The Basement: Andrew Gallimore | DMT Didn't Take You Somewhere New — It Unlocked What's Always There

Today we're talking with Dr. Andrew Gallamore. He's a Cambridge strain chemist and neuroscientist. And he spent 30 years studying one molecule, DMT, what he calls the world's strangest psychedelic. Many people report meeting entities when using DMT. And Andrew has a theory about them that's not exactly mainstream. He writes about this in his book, Death by Astonishment.

"Death by Astonishment." Finally, a cause of death that isn't fell out of a window after questioning the official story of the CIA.

He thinks the beings people meet on DMT might not be hallucinations. They might be real, alive, sensient, and living in another dimension. And he makes a pretty good case because there are people who take DMT for years and then one day a creature waves a finger and says, "You're not welcome here." It's called a lockout. And some people stay locked out for years. Ouch. The machine elves have bounces. I better be respectful next time I'm in a machine elf champagne room. Huh?

Today we're covering where DMT comes from, what it does inside your brain, and a new theory he built with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. It connects the whole thing to consciousness itself. After our conversation, I'll come back with a little quick analysis. But until then, grab a brain bucket because this one goes deep. Let's go down to the basement. Dr. Andrew Gallamore, welcome to the basement.

Good to be here, AJ. Thank you very much for having me. It's good as can be. Um, I guess just quick disclaimer before we get started. Uh, we're not endorsing anything, uh, any drug use. We're not promoting it. Uh, none of that stuff. Uh that being said, we both have experience with psychedelics. So when we're talking about it, we have been there.

Yeah.

Okay. So at I thought I heard you say at seven or eight years old, you're into ghosts, vampires, werewolves, all the paranormal. It looks like you have just upgraded your monsters to a new level. Is that what happened? Is you're just you're just the monster kid?

That's pretty accurate. I mean, I was into Yeah. uh werewolves, vampires, ghosts, the occult, Ouija boards. Uh my parents were horrified. I mean, it's like that the headmaster of the school had to call in my parents, my father specifically.

What were you doing that the headmaster got involved? What was that specific?

Um stories.

You were telling stories?

I was writing. So when you when the teacher said write a story, I would write these most horrific because I'm going to I'm going to defend myself a little before.

You were that kid.

I was that kid. But my I have I've got quite a big family. So I've got two older brothers uh and two younger brothers. So I'm right in the middle. And the two older brothers obviously were a huge influence on me. My oldest brother Ian when when I was kind of oh six, seven, eight years old, he was like 12 um and so he was more mature and he was very interested in horror movies and like in those days there was like band movies. Remember that? Sure. This one's banned and you

Faces of Death Faces of Death and Cannibal Corpse and this kind of thing, right?

So you have to watch them,

right? So he'd he'd mail off some V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V VHS, you know, copied, pirated.

Y

and come back and then he watch these movies in the living room because there's only one VCR in in in the in the house, of course, in those days.

Uh and I would sit and watch them. My my parents were very relaxed about this. um um until I started kind of reproducing these kind of things in my stories at school and my think my headmaster was slightly concerned that I was you know going to be the next Michael Myers or something like that

or the next Neil Gaiman. What was that what was that last straw story about?

Do you want me to say it really?

Yeah.

Um, so in the story, it was a story about a an escaped lunatic inspired by the Halloween movies. Uh, he escaped from the the sanitarium. Um, and he murdered several people and then in one instance he came across a god, do I want to say this? He came across a woman with her baby in a pram and anyway, the baby ends up being diced. And I use that word um,

diced. diced with a spade and the headmaster was understandably in retrospect thought this is like a I mean I was like seven years old.

Oh god.

As elementary school anyway. Uh and so yeah, they they used to he used to like every day at the end of school he'd come to the classroom he'd check through my work and check that I wasn't writing horrible things. Um, yeah, it was

What did your folks say about that story?

Yeah, they they had a word with me and said maybe you should, you know, maybe write about nice things,

but they weren't you weren't worried about you being

No, they they knew where it came from. It was just the influence of my older brothers. But but still at that time, it wasn't just that story. It was that I was interested in the occult things that seven-year-olds aren't norm normally interested in. And I was quite advanced reader for my age. So, I I used to go to these, you know, old secondhand bookstores and try to find books about ghosts and vampires and things like that. And I really believed in them. Um, I wanted to be a ghost hunter when I grew up. Um, that didn't come true, but in a way,

in a way it did.

In a way, it did.

Yes.

There we go.

Um, when I was nine, I bought a mail order book on witchcraft and the occult, and I had quite a sit down over that book.

Yeah, I'm sure. So, so I get it.

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So, take us from there to the I know you've told the story a million times, but I have some some follow-ups. Take us from there to 1996. Your friend shows you a magazine.

Yeah. So when I um

what magazine was it?

I don't remember. Um but it was after I graduated from high school. So in the two years we call them A levels in in the UK. Um so I was 16 years old I guess. Um I I started to get interested in psychedelics. Um reading about psychedelics um and talking a lot about psychedelics. I started studying chemistry, uh, biology and and I wanted to be a pharmacologist. I wanted to study drugs basically and how they affect um, the mind.

What drew you to psychedelics specifically,

especially for someone who wasn't didn't take them

at the time? I didn't know. Um, but when I think back, you know, the interest in ghosts and werewolves and vampires, it's unusual things. I guess you could put it in the most broad sense. I guess

that's what tracks for me is you've always been into the the alternate realities and

Yeah. And because I I I used to collect a magazine called The Unexplained. It was one of those ones that came out every week and you got the binders, that kind of thing. um ordered it specially from the the news agent. Um and within there there was a lot about ghosts and all that kind of stuff, but then there was stuff about like ESP and UFOs and things like that. Um, so it's it's not so strange that as as I became, you know, an adolescent and started to mature that my interest shifted away from just ghosts and werewolves and into more serious things, I guess, you know, more scientific things. And psychedelics seem to be a way of of altering your mind, of altering the structure, dynamics of your reality. And so that kind of excited me. Wanted to know how that uh worked. So I'd been talking about it a lot at school. And then one day my friend um he's I can give his name actually now is Nur Abbas his name is he's actually interestingly well or he was a few years ago the chief designer for um oh what's his name used to he used to be married to um Kim Kardashian easy Yeez used to have the easy shoes everyone's screaming at us right now but I don't remember?

Oh, from the show.

No, no, no, he's like a black guy. He's the most crazy guy that was on Rogan. He's been on Rogan. He's been on every He's most Everyone's going to go crazy. After the break, we're going to find that out. We will.

Kanye West.

Kanye. Kanye.

Yeah. Kanye. He was a chief designer. He became a fashion designer and he was actually Kanye West chief designer. Anyway,

wow.

Yeah.

He'd be fun to talk to. Yeah. Nurabas. And he brought me this magazine when I was 16 years old and and said, you know, look on the back page. There's something I think you'd be interested in. And I, you know, rolled it up. And later in the day, I I I opened it and it was picture of this bearded fellow uh called Terrence McKenna. And it this was an interview with him. Um, and there was lots I don't remember the much of the details, but I remember him being asked about his quote unquote favorite drug, this thing called DMT. um didn't say what it was. Other than that, um when you take it, it takes you to this other world that's nothing like this world and that's filled with these strange beings called machine elves.

Sure.

Um, and I thought this is this is incredible, but it only lasts 15 minutes. You know, this fast acting drug that will instantaneously transport you to some other reality that's just as real or more real than this world. Uh I thought well, you know, that's even more interesting than psychedelics generally is this particular psychedelics. So my next task was to find out what DMT even meant. Um, you couldn't just Google it in those days. Um, I remember I went to the local library in my city um the central library and found one of those books of acronyms um initialisms and looked at DMT and found dimethyl terrathalate which is a type of plastic apparently. So for for a short period of time DMT in my head was dimethyl terrathalate.

Oops.

Yeah. Then we got the internet as you just mentioned and there's only one internet in the school like you had to go collect this big black cable from a guy in a white coat give you a password. The password was mushroom. I remember that.

That's perfect. And I would spend all my my lunch break and any free periods I had I would I was I was the only one who used it. No one else knew what this it was so new the internet. No one really knew its power. Uh, but I kind of did. I had a friend who also had the internet in his house. Um, and so I spent all my time just on out of Vista as you said before Google. Um, just trying to find out all about DMT. Um, and it how to how to extract it, how to, you know, which plants you can get it from and all that kind of stuff and uh, all these different crazy experiences.

Did you look into the history of it as well during those searches or you more interested in what Terrence was talking about?

I was more interested in what it did. Um, I became more interested in the history later on, but at that time this was just this naturally occurring molecule um that seemed to have almost magical properties. Um, and and that was the beginning really. Um, that was the beginning of what turned out to be a 30-year um um journey trying to understand DMT, you know, what what it does in the brain and how it's able to achieve these remarkable effects on consciousness.

What did your family think about this new hobby? Cuz clearly you told your brothers.

Yes. Well, they didn't understand it, you see. I mean they I would if I refer to it as DMT then that's fine. If I use the word drugs that's different matter

right.

Yeah. Yeah.

So um your book Death by Astonishment that's a Terrence McKenna quote.

That is a Terrence McKenna quote.

So is that a bookend? Is that a a tribute? Is that a thank you? Why did you choose that?

All of those things. Well, initially it had a completely different name that I'm not going to tell you.

Okay.

Um, which was okay. Uh, but I was writing I was writing the book proposal with my editor to submit to the publishing house. Um, and in part of the proposal I said, you know, DMT of this molecule that as Terrence McKenna said the only risk is death by astonishment. But then I I wrote in in quot in brackets I thought, actually, that's a pretty good title, right?

Um, and I I realized in retrospect it's the perfect title. I mean, that's I mean, it's such a kind of a showstopper title. Death by astonishment. And of course, it's a beautiful tribute to the late great um Terrence McKenna. Um, and so yeah, that's that's kind of how that name came came about. And I think it's it's a perfect name for the book. I think that is, you know, it's all about it's everything I know about DMT. Um, everything I've come to learn over the last 30 years studying DMT.

So this um sparks interest in chemistry. um your PhD thesis, let me see if I can get this right. Is it the um the biogenesis of terrestrial and marine polyyclic ethers?

Wow.

Is that what it was? You've

done your research, dude.

Well, that doesn't sound like that that sounds like just marine biology and things like that. That has nothing to do with psychedelics.

But nothing to do with psychedelics.

So, is DMT still sort of this undercurrent while you're working through all this?

Yeah, it it it always has been in a way. Um, you know, I've never worked in a quote unquote psychedelic research group um or any kind of psychedelic lab or anything like that. It's always been, you know, I've kind of I have many interests in in chemistry and in pharmarmacology um uh, you know, as well as psychedelics, but that's been the kind of the foundation that's running through all of it. But but my PhD at Cambridge, yeah, that was biological chemistry. It's basically trying to understand how these often exquisitely complex molecules that are produced by plants and microorganisms, you know, how are they actually stitched together and made inside microorganisms. That's something that I really fell in love with during my first degree. um the kind of the it's called biosynthesis, how complex organic molecules are constructed inside living beings. Um, and I I thought I want to study that for my PhD. Uh, and so I went up to Cambridge and worked in a group that specialized in that thing. Uh, but all the time still I was thinking and writing about DMT. And then um after I finished my PhD I did a posttock again at Cambridge and then I thought there's something missing from my intellectual repertoire should we put it like that uh in that I I I understood the chemistry I understood the pharmacology um, you know, that kind of lowlevel stuff molecules interacting with living systems that was all kind of under my belt shall we say um, but I still didn't feel that I was uh sufficiently sophisticated in the neurosciences. So I thought I need to I need to move up to the kind of the higher level um uh of the neurosciences and so I I I did two posttocks um in computational neuroscience kind of the forefront I think of neuroscience trying to understand how the brain works by using computational and mathematical models. So I I went to the University of York and then University of Oxford um did two posttocks in computational neuroscience and then finally my final posttock which actually the longest one lasted for seven years was at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. Um, so I needed a job after my penultimate posttock finished and there was this position in in Okinawa. So I thought why not? I didn't have ties in in England at the time. So I thought oh why not move to Okinawa.

What was the position? Was it a mainstream type of job?

It was a post-doal research fellowship. So basically another posttock.

Okay.

Uh, but this was in in computational neuroscience as well. Um, and I spent seven years kind of modeling very small pieces of the brain, basically individual neurons in the brain, trying to understand how they speak to each other and how they um strengthen and weaken their connections, all connected to to memory and neural function generally. Um,

so you were you were building this DMT research foundation the whole time.

Yes, that's how I I see it is that I was you most people kind of specialize at one level. You know, if you're a chemist, you you study the molecules. If you're a pharmacologist, you're interested in drug receptor interactions. If you're a neuroscientist, you're interested in how kind of the global effects on neural activity. Um, but I think really to understand psychedelics, you need to kind of span all of those. You need to understand all the way from the lowest level the molecules all the way up to global neural activity. Um, so I finished my posttock in Okinawa after seven years and I thought right, I'm leaving the academy. um I've sort of graduated um and I don't want to be I wanted to kind of deinstitutionalize myself um and just focus on writing basically.

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Cambridge, Oxford, York, Okinawa. You could have had a very successful mainstream career. Do you has there been a professional or personal cost to making the decision?

Oh god, yeah. I mean, for sure. Um I I was at the stage in my career where normally what would happen is I would start applying for uh what are called readerships or lecturesships. So when you start taking on graduate students of your own, you become a part of the department uh wherever you work. But the thought of being that person horrified me. the thought that I would be, you know, like my professor going to meetings and managing funding and managing students, all that stuff. I never had any interest in it. When you're a posttock, you have a lot of freedom. You kind of do your own thing. But once you get to that level where you're elect a lecturer, you know, professor, uh then you have to start taking on all these other responsibilities. It takes over your life. And I could never invest as much time as I wanted into my my passion which is DMT and writing about DMT. I always wanted to be a writer ultimately. There's a lot of training required to write about these things.

Sure. So, you know, it's 20 years, I guess, before I was able to kind of make the leap um give up my fairly well- paid uh position in Okinawa um and basically go from decent salary to absolute zero salary um in in in in a single day. That that's kind of scary, you know, and there's no option to move back to my parents if if I fuck up uh because they're over in the UK. So, it's like this goes wrong. I'm I'm in deep deep trouble in Tokyo. So, I moved from Okinawa to Tokyo, which is where I live now, and that's where I've been for the last four years. Fortunately, I didn't majorly fuck up and things are okay.

Well, I mean, Tokyo is fascinating because Japan has very strict drug laws and they're getting stricter if I I mean, I think cannabis they just banned. H how is it is it a c a culture issue for you? Is it?

Um, so people I think when people say Japan is very anti-drugs, what they're actually referring to is methamphetamine,

okay,

and cannabis. These are the two biggies, right? Methamphetamine for very specific historical reasons. Post World War II, there was this huge wave of meth methamphetamine use throughout the nation. A lot of the military supplies um uh kind of were released onto the public market. It was perfectly legal at the time. Then um there were millions of people in Japan using meth regularly. Um, and then they they banned it and then all of these little clandestine laboratories started popping up. Um, I think in in Osaka in 1952 in just one year there are like 50 labs that were raided just in one city. You know, it's like breaking bad all these little meth labs everywhere.

Sure.

Like in New Mexico or something. People don't imagine that that's possible in Japan, but it really was. So, and this was a time when the Japanese were literally a defeated nation. And they thought this meth could be the end of them. It was like an existential threat to their very civilization. Uh uh, and so that there's a kind of I guess gen hate that word generational generational trauma. Uh, but it feels like that you mentioned meth and people there's still that sense of meth.

Um,

yeah, cuz you have to figure the Americans brought it there.

What? Meth?

Yeah.

Well,

and certainly amphetamines.

So, methamphetamine actually was invented by a Japanese chemist in in the late 19th century.

It was

nagai. Yes. Nagayoshi. Nagai. Yeah. Everyone thinks it's either the Americans or the Germans, people. I get, but it was actually

Well, those are two countries everybody blames for everything,

of course. Yeah.

But it's actually a Japanese chemist. I didn't know that.

