Brain Scientist: "Everything They Told Us About DMT was a LIE!" | Andrew Gallimore

And then what was your involvement in the research with the extended state DMT stuff? Um, so the initial proposal for DMTX as it's now called, or extended state DMT, was something that myself and Rick Strassman, who you've also had on the podcast quite recently, as I recall. Um, yeah. So we, you know, I wrote to Rick with the idea that this kind of the pharmacological peculiarities of DMT would make it amenable to this technique called target-controlled intravenous infusion. And we wrote this paper showing, kind of really as a proof of principle, um, that it should work and that you should be able to induce somebody into the DMT state and stabilize, stabilize, stabilize their brain DMT levels, um, and hold them in the DMT state, in a breakthrough DMT state, for 30 minutes, an hour. Um, so it was just a proposal, really. It was a hypothetical, um, proof of principle model. Uh, but then it was picked up by, um, Imperial College London, um, then under Robin Carhart-Harris, um, subsequently Chris Timmermann, um, and they, they were the first kind of academic group to implement it in humans. So myself and Rick, we consulted in the early stages of that. Uh, but then that was entirely the Imperial College's, um, study.

>> And how many people were involved in it? And do you know like, like how far did they get with that? Like I imagine doing that kind of a study over a period of time, >> and I by now, I would imagine some of that data has been aggregated and analyzed. Has there been any sort of like conclusion or summary of it?

>> It was really a more like a pilot study. So the aim wasn't to, I mean, there were only, I think, 11 volunteers, so it's not enough.

>> [ __ ] I could have found you more than that. I could have found you a few.

>> Done, but the aim was to show that it was safe and tolerable, right? Because it wasn't 100% clear that it would be safe to hold someone to see, like, can we do this? Does it work?

>> Yeah. Right.

>> And, and do, are there plans to do it again? See if they can go deeper and see if they can, uh, figure out some more problems, get some more answers?

>> Absolutely. Um, I mean, the guy that funded it, Anton Bilton, um, he was a property entrepreneur or property tycoon or something like that, but he's shifted towards consciousness exploration. He's very interested in ayahuasca, and he funded this first pilot study, and he was actually one of the subjects as well.

>> M

>> Um, but I interviewed him for the book, and he said, you know, 30 minutes is, it's not enough.

>> Um

>> Wow.

>> You know, he wanted to go for two hours. And, um, there, there's actually already a group in Matias Liki in Basel, in Switzerland, who, uh, extended it for 90 minutes. Um, and there's another group that extended it to, I think it was six hours. But this was a very, very low kind of sub-breakthrough dose. So it wasn't like they were doing it at Imperial and, and Basel. But, but clearly it works. You know, you go into the state, and not only do the brain DMT levels seem to stabilize, but so does the experience, which means that you can, you can establish communication with these entities, beings, intelligences within the space. And in theory, then you can start to think about, well, what can we learn about them? You know, can we establish a communicative relationship with them? Um, and can we study the space more formally, its structure, its geometry, its topology?

>> Couldn't you get a very similar experience using something like ayahuasca, which I think has, from what I've, I've never done it, but I understand it has this very similar effect, just longer lasting?

>> There's a couple of issues with ayahuasca. Well, not issues. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a wonderful indigenous technology, ayahuasca. Um, but it's not the same as DMTX for several reasons. I mean, first of all, the, um, how should I call it? The side effects, uh, like purging, you know, vomiting and [ __ ] and it's, it's kind of unpleasant. I mean, that is, it's all part of the, of the thing, but, um, um, you kind of don't want that if you're going to send mathematicians in there to the space, it's not ideal, right?

>> Um, and so.

>> You avoid that first of all with DMTX. Also, even with ayahuasca, yes, ayahuasca extends the DMT experience, uh, but still DMT levels rise in the blood, they reach a peak, and then they steadily start to, um, to, to, to fall down again. I mean, so you're still at the mercy of pharmacokinetics and metabolism, except it's just slowed down.

>> Okay.

