbon to get rid of the smells. I didn't know quite enough about that stuff. I was looking for information, but I couldn't get it dialed in. I'm okay. This is how you build like a safe hood to you. So basically I was doing things in my house with the windows open. And because nobody ever came to the house, the only person that ever would have knocked on the door would have been the owner of the house. And if they had ever knocked on the door, and I very, I verified that there weren't smells like solvent smells coming out of the windows. It wasn't enough to where like you could walk up to the house and smell acetone or something coming out of the windows. Not even tollewine or some of the smell your stuff. There wasn't quite enough fumes for that. So I just took the chance that if the, if the owner knocked on the door, I would say, Oh, hey, let me go back in your house. I'll be back right, right with you in a minute or something. I was, but he never did knock on the door. Nobody ever came over in two years that I didn't know was coming over. I did probably breathe a lot of, even though it didn't seem like it at the time, I think I breathe a lot of tollewine. And I probably breathed some other stuff. I used dimethylformamide a couple times. The solvent in the whacker in total synthesis was DMF. And I caught a whiff of that stuff. I said, hold, you should, is there any other way to do this? And somebody on the hive said, you can run the bins of quinone whacker with methanol as a solvent, but it's going to reduce yield by, you know, seven percent or so. I said, I'll take that. I don't want to smell. I got nauseous. I've just, that stuff is powerful. I know, you know, that is a smelly solvent. That one I was worried about, the owner, you know, walking down his drive, we smelling that from, from 40 yards away. So, you know, I tried to use things that weren't smelly. Or if they were smelly, I kept them, kept the lid on as quick as I could, you know, and got the lid on as quick as I could. So, fuck, I'm sorry, I lost the thread. So, what was the, what was the question? Oh, you just, I don't know if you were talking about the cancer risk, or if you actually got cancer from this? 17 years later, I got liposarcomatumor in my groin. Could it have been from exposure to chemicals? Absolutely. But the thing about cancer is, unless you like, you know, with some, as best dose, or some, you usually don't know what gave you cancer. If it just comes out of nowhere, you usually cannot pin it on one thing. But I think it's entirely possible that I breathe too much colluing, or maybe I breathe, maybe I got too much of something else, either in my lungs or on my hand. I were, I wore gloves, I wore safety glasses, I did that stuff, but I didn't do like the most important thing you can do is wear a mask all the time. I would hold my breath, you know, I would do something, I would hold my breath. I was just trying to be as careful as I could up to the point of, and I can't even tell you why I didn't just wear a mask all the time. I don't know what, before very long, I got kind of cavalier and I thought, well, as long as I don't just, as long as I'm smart about it, and don't just leave, you know, vessels of solvent laying around, fuming into the air, as long as I'm like selective, you know, and wear gloves and stuff, I should be okay, but I think I underestimated the potentially the, and I don't know if you can get cancer off of breathing, like I don't, wouldn't you normally expect lung cancer? If you, if you breathe a solvent, I would think that lung cancer would be the result. But yes, 2017, I got a liposarcoma, which is, again, my, I have very good luck, I suppose, and blessed with good luck, because that is one of the least virulent and sort of aggressive forms of cancer, many forms of cancer want to kill you. It tries to spread, it gets into your system and finds ways to kill you, get it liposarcoma just kind of forms in a sheath of fat. And so I had that surgically removed and it was very relieved about that. I relocated to Thailand in 20, where I live now, in 20, 22, but right a few months before I relocated to Thailand, I noticed another growth, you know, after a few months, I realized, okay, this thing's actually getting bigger, so this is not an ingrownal hernia. This is another damn tumor. So I went to a hospital, get checked out here in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and it did turn out to be a second go-around with the liposarcoma. And so I had that taken out in April of 2023, and I'm good since then, doing great, but the scary thing about cancer is you just never know and it's going to decide to fuck with you again. So yeah, I think it's possible I gave myself cancer from being cavalier about my handling of chemicals and solvents. It's possible. It's also possible that that cancer came from something entirely unrelated and I and has nothing to do with the kinesis lab, you know, who knows? I'll never know. And when you were running this lab, I think lots of