Japanese chemist. Yes. from ephodrin. So ephfordin um is the molecule that you can convert you know sseudphdrin they use is basically the same molecule but slightly different geometrically but anyway ephidrine you can convert directly to methamphetamine and he was working with ephedrin

um this at the time this you know Chinese herb that had various uses um and then he synthesized methamphetamine and it was basically forgotten about for a number of decades and wasn't seen to be that important until people started reporting on its effects on um alertness and mood and that kind of thing. And the Japanese were using it during the Second World War specifically. They they would they used to create these little green tablets that were mixed with green tea, so they're bright green, and they would stamp them with the emperor's crest. Um, so it almost became like um um what's the word I'm looking for? Um, but but anyway, it was very much sanctioned by the authorities. Um, you know, the imperial imperial Japanese authorities at the time and

Japanese soldiers were using the kamicaz for example.

Sure.

Were using methamphetamin would elevate their mood, increase their kind of fighting fighting spirit.

Sure.

And they don't have to worry about long-term effects.

They have to worry about long-term effects quite literally. Yeah. Um, and then after the war, they had all these stockpiles that made it into the market and then the government, the Japanese government actually banned powdered forms of meth. So they started making liquid forms, injecting it. So they had a huge injection problem um with with meth, probably the most intense way to take it. But and you know, school children were using it. Um, high school students, um housewives, yeah, you know, laborers, whatever. Everyone was using meth in in in kind of the late 1940s and early 1950s until it was banned

and then they really cracked down on it. It's like a moral panic. I mean, amphetamin salts seem to be everywhere anyway, right?

Yeah.

Um, so DMT first synthesized in 1931, first found to be psychoactive in 1956 and um, that was Steven Zara, right?

Steven Zara was the first to inject pure DMT.

Now, this is at the same time where LSD is a popular psychedelic and psychiatric research. Why? Why did LSD catch on and DMT did basically went disappeared until McKenna?

Right. Yeah. I mean, that was so you're Yeah, you're right. So during that period there was a flurry of these molecules that were either discovered um or invented and LSD was was the main one at the time and Zara actually Steven Zara was this Hungarian physician working behind the iron curtain so in communist Hungary um and he wanted to work with LSD and he wrote to Sandos um the the only company that was producing LSD at the time said, can I can I have some LSD please? I want to start working on it and I said, no, no, no. No, no,

we're not sending LSD into bloody communists.

No, nope.

Nope. Uh, and so he said, "I need something else." Um, and he thought about me. He ordered some measculine from from the UK and that arrived safely and he he took his first dose of measculine on Christmas Day um and had this wonderful experience um in church.

What was he trying to achieve? What was the purpose of his experiments?

Well, he was interested in um he was a psychiatrist.

Ah,

right. So, he's interested in you know at the most fundamental level he was he was interested in the human mind and how we might study the human mind. But he's also interested in you know, could these molecules find uses in psychiatry treatment for various sort of neurosychological disorders. Um, so he tried measculine and then he found this paper that was so there was this um plant called uh anodenthea peragrina which is this um yopo this snuff that scientists had just come to understand, you know, had been used um by various tribal peoples indigenous peoples in South America for perhaps thousands of years and was said to induce um what seemed to be like psychedelic effects. You they would go to other worlds and they would speak with these strange discarnate beings which they thought were like demons or something. Uh, but no one knew how it worked. Uh, and so they they started to analyze it. This the kind of the first study analyzing these seeds from this paragrin um plant. And they found two molecules in there. One was buffotine which is um five hydroxy dimethylryptoamine. It was

5 M.

No, that's fivethoxy.

Ah

okay. Yeah. So 5 MO DMT is five methoxy DMT. If you take that methile group off that carbon you get five hydroxy just a hydroxal group. That's botanine. That was a known molecule. Um, and it was known that when you injected it into prisoners, because that's the way you did it in those days, you found a group of um, prisoners that were normally imprisoned for using drugs, normally young black men basically.

Um, and you would inject them with drugs and see what happened. And, uh, botanine was one that had already been tested um, and was found to have mildly mindaltering effects. Generally, it made people very nauseous and their face went purple, they started vomiting and it's very unpleasant. Uh, but they found that molecule in this um, this uh, yopo seed um, and they thought, well, that must be the kind of the the central psychoactive molecule in this. They also found another molecule called DMT dimethylrypamine and they just ignored it. Um, which is a huge mistake. Um, until Steven Zara read this paper um, and he thought, no, that doesn't make any sense. It's not particularly psychoactive. Um, so why would that be this why would that be regarded as this molecule that would transport you to other worlds and allow you to communicate with discarnate intelligences? That didn't make any sense. So the only other option was DMT that was also in the seed and it being ignored. So he thought, okay, I'll just I'll give it a go. You know, no one has tried this. Uh, so he synthesized it. Um, he made 10 grams in his laboratory in 1956. Uh, and he started swallowing it first of all, you know, increasing the dosage. He went up to like a gram of of DMT. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. We know why now, but that time we didn't know. So he was ready to give up basically.

He didn't try insiflating it.

He didn't try snorting it. snort it.

He didn't snort it. No,

that might have worked though. No.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That might have worked.

It would have been painful, but

yeah.

Uh, it might have worked. So, he basically he was like ready to give up. Maybe his hunch was wrong. And then a friend, a colleague says, "Have you tried injecting it?" Uh, I haven't. So, injected it into um um I think it was a cat or a rabbit. I think it was a cat for some reason. Uh, and the cat kind of started behaving strangely, you know. It was it was having some kind of effect.

I don't mean to laugh. I'm a cat guy.

Yeah, I'm a cat man as well.

So, you know, satisfied that it wasn't lethal, at least in cats. He uh Yeah, we shouldn't laugh. People People complain whenever I tell this story because poor cat. And it's true, but different different times. Different times.

Um,

yeah, so then he ejected it into himself. Um, so sometime in April in 1956 he injected it into his intramuscularly and yeah, the rest as they say is history. He had this he started seeing these fantastical patterns and rapidly procession of rapidly changing geometric imagery all moving very quickly. He, you know, he was having a DMT trip. Um, and so then he he started recruiting um colleagues so doctors, nurses from where he worked. Things were much simpler in those days. You didn't need to fill out forms getting ethical approval or that

da wasn't right.

No, no, no, no. Um, injected it into various people, healthy volunteers, uh, and they started describing what we now recognize as the classic, um, effects of DMT. They would start going to describe going losing awareness of the normal waking world and going to these strange world filled with gods and spirits and

well let me back you up just a second. So why why DMT didn't catch on still? So he's synthesized it works but LSD still is the one that MK that MK Ultra and everybody Sydney got goes there.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so after, so Zara started publishing these papers. So, the the very first uh awareness anyone would have had that DMT was even psychoactive as a psychedelic would have been Steven Zara's papers. Um, so that was in the late 1950s. From 1956 up to kind of 1960, he published several papers in healthy people in schizophrenics and that kind of thing. So, the data was all there. Um, the problem was is that well LSD had its foothold by then. Um, it was extremely potent. Potent meaning you need a very small amount of the molecule to achieve the desired effect. So you could you know in one gram you've got you know like 100,000 doses or something like that. Um, and whereas with DMT and you could swallow LSD, you know, drop it on your tongue, dissolve it in lots of paper, very very simple to uh to distribute. Um, whereas with DMT one,

um, it was much less potent in terms of the amount you needed. Instead of 50 micrograms, you needed, you know, 30 to 50 milligrams. Uh, and you needed to inject it.

That was a big issue. People didn't like to mess with needles, certainly in the West. Um, and and so it was it was kind of an exotic psychedelic. You know, if you were in the know um and you had access to a welltock dealer in the 1960s, you could find um DMT. You know, William Burus, for example, he was probably the first person to take DMT outside of a clinical setting. He injected it. Um, um, and

that's right. I forgot about that.

Yeah. theory as well, you know,

and he's Burrow is one of the great thinkers of his time.

He was and he had a really important role actually in in in working out how Iaska worked.

Did he?

Yeah, we can get to that.

Okay.

Yeah. But um so yeah, William Bur took it. William Bur was horrified. Um he he he took too much one day and he found himself in this what he called the white white hot lattis ovens. The the soulless insect people were kind of menacing him. Uh, and he was he was appalled and he thought this is the the absolute horror show of all drugs. Nobody should be taking this. And so he wrote this kind of breathless letter of warning to Timothy Liry. And Timothy Larry at the time he wasn't particularly wellknown. He was kind of a neophite. Uh, you know, this kind of tweed jacketed Harvard psychologist who had just that year um had been to Mexico and had his first experience with solos philosophy mushrooms. Uh, so he was well primed for DMT. Um, but Boris wrote this letter saying stay away from DMT. It's it's a nightmare the nightmare the nightmare drug. The nightmare hallucinagen he called it. But of course Timothy Larry thought

Larry said challenge accepted.

Challenge accepted. Um, and so Larry spoke to a psychiatrist um friend who said that, you know, he'd injected people with DMT and 90% had had a terrible experience.

Really?

Yeah. Yeah. We don't exactly know who who this was, but he said a psychiatrist working in LA um who was injecting people with with DMT in his in his office. And he said that 90% had had a bad experience. We don't know why that is. But Liry said

Liry was just kind of formulating his set and setting hypothesis that really came from Liry. The idea that the nature of your psychedelic experience comes down to

the setting. Where are you? Who is with you? And also your mind set.

Um, and so he thought, okay, maybe if the set and setting is right, so you're not in a clinician's psychiatrist's office, which is where sick people go, right? Where crazy people go. Uh, but in fact in a beautiful environment um can you um actually induce a more pleasant experience? And so Timothy Liry um and Richard Alpert uh who was one of his kind of partners in crime shall we say during during that era um they were both injected with DMT and both had incredible beautiful experiences. Timothy Liry described these angelic beings like uh elflike insects. Yep. And he was the first person to really use that term elf um in in uh in describing the DMT state. And now elves are

the most famous um beings within the DMT space.

Well, most just about everybody listening have they've never taken DMT and probably never will. So, we don't have to talk about our personal experiences if you don't want to. I don't mind. But can you describe from that first inhale?

What What do you see? How does it feel?

So,

and this is not a recreational drug, folks.

This is not a recreational drug. It's not a party drug.

No, it is not.

No, it is not. Um, it's a it's a dark, quiet room lying on your bed kind of drug. Um, so my first experience with DMT way way back, um, in a place where it was completely legal. Um,

well, if we're going to talk about yours, then you have to tell me what led up to it. Why how did you get the courage? Were you just like, well, I I have to do it now.

Yeah. I mean, I'd reached the stage where I'd been studying DM I've been fascinated by DMT for the best part of a decade. Um, and I'd read all by that point all the Terrence McKenna books, listened to his lectures, and it was like, okay, I need to find this this molecule and actually try it. Otherwise, I'm just talking blindly. Um, and and so I managed through unspecified means to acquire some DMT in an unspecified location at an unspecified time. Um, and I, so I'll kind of talk you through what happened to me. Um, so I had a glass pipe and I loaded it with what I thought was around sort of 50 milligs of DMT and I I first of all I I tried to now we have these great vaporization systems. In those days I just had a a lighter. I

no volcano bag,

no nothing like that. It was all very very basic, you know, like a crack pipe basically.

Um, and I didn't really know what I was doing and so I was heating it and it was it tasted awful and I was coughing.

The smell is terrible.

A lot of it was burning probably. So it was smoke, you know, horrible acid smoke as well. I couldn't get enough in my lungs and I was I basically gave up for the evening. And then just as I was about to go to bed, like 2:00 in the morning, I think it was, I saw the pipe on on the desk beside me, and I thought, "Okay, just one more quick attempt." And I was a bit more relaxed this time for some reason. And I started inhaling the vapor. And then something happened. I just remember this like this ping, this very distinct sound uh like a very high-pitched pinging sound that was completely different early in the evening and somehow I knew that something was happening. Uh, so I continued inhaling. Then I had to put the pipe down. I laid down and I was I was hurtled at great speed through this indescribably complex geometric imagery. People like it's I can't English it. It's unglishable. uh, but straight away and I don't know how I knew this but I knew this uh with every fiber of my being that I was I was I wasn't just in a place but I was in a place that was constructed by the hand of an immense and timeless intelligence that was vast much older far far billions trillions of years older than our universe than our reality.

um more advanced, just indescribably strange

and when you're there, you know it to be true.

You know it to be true. I had no shadow of a doubt. And that's what was so horrifying for me at the time. It was shocking because I was expecting just to kind of go into a dream world and see elves dancing around, you know. I'd got all this stuff from McKenna.

Had you done other like magic mushrooms or things before?

Mushrooms, MDMA, um, not really a psychedelic, but yeah, I was famili familiar with the effects of drugs when they come on.

Not so when you start things start to change you like, okay, I've been here before.

It's it's that breakthrough that's like, what is this?

It's so fast. With mushrooms, it builds and you feel the energy and you can you can kind of

settle into it. Uh, but with this, it's like rocket ship, you know, like a roller coaster. Uh, one moment you everything's normal and then literally 20 30 seconds later you're just being fired into this place that's that's completely un you couldn't there's no way I could have predicted it or anticipated what this was going to be like. I could have read all all the books about DMT and listened to every single Terren McKenna lecture in existence and I still wouldn't wouldn't even be close to what this was. It was truly ontologically shocking.

Yes. um that this place existed and it was right there and it was far more advanced and it was it was this hyper technological space that was built by the hand of an alien intelligent. I didn't see entities dancing around but I felt the immensity of and the undeniability of this presence and um I I it lasted two or three minutes. I don't remember all the details. I remember starting I lost any awareness of not just myself but of even the concept of humanity. Um, and that lasted not long, two 3 minutes. Then gradually I started to get these little fragments of memories of having been a human and as if my brain was kind of piecing back together my humanity.

it's very strange that that come down is is like that you start to become human again.

You become human again.

It's very that only a couple of minutes. So yeah, it's because of that janky method

where

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't I I don't want to give people too much information but even to

vaporized properly we're talking what 15 20 minutes most.

Yeah. I mean the peak itself I mean you you get into the peak within a minute inside a minute. Um, then you're there in the breakthrough state probably between 3 4 5 6 7 minutes and then you then you start to come down and then the after effects will last yeah 15 20 minutes. You know when when I came back I I I just laid on my bed on my back. All I could say was I was shaking and I said, oh my fucking god, that's all I could say. Like I couldn't believe what had just happened to me. I could not believe it. Um, I remember writing a message to my friend, you know, on Facebook Messenger or something. This is this is the most in I was just I was I was euphoric but shocked at the same time. It's like my god, this really is it. You know, Terrence McKenna wasn't joking here. This is this is something. Wow. I need to

Yeah. This is not melting walls or seeing colors. It is not.

No. No. I mean, the one of the first I read a book had a little section on psychedelics and described DMT as like a bit like LSD but but much shorter acting like 15 minutes and people some people will go into it thinking that's what it is just like taking LSD but very short uh duration but it's not

nope

you you you cannot be prepared for it in a way I don't think um you can't anticipate or predict what it's going going to be like and it will shock you death by astonishment you know going back to that he was only half joking when he said that um because true astonishment I think is a very rare emotion. Now we kind of use it to mean mildly surprised, right? That true astonishment where your mind

cannot even begin to comprehend the immensity of something. That's what DMT delivers.

And you can't really explain it. You can't explain that, you know, your ego kind of dissolves into this oneness with everything and and everything makes total sense.

Yeah. At the time it does.

It does.

Yeah. Um, in psychedelic therapy there's a there's something called integration. Did you do any type of integration work post trip?

No. I mean this was um integration is a big thing now but at the time maybe it was in certain specialist circles but at the time it wasn't didn't really know what integration was. Uh but in a way it's like it's so fast and and although yeah for 15 20 minutes I was shaking and I was shocked by the next morning um it's like my my brain had kind of thought okay we'll get we'll compartmentalize that somewhere.

Yeah.

Um and let's put that away.

We'll put that away. Um so there wasn't any lingering after effects or anything like that. You know it's it's neurologically it's a very benign molecule. It's not going to hurt you physiologically, right? But your world, your entire ontological foundation of your reality is going to be obliterated. Uh that's the problem, I think.