>> So you can't stabilize DMT levels with ayahuasca. Uh, but also, if you actually measure the blood concentration of DMT during an ayahuasca trip and compare it to what you achieve with injected DMT, you only achieve about 20%, uh, 20-25% of blood DMT levels. So ayahuasca, it's drawn out, it's longer, but it's actually generally milder. It's not as intense as a breakthrough DMT trip.

>> Right. And also it wears out. When you do a DMT trip, it also kind of like steals serotonin, right? So like a lot of people talk about when they do DMT, the next day you'll kind of like have low energy, lower levels of serotonin, these kind of things. That's why some people take like 5-HTP after they do DMT so they can try to restabilize the chemicals in their brain. And this can kind of like rob your brain chemical battery of the basic chemicals that it needs to to function in a normal everyday environment. Is that right or is that wrong?

>> Not, not quite right. No. I mean, so with, I mean, robbing of serotonin, I mean, psychedelics generally, I mean, they bind to this, this serotonin receptor, or several,

>> 2A receptor, right?

>> 5-HT2A. Very good. Yeah. But also other receptors as well, and that's not the only one, but yeah, the 5-HT2A, that's kind of the primary locus for their effects. Um, now, what you see with other psychedelics, interestingly, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, is you see this what's called desensitization of serotonin receptors. So the, the more, if you stimulate a serotonin receptor repeatedly, um, or over a long period of time, then the, the receptor actually stops working. It's like a, it's like a, a negative feedback mechanism if the receptors are being overstimulated, and then they are actually removed from the membrane and recycled. Uh, this is why if you take, let's say, LSD on one day, and then you take it a day later or a couple of days later, you won't get, you get this what's called tachyphylaxis, which is basically short-term tolerance, a very, very rapidly appearing and short-term tolerance. That's why you have to wait a couple of weeks. But interestingly, with DMT, for reasons that aren't quite clear, and we've known this since the 1960s, um, is that DMT doesn't seem to desensitize these 5-HT2A receptors. So the, so you can, you can inject someone with DMT repeatedly.

>> Yeah.

>> Uh, or even maintain their brain levels of DMT. So the 5-HT2A receptors are being continuously stimulated by DMT, and you get basically no tolerance effect, or very, very limited. There is evidence, there is maybe a little bit of tolerance happening. Uh, but it's not anything like what you see with psilocybin and LSD. And that's the only reason that you can actually do this infusion protocol, is because otherwise you'd have to keep ramping up the concentration to maintain the subjective effect. So you could, you could ramp somebody up and keep them in a steady high level state of like a breakthrough level of DMT in their blood,

>> for theoretically hours and hours and hours. Six hours.

>> Yeah.

>> And when they come down, there's going to be no negative side effects like that last for 24 hours or any kind of short-term side effects at all?

>> Well, I mean, imagine you, you're in an extremely altered reality that's extremely stimulating and extremely strange, and mentally, it's psychologically taxing for sure. Right. So it doesn't surprise me after that, you'd need to, you might feel kind of worn out the following day and might need to kind of rest. But it, it's nothing to do, I don't think there's no evidence in, in my opinion, that it's anything to do with damage or depletion of, of serotonin or, or serotonin receptors or anything like that.

>> Mhm. What we see with, with psychedelics generally, and particularly with DMT, DMT going back to, um, you know, you spoke about, um, you know, how do we explain? So we have this brain that's building the world using all of these models that it's learned. How then does it construct these hyper, hyper technological, hyperdimensional worlds that it hasn't learned to construct, filled with beings that are not animals,

>> they're not humans, they are

>> utterly completely alien.

>> How is that possible?

>> Right. Right.

>> Um, and that's kind of my argument, uh, is that this shouldn't be possible. It's like the brain is speaking a language it never learned to speak, and doing so flawlessly. This is not a, it's not kind of fumbling around and just trying to make sense of this disordered or chaotic brain activity. It, these are razor sharp, engineered to utter perfection worlds, and they are not dreams. They are not dreams. Um, that's, they're often dismissed as waking, waking dreams, you know, hallucinations. But again, going back to dreaming, in the dream state, you can actually, I'll tell you a little story that I was telling Matt the other day, yesterday, um, when I came back from Tokyo last time, sorry, came back from the US from, back to Tokyo, um, I had, I had a series of lucid dreams where I was.