people have different motivations. We spoke previously about how some people see it as a way of changing the world or bringing a medicine that will promote some kind of social change. Some people like Strike, for example, I think had a explicitly political orientation what they were doing. He wanted to overthrow a prohibitionist regime. You know, he was someone who was vehemently opposed to the war on drugs and wanted to create this infrastructure where drug laws would be rendered ineffective through dissemination of chemistry information and chemicals and creating a network where chemists could communicate with one another. I mean, it's kind of amazing. And then you have people like Shulgen who were not oriented toward actually, you know, distributing chemicals to people as much as exploration and dissemination of information. Did you, I mean, you're doing this at a time after the publication of P-Call. Did you think, oh, maybe I should make some 2CB or some 2CT7 or maybe I should make some new variant of MDMA. Did you have any curiosity about pushing this in other directions or maybe even just a commercial orientation, which I think is also totally fine. You know, I don't think there's anything wrong with people that want to make a lot of money. You know, as long as you're not trying to harm people. It doesn't seem so different from the motivations of most people in various branches of medicinal chemistry. So after you had the success and there was a little bit of money coming in, what was your plan? What were you hoping to achieve? Well, for me, a lot of it was that I was just, I was really digging on having a way to, I was, I was making money. I was my own boss, you know, very similar to when people grow weed for a living, which I did after I quit making MDMA. I shifted directly into cannabis for the medical cannabis scene for like eight years. But much like weed growers, you know, I just, I was just enjoying having having my own day. You know, I was just, I was, I was my own boss, you know, but I was also very opposed to the drug war and all, you know, always will be the way it was conducted and still is probably in. So I was, I was right there with everybody with the, with my view of all that, but I did not have any illusions about maybe I can make a difference in that. Like maybe I can create so much of this stuff that I'll help tear down the war on drug. I didn't have, I was very realistic about that stuff. I didn't believe I was going to, this is similar to the way, you know, a lot of the hippies in the 60s felt about LSD that we're bringing about a massive social change and they did, but it just didn't try to be as big as they thought. They were hoping to change the entire spiritual fabric of the planet. And what they did was they changed the fabric of the American society for a few years. And you know, there's been lasting changes, but I mean, they, so they they had a massive view of what they might be able to do for the planet with LSD. And I think maybe some people in the beginning of the MDMA thing felt similarly like we can change the whole world spirituality with this stuff, but I didn't have any illusions about that really. I knew the DEA was still very powerful. And then like you said, once 9/11 hit, I, it's only going to get worse from here as far as government breathing down your neck. I knew of getting much worse. Yeah, for me, it was mainly a great way to combine having my own entrepreneurial little thing happening and helping people have those same kind of, I hope that people had the same kind of spiritual changes that happened to me when I took it. Again, not not not a sort of polyanna. Like I hope 1000 people, you know, I hope I change 1000 people. I wasn't like that. I just hope that somewhere out there, people were taking my stuff and coming out of it a slightly better person, which is what happened to me. And so as you're doing this, you're making a good living, it's interesting work. What made you think that it was time to stop? Were there close calls with law enforcement? Did you know other people who were getting in trouble? What motivated you to cease your operation? You never had any legal problems, right? Now mainly what it was, as we talked about a minute ago, is that 9/11 kind of threw a different mood onto things. So already with that, I was feeling like, okay, the party's probably over with these kinds of things. Because shortly after 9/11, nobody could really tell how far it was going to go, how far government, the federal government was going to go as a reaction. Everybody was just kind of freaking out that it happened. So it's just kind of creeping paranoia. I thought, how long can I get away with this? I imagine myself to be on a DEA list of purchasers. I don't know that I was and nothing ever happened, but I imagined, oh, there's probably they have a list of people that buy, let's say that bought those five leader pales of the oil from this country in Canada. Maybe they got a list of everybody that's been buying that