And I don't recommend doing it alone. Um definitely not with open flame.

No, no, no.

Cuz you're going to be careful, guys. Be so careful with it. Um, best way to try it, it would be I think using DMTX or that you and Straman created. It's probably a good way to explore it. Um, coming up on a break when we come back, I want to talk a little bit of chemistry and then

Sure.

And maybe you can convince us that those entities are not hallucinations.

I'll do my best.

All right. Be right back. So, let me see if I can get this right. We've got tryptophan gets decarboxilated into tryptoamin. IMT gets involved. Then we've got two stages of methylating to get to DMT. Is that about right?

Yeah.

That sounds like a pretty expensive process to keep in human biology or all biology. So, what is the evolutionary purpose of DMT in all these living things?

Okay. Yeah. So it's actually you know compared to most molecules I mean let's say LSD right LSD is not natural uh it's semiynthetic but it's derived from um lysurgic acid amide um which is natural and it's far more complex than DMT. DMT is actually not only the most common naturally occurring psychedelic found in countless plant species you know hundreds um but it's also the simplest you go as you said you go from tryptophan you go to tryptoamine and then it's one step then you got another step which is this dimethylation

by indol nmethile transferase in MT

right

um and so it's just two simple steps from tryptophan this amino acid

um So, so that's really to me that's there's something uncanny about that. You would have this simple molecule that's everywhere. Um, you know, you walk through your local park and there's probably half a dozen different plant species all busily, silently constructing the world's strangest psychedelic drug. Uh, and you've no idea. Um.

And it's also found in in humans. And we've known that since the 1950s when people started getting um schizophrenics to line up and be in a bottle basically.

Sure.

Right. Exactly. Um so why is it there? I don't think anyone's got a definitive answer. So I can't give you a definitive answer. usual uh answers are well it's an insect repellent or it's you know it's some kind of it's used to um uh kind of an anti-feeding an anti-predation kind of molecule um it affects the neurochemistry of insects let's say we know that psilocybin does that for example.

Sure.

Um that it it would dissuade organisms you know uh predators from feeding on on a plant by producing DMT.

I don't like I don't like that one.

I don't like that either it doesn't explain why unless

even because any mammal's stomach would break it down.

That's what you'd think you see as well. Yeah.

Um so this the short answer and the not very exciting answer is we don't really know why it's there. We don't know why it's in humans. We don't know why it's in plants. But it is and it's very easy to make and it's just two steps from tryptophan. So it's not like um you they you know many molecules you have to go through many many steps on something like morphine for example. there's many steps to get to morphine. Um, but to get to DMT, it's very simple. So, basically all living organisms uh probably have the the enzyatic machinery to to make DMT, including humans. Um, so it feels almost like um you have this message in some way about this other place that's kind of embedded within our reality. Um, but it takes a certain amount of intelligence in order to decode that message. You know, you can't just munch on plants and have a psychedelic trip like you could with mushrooms. Um, you you can eat as many plants as you like. It's never going to have any effect. Um, you need to isolate the molecule and actually like Steven Zara as it did. And that took humans all the way up until

the 1950s to actually work out what this molecule was and how to use it, techniques that to administer it.

From a a chemistry perspective, what why are those methyl those bolt-on methyl groups so powerful? It's because it's basically a serotonin molecule. Yes.

Yeah. So serotonin is five hydroxyryptamine.

So if you remove that hydroxy group, you get tryptoamine which is has no effect. it doesn't get cross the bloodb brain barrier very efficiently at all. So if you inject someone with serotonin they want sorry with tryptoamine there are no psychoactive effects. Um so that me that that methylation makes the molecule slightly more fatty should we say more lipid oil soluble

allows it to get very very rapidly into the brain. Um, and then it binds to this um specific set of receptors. The most famous one being the serotonin 5HT2A receptor. Uh, and this is responsible for its effects. And we want to get into the neuroscience. We can talk through exactly how that that process works.

I'd love to if you don't mind.

I don't mind.

Please.

Yeah. So so psychedelics. So what what are known as the classic psychedelics? So DMT, LSD, psilocybin, escalin, those are the most famous ones. Uh, they all work mainly through this serotonin receptor um called the 5HT2A receptor. Uh, so there are many serotonin receptors and they all have different functions. Uh, what a receptor does broadly receptors are embedded in the membrane of neurons. So the neurons are these information generating cells of your brain. They they generate little electrochemical spikes which you can think of as like uh binary digits almost, you know, on and off. That's all a neuron really could do. Uh, it can fire it's called an action potential, a spike or it can be quiet. It's like a one and a zero. Uh, and and and neurons are generating these action potentials all the time or or not. uh and then they have these chemical connections called sinapses that allows them to share information. So all of these millions of neurons that are that are connected in your um that form your cortex cereble cortex in your brain um and the receptors of all different types of receptors for all different types of neurotransmitters and neurom modulators and other neurochemicals. Um, these chemicals bind to these receptors and they affect the way the neuron behaves. They're like tuning dials if you like for the the neurons. And the 5HT2A receptor specifically is what's called an excitatory receptor. It excites the neuron. It makes it more likely to fire uh these electrochemical spikes. Um, and it makes it more likely to uh to fire in when when it receives stimulation from another neuron. So it excites the cortex broadly. Are we finding that psychedelics uh those neurotransmitters are concentrated in specific parts of the brain?

So, so the cortex, so let's talk a little bit about the cortex. So you have this outer layer of your brain, this folded outer layer which is called the cereal cortex in the newest part of the brain evolutionary. Uh, and it has several layers um kind of six layers uh broadly. Um, and each layer of the cortex has different function terms of its connectivity whether it's receiving input or is more like an output layer or it's more of an interconnection layer that kind of thing. uh and the cortex is is responsible for constructing your world model. This is the this is absolutely fundamental. Um, the world you experience now, the subjective world you experience, the structure, the content, the dynamics, everything you're experiencing, let's say in your visual world is being constructed by your brain. Um um, you're not your brain isn't like a video camera. that's kind of taking pictures of of the outside world. It has to construct a model of the environment um that may or may not resemble what you know the true structure of the environment which we never have direct access to. So so you're always living in kind of a it's like a waking dream in a sense you know an Seth calls it a uh a waking hallucination. Don't really like that term but anyway.

but later I think we we'll get into uh your work with Donald Hoffman and and his theories which are really interesting.

Yeah, absolutely. That's a completely different take on the whole thing, much more fundamental.

But if we stick to kind of the brain level, you have this world model that's being always being constructed by your brain. Uh, and we know this because you can manipulate your brain. If I remove the top of your skull and start um playing around with an electrode in there, I can change your world.

Sure.

Right. Nothing in the out the environment changes, but your world changes. I can make you see um colorful patterns. I can make you hear voices just by stimulating different parts of the brain that are responsible for generating different aspects if you like of your uh of your world. So we know that that's that's the case. Uh, and if you take a psychedelic what does that do? It changes your world. Uh, it binds to these 5HT2A receptors that are concentrated in layer five of the cortex, one of the deeper layers of the cortex. Um, and what that does, um, is it it kind of shakes up your world model. Uh, it the world model stops being kind of very rigid and well- definfined. Um, and becomes much more fluid and dynamic because these neurons are being stimulated by this 5HT2A receptor. Um, um, the neurons start firing more often. They start sharing information between each other. And so this very very rigid uh and uh uh precisely constructed world model which is the one you're using to kind of make sense of the environment starts to change. Things start to loosen up. Objects might start to morph or change their identity. Um, this is happening uh because of this this stimulation uh by by the psychedelic. Um, but with DMT something DMC seems to kind of transcend all of that goes beyond that.

Mhm.

So you can actually measure if you put someone in an MRI machine. This work was initially done by Robin Kart Harris who's now at University of California San Diego. Might have got that wrong but anyway a university in California. Um, maybe San Francisco. Um, but anyway, if you put someone in a MRI machine and give them inject them with psilocybin for example, you can actually see how their brain activity changes. So normally you can see the brain kind of moving between states in a very controlled manner uh as your brain is kind of constructing your world. Um, but then you when you give psilocybin that activity starts to look more random. It's as if the brain is moving more freely from state to state. Um, and so that kind of

you mean TMT is more freely

uh with psilocybin. Okay.

Right. Or LSD.

Okay. Um, but and so you can kind of measure the the entropy so the randomness in in neural activity.

right.

Uh, and what you see is you go from this baseline level where the brain is kind of ordered uh and then you start to see this increase in randomness. So it goes up like this um uh and this kind of maps quite well with the subjective experience. Your the world becomes more fluid. Your thinking becomes much more fluid and dynamic. It's like you're kind of you're it's like heating up a piece of glass, right? The glass is very rigid and you heat it up and it starts to melt and you can kind of mold it to any kind of shape. Psychedelics are kind of doing that to the brain, doing that to your world model. And that's why you have this the effects of psychedelics. But with DMT, something different seems to happen. You get this initial um uh increase in randomness, but it's as if um the brain suddenly collapses into this new order. So you go from the old order, the original order which is the normal waking world model into this more uh fluid and dynamic state and then at the breakthrough uh it's like the brain has has collapsed into this entirely new order which is this entirely new novel, entirely alien um world.

Is that when we start to lose the our ego?

That's part of what's going on. Yeah. Uh, you the ego is an interesting concept um in that it's it's not that well defined but there are certain networks in the brain that we think are responsible the default mode network is the one that's spoken about a lot.

Sure.

Responsible for um um the sense of self as as distinct from the other from the environment. Um, and what psychedelics do is because of this stimulation of these five HTT2A receptors those networks start to break down and that order starts to break down. And so you have all of these effects, psychological, subjective effects, effects on the world, effects on your sense of self. Uh, they all start to break down and that the higher the dose becomes, the the more pronounced those effects appear to be. But with DMT, it's not like there's just an increase in randomness because the DMT is not the MT world is not random. Uh, it is very coherent. um exquisitely um complex uh you know staggeringly coherent narrative complexity. Um, it's like literally as if the normal waking world has been switched off.

Yep.

Uh, and a new world. It's like those old radio sets where you go from dial you have one channel then you twist it and it's kind of noisy. Yeah. That's kind of psychedelics. And then finally, if you twist it enough, this entirely new crisp clear channel crackles through the speakers. And that's kind of what DMT is doing. Um, and

you've called that world navigable.

It is navigable. Yeah. Excuse me. Um, for most people it's not navigable. For most people it's just like hold on. Um, but with with experience, yes, you can you can navigate this world.

Yes. But the problem is um the problem I have um with the kind of the standard explanation of this DMT state um is that this normal waking world is is a world that your brain kind of evolved to construct. You know the moment that you emerge from the womb your brain is constantly sampling sensory information from the environment through the eyes etc. and and using it to kind of construct this world model. uh that's the only world model your brain knows how to build or should know how to build. It's like uh you know if you you grow up speaking English you can't speak any other languages unless you learn them.

Um, and in the same way this normal waking world the should be the only world your brain knows how to construct. But when you take DMT, your brain starts constructing these entirely alien worlds that are that are far more complex, far more intricate, far more coherent uh and far more real feeling than the normal waking world. It's not like dream. You know, when people dream, they tend to dream of people. They tend to dream of animals. You know, people in uh the Midwest will dream of people. They will dream of dogs and cats, right? If you ask someone who lives in the Amazon rainforest what they dream of, they'll dream of catching stingrays. They'll dream of the animals that they will find in their environment. This is obvious in a way. You know, when you dream, your brain is simply constructing the normal waking world. Dreaming is like continuous with the normal waking world. Your brain is using those models that it knows to construct a world in the absence of sensory inputs, which is what dreaming is.

Um, so that's kind of makes sense.

So why then not DMT? not DMT. Your brain starts constructing these worlds that it shouldn't know how to build.

Well, take us through the take us through the world. So, and may and maybe we can talk about um DMTX because that's that's a protocol you developed with Brick Strasman. And so, this is introvenous DMT.

Yeah.

Can keeping you in that state for a long how long?

How long how long is a piece of string is the answer to that question. Okay.

So, yeah. So, so Rick Strazman, as many people will know, he did the world's largest DMT study in the 1990s. He injected them with DMT, what's called a bolus injection. So, all the DMT at once or within like 30 seconds. Um, you get a very rises in the brain. Um, they are they have this breakthrough experience and then almost soon as it reaches the peak in the brain, it starts to metabolized and excreted. And so there's this exponential drop off and then when you reach a certain level in the brain, you come out of the DMT state. And so it's if you really want to study the DMT state, you know, it's geometry, its topology, that the entities, the language, all that kind of stuff, you need to be in there for a lot longer.

Mhm.

Uh, and so it occurred to me back in sort of 2015 that DMT so I was aware of this technique from anesthesiology called target control introvenous infusion which is a technique they use in anesthesiology during surgery. So what they don't do when someone puts you to sleep they don't just inject you with a drug. They inject you with a very fast acting uh anesthetic that if they just injected it you'd be asleep for a few minutes. Um, but they use uh what's called an infusion device, infusion machine. So they deliver using a programmed infusion protocol. They deliver um the anesthetic into your bloodstream. The aim being to keep your brain anesthetic concentration fairly fairly constant. So they can keep you anesthetized for as long as they want. Soon as they stop the machine, a few minutes later you'll wake up. It's beautiful thing. And they can manipulate the the depth of your anesthesia as well. So this is has been the mainstay of anesthesiology for decades. Um, and it occurred to me that the the kind of the requisite properties of of the anesthetic drug uh are the same as DMT. It needs to be short acting. It needs it can't build up in the bloodstream. It can't have subjective tolerance. Right. Right.

So the effect of the drug must remain constant throughout the whilst you're anisttized otherwise you'd start to wake up even though the drug was still pumping into your brain. Um, DMT has that as well. Rick Strasman showed that you can inject someone with DMT um, and you can measure the intensity of the experience using his rating scale. Then you can inject them again 30 minutes later and they will have the same intensity of experience and you can do repeat that over and over again. So it occurred to me, I thought, wait, you know, DMT has all of these properties that we need for target controlled introvenous infusion. So why don't we work together me and Rick and actually uh develop a model for this a mathematical model of the of DMT's uh distribution metabolism excretion that you need to build this kind of target controlled introvenous infusion model uh but just replace the anesthetic drug with DMT. Um, so I wrote to Rick and I said, 'I have this idea, uh, and I need your data, his blood data, because you need blood sampling data, uh, to to build this model and he he had it on some old hard drive, this old Excel file, which he kindly sent to me and we set to work. We built this model.

Did you convince him or talk him into it or explain the protocol or

No. Um I think he he when he wrote DMT the spirit molecule in 2000 um he he mentioned towards the end of the book that maybe an infusion will be better. So it wasn't an entirely alien idea to him. Um um and so you know when I came along with this very concrete proposal to write this paper u we we'd call it extended state DMT. Um later it became known as DMTX.

Um, and we published this model kind of a proof of principle basically to say this should work. We didn't know if it would work but it should work. We should be able to stabilize the DMT state and hold someone there for 30 minutes an hour 2 hours 3 hours. however long. Um, and then that got a lot of attention. Um, and the Imperial College team in London picked it up and said, "Okay, let's do this in humans. Let's see if it actually works." And they in in I think 2020 around that time they recruited a dozen people for a pilot study um and were able to indeed show for just 30 minutes. uh but 30 minutes is a lot longer than a normal DMT trip. They were able to stabilize the DMT state and maintain fairly stable intensity uh of experience. Um, and since then uh you know a number of um groups have kind of extended this to 2 three hours. I now work with a a company called Elusis, Elusiis, in the Caribbean. And we've got a special license to actually um bring anyone onto the island and to undergo several DMTX sessions with qualified medical practitioners, psychiatrists, anesthesiologist, um and and anyone now can basically spend as much time as they like really within the DMT space exploring. And so, you know, go to elucismind.com and you can also, you know, kind of sign up and spend a few days on the island.

Elus went live um in March, right?

Yes. So, the first cohort was in March.

The first cohort. So, what are people seeing?

Um, well, we we it's very early days. Um, so, we don't kind of have a kind of published reports or anything, but the

What are we all seeing? the waiting room, navigating the space, the entities.