>> Oh, really?

>> For some reason, when I'm jet-lagged, I get lucid dreams. I don't know why. I've had them since I was a child, but very completely unpredictably. But during this period, I was having a lucid dream almost every night. And I was in this dream, and I was on this beautiful green mountainside. It looked like Switzerland or something. Very nice. And then there were hundreds of dogs running down this mountainside. And I knew I was dreaming.

>> Um, and so I thought, okay, I'm going to do a little experiment.

>> Um, we know that in the dream state, the brain doesn't have access to information from the primary visual cortex. That's quiet because that's receiving sensory information from the environment. So that's all quiet. So all the fine details of the world in the dream state aren't being represented.

>> So you can dream of a dog, but it will be a [ __ ] dog, right? It's kind of a broad dog, but if you get, and, and they look like dogs, and you, if you don't know you're dreaming, you wouldn't act, you wouldn't.

>> Know any different.

>> Um, but I, I knew I was dreaming. So I got really close to one of these dogs, like right in its [ __ ] face. Yeah. And I thought, I'm going to see how good you are. You know, how, how good my brain is at modeling this dog. And they, it was a rubbish dog. [Laughter]

>> It was just really bad. Wow.

>> When it got, and, and that made sense because my brain, it knows how kind of how to build a dog,

>> but unless it's got sensory inputs, it's, it does a pretty poor job when you get down to it.

>> And so, so that kind of makes me think, and you see the same thing with psychotics, um, in that the visual primary visual cortex often just isn't involved when they're, um, having visual hallucinations. The brain is just using these higher level models, object models to construct these hallucinations.

>> Um,

>> So then when you look at DMT, it's kind of remarkable. These aren't just sketches or kind of broad brushstroke representations of alternate worlds, you know, just using these high-level models. These are inordinately detailed, crisp, perfect worlds that have perfectly coherent, you know, staggeringly dynamic narrative complexity. It's, it's like the brain has somehow received, started receiving extremely detailed sensory inputs, and, you know, like the brain is kind of tuned in, instead of receiving information from the normal sense organs, somehow it's receiving information from somewhere else, and that's why it can build these staggeringly complex worlds that have no relationship whatsoever, um, to the normal waking world.

>> Um, so this kind of, this idea got me thinking about that possibility that DMT is gating access to some alternate source of inputs.

>> Information is being directed into the brain in the DMT state. The brain is more sensitive, as I said before, it's more sensitive to information inputs because of its excited state, and it's also much more fluid. So it's, and there was actually a study done by the Imperial College team, literally just a couple of months ago, that looked at the changes, and they've done a few really cool studies, and I'll talk about them, um, with DMT. Um, but this most recent one showed that in the DMT state, if you basically, if you perturb the brain, right, you stimulate it, either with visual inputs or maybe a little electrical impulse, you'll see, you'll see a little kind of increase in activity if the brain kind of rings, if you like, as all the information starts spreading through the brain. Right? This is just normally like this. Yeah.

>> In the presence of DMT, it's more like, right? Because it's so sensitive, you know, you just perturb it a little bit, and it kind of, it's, it's so

>> sensitive and responsive to these inputs. So that kind of makes sense, right? That this would be the kind of state where the brain can start receiving information from what, some kind of intelligence, perhaps some kind of intelligent agent.

>> Um, but at the same time, if that was the case, perhaps you'd expect to see, because what you can do, um, is as well as kind of measuring neural activity in, in an MRI or with EEG, you can also measure now the flow of information through the brain. So when someone is, let's say, viewing an image on a screen, you can actually see these waves flowing from the back of the brain, the primary visual cortex that's receiving the information. You can see them flowing forward.

>> Yeah. You can also see waves flowing in the opposite direction. You get this kind of forward and backward waves.