stuff. And maybe I'm on that list and they're just working through the list. And maybe next month, they're going to get to meet. I started thinking about these kinds of things. I may have been able to go for three, four more years. I don't know, but I started to get paranoia. I started to get to the point where I was having trouble sleeping because you start picturing the door and getting kicked in at 4am by DEA agents. So congratulations DEA, you're scared me out of it without even doing anything. Which is that's the name of their game. You know, that's exactly what they do. Hats off to them. They scared me after a while. I didn't want to go to prison. And you know, at some point I would kind of woke up and realized you have a drug lab in your bedroom and you're living next to your your landlord and you're ordering chemicals off online. And like how long can you keep getting lucky with this? And I eventually concluded that not much longer. I just said, let me just get out while I'm ahead. And let me tell you how it's very difficult to walk away from 10,000 a month cash. The kind of money is kind of difficult to walk away from. Especially if you don't have like a good plan. But luckily I was turned out to be good at grown cannabis. So again, you know, you know, cork of timing that was also just in time for the next peak, you know, three, four years of of good times for cannabis growers in the Bay Area. But then of course, later on the market got extremely glutted. I want to say 2010 people lost their fear about going to jail for growing weed. And I started to go to the hydro store to get my stuff and I'd be standing next to soccer moms and grandfathers buying, you know, their equipment and stuff. And I was like, okay, the writing's on the wall. I'm but it was a good it was a nice segue out of cooking to go to something much, much less nerve-racking. I mean, I went from being on my last nerve, you know, way to thinking if the cops come, whatever, I've got my paperwork and I'm just growing pot, you know, so it was a huge relief, you know, to go from, you know, the edge of an ulcer to just everything's good now, you know. Yeah. And you were able to sell all of your equipment and just make a clean break with it. Yeah, I called a guy I knew in the community for the VPL list and I said, I'm getting out of it. Do you want my whole labs worth, do you want everything I've got? He's like, yes, don't sell it to anyone else. I'll be up there in two hours and I said, okay, they didn't give me like $1,500 and you can have everything. And it was probably, you know, like in terms of what I paid, well, I guess I only paid like, yeah, like $3,500 for all. I had some chemicals left to sell for the guy, but mainly it was vacuum pumps, glass, hot plate, stir, you know, those kinds of things, just all that gear, clamps, all that stuff. And sold it for $1,500, he came loaded up. Everything I had took it away and I heaved a massive sigh of relief. You know, like I, I can't believe I got away with this. Thank God, I got away with this. What about other high b's? Did you have much interaction with any of the major figures in the hive or have a sense of who they were and how things turned out for them? Well, in terms of their stories later, that kind of stuff drops off as people go away from it and the hive, you know, the hive eventually got clamped down on by the DEA, I think. So suddenly the hive was no longer there and they had to build a mirror server in Holland or Germany or something. And a bunch of the stuff came back up on a European server, but at one point, DEA shut down the hive and I lost track of a lot of people, but I had basically what I had was just friendly conversations with people in online for some things, and then many, many really fun discussions with people in, you know, privately through Hush Mail and stuff. You know, I know all the big, at one point or another, I had discussions and friendly conversations with all the big guys. What I can say to the big guys like Rodeum, maybe the top guy there was Rodeum. I think he was a Dutch chemist. I probably talked to Strike a few times. Like let's say I had a question about recrystallization. I would direct it to a guy that I knew would answer that question really well for me because he had talked about the nuances of recrystallization. So I would approach him privately and say, "Hey, can you give me something to enhance my, you know, do you have a tip on recrystallizing?" And then he's, "Oh yeah, do this and it'll be a little better." "Oh thank you, you know, I'll get stuff like that." But sometimes it's just purely a social and just people talking to each other. We just talk to each other and share what we're doing and say, "Okay, be careful." But since it's been like 25 years, I can't quite think of all the names right now. Have you ever gone through hive site material? Yeah, I've gone through the archive certainly and I've looked at many of the arrow-ed posted write-ups. For example, your write-up is hosted on arrow-ed. So