So, when the Imperial College team published their um DMTX study, they um we actually I actually did a like an online webinar with all of the or several of the participants. Me and Graeme Hancock actually chaired it. Um, that's still online. People can find that basically for Andrew Gallim or Graeme Hancock. should be able to find that. Um, and we spoke to several of them, including the the the first subject zero, as I call him, Carl Smith. Um, he was the first person to undergo DMTX in a controlled kind of research setting. Um, it was five doses, increasing doses. Um, and I think every couple of weeks they'd go in, they'd be injected, infused with with DMT for 30 minutes. Um, and and then we got to speak to them about their experiences and you know so thing about DMT is that it's it's a very varied experience and no no two experiences are always the same. Uh, however uh Carl Smith particularly he's one of my colleagues at New Nordics. um we're both directors. Um, he um he found that the entities over the sessions with those several you know five sessions of DMTX the entities started to notice that he was coming back rather too often and spending a little bit too much time in there. uh and he he describes the sense that the entities were saying not you again you know you're back again you know as if there was this kind of continuity between the experience they weren't totally isolated experiences but there was this this continuity between the experiences and during one experience one DMTX session he was being scanned by some machine this is in the

the normal waking world right like an MRI machine or something

he was being scanned his brain was being scanned And the entities were aware of this. The entities kind of rushed in uh and they he said they seemed a little bit confused like they're the ones normally doing the scanning um and not whatever this was. They didn't seem to understand what was going on. Most people when they take DMT they aren't being scanned. They're doing it, you know, in the back room or basement or something.

Did he describe what they look like?

Um, he didn't know he didn't describe what they looked like, but he said there were very very large numbers of they were crowding in as if they'd seen something going on. Um, and they come crowded in. Um, and there was another guy called Anton Bilton. He actually funded the study. Uh, he has this great institute called the Turingham Institute and has these wonderful private symposia every few years. Um, and he funded it and he said, "I want to be a subject since I'm paying for this bloody thing." And it's not not a cheap study by any stretch of the imagination. Um, and he described an experience where he found himself in like the waiting room kind of place with these morphing geometric walls and these beings were looking down upon him. He called them the gingerbread men. U, these elfishlike beings, small beings. Um, and they seem to be, he said, they they always check the back of my neck. Uh, always do this. I don't know why. He said, "The only thing I can think is they were checking to see if there was a cord attached, whether I had kind of passed permanently to their side."

Wow.

Yeah. And then, um, when they were satisfied that he hadn't, that, you know, he was kind of there temporarily, they started showing him things. Um, and one thing that happens quite regularly is they they show you devices um that are kind of like like a electronic some kind of mechanical device or electronic device like a a jewel encrusted pad he described it. Um, which is interesting, right? It's like imagine an iPad, I guess, with with knobs and wheels and dials and numbers and all this kind of stuff and trying showing it to him as if as if he was supposed to do something with it or make sense of it. But of course, he couldn't. But this term jewel encrusted pad is very interesting because Timothy Liry back in the 1960s, he wasn't aware of this, Anton, but I'd said to him, jewel encrusted pad, is that your terminology? He said, "Yeah, that's how I describe it." Because Timothy Larry back in the 1960s says that these these elflike insect beings were profering this jewel encrusted pad um like a a device um that was some you know some kind of futuristic iPad thing.

Would an Amazonian see that because they'd have no context for anything like that.

Would they see that? That's a good question. We don't know. Right. That's this is the kind of study that needs to be done is get people who are completely naive to pure injected DMT right.

And bring them in um and see you know what what do they see because the experience is like to be very different to IASA um for a number of reasons but but but yeah do they see the same kind of technological devices um or do they not and you know what what is the reason for that but um but yeah there's there's always this sense that you're interacting with some kind of extremely advanced species um extremely advanced cognitively uh intellectually technologically like a hyper techchnological kind of um species or ecology. Um, and they they they they seem often eager to show you things, devices, multi impossible things, you know, nine-dimensional fab eggs. Terrence McKenna used to describe them, you know, just weird things. liquid light crystal machine things strings, you know, things that you can't really but just things that kind of thing as if as if they're trying to impart some kind of information or trying to make you understand but you don't understand. And that's what's so frustrating about it. Um, and Anton in the same way when he was presented with this dual encrusted pad, he couldn't make any sense of it. And eventually they just gave up and they kind of says there was like a like a swipe as if and the whole scene completely changed. He was in this completely different environment. Um, yeah, so lots of very strange um experiences coming out. But I think what where DMTX really comes into its own is being able to spend imagine if you'd sent in, you know, a mathematician or a linguist. It was it was familiar with strange symbolisms and languages or uh or or or whatever. Somebody who could spend an hour within the space interacting with these beings and trying to extract certain types of information from these beings. I think that's that's how I see the future of a DMTX program as opposed to research programs of the past which have generally been Have you taken psychedelics before? Yes. Good. Do you have any heart conditions? No. Okay, there you go. Go in, tell us what you see. Uh, but

with DTX, you can bring them out, can't you? Get them to describe what they saw, and then put them back.

Exactly. So, you So, not only can you send in specialists, so if you want to study, you know, the topology or the geometry of the space, you send in a mathematician that's familiar with these kind of things, and they can say, "Oh, this is a seven-dimensional space, or this these are the symmetry groups that are on the walls of this space." They can tell you exactly what's going on mathematically, you know, um, and what's changed compared to the normal waking world. And they can spend, yes, they can spend, you know, it could be deep within the space for an hour or longer or you can adjust in real time. So they can have a device where they can adjust the infusion rate. So the the the amount of DMT being infused into their bloodstream, they can manipulate that in real time because DMT is so short acting. Um, if you bring down the infusion rate within just a minute or so, you start to come out and then you can communicate with the team and say, "I'm seeing this. I'm seeing this." And they might say, "Oh, can you can you look for this or can you ask them this?" Okay, I'm going back in. They go back down again. Uh, you know, so you have this ability to manipulate the depth in real time.

It's fascinating. What what got you thinking that maybe what people are seeing is connected and it's not a hallucination that it's that it's a realm or

Yeah. I mean I So what I think's going on with DMT um is I don't think you're going anywhere. That's really important. You're not it's not like another dimension or something like that. Um even in the DMT state, the brain is constructing this model, right? So normally what's happening when you're awake and completely sober is your brain is using sensory information let's say through your eyes and it's using it to kind of um tune and keep its model kind of tuned to the environment basically. Um, now when you take DMT the brain starts constructing this alternate world model um and it's as if there's some alternate source of sensory information coming into the brain that's kind of modulating that DMT world. So you're not going anywhere. you don't have to kind of travel anywhere. It's simply a it's like switching the channel, right? If you have a TV set and you're watching channel one, um then you switch the TV set to channel two and it nothing goes anywhere. It's simply that you've changed the receiving.

Well, you you said that it's like you're receiving an alternate reality. How do you know that you're receiving it, not creating it?

Well, you are creating it. um you're always creating the world model. Uh, but again from the in the normal waken world you're receiving sensory information which is informing that creation. So it's it's it's like it's it's always you it's always being created by the brain but it's mapped to the environment the normal waking world right it's modulated and it's it's kind of constrained by sensory information coming from the environment right now in the DMT state what I think is happening is that your your brain is constructing this alternate world but it's being constrained by some other source of sensory inputs uh which I think distinguishes it from a hallucination. And the reason I think that because you could say you're quite right that it's purely constructed, right? There's no other source of information coming in. It's literally like a kind of dream state. Uh, but again, you know, the dream state is very different. We can explain the dream state. Uh, the DMT state is like this. It's like the brain has started speaking a language it never learned to speak. Um, it's constructing these worlds that have no relationship to the normal waking world. a relationship to the world the brain evolved and learned uh to construct. Um, and you it's hard to explain that, you know, if a if a 5-year-old British child started speaking some obscure dialect of some South American indigenous rainforest language, right? And doing so fluently, that would be completely confounding unless he'd been taught it. uh in the same way the brain switching to constructing this alien world uh so efficiently um is very very very difficult to explain uh and that's kind of the foundation of of why I think there's something going on more than just me than mere hallucination with with DMT but we need to test it um now there are a number of ways you might do that for example you you might look for you know if if two people for example are going, let's say, interacting with the same entity as some people claim to be able to do. Um, can you kind of pass information through that entity? Can someone deposit information into the DMT state?

I want to ask you about that.

The the blue yellow test.

blue yellow test. I want to ask you about that before we do that.

Mentioned uh Robin Card Harris.

Let's steal man straw man because he he disagrees and thinks it's hallucination.

He does. Yeah. Why does he think that? And why is he wrong? I mean, I want you to be right, but it's, you know, logically, parsimmoniously, it seems like hallucination is what it is, but I I prefer your theory because it's just more interesting.

Well, I think I'm not going to say that Robin is wrong. Um, but I think I think Robin and all kind of mainstream button-down neuroscientists start with that the assumption that we're dealing with hallucination. And I think that that's reasonable actually. Uh, it should always be your default position. Um, most of my work, I would say 80% of what I've done in the last 20 years is not actually trying to convince people what DMT is, but actually trying to convince people what it's not. Uh, I actually try to explain to people why I don't think it's hallucination. rather than telling them that I have the answer that you know with people it's the spirit world or whatever the astral plane um I really tried to focus on kind of why I think it's very difficult to explain DMT purely as a uh as a hallucination and Robin would say well this is just um well I can't say what Robin would say uh but it's Robin assumes that we're dealing with some kind of information um some kind of um um some kind of hallucination that your brain when perturbed by DMT is is constructing um these uh worlds perhaps informed by archetypal structures. That's a big thing I know with Robin. He's he often takes this very Youngian angle. He thinks that well we can these are archetypal structures. That's where they're coming from. These are inherited patterns. That's why everyone sees certain types of entities is because these are embedded archetypal structures.

In every culture.

In every culture.

As little people.

Right? Ex. Exactly. Um, but I I I think that would work if the thing is that archetypes are not they're not images. First of all, you know, an archetype really um we know now anyway um that an archetype is really just a it's a an inherited mode of social interaction. So, you're born with certain in animals, we just call them instincts, right? Uh, a baby, for example, will want to be close to its mother. It will see its mother as as a source of warmth and comfort and safety. Um, and will, you know, smile when it sees its mother's face. Whereas when it sees a stranger uh it will u it will be naturally kind of scared and will start crying. If it's separated from its mother it will start crying. These are instinctive behaviors um that are are essential. Right? In in in animals we have certain instinctive behaviors that don't need to be learned. Uh, if you take a a pair of young rats in a cage they're entirely raised alone. Put them together uh in a cage they will start playing. um they will start, you know, scrapping and all this kind of stuff. Um, all instinctive. They don't need to be taught how to play. It's just instinctive. Um, you put a cat few cat hairs into that cage,

right?

They freeze. They're scared. Doesn't work with dog hairs. It works with cat hairs, right? So they have this innate program. We might call it a cat archetype. Doesn't mean they can dream of cats or that they can imagine cats. They can't. But they have this innate response to a cat.

They know what that smell is.

They know that that smell, they don't know what it is, but they know that instinctively that they need to be a little bit careful because there's something unsettling. There's something dangerous uh here. Um, and they don't need to be taught that. And that's kind of important. And in the same way, humans have lots of these archetypes. Um, the mother archetype, the father archetype, uh, the stranger, the wise old man. What's the wise old man? Well, it's an elder member of of the tribe who has a lot of life experience and wisdom and who you should listen to. Um, that the trickster, this is someone probably from outside the tribe maybe. Um, who you need to be a little bit careful around, you know, should you reveal your darkest secrets to them or should you remain tight lipped? Should you listen to what they say or should you uh should you ignore them? You know, these these are all types of social interactions that have been essential in as social humans for millennia. uh tens of millennia. Um, and so these are kind of hardwired. And so these become associated with certain types of people we call the archetypes. Um, but they're not images. Um, they don't endow you with with the the the ability to construct images. U, but you learn to construct images associated with them. As you do is you learn your brain learns to construct the normal waking world. They become associated with certain types of you know the mother archetype is becomes associated with your mother uh and that kind of thing. So archetypes are kind of limited um in what they give you. They give you these very kind of quick and dirty ways of responding to to to humans. There's certain types of humans that you're likely to meet in the environment that you should respond to in certain ways. You don't respond to your mother in the same way you respond to a complete stranger in a dark alley. Uh, we have these hardwired archetypes that allow us to to differentiate those respond in an appropriate way. Um, but they don't give you hyperdimensional worlds filled with non a non-human, non-anim animal beings that are far more complex than humans, you know, they don't give you all of that stuff. Um, and so it's still

it still doesn't explain even if you invoke the archetypes why and how the brain is able to construct these these things so reliably. But again, I understand that not everyone is going to be convinced by this, and I don't necessarily expect them to uh be convinced by it. I'm not trying to convince them that the DMT world really you really are interacting with um other intelligences in the DMT state, but I'm I'm just trying to trigger a little little uh sliver of doubt in your mind that actually there maybe is something slightly unusual going on that we need to study. We need to we need to really um study this space and study these entities and with an open mind and not just assume from the get-go that is just a hallucination and our job is simply to explain how this hallucination works because there's so much going on in DMT state that I think remains um a true mystery.

Do do we know if Robin has tried DMT? I don't want to out him. The reason I ask is if you've tried it, then you inherently feel like you're connected to everything else.

Yeah, I I I do know the answer to that question, but I I'm not sure if I can.

That's fair enough. That's fair enough. Um, cuz when I when I read his uh his quote about hallucinations, I was thinking, Robin, I don't know if you've taken it because it it's pretty mindopening. Uh, but there are there are some problems with it that that I'll I want to talk about as we move along. You mentioned rats which brought me to a question I wanted to ask. I think we're finding that under cardiac arrest brains being flooded with DMT.

Yeah.

What do you think is going on there?

Ah ah okay. There's a bit of a story there.

Okay.

So so again the reason I mentioned earlier that people have been looking for DMT in humans since the 1950s. There's a reason for that uh because there was this idea that something called the transmethylation hypothesis of schizophrenia um which was the idea that you know serotonin also comes from tryptophan and tryptoamine uh but if you kind of divert off the serotonin production pathway you can get very easily to DMT. So when people started when Zara particularly started and other people started publishing studies showing that DMT was psychedelic uh and that it could easily be produced from tryptophan. They they thought well maybe what's causing these uh abnormal psychologies in in schizophrenics is that they're they have this disorder with their tryptoamine metabolism and that they're they're producing too much DMT. So this makes sense, right? And so easy to test. They started looking for DMT in urine, in in in blood, in saliva, etc. And they found it. But the problem is that they found it in basically everyone,

right? And there are some studies that I think there's been over a hundred studies now looking at DMT levels in humans since the 1950s. And um there's never been there's never really convincing evidence that some studies say, "Oh, there's more DMT in schizophrenics." Other studies say, "No, there isn't." It's certainly not definitive. And does it even make any sense? Schizophrenics don't tend to, you know, really like schizophrenic visual hallucinations when they're there mainly they're auditory they're hearing voices. Uh, but when they do have visual visual hallucinations they tend to be of normal appearing normalsized humans.

And they tend to be in the same space where when you're on DMT you're not here anymore. You you are gone.

Exactly. Yeah. So it's like that it's like you're in a waking dream. It's like your, you know, your your brain has inserted human into your world model inappropriately.

They interact with the environment. They sit on chairs. They don't they walk through doors. Uh, they don't walk through walls. They do they seem to obey the laws of physics, right? So that's your brain kind of again using its stored object models and models of the world uh but not doing it quite appropriately. That can that's relatively easy to explain. Um, but anyway going back to um the rats. Yeah. So the the idea so the pineal gland this is basically taking us to the pineal gland. Um, so Rick Strazman in the 1990s he proposed that um DMT we know that the pineal gland is producing melatonin. This tiny little gland about the size of the end of my um pinky u sits right in the center of the brain. It has this exalted position in mystical traditions for many many years.

Um, and Rick Strasman suggested that perhaps pineal gland was releasing DMT.

Um, um, and that this was responsible for certain alter states of consciousness or very specifically the near-death experience. Um, this actually I should give proper credit to Jace Callaway in the 1980s. He proposed that dreaming was due to DMT. That when you dream your um your brain stops tryptoine metabolism changes and your brain stops producing serotonin and basically starts producing DMT and that causes dreaming. That was his hypothesis. So you have two hypotheses. One is that DMT causes dreams, which I don't think is true either because dreams are nothing like DMT, right?