>> Wow.

>> Now, if they close their eyes, then that, those forward flowing waves, they, they stop because they're not processing visual sensory inputs. Yeah. But with DMT, something very interesting happens. Uh, even when they have their eyes closed, you inject them with DMT, and you immediately, or within a few seconds, you start to see these forward flowing waves traveling from the back of the brain, as if the brain is receiving visual sensory inputs.

>> Wow. Now the question is, is, I mean, and they even said this, is the, the pattern of brain activity was indistinguishable from visual sensory input. It's like they're seeing with their eyes shut.

>> Um, but the question is, is, well, where's that? You know, is this just spontaneous activity in the primary visual cortex? You know, that part of the brain that represents lines and shapes and very basic things? Is that just becoming spontaneously active, and the information is flowing forward, maybe? But would that explain hyperdimensional cityscapes and, you know, you know, hyper technological worlds filled with alien beings? I don't think it would. Memories explain that? You know, could we imagine it's information coming from the hippocampus? I don't think that works either.

>> Um, it's not object models the brain has learned to construct in, you know, the higher levels of the cortex. So it's all missing, as far as I'm concerned.

>> Um, there's no way to explain it.

>> Um, but if the brain is becoming sensitive and is receiving information from some alternate source, then that's exactly what you'd expect to see. You'd expect to see it flowing through the brain. Of course, the source we don't know, but I, I posit that it's some kind of intelligent agent.

>> Does that happen too, where you see the brain waves coming back forward from the visual cortex when people are dreaming?

>> So when they're dreaming, the, the primary visual cortex is, is generally quiet because that's the part of the brain that's receiving information from the environment.

>> Explain that.

>> Same with psychotic visual hallucinations as well. This part of the brain is quiet because they're not using that part of the brain. They're just using these stored models to generate hallucinations. With DMT, it actually looks exactly like visual stimulation, even when their eyes are completely closed, as if they're literally, I mean, they are literally seeing another world.

>> Yeah.

>> Have you heard of Wilder Penfield?

>> No.

>> So he, he did a lot of work in, in the middle of the, the 20th century, and he was interested in epilepsy. He, he used to, invented something called the Montreal procedure,

>> uh, which is basically to, to cut out parts of the brain that were, uh, the focus of epileptic seizures.

>> Oh, wow.

>> And cure them like that. Um, the problem is, you need to find out which parts of the brain are actually becoming hyperactive during epileptic seizures. And so what he did is he, he cut open the brains of his patients, like, you know, like sometimes the whole top of the skull.

>> Um, and then he would take an electrode and he would like zap different parts of.

>> Trying to cause a seizure?

>> No, he was, well, he was actually trying to, I mean, that's part of it. Yeah. He wanted to find out where was the, which part of the brain are we going to see kind of highly excitable, erratic activity, and that would tell him that this was,

>> perhaps the, the, the locus of epileptiform activity. This part you could cut out. But at the same time, he was also interested in mapping. So he obviously didn't want to cut out parts of the brain that were very important.

>> So he would systematically work through the patients were awake, by the way.

>> Mhm.

>> Um, so he could, so they could speak to him, they could, they could, they could describe what they were seeing.

>> Yeah.

>> And what he found is when he started stimulating right at the back of the brain, the primary visual cortex. So this is the part of the cortex that receives information from the retina.

>> Um, so it's the, the closest part of the brain to the environment, you could say. But it only, it only represents very simple, basic, fine details of the world. So lines in particular directions, lines moving in certain directions, certain patches of color, very basic information. This is, this is

>> the pattern, really, that your brain is receiving from the environment. Uh, the primary visual cortex at the back. Then that information is sent upwards through these, this kind of hierarchy, hierarchy of levels that try and find patterns. So at the moment, you see a world of objects. You can see me, you can see the can, you can, all everything is making sense to you. You don't see lines and, you know, it's, you see a world of objects, but that world of objects is kind of constructed from this basic pattern of rapidly changing lines and basic shapes.

>> Yeah.