even if you don't look at the hive, you can see certain posts. But in terms of, you know, actual participation or knowing about it when it was active, it was before my time. Yeah. By the way, I have a huge folder of stuff that a lot of it came from the hive and a lot of it came from other just internet sources of the time. So if you ever want to go through, I've probably got some kind of esoteric stuff from that era. Oh yeah, send it along. And if you don't mind, I could even make it publicly available for anyone else that might want to learn from it if there's nothing sensitive. Yeah, I think it's all just, it's either copy-paste stuff that I made documents from hive posts that were particularly, you know, educational or whatever. And then some of it was, do you remember the anti-agent newsletter that I was called? The anti-agent review. I've got like, I think I've got the entire history of that. And just so much stuff I can't remember what it all is. It's got a huge folder of stuff. I think I kept it when it looked like like the hive, like the feds might shut everything down and we might go into a dark, the internet might go into the dark, you know, and I was, I didn't know what was going to happen, so I saved a bunch of information. Kind of similar to what you do, you know, I just wanted for posterity, you know, I wanted to save as much information as I could. And do you miss it ever? Do you ever consider going back? Are there any aspects of this that you'd like to revisit or things that you wish that you'd done? I absolutely miss it, I miss the activity, you know, miss doing chemistry, definitely. Would I ever consider doing it again? No, because my life is so different now that I mean, the only way I could do it again is if the world changed so, so much to the point where even Thailand allowed anybody to have their own lab, you know, or so that'll never happen because Thailand is even more conservative than the US. So, and, you know, I married a Thai lady here and so I live in a local neighborhood, I don't live in like the downtown Chiang Mai where all the tourists are, I live in a neighborhood way sort of in the suburbs and I'm very much like a local guy. No, I could not, I even, I even pined sometimes for just being able to do a simple plant extraction because that's if you can't do some real synthesis, like sometimes it'll scratch the its just to extract some alkaloids from a plant or something, you know, but I don't even dare do that here. Like I wouldn't even dare pick up some lab glass here in Thailand no way. You don't even have the same kind of rule of law. I mean, you have rules of law but then again, here, but then again, you have whatever they want to do to you, at least in the US I would have maybe a fighting chance, but had a situation come up, maybe get a good lawyer, maybe, you know, knock it down to something small, but no, I would die in prison here if I ever got sent. So, no, it's probably a chapter of my life that'll never get revisited. And just to sort of consolidate the chemistry because you wrote this very influential tech for the synthesis of MDMA and we've talked about this, we haven't gone into too much technical detail about exactly, I mean, we've talked about it a little bit, but are there innovations, things you learned, tricks, mistakes, anything, anything's any technical synthetic ideas that you think are worth conveying to people listening to this? Yeah, they might just be like notes of interesting trivia or whatever, but there were some things that I came up with that I it's been so long I kind of can't tell for sure, remember for sure whether I came up with it or whether I just refined them a little bit, but one thing that sticks out my mind was I think in the ridder, preparation of the aluminum and the ridder in the amination, the reductive amination, it was just kind of said to just get some foil and just kind of rip it up and and put it in there or something, I have something very basic didn't really go into detail that I can't be totally sure, but I think I came up independently with what I ended up doing was running heavy duty like Reynolds wrap aluminum foil through a paper shredder and it would give me ribbons of heavy duty foil and I would cut that up into like two inch long little strips with scissors and then I would end up with all these little like inch long and quarter inch wide little ribbons of foil and then because the first couple times I did it whatever they have in the book I noticed that I got I didn't like the way the aluminum reacted I can't remember whether it was too slow or too fast but I thought it's God get a little better than this they must have been too fast yeah it was too fast because and it didn't feel controllable because that was why I decided to compress it so I took the cut cut up pieces of foil and ran them through a coffee grinder and then what the coffee grinder compressed it into these little pellets like the size of a large green or rice so it was compressed but not super