And then the near-death experience, that's more compelling. Yes.

That's more compelling. And there have been some recent studies that showed there are very there is kind of a quite a large overlap between the kinds of experiences people have during near-death experiences and the DMT phenomenology. They're not exactly the same.

>> But only 10 to 20% of those people have that experience. The rest don't.

>> Exactly. Yeah. Including Don Hoffman, actually, but that's another story.

>> We were almost off the top. I can't wait. So, so what do you think is happening? Yeah. Why is it what why did we evolve to have that there? So is that why we're seeing the tunnel? When I see the Virgin Mary or I see my grandmother, my mother, am I seeing an entity?

So that's the hypothesis, right? So Rick Straman s said that when you die or when you're in during the dying process, the brain is flooded with DMT. Uh and th this is kind of the the conduit by which the soul exits the body. It's a very mystical kind of it's not purely a scientific. He's definitely strayed into the mystical realms here. kind of exited the scientific arena a little bit.

>> Um, you kind of have to.

>> You kind of have to. Yeah. Um, but it was purely hypothetical. It was just a hypothesis um that a number of people caught on to. And so the DMT dream, DMT death thing has become kind of embedded in in public consciousness, but they're both purely hypothesis.

However, um more recently, um a guy called a biochemist, I think he's biochemist, Edie Fresca, who's working with Rick Strazman and Dennis McKenna, uh he found that um DMT when you if you if you have some neurons that are deprived of oxygen, so brain cells, you you deprive them, they they are very oxygen hungry. Uh if you deprive them from oxygen, we deprive them of oxygen, they die very quickly. This is why strokes are so devastating. Um, in a very short period of time, blood flow to certain parts of the brain is compromised. That that part of the brain starts to die, which is why strokes need to be treated so so rapidly. It's an absolute critical, you know, clinical emergency.

Um, but what he found is that if you deprived neurons of oxygen and added some DMT to the mix, the neurons survived much longer.

>> Neuroprotective.

>> It's neuroprotective. And it's actually a particular receptor um um called the sigma one receptor. It's not not the serotonin receptor. The sigma one receptor binds to this and it it it protects the neurons in some way. There's some biochemical cascade uh that that helps um helps the neurons to survive for much longer.

So then you think about this. Oh wait a minute. What happens during the dying process? Well your cardiovascular and respiratory system start to collapse. Your brain is starved gradually more and more starved of oxygen. Now this is precisely the time when uh you know if you do come back right if you don't die this is precisely the time when you need as much DMT in your brain as possible to help protect your brain. So if you do come back the brain is protected because this is the most oxygen you know hypoxia sensitive organ in the body. Uh and so it would make sense that if you're dying that somehow DMT endogenous DMT production is ramped up very very rapidly. you get this flood of DMT in the brain which protects the brain. Doesn't explain the experience however because you can do this with any molecule that binds to the sigma one receptor. Uh so it suggests there's some connection there with the dying process.

Um, and so they recently they they tested this in in rats. They would they would stop the rat's heart uh induce basically cardiac arrest in in a rat and they would they have these things called these like micro what are they called? um uh I forget but anyway they have this system where they can actually measure they can put this device uh this probe directly into a rat's living rat's brain and actually measure in real time the levels of various molecules kind of a credible thing.

>> Um and they found indeed that when the rat's heart stopped levels of DMT rose very very spike in DMT um there was also other neurotransmitters that that were spiking as well so whether it's specific for DMT is not doesn't seem to be uh but it kind of fits together right that when you're dying the brain or the brain or could be the lungs we don't know uh but levels of DMT in the brain at least uh rise this protects the brain.

>> Have they have they've been able to test on the rats different brain activity?

>> No so you're suggesting like they can measure the NDE of them experience there?

>> It sounds like all mammals would do this or that's what it sounds like. I'm just wondering does every animal when it goes through this process does their reality change? Do they move to this new dimension?

>> This is a Yeah, unless unless you you kind of undergo a rebirth as as a rat. We're not likely to find that out. I mean, you certainly you can measure.

>> Couldn't you test could you test their brain waves to see?

>> Yes, you can. You can you can but whether you can do that at the same time as this micro that's called micro diialysis. You can do that at the same time as this measuring the levels. You probably have to do it separately. You have these like tiny little MRI machines. Very cute little Men.

>> You could probably do that.

>> Looks like a Barbie MRI.

>> Yeah. I don't think it's been done though, but it's Yeah.

>> Uh, a quick sidetrack and then I want to get to blue yellow. Five MEO DMT is something that I'm not interested in doing. But that seems to be real dark ego death very quickly where with DMT there's some ego dissolving but you're still you're still narrating and you're still remembering. So there is you're still kind of driving where 5me is a little bit you're more observing and you kind of go into the void.

>> Yeah. They they used to call 5me and DMT the power and the glory.

>> Oh, right. So, DMT is the glory. It's it's very it's it's obviously it's characterized by extremely contentrich. It's extremely visual. It's full of stuff, more full of stuff than than all waking world.

>> So, it's a beautiful experience in many can be horrifying as well, but it is a beautiful rich incredibly exquisitly rich and complex kind of experience.

>> Yeah, not everybody from DMTX had a had a had a glorious experience. I read a couple that were like those evil motherfuckers or I've read a couple of those dark ones.

>> Oh, there are some dark ones. Yeah, for sure. But gen it's less than 10%.

>> Yeah, it's it's a bad trope.

>> It's a bad trope. Um, but yeah, I Carl Smith going back to him, he was subject zero Imperial College. He said to me many years ago, he says if DMT is like the fourth dimension, 5me is like the 12th dimension.

>> Yeah.

>> It's like you go past all the form. You you transcend form. If you go far enough beyond, you can you can actually go beyond DMT this highly structured form and contentrich state into the void into pure white light of consciousness itself. That's the 5me. And he actually said during his DMTX experience that he was able to sometimes see the 5me space kind of there some way away whilst he was in the DMT space as if he could almost reach it as if they were connected in some way. That's very interesting.

>> Yeah, that's very interesting. Um, I don't know if you want to say but have you experienced five?

>> Uh, and I like you, I'm in no hurry. I've got my hands full with DMT. Thank you.

>> Yeah, I'm I'm in no hurry either because Yeah. And you can buy that online from these churches. Don't do that. I don't don't buy anything from the churches.

>> Don't go chasing toads down in.

>> Um, what was what was that church that you that you criticized?

>> They're still in business, by the way.

>> Are they really?

>> Oh, yes. Yes. Yes.

>> Good. Yeah. It was the church of used to be called the church of Sylum Oxen. Then it became the church of the sacred synthesis I think.

>> Yep. There. Yeah. They're still they're still operating.

>> And um, it's a couple of lawyers that are running basically a church farm. I think they've claimed that they've helped create something like 80 to 100 of these sacrament churches. They I mean they wrote a couple of books on how to do it.

>> To get around being able to buy drugs in the mail.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

>> But.

>> But I just want people to know that that's it's not legal what they're doing.

>> So So don't send them money.

>> No. No. I mean they they say that their their sacrament doesn't contain they said doesn't contain any the illegal parts of the mushroom is that the psilocybin and the psilicin they said it doesn't contain any of that and it's just psythoxin. molecule, the sacred molecule that they produced. But actually when people analyzed samples of this this sacrament, u it actually contained no syylomoxin whatsoever and it was purely just it was just magic mushrooms. So they've been shipping that to people um including internationally as well.

>> Oh boy.

>> Um, so you pay a you know subscription fee and um, you get shipped these allegedly perfectly legal mushrooms because itself molecule isn't illegal. that should be completely legal, but actually if someone was to one of these samples was was intercepted, it's like you can get in really serious trouble depending on where he lived.

>> Um, it's and and it's such a what really annoys me about them is that it's such a simple thing to do.

>> Um, you know, he had this vision that um if you feed fivethoxy DMT to magic mushrooms, they start converting fivethoxy DMT to siloin. simple chemical step.

>> Wasn't that based on debunked research though?

>> It was that Hamilton Morris recently debunked it. Yeah. Okay. By a guy called Garts.

>> But anyway, you know, once they' done that experiment, nothing wrong with doing the experiment. Um, they should have done the obvious thing which is to analyze chemically analyzed. It shouldn't have been left to some outside person, some independent group to actually analyze their mushrooms and and check that it doesn't contain psilocybin and psilocin actually contains what they say it contains. They just said, "Oh, it feels completely different to mushrooms in a completely biased subjective uh way uh um um of kind of appraising this this mushroom." And then when a group did actually analyze it, as I said, there was no symathoxin in there. whatsoever.

>> Um, and of course they threatened to they tried to um sue them for1 million $1 million. Literally it was you know several people lots of people they tried to sue.

>> Well they're lawyers. They're not chemists. They're not scientists. They're lawyers. So they're they're going to sue. They lost every case they sued. Yeah.

>> Um, yeah. So guys don't that's um.

>> Andrew won't say it but I will. Um, Greg Lake and Ben Wi. Stay away from uh those churches. That's the uh I feel like those those churches kind of cloud the legitimate research, don't you?

>> Well, it depends on the church, I guess. I mean, I think I think humans really do have a dare I say a god-given right to alter their consciousness in however they they they feel fit.

>> Um, and if that includes using philosophy mushrooms or IASA or DMT or whatever, I I don't think that should be a crime. And I think there's something extremely wrong with the idea that certain states of consciousness are basically illegal. I mean, yes, it's the molecule, but really not the molecule. You know what's important is what it does to you, what it does to your consciousness. And so it basically means that the LSD induced state of consciousness is illegal. The DMT induced state of consciousness is an illegal state of consciousness.

>> Um, so I I think people I I can fully understand people who who would try to find loopholes in the law and you know more power to them to do that. Uh, but when you start creating churches, I think then you you there's a danger of you getting into kind of cultish territory, starting your own religion.

>> Some for some people it's clearly just a way of getting around the law. Uh, but for other people like the church of Salomoxin, for example, it becomes much more than that and they start making big money from this. I mean the $50,000 a month I think was a number, don't quote me on that, but it was a big number.

>> I think in the lawsuit it was 100,000 a month. Yeah. Okay, there you go. So, $100,000 a month. Uh, and then some some guys publish a paper basically saying that you're the entire foundation of your sacrament, you know, people are paying $100 a month, whatever it is, for 30 grams of dried mushrooms, something that could be obtained for pennies really if you grow your own.

>> Someone shows that that's nonsense, that it's not scientifically valid.

>> Go from $100,000 a month to very small number. You can imagine them being being pissed off by that. But it's their own fault.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> We'll leave on that that up note about the churches. All right. We'll be right back, guys. It's going to get wild. I want to ask you about this. back in 2021, something you posted.

>> Going back.

>> Retrieved and carefully restored from the archives of the highly secretive, now allegedly defunct laboratory for reality engineering Tokyo with its own psychedelic molecular technology technical manual. That is not a paper. That is not a scientific paper. That's what is that a world building an ARG? What what what were you doing?

So that's from my so my second book reality switch technologies psychedelics as tools for the discovery and exploration of new worlds. So that was kind of a concept book. I mean fundamentally it's a book about how do psychedelic molecules um alter the structure and dynamics of your world? How do they allow you to explore other worlds? basically um it's a it takes you through the all the way from the chemistry through to the the biochemistry and the pharmacology and the neuroscience and looks at DMT, it looks at the classic psychedelics generally. It looks at Salvinorin, it looks at even ketamine, things like that and basically it's like a manual for understanding psychedelics basically. But it's but it was kind of like a concept book in that I wanted I wanted to give it this kind of um this kind of feeling as I guess like this kind of cyberpunk vibe as being this.

>> Yes.

>> This kind of old document from this defunct reality engineering institute in Tokyo. That was the vibe uh you know kind of Akira kind of thing. That's what I wanted. So if you if you actually buy that book, the whole book looks like it's been kind of photocopied. It's like one of these declassified CIA documents with all the stamps on and the retracted bits.

>> You know that you could still get that. I'm going to I'm going to do that.

>> Yeah, it's that was a very.

>> I love I love that book. Uh, and that whole reality there's some photos in the center of the book that that purported to be from this now defunct secretive reality engineering institute in Tokyo, which of course is just figment of my imagination. I bet a lot of people hopped on board though with that.

>> A lot of people did and they would write to me as well and say, "Hey, I think there's a problem with the printing on this board.

>> It looks like it's been photocopied." So, yeah, that's part of the design.

>> I thought it was great. Um, so let's talk about the the blue yellow screen test.

>> Right?

>> How does that work? And what what are you trying to prove? And is that connected to traces of other with a with Don and Na.

>> Yeah. So, so obviously, you know, I can talk until the cows come home until, you know, explaining why I I think DMT is more than hallucination.

>> Um, but we really need real tests. uh experiment what what are the kind of experimental tests that we can do u that that can distinguish between actual interfacing with some kind of intelligence versus pure hallucination.

>> Um, and and so in 2015 I started working with uh a nonprofit in Florida called New Nautics and now one of the directors we we're interested in kind of kind of like we describe it as like a SETI of the mind kind of program rather than looking for intelligence out there in the cosmos. We're looking for intelligence you know inner paths to outer space as Rick Strazman called it.

>> Um, and so we we're interested in kind of spearheading and developing research various research projects um within the kind of psychedelic arena to actually study things that other people don't study. Right? Actually most people assume it's hallucination and so they wouldn't dream of doing these kind of experiments trying to actually test that.

>> Um, and so new nautics people can go to the nautics website nortics.org naucs.org or and find out all about the work uh we do. People can even donate if they want to to help kind of fund that kind of research.

>> Um, and now with the DMTX technology, now that we have this ability um to uh extend the DMT state, we can actually do experiments now. And now we even have the venue. I mentioned Elusis earlier uh eusis based on you know theian mysteries.

>> So, uh, we have this legal setting where people can go and we can actually bring in cohorts. We're like the research arm of Elusis at New Nordics. We can design these experiments um and we can actually bring people onto the the island in in the Caribbean, St. Vincent and the Grenardines um and um perform experiments aimed at studying the DMT space and testing the DMT space, doing experiments within the DMT space.

>> Um, and so this blue yellow. So basically what we want to know is when someone goes into the DMT space and they're interacting with some kind of entity, let's say, are they really interacting with some kind of independent agency uh and how do we test that? And it's one can imagine a whole suite of different experiments that one could do. I don't think you you there is kind of one mic drop experiment that's going to settle the question once and for all but you can imagine various research programs aimed at testing that and one broad type of experiment is looking for um some kind of correlation um within the DMT experience that that that can't be uh explained in terms of that the subject couldn't know right so I I mentioned earlier this idea of um someone depositing information into the DMD space and someone else retrieving it later on and that would show there's some sort of communication channel.

Another type of experiment which is this blue yellow one you mentioned uh is can a DMT entity um can they track some kind of external variable that the subject doesn't know right so it could be the simplest case is some kind of binary variable right it could be switching between two colors right so in another room completely isolated from the subject you have a computer screen uh that's set to randomly switch at random intervals between two different variables. Most simplest idea would be two colors, right? A blue screen and a yellow screen. Simple as that. What we want to know uh is can some entity uh can their behavior in some way be tracked to that variable. Right? So for example, the subject goes into the DMT space, starts interacting with an entity. So here we've got trained people who can reliably interact and with with certain entities.

>> Uh, and then basically we can ask the subject um to basically at intervals at set intervals they need to say okay is is is the screen blue or yellow right based upon your experience right they could be asking the entity directly um is it blue or yellow now u or it could be just like what feeling what what are the dominant colors within the space maybe they're not even interacting with an entity um just what vibe do you get based upon your experience Um, do you are you leaning more towards blue now or leaning more towards yellow? And sometimes that might be obvious. You know, if the experience becomes brightly colored yellow, then they would say yellow. But it might be much more subtle than that. They might have to kind of guess a little bit. But the idea basically is simply that um when you when you perform that experiment with the subject, you compare the actual random flipping between blue and yellow or whatever other binary variable you choose, is there a correlation, statistical correlation that is beyond what would be expected by chance? And if if so, if you achieve that, then that suggests that yes, the DMT state, the entities within the DMT state can somehow track. So it's not it's not like many people have proposed experiments where you go into the DMT space and you say to an entity if you're so smart um you know um break down this complex number this this large number into its unique prime factors basically asking them to uh perform perform things perform mathematical operations. I think that's that's quite an.