>> Right. Right. And the brain can also learn stuff over time and figure out, I think you talked about this on one of your videos, like this is a water bottle. I've seen this a million times before. So now I don't have to waste processing power on this.

>> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So your brain is learning to construct useful models of the environment.

>> Um, whereas despite having no direct access to the environment, all it has is this pattern of activity, this very rapidly, um, changing pattern of activity, very, very fine details that's in the primary visual cortex. So when Penfield stimulated the primary visual cortex, his patients would say, "Oh, I see a triangle," um, or "I see lines," or "I see flashes of color." Very basic, simple, fine details. They weren't seeing objects. But then he started stimulating further and further forward. So up this cortical hierarchy, then they would say, "Oh, I see, um, orange circles," or "I see green triangles." You're starting to see shapes being formed. Then he would move even further and further, further forward to the higher levels of the cortex, and they would say, "Oh, I see this," a 12-year-old boy said, "Oh, I see robbers with guns." So now you're seeing these higher level models, um, which is kind of the stored, the stored object models that your brain has, has, has kind of developed and learned, um, over, over time.

>> These would be random things.

>> Yeah. I mean, obviously the.

>> Like, was it triggering memories, like fra, like like fragments of memories?

>> That's interesting. Right. So, right. So you have this cortical hierarchy from V1, as it's called, the primary visual cortex, up to V2, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah. The higher you go, you get,

>> um, less specific, more general things, like, you know, dogs.

>> Yeah. But not a particular dog, right? But let's say a dog.

>> Okay.

>> Or maybe even different types of dogs, but not any particular, not the dog that's actually in the room. Now,

>> there is no dog in the room, but if there was,

>> yeah,

>> sure.

>> Um, then this higher level model is being represented at these higher levels of the cortex. And right at the, in the V1, you've got the very fine details of this specific dog, right? Yeah. The exact, you know, the pattern of its fur, the color of its fur, the shape of its eyes, all that kind of stuff is being represented down at this, this low level.

>> Um, which actually gets us to dreaming. We'll get to that later. Um, but then right at the top of the cortical hierarchy, sits right at the very, very apex, that has a kind of bird's eye view of all these levels, you have the hippocampus. And the hippocampus is basically, you know, you've heard of the hippocampus, right? To do with.

>> I have no clue.

>> Memory, right? And particularly to do with forming memories. Okay. So this, the hippocampus sits right at the top of this cortical hierarchy, and it's kind of watching your brain build its model of the world, and it creates like indexes, like an indexer.

>> Right.

>> And so when you recall something, some particular memory, what's happening, in very simple terms, is your hippocampus is reacting, activating that particular pattern of activity that happened in the past. So you, you're kind of, you're given a kind of a glimpse of what your brain was doing at the time that the world that your brain was modeling yesterday, or three weeks ago. The hippocampus doesn't store memories as such. It's not like a storehouse of memory. It's more like just this index, and you can point to specific,

>> patterns of neural activity in the past that were that representing your world at that, at that time.

>> Oh, wow.

>> So the kind of the neural activity kind of unfolds down the cortical hierarchy from the hippocampus and reactivates these patterns that happened in the past.

>> Oh, [ __ ] that's wild.

>> It's cool. Right.

>> I had this guy on recently, uh, Robert Epstein. I don't know if you ever heard of him, but he has this crazy theory called neural transduction theory, where basically he's, he's trying to claim that memories aren't stored in the brain. He was basically, the idea was like the brain is an antenna, and we're like downloading, we have all, all these memories are in like this,

>> the cloud.

>> The cloud. Exactly. Right. And we're downloading them from the cloud.

>> Yeah. I'm not sure about that.

>> Yeah. I'm not sure about that either. That doesn't, uh, I don't know, because like, you know, how would you explain, how would you explain things like, like chess players, right? Like, how does, how do you become like a master chess player? I mean, these people are obviously doing this, spending days and hours and weeks and years memorizing all these moves, and they're doing work, and there's clearly memory involved. How do you explain that they're just downloading that?

>> It doesn't make.