compressed like it would still break up and so that was when I did that I had my first absolutely gorgeous amination where the where the reaction went just picture perfect you know the vigorous yet not threatening to get out of control it stirred well just I remember just everything just clicked as soon as I prepared the aluminum that way because other people were talking about trying to do things like just tear it up with their fingers and have sheets of it I think even Sasha did did a couple things sometimes where he put just like straight pieces of foil and it was like he had to add more in a OH or something so I knew there was like a problem with flat open foil sort of reacting in a weird way so I hope I came up with that myself I can't really remember whether somebody else triggered that idea or whether I came up with it but when I did that I got what I considered to be as good as you can get reaction exothermic reaction dynamics out of that out of that process I could just win perfectly every time out of necessity I came up with things for keeping in vacuum distillations where you had to have like like vacuum like a distilling distilling the mdp2p maybe I needed one notch stronger of a vacuum pump but the one I had was like I just needed a little bit more vacuum at the heat that I was trying to do that so I ended up sort of innovating for myself a thing where I took pieces of rag just cloth like like dish towels ripped up and I would wrap distillation column in the distillation condenser that was where it seemed like it was just losing the heat a little too much so I would wrap that with with some fabric and then form aluminum foil over that and just kind of created a insulation over over the vital parts of the glass where I felt like I was losing heat and then I would get a good smooth distillation of that of the ketone you know so I was I was just finding little things those kinds of little things were what we're missing in the roughly written stuff that I was coming across and you know you know maybe that would have been irrelevant to somebody that had just a little bit stronger that puns than I did but I I came up with little things to make it all work for me you know and I kind of pictured a lot of the guys out there were like me were maybe using us you know kind of a slightly two-week vacuum pump and things like that so I would try to convey a little details on it. You mentioned that you made mda using sodium cyanoborohydride do you remember that or why was mda unattractive? Do you tell me about that chemistry? Yeah actually what happened with that was some of the people that I were it was selling mda2 and burning man I think 2000 yeah burning man 2001 so right before 9/11 burning man 2001 some of the people I'd been selling mda2 said you know mda is everywhere now can you make mda? I said well I probably can but I've never done it before but the method looks pretty easy and they said essentially come to burning man with a bunch of mda and you will get rid of it as quick as you can you know pull it out of your backpack or okay so I managed to somebody kind of do I think somebody contributed a bag of I remember some methylamine hydrochloride just like coming this is another crazy thing Hamilton somebody sent me methylamine in the male I mean I was crazy for accepting it for letting it happen but somebody sent me methylamine in the male like just not even well packaged like in a couple of baggy bags you know two layers of plastic and then it might have been sealed in some food storage plastic something but anyway I opened the package and the package didn't smell before I opened it but as soon as I opened the package whoa there's a cactus you know like oh my god there was so risky being mailed that stuff in the male but anyway I was able to make it easily because somebody sent me some methylamine and I just followed the the method in total synthesis and rented a tank of helium I think to displace the oxygen because you were supposed to use nitrogen or something you just couldn't have oxygen in the reaction flask when air couldn't have air in the interaction flask when you did it so I had to flush it out with helium or something it's what I recall and then yeah I'd ran maybe argonny no because it was something easy for me to get so it had everything he I was helium I'm sure it was helium and so my thinking at the time was well the whole point is you get you got to flush the oxygen or the air out of it that's the main thing you don't want to oxidize so anything besides air or oxygen was going to work it was the way I thought at the time so I didn't try to get anything gnarly like nitrogen or argon where I just got some helium from the from the balloon another clandestine chemistry chick you know go to the the folks that do party balloons and get a tank of helium so I just did that I just you know flush probably way longer than I needed to stuck the hose in there and to push for like 30 seconds and then cap it real quick and there was any air in there it's not