>> Ask they don't want to do that.

>> They probably don't want to do that.

>> Didn't you have one entity who just said we're done for for today?

>> Oh yeah, we'll get to that. Yeah, that's the to do with the lockout effect. Very interesting. I didn't mention that actually. That's another reason why I don't think but we'll get to that.

>> Okay.

>> But yeah, so so I think this is a much simpler experiment uh in that you're simply asking someone to basically say blue or yellow.

>> What makes you think that the entities can see into our world? So easy.

>> We don't know that. We don't know that. Um, which is why you have a number of experiments. So you might be asking again, you know, deposit and retrieval that's slightly different here. looking at an information channel u into and out of the DMT state. This is more tracking an external variable.

>> You might ask um the entities to um or sometimes rather than giving the entities tasks. This is something I really struggle with um is that you requiring the cooperation of an entity for them even to know what you mean. There's nothing guaranteed. We'll get to this when we talk about Don Hoffman.

>> Uh, there's nothing guaranteed in my current model of of of of DMT that's that that requires or even implies that these entities are highly intelligent in the human sense, but they seem to occupy a space that is um geometrically, dimensionally, and topologically very very different. And so they're doing things within that space that cannot be done um within um the normal waking world.

>> And they kind of betray their intelligence in a way.

>> Um, you don't need to ask them to do things. They just do things that the human brain can't. Right? So if it's a hallucination, then obviously what that entity can do is limited by what your brain can do.

>> Right? If the entity starts speaking ancient Greek and you don't know ancient Greek, we've got a problem here.

>> Right? Um, now if an entity starts performing mathematical operations, starts doing things, right, that your human brain cannot do, then we've got a problem here to explain.

>> Um, Andres Gomez Emilson who works who's uh part of or founded the Qualia Research Institute probably the most important group on the planet now who's really studying the the mathematics of of of the DMT state and the topology and the dimensional structure and all of that stuff. He describes entities doing things that a human can't do um mathematically like painting surfaces with certain colors. So there's something called the four color theorem um which states that whenever you have a surface that's got different shapes all perfectly tessillated like a map.

>> You can color every shape with a with with four colors so that no two shapes are but with the same color. So come comes back to the idea of coloring a map of the c of all the countries. if you only need four colors to paint every country um with a different color. So no two countries have the same color kind of butting up against each other. It's called the fourc color theorem. You can do it with any kind of map.

>> Uh, but the more complex the map becomes, the more cognitively demanding it becomes. Eventually it becomes impossible for a human to actually color these surfaces.

>> But what he noticed these entities doing was having these exquisitly complex often higher dimensional or with surfaces with strange topological structures and and these entities painting these surfaces with four colors just perfectly as if demonstrating uh their abilities. And he said, you know, I couldn't do this. It would take me hours or longer to do what they were doing in a fraction of a second. And repeatedly they paint the surface and then they would reset it and then paint it again and then do it again repeatedly.

>> Um, and most people if they saw that they would go that was you know crazy or that was weird or that was beautiful but they wouldn't understand what they were actually looking at.

>> I wouldn't.

>> No would norther would I norther would I neither would I. Nor would I.

>> Was I was surprised by all the math in traces of other and in Hoffman's theories. There's a lot of math in it. There's a lot of math and I think you need you need the maths um to so we say maths in the UK. I can't can't bring myself to say math. You need the mathematics to really kind of to understand the DMT state because it is entirely different. It's not this simple 3 plus one-dimensional world that we live in. It's very very different. And being able to go in there and say how it's different, why it's different, what's going on. And this is why I said earlier you send in specialists into the DMT state. You send in people like Andress who can say look what these entities are doing is not just beautiful or strange. It's impossible for a human brain to do uh or far beyond normal human cognitive capacities even in the most intelligent of people like Andreas.

>> Um, and so those are the kind of things you see where the entities are actually betray their intelligence displaying it. They're not giving you numbers or giving you blueprints for the time machine. I don't think it works like that, but they're they're doing things that you just have to recognize are beyond human capabilities and and in that way uh you you know that adds another piece of evidence that we're dealing with something that is beyond the human shall we say. That's very interesting.

>> Um, can you give us just a simple example of how the maths apply to this work?

>> Yeah. Well, so.

>> I'm just trying to get a foundation before we get into Don Hoffman.

>> Okay. Yeah. Well, we can get into Doon Hoffman because the mathematics definitely applies there.

>> Um, so so I've been um kind of following Don Hoffman, Donald Hoffman, professor um cognitive scientist, University of California at Irvine and for for decades.

>> Um, and he has this mathematical model um that he calls conscious agent theory.

>> Mhm.

>> It's what he calls um conscious realism which posits that consciousness is fundamental uh and that reality consists of and only of conscious agents interacting.

>> Um, so everything we see and perceive is the result of the interaction of these conscious agents. And he has this precise mathematical model.

>> Um, from which he can kind of boot up physical reality. So rather than this failed program of assuming that matter is fundamental then trying to boot up consciousness from dead uh inert physical matter.

>> Um, he's going in the opposite direction which I think is the correct one. Assume that consciousness is fundamental try to get the appearance of the physical world from consciousness and from the interaction of conscious agents. So he starts with a conscious agent which is.

>> I think he got his math to work through game theory. Like it like the math is legitimately works.

>> The mathematics legitimately works and it's it's incredible really that he starts with a very simple kind of minimal assumption model of a conscious agent. A conscious agent is an agent that can do basically three things. It can perceive other conscious agents. It can make decisions based upon what it perceives and it can perform actions um which affect other conscious agents. So you have you this kind of network emerges of conscious agents. So all interacting via perception and what we see and what we observe um is this interface. So we never perceive the conscious agent network directly because it's far too complex effectively this infinite network of conscious agents. What we see is this um interface that allows us um to interact in adaptive ways with the environment.

>> Everything's an icon.

>> Everything's an icon. Right.

>> So this is the fitness before truth method.

>> This is fitness before truth. Um, and so that was his original idea that he's been developing and testing various ways over the last few decades. And most recently uh he started uh he came up with this what's called the trace logic.

>> The mathematics are a little bit sophisticated. I don't want to get too much into that um because I'll get out of my depth pretty quickly as well.

>> Um, but what he found is that using this new model um he could actually kind of boot up um not just the world as it appears to us, but he could also boot up um relativity. So he could explain within this conscious agent theory trace logic um model um why time dilation and uh contraction at high speeds and all this kind of stuff that comes from relativity which we thought was kind of fundamental to the way kind of spacetime works actually he can get it from just the interactions of conscious agents you know he can get he get he derived the shreddinger equation.

>> I mean it's incredible stuff uh just from basic conscious agents and so um.

>> Just a few months ago, actually, I got an email from a guy called Gaspard, who's working with Don. he's he's um kind of built this thing called the the Trace Institute based upon Don Hoffman's work to kind of start to build Don's legacy because Don Hoffman's kind of disorganized in some ways and there all this stuff that floating around in papers and interviews and other stuff but there's no kind of kind of properly organized archive and an institute to actually follow on his work and kind of pick up the mantle so to speak. So Gasbard, who's also been following my work, said to to Don, you should you should read this guy, Andrew Gallimmore, you know, read his book Death by Astonishment because a lot of the ideas in here, you know, I talk about intelligent agents in a very neutral way. I don't talk so much about aliens or spirits or that kind of thing. I'd say we're dealing with some kind of intelligent agent in the DMT state. Don Hoffman talks about conscious agents. So Gaspard quite rightly noted that there seem to be some overlap here.

>> Um, there is perhaps some cross fertilization between our our different ways of looking at at reality.

>> There is but there's some conflict as well.

>> There might be some conflict. U, we we can get into um but Gasbard said you know would you like to meet Don Hoffman? Um, you know, Don would like to meet you. we can have a discussion and see if where where there is that overlap and so um uh we met online and straight away I said should we write a paper on this see see if we can see where that the connection is and I it was honestly and I I don't say this lightly it was one of the most profound few months of my life.

>> And this was a pre-print just last month I think right?

>> Pre-print we published just last month um and it was it I I kind of had this working model of what DMT was doing that it was um that it was kind of gating access to some other source of sensory information. But I never within the physicalist framework there was no way for me to explain how does information come from somewhere else. It's not coming through the normal sensory organs. Where's that information coming from? I didn't have an answer to it until I started working with Don's model.

>> Um, so in my second book which we just spoke about reality switch technologies I developed this concept called the world space. So remember that your brain is always constructing the world. Uh, and so there's kind of a vast state space of all possible worlds that your brain can construct. Right? Normally we sit within this very small region what I call the world space. I call this the consensus reality space.

>> Um, but there are all these other worlds, world moments. A world is just everything you're experiencing at a particular moment. And your brain is constantly moving between these states. If you take this vast landscape, all possible world moments, I call that the world space. And normally we sit within this very narrow region. It's like a well and a tractor basin within this world space, the consensus reality space.

>> Um, and that's the normal waking world. Those are the states that represent the structure, the content and dynamics of the normal waking world. What DMT does, as I postulate in reality switch technologies, is it perturbs the brain and it pushes it into a different region of this world space landscape. And this is where the DMT worlds are represented. But what I didn't have in that model was how information comes in to actually kind of modulate that, you know, uh modulate that experience. it was just how does the brain go from building the normal waking world to the DMT world.

So then I started working with Don's model uh and a mathematician called Nifer Hermanson who's absolutely pivotal making this all the mathematics work and we basically we we probed the model. We said okay if normally we we only sit within a narrow very small region of what Don Hoffman calls the experience space it's the same idea.

>> A conscious agent has this vast set of states vast numbers of different experiences uh and we sit within this very narrow region of this experience space it's the same idea as the world space um but what Don Hoffman's work has is kind of the experience base is simply a set of states. All possible states that a conscious agent h could have all possible experiences.

>> Um, but what sits on top is this mathematical structure uh called a markoff kernel which is called the qualia kernel. What that does is it gives dynamical structure to the experience space. So what that means is you're in this state now what are the probability that you'll move to this state or this state or this state. So it gives that dynamics. It determines the dynamics of uh how you move through uh around the experience base. And as I said you normally we will sit within this very small region of the total experience base which is the adaptive region uh where we we experience the normal waking world. This very thin very very small uh location within the the experience base.

>> Um, and that's determined by the qualia kernel which has evolved within that region of the experience base to create the world that we experience. However, if you can perturb the brain, perturb the conscious agent, you can knock it out of this region of the experience base into an entirely different region uh where the the the normal rules that are basically uh applied by this qualia kernel, they no longer apply.

>> Um, so you you enter a uh a type of experience, a type of being within the world that is completely different. Right? This is purely abstract at the moment. We're not thinking about DMT. You enter a region of the experience base where the dynamics are completely different. The Marovian rules, the Marovian dynamics that determine how you experience uh the world within this region of the experience base are completely different. Now the qualia kernel that sits as I said that's determining these dynamics is actually composed of three different kernels the the perception the decision and the action kernels. So there's three parts. So together they determine not just what is your experience like within this region of the experience base but how are you interacting with the larger the broader conscious agent network. What kinds of other conscious agents can you uh interact with? Can you perceive? Because in this region, the consensus reality space, you only can only interact with a very very limited number of conscious agents. But in this region of the experience space, we proposed you might be able to interact with agents uh that are normally completely imperceptible.

>> Let me ask a question then.

>> Go on.

>> Information theory would say that that other region is just a lossy projection and you can never fully know what's there because it may even be Don's work where and n can't be greater than m. So brain is finite. We can't perceive other dimensions because our brain just can't do it. So if we're going into these other worlds, it has to just be a shadow of the world because we we really can't know.

>> Well, okay. Yes. So the world you experience is always it's always the interface. So you can never get out of the interface, but the interface would change as you move the different regions of the experience space. So what you see in the interface is determined by the dynamics that are imposed by this qualia kernel. Right? So in this region u we experience this lowdimensional world we're interacting with this very limited number of conscious agents that are that that through the our perception channel our perception kernel we're able to kind of render that information in a way that makes sense to us but once you move into this other region of the experience space so we propose the the dynamical constraints are completely different. So the world wouldn't necessarily be 3 + one dimensional. It it could be completely different. It could be completely alien. The geometry, the topology could be completely alien. And and the conscious agents that you can interact with in that region uh of the experience base could also be completely different.

>> So your brain has to also be a projection to make that work even mathematically.

>> Yes. Yes. You always work in conscious agent theory. Your the brain itself is part of the interface. you're a conscious agent or a set of conscious agents and we're talking purely about at the level of the ground of reality if you like.

>> Um, but what's beautiful is you can actually you know this was purely initially a kind of a mathematical abstraction that we were doing talking about how the the qualia kernel and the marovian dynamics all of this stuff but then we said okay let's let's imagine what that would actually be like if you were knocked out of this region of the experience space and you found yourself in a different region of the experience space where the marovian dynamics are completely different and the interactions between the broader conscious agent network is completely different. Well, it would be extremely strange.

>> Um, nothing would seem to make sense. It would look impossible. Uh, it would look perhaps highdimensional. The topology, the geometry would be completely different. The beings that you interacted with would seem completely alien. In other words, the the entirety of the DMT phenomenology basically fell out of the mathematics.

>> It's elegant.

>> And when that happened, uh, that was like it was a profound moment in my life. probably the one of the most profound moments in my working life studying DMT that DMT went from something which didn't quite make sense. You know, there's still missing pieces in the way I thought about it and then suddenly with Don's model everything falls into place.

>> It does. But even then that world, those entities are still just icons and projections.

>> Yes. Yeah. So, so what you have to think is that so when you perceive another conscious agent, what's happening is that conscious the way that that conscious agent interacts with the conscious agent network um changes the states of the conscious agent network and that has an influence on your experience states. Doesn't mean you're you that you can map the actual conscious agent dynamics directly into your experience base. You can't. Uh, but you can there is some influence statistical influence on how your world states how your experience states kind of update and that's that's what perception is and we form these icons you know I never have access to your internal dynamics I have this highly simplified icon and when you're I'm perceiving you basically what you are doing as a conscious agent is is affecting my experience and that's basically what perception is in the conscious realism model.

>> And that completely changes when you go out of the the um consensus reality space, this very limited region of the experience space. I I can no longer see you. I can no longer represent you or anything.

>> Um, but I start to be able to represent highly unusual exotic Marovian dynamics that I simply couldn't do in this state. And that's why we think you're able to interact with other conscious agents that aren't simply are beyond the the agents rep our representational reach if you like. We simply have no way to represent what they are doing in any way once you move into this other region of the experience base because the qualia kernel in that region is completely different. So this is a bit complicated.

>> Uh, but you can you can start to interact with the conscious agent network in completely different ways and that's what DMT is.

>> Mhm.

>> You're interacting with.

>> It feels like you're in another world because in a in a sense you are. It's like the the headset has been changed. You're you're in a completely different region of the experience base and you're interacting with other conscious agents that you weren't you were unable to interact with or perceive in the whilst you were stuck in this region of the uh of the experience base. So it all falls into place quite beautifully and that's what shocked me and was you know a profound almost religious experience for me.

>> What do you think our icon is in that other world? How are we per perceived?

>> Um, normally I never looked in a mirror. Well, that's the thing is that for most people they would close their eyes and and the normal waking world is is irrelevant and and and that's it's clear that the brain is kind of losing its ability very very rapidly. If you take a low dose, you will see dramatic changes um in um the way that other people in the world um appears to you.

>> But normally once you get once you deliver that robust pertubation of the brain of the conscious agent with DMT um this world is is gone. There's no representation of it whatsoever. Even if you have your eyes open it's like you're interacting with the conscious agent network um in conscious realism theory in in a completely different way.