>> Because I, because I can't do that. That person can do it because they've spent all the time doing it. I would only imagine that it would like, memory would have to be literally saved in your, in your brain, like a hard drive. And that's interesting, like the idea of neuronal patterns, like it's not.

>> Yeah.

>> It's an interesting way of thinking about it or looking at it, as it's just patterns of neurons that are reactivating these senses, these sensory inputs that you had at a certain time.

>> Exactly. Because.

>> And like, like for example, would be like, you know, how like we talked about this last time, I think the house scent connects so strongly to memory.

>> Right.

>> And you can, like, smell some laundry detergent you haven't smelled in 18 years that you smelled at like, one of your ex-girlfriend's houses, and you smell it again, and it'll teleport you right back into her bedroom.

>> Yeah.

>> You know, that's like insane how that works.

>> Yeah. I get the same thing with one particular, um, scent, the one my exes from 25 years ago used to wear, and whenever I even now, when I smell it,

>> like, oh, that's that person.

>> It's crazy, right? It's.

>> Kind of, I mean, it's like magic.

>> Yeah, it is like magic.

>> Um, but it's, it's not magic. Um, and also, if you think about, you know, what's happening in dreaming, we know that the, when you fall asleep and you enter REM sleep, the hippocampus starts working, and it actually, one of the main, kind of, one of the theories about what dreaming is for, uh, again, it's not 100% clear, but is, uh, the hippocampus is basically replaying and strengthening. Every time a memory is recalled, it's strengthened because you get strengthening, strengthening of the connections, the synaptic connections between the neurons that were active. And so the, the hippocampus is basically kind of consolidating these memories by replaying them, which is why you tend to dream about things, especially things that were emotionally significant. Like if you see a, if you're scared of spiders and you see a spider crawling across the wall a few hours before you go to bed, you're probably going to be dreaming about

>> spiders. And it's like your brain, oh, we need to remember this.

>> Even if it's perfectly harmless. Um, so yeah, and then, so getting back to Penfield, you know, what do you think happened when he started stimulating an area of the brain close to the hippocampus?

>> Memory started flooding back.

>> Yeah, exactly. So this little kid, this 12-year-old, he said, "Oh, I can hear my mother." Um, she's telling my sister she's got her coat on backwards or something like that. And Penfield said, "Is this, do you remember this happening?" And he said, "Yeah, this was this morning, just as I was leaving the house." Um, so already the hippocampus had kind of indexed that particular memory, and Penfield was stimulating,

>> um, that part of the hippocampus that just happened to index that particular memory. If he moved the electrode, it would be a different memory. And then, yeah, which makes you wonder then, is like, so getting back to psychedelics, if psychedelics are stimulating the cortex via this 5-HT2A receptor,

>> um, you know, they stimulate the primary visual cortex, and you get geometric patterns, and this has been known since the early 20th century, and you can explain that as the visual cortex is structured in a certain way, and when it's stimulated by the psychedelic, it tends to generate certain motifs, certain geometric structures, often called form constants. So people will see cobwebs or tunnels or spirals, these kind of things, right? But, okay, what happens if they, as they stimulate higher levels of the cortex? So the, the parts of the cortex that are responsible for representing objects, well, they might see objects, they might see faces.

>> Um, they might see animals. But then what happens if they stimulate the hippocampus? Well, then you're going to see memories flooding into the cortex. So they might relive past experiences. And again, that's been known since the 1950s.

>> Um, is that certainly at higher dose levels of LSD, for example, people will often relive their past experiences. So they're basically activating the hippocampus, and memories are flooding into the cortex.

>> Um, and you also see this interestingly with psychotic patients. So again, in the 1950s, um, a guy called Sam Jacobson, um, he started actually sticking electrodes into people's brains of psychotic patients and measuring brain activity when they were hallucinating.

>> >> Right? Suggesting that their hallucinations were kind of at least partially drawn from memory.

>> You were kind of explaining how our memories reconstruct our experiences on DMT.

>> And different types of things.

