🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that just experienced a digital ego death. Gazed inward a little too hard and realized our emails are nothing more than a series of zeros and ones. ☠️

At first blush, Hamilton Souther seems like a walking paradox. The same guy who launches web3 and AI projects also happens to have spent years living off the land in the Amazon (the rainforest, not the company). But Hamilton sees no contradiction. To him, ayahuasca and AI are both powerful technologies designed to expand consciousness and solve complex problems.

We asked Hamilton how he earned the unprecedented exception to become the first Western maestro, why Silicon Valley elites are increasingly turning to psychedelics, and how his vision of AI as an "infinity translator" could bring humanity closer together.

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You became the first Westerner recognized as a Maestro Medico Vegetalista at just 25 years old. What was your apprenticeship like? How did the local community respond to you?

The apprenticeship was arduous, intense, and accelerated. I was accepted by Julio Llerena Pinedo, a renowned medico vegetalista who practiced with five kinds of visionary plant medicines: Ayahuasca, Palero (trees), Sanango, Mapacho (tobacco), and Toé (angel trumpet vine). He had extensive knowledge of the forest and many non-visionary medicinal plants, as well.

At the time, it was taboo to teach foreigners. We could experience the medicine and participate in ceremonies, but we weren't supposed to be brought into the lineages. They made an exception for me after about a year and three quarters of being there. Once you’re accepted, training happens continuously. There were frequent ayahuasca ceremonies and dietas, which include strict restrictions on the food you can eat and activities you can participate in while drinking medicinal plants.

I homesteaded beyond where humans lived in the forest. There was a small native community of Matsés downriver, and where we were, there was a collection of nine families spread over about a half hour of river. I was the very last person. I truly lived off the land for four and a half years as I fulfilled my apprenticeship and became a maestro.

The only reason they brought me into the lineage was that Julio had fallen ill with no one around who could help him. So I performed the healings, and when he asked what I wanted in return for saving his life, I told him I wanted to apprentice.

Considering you’ve worked with everyone from Amazon locals to global CEOs, how do you adapt your approach to different groups?

The cornerstone of my practice was my training as an anthropologist. I never left the scientific method as a way of understanding both my apprenticeship and the people I work with. While the plant medicines have remained the same, the kinds of people have changed—from local indigenous communities to people from all over the world, from every socioeconomic level and societal role.

The idea was to understand people and how plant medicines could best support them. There's using plant medicine as medicine for personal healing, and then there's learning, which in the Western sense is about achievement, success, growth, and self-improvement.

Julio taught that there were two main reasons to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies: medicine, which represents healing traumas and illnesses, and learning divine wisdom, which represented personal exploration—knowing more about yourself, the world, the cosmos, source and spirit, technology, or your place in the world. From that perspective, there wasn't any tension as I met Westerners with this medicine.

I think the nature of how you language the experience for others is really important. We had to find ways to demystify how locals speak and translate it into a context understandable for Westerners. When locals talk about spirit, they're talking about energy. When they say someone's spirit is sick, in Western terms they're talking about psychology. When they describe going into visions, for a Westerner, they're accessing their subconscious with full personal awareness.

You’re also involved in some web3 and AI ventures alongside your plant medicine work. How do these worlds inform one another?

In the early 60s, studies were done at Stanford with executives, scientists, and technologists who were trying to solve difficult problems. When they were given LSD and mescaline, over 50% had major breakthroughs in their problem-solving.

The common link between altered states and accessing solutions is an under-explored nature of our consciousness that produces constant rethinking and creativity. Plant medicine has influenced all my understandings of technology, and technology has influenced my understanding of plant medicine. It helped me understand that visionary plants are a kind of technology themselves that Earth somehow birthed. 5 billion years ago we didn't have them, and now we do, and they change us when consumed.

My work at Blue Morpho over the years has allowed me to meet people in technology from web1, web2, and web3. Psychedelic use among Silicon Valley elite is incredibly pervasive and purposeful. People in technology are using psychedelics to expand their creativity, awareness, and understanding of design. There's been a cross-pollination between plant medicine and technology, with people ourselves as the bridge.

This has influenced my approach to design as well as how I think of distributed systems and blockchain infrastructure in web3. AI is fascinating because it’s still a black box; it’s not well understood what’s actually taking place. It's a visioning exercise to decode AI right now, and there’s a systematic way to explore that inside plant medicine.

What do you mean when you describe AI as an "infinity translator" for intercultural problems?

In the next few years, it'll become evident that what humans struggle with globally and individually is ultimately found in linguistics. There's spoken language, mathematical languages, and even imaginary languages. The digitization of language enabled translation between languages at will. But even then, there are great philosophical and cultural differences that are hard to bridge.

AI will become a translator for those gaps. It won’t just translate the words I’m using but explain the meaning in a way you can understand. The digital revolution made the Rosetta Stone concept ubiquitous amongst all languages, but this next step is about nuance and understanding. When AI becomes the infinity translator between cultures, we’ll see vast changes in geopolitical relationships, conflict resolution, and even how multinational teams work together inside organizations.

But I think we're going to see something even more magical. AI will identify and fill gaps in language use that we weren't even aware of. It can expand our language. We need language to discuss anything with others, but what we can currently communicate is actually a tremendous reduction of what exists. That's where I see AI reaching into the field of the unknown, providing translations that rapidly expand our scientific understanding, and disseminating it into popular culture.

With the explosion of interest in psychedelics, what concerns you most and what gives you hope?

What concerns me most is the lack of deep historical understanding and context. We as a species have been using psychedelics for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years to grow, learn, create culture, and enhance who we are. As large populations discover these tools for the first time, it will be easy to incorrectly assume these experiences are new. The truth is our ancestors have carved a deep, safe, and well-trodden path for working with these visionary plants.

I'd like to see us pay respect to our ancestors for their hard work and real experimentation. They laid the foundation for our understanding of responsible use, set and setting, preparation and integration, and everything that makes these experiences positive for individuals and culture.

What gives me the most hope is that plant medicines and psychedelics open and expand the mind for creativity, innovation, and the emergence of new genius to help steer our species during this time of great transformation. We've never seen both industrial and technological revolution happen at such speed, and it requires innovators to guide society in utilizing these technologies for our collective benefit.

Learning to think in new ways through psychedelics is our greatest catalyst for innovation and creating cohesion as a species. One thing that happens with plant medicines is a great awakening to consciousness and the nature of the heart. Only then can we find the ability to meet others in ways that transcend the mind, where our differences are contested. This is our opportunity to relate more harmoniously, transcend conflict, and develop better tools for doing so.

Want more from Hamilton?

Join a visionary event at Blue Morpho in Peru, or explore Mystery School and the other online training programs at Blue Morpho Academy.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.