>> Um, and so you're it makes us what DMT is doing is is allowing us we have this vast beautiful landscape of possible experiences and DMT is one way not necessarily the only way certainly not the only way of changing not just the experience not just the structure and dynamics of your subjective experience of your interface but allowing you to interact with reality itself the conscious agent network in completely different ways. is um and so it's not just a model of DMT or DMT is the most efficient delivering that kick uh to the conscious agent but people describe very profound encounters with with entities and strange alien beings highdos psilocybin or even ketamine John Lily.

>> Um, used to.

>> Inject high doses of of ketamin and flotation tank and he would describe interacting with strange uh digital alien consciousnesses Um, so maybe it's all about finding molecules that will deliver that robust kick to the conscious agent that pushes it out of this very narrow region and allows your world not just to change but also allows you to enter into two-way interactions with other parts and other other beings, other conscious agents within the conscious agent network. Do you think that that world is lateral to ours or is that deeper to the source?

>> Well, we're always at the source. And this is what's kind of beautiful about conscious agent theory is that there is no level deeper than a conscious agent. A conscious agent is the ground of reality itself.

>> Right?

>> Uh, but normally we only interact we we only see a kind of a only influenced by a very thin slice of that conscious agent network. We're kind of held constrained by this qualia kernel that's been sculpted by evolutionary pressures.

>> Uh, and what psychedelics do, DMT particularly, is pushes us out of that. And so, we're simply within. We're still a conscious agent, but it's just we're our way of being in the world and our way of interacting with the broader conscious agent network has changed. U, but we're still at the level. We're still a conscious agent.

>> That makes sense. So we could we're living our world is a Mac and you.

Go into a different realm, and you're just booting up Windows or Linux. It's just a different interface.

It's a different interface, right? It's like changing the headset, basically.

Yes.

Yeah. When was the moment where you abandoned materialism and decided that your brain is an icon?

Well, I abandoned materialism many years ago. I mean, people think that I'm a materialist because

I thought I did.

Yeah. Because the, because I, I write at the level of the brain. I can get my teeth into the brain. Not metaphorically, of course, but, you know, the mechanics of it and all that stuff, I can understand and get my teeth into if someone. But really, I've always been an idealist. Well, for a very long time. I mean, I felt that consciousness was absolutely fundamental. This is the oldest message, you know, from all of the, the mystical traditions going back to, you know, ancient Hinduism and stuff, saying that consciousness itself is fundamental. I've always felt that. But there was nothing really to get my teeth into until Don's work came along. Because Don said, hey, if consciousness is fundamental, that doesn't mean it's just this kind of diaphanous mist or fog or whatever. Uh, you can actually do mathematics with it. You can, just like you can with, um, material physics, you can, you can, you can think about, okay, how do these conscious agents interact? What is the mathematics of that? You can actually look at the mechanics and the dynamics of conscious agents and do stuff with it, actual science. Um, and so that's why before I started working with Don, I kind of avoided the question of consciousness simply because I had nothing to get my teeth into. Uh, and there's always a danger that you'll end up going off into the more spiritual, mystical stuff, which I've generally avoided for the same reasons.

Um.

Yeah, I don't hear you talk about consciousness itself.

And you're familiar with Doug Hameroff's work?

Yeah.

It seems like it, it would matter. Stuart, it, it seems like it would marry nicely with DMTX.

Yeah, Hameroff is, is a physicist as well. I mean, Giulio Tononi, I was quite interested in integrated information theory for a while. I even wrote a paper on it, connecting it to the psychedelic state. But again, these are all really physicalist theories. They're trying to, they assume that the physical is fundamental and that somehow consciousness is generated, whether it's when integrated information is non-zero, whether it's these quantum effects in microtubules or whatever. But it's still a physicalist theory.

The microtubules are still just another icon.

You know, exactly. And so what I love about Don is, you said, forget about all of that. Let's start with the only, the one thing that we, we can't deny, which is our consciousness. Let's start with that. Let's assume that's fundamental. Then try to boot up the appearance of physical reality. And he's, yeah, what he's achieved, I think, in the last year or so, is, is remarkable, uh, in being able to explain so much about what's going on. Uh, and, and it all makes perfect sense to me. And when you connect it to DMT, uh, it, it just all falls into place. As I said, the DMT phenomenology kind of falls out of the mathematics, which is so beautiful. And too beautiful for it to be completely wrong. It could be completely wrong, of course. I'm not saying this is, I've got the answer. Uh, but it's certainly something that I think needs to be, uh, pursued.

So, you and Don just gave a talk together a day or two ago.

Yeah. So, we wrote the paper. We worked on it for several months, me, Don, and, and Nifer. Uh, and then I said, "Hey, I've been invited onto, have you heard of the Y Files?" Um, I've been invited on this podcast, and I'm going to be there in June, the middle of June. Um, and so Gaspard said, "Oh, we need to do an event." And so that's why I did the event with Don. Because

Oh, that's incredible. I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

Yeah. And so we, uh, arranged it on Saturday. So it's just a couple of days before today. Um, and we, it's basically the launch of the Trace Institute together with, um, the collaboration between the Trace Institute and New Nordics, um, that I work for, that I'm a director of. Uh, and we sat on stage for an hour and a half and just having a, you know, a moderated conversation in LA, in, um, Venice Beach, and just talking about, you know, kind of telling the world that DMT and conscious realism and kind of fit together in this beautiful way. Um, and it was recorded, so it's not been released yet, but people will hopefully soon be able to actually watch, uh, this conversation. And, and in the paper as well, we, we did that blue-yellow experiment. We proposed that as well. So it wasn't just a theoretical. There's a lot of mathematics within the paper, it's a theoretical model, but also we, at the end, we say, okay, how can we test these things? And now that we've got, as I said, the Elus, um, um, the Elus retreat research center in the Caribbean, we can actually pretty quickly start raising money to actually fund some projects on the island in a, you know, in a legal setting without having to do the whole university,

route, which would try, trying to avoid connecting ourselves with universities because they obviously, they might not take kindly to the idea of testing the intelligence of DMT.

It was, it looks like a, a luxury vacation is really what it looks like.

Oh, it's a beautiful resort, no doubt about it. Yeah. But it's also a research center as well.

Something I couldn't get my mind around was DMT tolerance in DMTX, where at some point, when the plasma level increases, the experience does not get deeper. In fact, it fades somewhat.

Okay. Yeah. So this is very interesting. Um, so as I said before, Rick Strassman showed that DMT doesn't have subjective tolerance, unlike other psychedelics. If you take psilocybin mushrooms, trip, then if you try to take them the following day, you'll have a very, very weak experience, right? And we know, we've known this for a long time with DMT.

Yes.

Um, but with DMT, you don't get that tolerance effect, which is why DMTX works.

Um, uh, but on the online forums, quite a few years ago, it's been going on for a while, but it's, a lot of people are starting to talk about it now. Is there, people would have this experience where, okay, they take DMT, often quite regularly, you know, maybe every, every day or every few days, right? Uh, they have a vape pen, so they're delivering the same DMT every time. And then one day they'll get, um, like a big, like a big X in the field of vision that says no entry, or there'll be an entity that will wag its finger and say, no, no, no, or they get some kind of message like, you know, you, you're not welcome here. We're not letting you in. And this is called a lockout. You've been locked out of the DMT space.

Wow.

Right. Uh, and so they, they say, okay, that's pretty startling. Um, um, and, and a guy wrote to me actually, because I kind of probed this a little bit on the online forums and asked people to, to give me their experiences. And one guy said that he was using DMT, he's, same batch as he always does, vaporized in the same manner. Uh, and then one day, some, um, I forget, it was like a mantis being or some kind of being, just as he entered the space, punched him in the face, and he felt the punch. Um, and he snapped back and he was back baseline consciousness. The effect was just gone like that. Um, and you get many, many of those kinds of experiences. Uh, and it's not pharmacologically, this is not easy to explain.

No.

Like tolerance is something that builds gradually and fades, whereas this is like an off switch. They have, you know, a, a string of perfectly visual psychedelic DMT states, and then one day they're told, "You're not coming in." Um, and, and sometimes that can last for months or years. A friend of mine, David Luke, um, a professor at at Greenwich University, a psychologist, one of the world's leading experts on DMT and very experienced with DMT, he was locked out for, someone told me it was like 20 years.

Are your serotonin receptors still absorbing the molecule?

Well, serotonin receptors, the thing about serotonin receptors, all receptors really, is that there, there's a turnover. So, the receptor itself will sometimes, just for a few days, will be in the membrane and then it will be removed from the membrane, broken down, and recycled. So, there's always this replenishment of serotonin receptors. Now, we know with like LSD, uh, as it sits on the receptor, the receptor becomes what's called desensitized. It stops working. That's why you have to wait a few days or a week or so, uh, until the receptors have been recycled. You got new receptors.

Sure.

Right.

Serotonin syndrome is a real thing.

Right? That it is a real thing. Um, but

What, but what blows my mind is it turning off.

Turning off.

Cuz receptors should still be active with the molecule. You just have it turned off.

It turns off. Yeah. And it's not, it doesn't come back a few days later either. Sometimes it turns off, and then the next day you're back. It's like a, you caught an entity on a bad day, that kind of thing. Sometimes you're locked out for months or even years.

Yeah.

And I can give an even more incredible account that I got from a woman during DMTX, that she was, um, doing DMTX in in Colorado, kind of a private group. Um, and she was undergoing DMTX. She was having this interaction with this entity for, you know, 20 minutes or so. Um, DMT flowing into her bloodstream and into her brain, stable DMT state. And then the entity said, "Okay, I think we're done for today." The visions just stopped. DMT was still flowing. The infusion machine was still on. DMT levels in her brain still there. And it was like, "We're done."

Can't explain that.

Can't explain that. Right? So, we want to study that.

Yes. Yes. At Elusis, what we plan to do, we're actually beginning to actually, um, uh, try and get funding for this, is to actually bring people on the island who are either locked out, who have been for a long time, um, who have repeatedly been unable, who could have visual experiences in the past, but were locked out and are still locked out. And then bring them to the island and infuse DMT into, bring them to Elusis. Bring, infuse them with DMT, you know, DMTX, and then actually confirm or

That would be interesting.

Deny that, basically.

If they're still locked out, then yeah, then yeah, you're really onto something.

Yeah. And then, then you can actually use, you know, EEG. You can, in theory, you can use fMRI. You can actually look, what is different to a control group? You also have a control group who are normal DMT users who can experience DMT. Um, and then you look, what are the differences between their neural activity? How is that changing? Is there, you know, what's going on here? Uh, and then you might look for, um, changes in their, their differences in their genetics. There's also this thing called the 5, 5% club, which are people who not who, who are locked out from birth, shall we say, they can never experience effects of DMT. 5% of people.

Do they have? That's very interesting.

Is that a serotonin issue?

We don't know.

Mood disorder? My guess would be is that it's a, what's called a receptor polymorphism. So, every receptor is, um, a receptor is a protein, and it's encoded by a gene. We all have different variants of genes, all the different genes encoding our receptors in our body. These are called polymorphisms. Um, and my, my suggestion, prediction perhaps, hypothesis, uh, is that certain people have a slightly different variant of the 5HT2A receptor. That means, or some other receptor, doesn't necessarily have to be the 5HT2A, uh, that means that DMT isn't, it either isn't binding to the receptor, or it's, it's not activating the receptor in the same way. Uh, it could also be a metabolic issue. Could be that they are, um, they're metabolizing DMT extremely rapidly. But Rick Strassman found that in about 5%, I think it was three people out of 60, so exactly 5%, even at the highest dose level, 4 milligrams per kilogram, which was a

More than a breakthrough dose.

Um, they experienced no effects whatsoever of DMT. So, we want to study that as well.

Yes, that's very interesting. Do genetic work, you know, take samples and actually, actually, um, look at the genome of these people and say, "What are the differences?" You know, and that's more, that's easier to explain than the lockout. The lockout is very, very difficult.

I had never heard that before.

Yeah. Um, what's happening to the serotonin in the, in the brain while they're under for so long? Is it just getting metabolized? Are they having mood issues when they come back?

Um, no. I mean, people, the, the Imperial College study, the aim of it was to kind of look at that, right? Is it, is this safe and is it tolerable? Um,

Because if you're on SSRIs, I don't think you should do this.

No. Um, what, what's with the problem with SSRIs generally is that people don't experience, um, as intense effects. So, it kind of blunts the effect because you get changes in the, the expression of certain serotonin receptors. But yeah, if you're on any, any kind of, um, uh, psychiatric medication for whatever condition, then tread carefully. That's a general kind of warning to anyone, not just DMT, but all psychedelics. You be very, very careful because they are contraindicated for certain people. These aren't toys.

Um, but yeah, I mean, DMTX, it's, it's shown to be safe and tolerable. Um, people broadly were able to handle the experience and come out absolutely, absolutely fine, even though they were in there for. And now there's been Matthias Lekic, I think in, in Basel, had his subjects under for, I think, 3 hours or something like that, at a fairly low level, not the breakthrough level, but he also had like a, a device where they could adjust the, um, the infusion rate, so they could control their experiences. So, we're going to see more of those kind of studies, studies where we, we start to learn how to use the DMTX technology, um, to really not just spend more time, but actually be able to navigate the space and increase and adjust the, the depth of the experience in, in real time.

At, at a low dose, are they responsive?

Yeah. I mean, even at the high dose, weirdly.

Even at the high dose?

Yeah. I mean, but, uh, auditory response, not, not visual. But during the, the Imperial study, one of the annoying things is that for the subjects, and Carl talks about this a lot, is that they were, they were being asked like questions like, you know, what's the intensity now between 1 and 10? It's three. What's it? No. Do you see entities? Yes or no? You know, what's the entity level? All these questions. So, you can never kind of just let go and enjoy or, you know, work within the space. You always have to be, have one ear to the team waiting on the other side.

I would be kind of annoyed, actually.

Yeah, that's the deal because they, they needed to get all of that data as well.

Yeah, but Lucis, of course, you don't have, you're free to kind of explore for as long as you like.

How, how different is the ayahuasca experience from DMTX?

This is a very good question, AJ, because, um, one of the kind of the pushbacks that we got, me and Rick, when we published this, is people would say, well, just ayahuasca, that's an extended DMT state. And in a sense, they're right. Um, but in several other senses, they're wrong. Um, so, with a regular DMT experience, blood brain DMT levels rise and then drop down very rapidly. With ayahuasca, because of the monoamine oxidase inhibitor, the harmala alkaloids within the, the traditional preparation, uh, that's kind of extended. So, it gets, rises slowly, and then it starts to kind of tail off gradually over time. So, you still have the peak, you still have the draw down, but it's, it's stretched out. That kind of concentration curve is, is stretched out. Um, so it's not, you don't, you never achieve a stable brain DMT concentration with ayahuasca. You're still at the mercy of your metabolism, pharmacokinetics. But also, with ayahuasca, Dennis McKenna, I think it was actually looked at blood concentrations of DMT, uh, of people who took ayahuasca and people who took, like, injected high-dose, breakthrough level DMT, and the, the peak blood brain, or blood DMT concentration in ayahuasca is only around less than 20% what you achieve with DMT. So,

Wow.

It's an extended, but actually generally it's a much milder, softer experience. Whereas what we're doing with DMTX is to push someone right into the breakthrough state, if they want to. You don't have to. You can have lower levels as well, but in theory, you can, you can bring them up into the breakthrough state and then hold them there in the breakthrough state, uh, for as long as possible. So, you have much, you have real-time control over the DMT state. You don't get that with, or anything close to that, with ayahuasca.

That's interesting because in my own experience, sometimes you just can't get there. You just, I, I just can't break through. I just end up in the, in the room of geometric shapes, and then I'm back.

Yeah.

Usually because I'm stressed, or distracted, or a dog is barking, or something.

This is ayahuasca with?

No, just DMT. I don't always break through. Um, but I haven't tried in a very long time. Past the statute of limitations.

Um, you're Alien Insect online.

I am.

Why?

Um, well, aliens. I like, I've been interested in aliens and alien intelligence. Not aliens as like gray beings in metallic discs shimmering in the night sky, that kind of thing. Although it is interesting. Uh, but

That stuff doesn't connect to this at all.