in there now and and just ran that and cleaned it up and you know again got a nice clean hydrochloride salt it was a little off it wasn't like the MDMA which was like crunchy kosher salt every time when I made that stuff and recrystallized at the end it looked like for all the world like coarse kosher salt that you would get in the grocery store that sort of looked like bright white beautiful you know but when I did the mda it did come out even after recrystallization came out kind of like a off white tan color and I'm sure that had something [BLANK_AUDIO] do the totally different reaction dynamics, you know, the chemicals going into it, maybe cyanobor or hydride, you know, leaves a little bit of color. But I mean, I cleaned it, I cleaned it well, but it still had, you know, different sort of color, but I was confident that, you know, because whatever is in there for the cleanup phase, I did it religiously. And I think I might have even recrystallized it. Oh, I remember now, I recrystallized it twice, even lost yield, but the cyanobor or hydride thing freaked me out at the time. So I was like, I have to make sure I get this totally clean, you know, even if I lose some, I probably lost 10% cleaning up a second time, but I felt good that there was nothing bad in there. And I took some of that at Burning Man and it didn't really, it was pleasant, but just didn't do it for me the way I am being made. I don't think I, I betcha, I didn't do it all that well. Like I bet you other people make that if I try to be amazed, but when I made it that one time for myself, I thought, nah, this is okay, but not, not the mad, not magical. Well, this is all fascinating. And I would love to read any of the accompanying documents. Are there other final messages or things that you think listening, people listening to this should know about this era or the work that you did or getting into this area of work, cautionary aspects, positive things that you took away from it. Yeah, the cautionary aspects are obvious, of course. It's probably not a good idea to launch a Klandis and lab in the bedroom of your house. You know, I would caution people probably not to do that because at least, at least do it better than I did, do it in a, you know, go get a warehouse, set up the right kinds of fume hoods and exhausts and do things, you know, better than I did. I did it the way a person who was just too much in a hurry to do it would do it. And that's what I did. So, I would caution people not to do it that way. You know, if you have to get more partners, get more money or whatever and do it, do it right, you know, and always wear a mask. Don't take chances with breathing in fumes like I did. I mean, I probably got used to smelling, tolluring, to wear, I didn't smell it anymore. You know, how that works with solvents. So, you de-decentitize to smell. So, after a while, I don't even think I detected the smell and thought, I'm clear. I can't smell it. My name is probably still in the room. So, you know, yeah, don't be stupid like me, kids. You know, wear your protection and do all that stuff. But I enjoyed every minute of it to one degree or another, even when I was paranoid at the end, I hated to leave it because it was such a fascinating way to the urinal living. And so many interesting people, I met so many interesting people in that in that journey. And pro-proved to myself that something wild, you know, that I could actually do organic chemistry without even going to college. That was a mind-blower. So, my overall experience of it was really good and fun and interesting. But, you know, if I were excellent at robbing banks, you know, I wouldn't advise people to rob banks, but do it well, you know. So, I can't really, all I can say to other clandestine or potential clandestine chemists out there is take your time and do it right and protect yourself. Don't be in a hurry just because it's a fun thing to do. Do it right. If you're going to do it, do it right. Do it safely. That would be my message. I think that's great. And I think this is a fascinating, fascinating historical overview. And I really appreciate your time. I think that this is a really great discussion. And I so much appreciate that you reached out to me. Oh, me too, man. I mean, this is, like I say, I've enjoyed your work since you started it. So, this is a wonderful thing for me to be able to talk to you and to talk to you. You might be the only person after that whole period that I've talked about. You are the only person after that whole period sort of ended, sort of in later years that has a passion for this topic and understands it. Everybody else that I would talk to about is, you know, they have to look at it as this weird remote thing they can't understand. So, it's been super, super gratifying to talk to you about it knowing that you know chemistry and know everything that I'm talking about. And you're preserving this kind of information for the historical record. So, you know, man, I love your work too. So, thank you too.