Oh, I think it does. Yeah, I think it does. But yeah, I've been interested in the idea of alien intelligence and insects. Well, these are kind, insectoid beings are kind of a common entity within the DMT space. So, alien insect, why not? I came up with that name and now it's my handle on X and Instagram.

Did you ever see the mantids during a, during a trip?

I've never seen a mantid. No.

I didn't either.

A lot of people, a lot of people have though.

Yeah.

I don't want to. Um, how, so how do, it's another problem with breaking through is if you go in anxious, it's also not advisable. So.

Yeah, I mean, it's, um, most, most people have relatively pleasant, although extremely bizarre experiences, but they're often, the most common type of entity people encounter is actually more of a guiding presence. Often like described as like a motherly, caring presence that guides you through the space, all the different, in, in my experiences from way back, there's a very strong sense of being taken, as if like, we've got so little time, I need to show you this and this and this. You can't bring any of it back because it's so short. Um, but this very real sense of, of being guided very, very rapidly through all these different rooms, I want to say rooms, all completely different and all equally strange and baffling and bewildering. And then you're deposited back in the real, say, the real world. You're deposited back in the normal waking world.

And you don't really remember those rooms, do you?

No.

Cuz I, I don't.

Yeah. I, I remember getting there and coming back.

Yeah.

That's about it. It's, it's a wild experience. So, how do we, how do we connect the UFO phenomenon to this? I'm starting to think about Jacques Vallée now and his theory about UFOs as consciousness, and why different cultures perceive, we perceive the fairies, then we perceive this, and now we're onto orbs, depending on where we are culturally.

Yeah. I mean, Vallée, John Mack, if you remember John Mack from

Who wrote Abduction?

You know, that he was this hard-nosed psychiatrist, um, until he started interacting with and working with these so-called abductees or experiencers.

Yeah, Harvard didn't like that.

Harvard didn't like that at all. Um, well, understandably, to be honest. But, um, I think his, his perspective shifted throughout. I mean, it did clearly, uh, shifted from the idea that we're talking of, that the, the UAP phenomenon or the non-human intelligence phenomenon is about biological beings that are arriving from other areas of, of the universe. I think that's pretty shortsighted and, uh, feels kind of outdated now. Um, and, and he started to think that actually we're talking, the abduction experience was more of an altered state of consciousness, as if they were being, these experiences were being induced into some altered states of consciousness and interacting with, um, normally imperceptible beings. Um, and of course, this fits perfectly with, that's DMT. I mean, if you read, there was, in, in Abduction, John Mack's first book, there is an account of this woman who was an abductee who was describing these small, lively beings kind of bounding around. I mean, this was, this is a Terence McKenna machine elf trip report.

Um, it's exactly the same. Um, Rick Strassman also noted that if they had taken some of his trip reports out of context and put it in one of John Mack's books, nobody would have questioned it because they were like, they seemed like, you know, you have this sophisticated laboratory type environment, and you've got these beings, got these small beings like workers or orderlies, and then you have these more, uh, powerful supervising beings that are kind of in the back.

I hear that story all the time. Yeah. That's an abduction experience. And it's also features prominently, um, in, in DMT reports.

So, so an abduction, could that be like an endogenous DMT experience?

It could be an endogenous DMT experience. It could be that these, I think we need to get away from the idea that an alien is a, is manifest, is, is something that exists within this reality. This, this very limited perspective that we're dealing with wet-bodied, wet-brained biological beings, and that that we're dealing with some kind of some other kind of intelligence, um, that isn't necessarily, quote unquote, physical, uh, but operates in some other domain. In just the same way that now we think about, or some people like me think about the DMT entities, isn't, is not spirits or gods, but some kind of intelligent agent that, that normally is always there, uh, but we normally are completely imperceptible and can't interact with. Uh, and I think that makes more sense because there's, there's nothing that says, um, that these aliens must be physical beings. Um, and one can imagine that, you know, I often talk about the, uh, the, the anti-artefact scale, um, you know, the Cartesef scale.

The idea, it's, it's kind of an expansive idea. The idea that we first we occupy this single planet, then we start, uh, harvesting the energy from the nearest star, and then it's kind of, it's the idea that as an intelligent species progresses technologically and cognitively, that they start to occupy larger and larger areas of the cosmos, right? That's the way we think about it.

We're like a high-level zero.

We're a high-level zero. But, um, John Barrow, the cosmologist, noted quite correctly that actually most of our tech, we do, of course, we send probes and rockets up into elsewhere in the solar system, etc. But actually, most of our technological advances have been not outwards, but inwards, to smaller and smaller scales. Right.

That's true. Yeah.

You know, down to from the molecular to, you know, biochemistry and all the way through to, uh, the, the atomic and then the subatomic, and now people talking about strings. People get deeper and deeper down, uh, into the ground of reality. That's where all of our, um, kind of technological efforts has been downwards. And so he developed what he called, um, the micro-dimensional mastery scale, which is like the anti-Kardashev scale, the Barrow scale, John Barrow. Um, and, um, the, the kind of, he had the minus one, minus two, minus three, minus four, rather than plus one, right? And he posited something which is he referred to as the Omega minus level. And this is when a technological species is able to actually control and manipulate the very ground of reality itself, whatever that is. So, we're past the quantum. We're past even perhaps the Planck scale.

Past the Planck scale. Right down, whatever's beyond, right? Quantum mechanics, of course, stops working at the Planck scale. You know, uh, John Donhoffman would say we're talking about consciousness here, right? Um, physicists would say something else. Doesn't really matter, but basically, when a species is able to work at the fundamental level of reality, that's the kind of the fundamental computational substrate of reality itself. That's where they're going to go. They're going to find a way of instantiating themselves at the ground of reality. They're not going to be trying to, um, to kind of approach light speed and expand through the cosmos. They're going to try to go downwards. And there's a lot more room downwards.

Right. You don't need more room.

You don't need light speed if you, if you get down there.

You don't need light speed if you get down there, right? And there's much more room. Is like, I forget what the exact number is, but, but if you look at the distance in terms of relative size from human size to the size of the universe, or from human size to the Planck scale, I think it's like millions and millions times bigger down there, or times smaller than it is bigger going up there.

10 to the minus 35.

Something, yeah, that's the Planck scale, right? So, in other words, there's, there's, there's a lot more room.

At the bottom than there is up there.

Um, much more room. Uh, which means that that's the direction we go. That's where, that's where we look for intelligence. And how do you do that? How would an intelligent species that had instantiated itself at the ground of reality, perhaps billions of years before the our solar system even came to be? How would you communicate with that kind of intelligence? Or how would they communicate with us? They'd do it through our brains, because that's how we experience the world. They wouldn't appear necessarily or manifest. If they would simply use our brains to communicate with us, and that would take the form of, as, um, Jacques Vallée said, um, that would take the form of what we normally describe as hallucinatory experience. Sure. You know, altered states of consciousness, that's how you do it. So, DMT, it's, it's like DMT is in some way facilitating that experience that allows us to interact with these beings that, or conscious agents, or whatever you want to call them, uh, that have been around perhaps forever. Um, but certainly a lot longer than we've been around.

It starts to, um, you can't avoid the question now. It's very interesting. I love when my mind is blown on this show, which it has been. I hadn't considered looking down, cuz once, because if you can get past the Planck scale, then you don't need light speed travel because you're essentially in the dimension where entanglement works. So you can go anywhere.

Where, yeah, where physics that we don't have any conception of works, basically. At the moment, we don't have anything deeper than the quantum. Everything stops working there. Uh, so what lies beyond that? What is the fundamental substrate of reality? And once you understand that, then you can manipulate and even instantiate yourselves as intelligent beings at that level. And then we have no conception of how that might work. Is that God?

Um, it would, well, I wouldn't say it's God, but I would say that we could be dealing with beings that are indistinguishable from gods, in that they are, they are so advanced that we simply cannot conceive of how advanced they are. Uh, that would be my suggestion. So, we have no conception of what they would be like, or, um, whether they even, whether they, whether they could even take on a visual form in any kind of way. We just have nothing. We have no reference. You know, when we had, when we had little beings, we had references. You know, they, they've got a head, and they've got big eyes, and that kind of made sense. We can, we can slot it into our, our picture of reality. But we're talking about intelligences that we simply have no conception of what they might be like. Uh, that's a wild idea. And the idea that we could actually maybe interface with them by taking this plant alkaloid called DMT is an even wilder idea.

Yeah, it is. I bet it feels like it's by design to me. It's too, it's too convenient.

It does feel like that. Yeah. Yeah. I would never say that that's the case, but there is something uncanny about DMT. But it's ubiquity throughout the natural world, and yet this incredibly crisply efficient tool by which we can access these, these other realms and these beings. It feels like they want us to find them. But I've never heard of lockout before. That's very interesting. You've seen enough. What do you think happens to us when we die?

Well, that came from left field. I wasn't expecting that question. Um, the short answer is I don't know. But I certainly don't think I'm, I'm past the idea that there was this infinite period of time before I was born when I simply didn't exist. And there's this brief, the lights are on for this briefest of flickers of light for a briefest amount of time, and it's off again.

Yeah.

Um, and I think it was Alan Watts who said, "Think about the state after you die. You don't exist. Then think about the state before you were born. You don't exist." So, those are indistinguishable, right? The state before you were born is identical to the state after you die. So, what happened then? Well, we know what happened then. Um, so I don't think, I think, I think we're part of something that is, um, we're, we're, we're, we occupy this very, very thin slice of something far grander, uh, and, and far more mysterious, and, and far more profound and strange than we can, we can conceive. And I just get the sense that this is like, I often describe reality, certain human reality, uh, as some kind of, feels like a game of some sort. It's just play, right? And, and the Hindus will tell you that. They will say, "Oh, Brahman is Lila. This is the play, the play of making the world. It's all one cosmic drama." Uh, and we take it very, very seriously. And the part of the game is working out that it's a game, that it shouldn't take seriously. This is just, just a ride, right? As Bill Hicks used to say. I get that sense that we

I don't take reality. I don't take life seriously, um, in that I don't think it's a really somber, serious, important thing. I think it's just a beautiful experience that we have, uh, for these briefest periods of time that we should enjoy it like we'd enjoy any other ride at the, the fairground or something like that. And what happens after, I don't know, but it's something we all have to look forward to.

Do you subscribe to the, the idea that there's a sort of a universal consciousness, and when we're born, we're, we're kind of spawned out of that? We come here, we have experiences, and we bring it back to the source?

Well, that's what conscious realism says as well. Um, is that there is one, this is described as a conscious agent network, but ultimately, there is, there's nothing but consciousness. So, sure, absolutely. Ultimately, there is one unified consciousness, and that's again, that's the oldest message, you know, Brahman, what is Brahman? That's the, the ultimate reality, and everything else is illusion. You know, and it's all, all the same illusion. Timothy Leary used to say, it's all the same illusion. Um, and so this reality is an illusion, in, in a sense. The DMT space is also an illusion. It doesn't mean it's not real. You're still interacting with consciousness, but it's, all, all experiences have the same ontological validity. They're all as real as each other, in some way. They're just different ways of experiencing. Um, uh, and so eventually, you kind of get past these questions of, oh, is, is DMT real, or is it not real? And that question no longer, almost doesn't make any sense anymore.

I didn't ask it. I don't.

I know you didn't. I wasn't blaming you, AJ, here, but people always ask me that. Do you believe it's real? Um, and before, I would give long arguments. I'm, I'm maturing now, where I actually think, actually, I'm kind of past that now. Um, there's a part of me that thinks it's all part of this grand cosmic drama. Uh, and there are different ways to play it, and different tools we can use to explore. We have this vast, uh, vast, you know, the, the kind of the playground, uh, of reality that we can explore. Uh, and DMT and other psychedelics and other tools are ways that we can, we can get out of this very small region of this vast playground and enjoy it and experience it and think, wow, the fucking incredible majesty of reality that we're part of. It, we're inextricably part of it, you know? We are a conscious agent, or built from conscious agents, as is everything else, and everything, everything else is experiencing the world in its own way. Um, that's an incredible thing to realize. And then these little questions about, you know, is it real or not real? They don't mean anything to me.

They don't.

No. That's why I love interface theory. Um, anything else you want to discuss before we go? This has been wonderful.

I just like to say, well, I certainly would like, you know, if anyone wants to learn more about my work, certainly read my book, Death by Astonishment.

It's an amazing book.

You want to read, understand the history of DMT all the way back to thousands of years, really, in indigenous plant preparations, all the way through to the 20th century and beyond. And what I think about DMT, the neuroscience of DMT, why I think it's not just hallucination, and what it could be, and all of that stuff. That's everything I've learned about DMT in the last 30 years is in Death by Astonishment. So, please get that. Uh, please follow me on X, Twitter, Alien Insect, as you said, or Instagram, also Alien Insect. Go to newnordics.org. Uh, if you want to learn about the research, uh, programs that we're developing at New Nordics. Uh, and if anyone wants to experience DMTX themselves in a perfectly 100% legal, safe, uh, medically supervised environment, go to elusmind, elusmind.com. Uh, and they can sign up to spend a few days on this beautiful, uh, tropical Caribbean island. Um, and I think that covers it, AJ.

All right, Dr. Andrew Gallaore, this has been a treat and a joy. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Bye, everybody. That was Dr. Andrew Gallaore. We covered the history of DMT, what it does to your brain, and his theory that the beings people meet are real. Now, there's not much to challenge here. DMT is a real compound. It's found in most living things. It was first synthesized in the '30s and found to be psychoactive in the '50s. But why does it exist? Well, in 2019, a University of Michigan lab induced cardiac arrest in rats and measured a surge of DMT in the dying brain. So, one theory is that when brain cells are running out of oxygen, DMT can protect those cells. Maybe that's why we produce it. Maybe not. Nobody really knows. The real question is whether the experience is more than a hallucination. Still no proof, but Andrew is looking. Then there's Andrew's work with Donald Hoffman. Hoffman argues we never see reality, only an interface, like icons on a screen. And I'm a fan of Donald Hoffman's work. Look him up on YouTube, especially because he could explain, if not prove, his theory of consciousness with math. And I love that the two of them are working together. Andrew thinks the brain is acting like a radio. DMT switches the channel, and suddenly we're tuned into a dimension populated by actual sentient beings. Here's an argument for that. A woman did one of these extended sessions in Colorado. She was 20 minutes in, and the DMT was still pumping into her veins, and she was deep in conversation with one of these beings. Then the being said, "I think we're done for today." And the vision just stopped. The machine was still running. The drug was still in her system. So, pharmacologically, that should be impossible, but it happened. Andrew is a real scientist. Cambridge, Oxford, real credentials. He's asking a question most scientists won't touch. Are these beings real? And he's creating experiments to test it. The blue-yellow screen, the lockout studies, all of it. Nobody else is doing this. Now, I went in sure that the beings were just in your mind, and I came out less sure. His book, Death by Astonishment, is fantastic. It's on Amazon. His nonprofit is newnordics.org. I'll link that down below. Try to spell it properly. The legal DMT retreat is elusmind.com. And the Elus retreat is basically a luxury vacation in the Bahamas. But I have to be honest, it's not cheap. It's hard to find pricing, and I wasn't going to ask him, but rumors say it could be anywhere from $9,500 or more. So, I'm just letting you know. But if you're going to explore consciousness, the best way to do that is legally with a doctor present. Don't mess with any of this stuff on your own. It's not fun. I promise. Until next time, be safe. Really, be safe. Be safe. Be kind. And know that you are appreciated. Don't mess with it. Oh, I played Bibia in Area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I would. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. So I'm singing like I should. Then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends, and it never ends. No, it never ends. I feel the crap guy. I got stuck inside Mel's home with MK Ultra. I feel only aware Stanley Kubrick, the moon landing, alone on a film set of shadow people there. The well just fought the smiling man, I'm told, and his name was Cold. I can't with the fish you all through the night, through the night. The Mman sightings and the solar storm still come to gather this young city underground. Mysterious number stations, planet circles, Project Stargate. And when the dark watchers found in a simulation, don't worry though. The black night, so I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish on Thursday night when they all wanted to give the truth, my all through the night, when they change you all through the I am the truth. Your girl loves to dance on the dance floor because she is a camel. Camel loves to dance when the feeling is well.