>> Well, not on DMT, but, but, uh,

>> other psychedelics. Yeah. And, and in, in the dream state.

>> So, so, okay. So that's, that's perfect. It doesn't happen on DMT.

>> So like two weeks ago when I, or a couple weeks ago, whenever it was, I did DMT last. The first, like I did it, I told you earlier, I was, I did it three different times. I like went in three times where I did like six hits. Entered the [ __ ] DMT world. I think it was six. Yeah. It wasn't the freebase, it was just a little vaporizer thing.

>> Mhm.

>> The first time I closed my eyes, I see aliens doing ballet right in front of me. Like these creatures, not vivid, but they were just doing ballet, spinning. They were wearing tutus.

>> Nice.

>> And then the second time I did it again, and I was looking for the code in the laser. And then I did it a third time, and I told you I saw just like a billion dicks that were etched in the sort of Sanskrit type code.

>> So did I see this stuff? Because I've heard endless amounts of people talking about seeing aliens on DMT, and was expecting to see code in the laser, and I had sort of a preconceptual idea of what I was going to experience on this. Like, if I had none of this, if I was coming in blank,

>> would I see the same stuff?

>> Um, it's, it's hard to answer definitively. I mean, we know that expectation and your, your set, um, what you expect, your brain, as I said before, your brain, your brain is a predictor. It kind of, it decides what it expects to see, and then it tests against sensory inputs. I mean, um,

>> the thing about DMT is that it often seems to transcend all of that. So it seems in many ways entirely independent of set and setting. Set and setting actually become largely irrelevant in many cases. Most people aren't expecting what they, I mean, in a way, it's almost impossible to expect what you experience under the influence of DMT. Could there be an influence, um, expectation? Could expectation, prediction influence the DMT state? Maybe. Um, but often I think it just completely transcends that. Now, were you expecting to, to see aliens doing ballet?

>> No.

>> Were you expecting to see aliens?

>> No. But you could say aliens could be similar to elves. They didn't look like elves. They looked like aliens doing ballet. But it's similar, right? It's a similar kind of archetype.

>> Okay. So, let's take the elves, for example. Now, the idea that it's expectation that makes you see elves. This is very commonly used as an explanation, uh, for why people see elves. Particularly Terence McKenna is given the blame for this,

>> right?

>> Um, Terence McKenna often spoke about elves. Um, uh, first of all, what do we mean by an elf? Broadly, some kind of small,

>> being that's lively, that's jovial, that dances around, bounds around, uh, often in great numbers. So multitudinous,

>> um, beings, right? Um, so Terence McKenna described these, and he's given the blame, then. So people, they listen to Terence McKenna, they expect to see elves.

>> Yeah.

>> Then when they smoke DMT, this polluted,

>> he's polluted, right?

>> The kind of the, um, the meme sphere, or something like that. Um,

>> now, does that make sense? Well, it could make sense. But then, so let's take the timeline. Let's draw the timeline backwards, pre-McKenna. Um, we go into, let's say, the first DMT study ever in the 1950s. Stephen Szára, Hungarian physician, injected DMT into himself. He lived in Hungary at the time.

>> Um, or in Budapest, I believe. That's in Hungary, right? I'm not being stupid.

>> Yeah. In the wrong guy. Anyway, um, he discovered the psychedelic effects of DMT.

>> Um, and in his very first study, one of his subjects, he was a, I think a nurse who worked at the hospital where he was working, she saw small beings that moved around very, very quickly. She described them as like dwarves, but again, it's the same motif, lots of little beings that move around very, very quickly.

>> We can, we can draw the line back even further. We go to the Amazonian rainforests. Uh, the Yanomami, a particular very large group, indigenous group in, in South America. They describe when taking their, um, DMT-based drugs, uh, Epena, uh, Yopo. So these come from, so Yopo comes from is a, the ground seeds of a tree called, uh, Anadenanthera peregrina. They grind up these seeds, uh, to form a powder, and then they, they snort it, or in fact, they, they put in a, have you heard about this? They, a long tube up to like a yard long. You still use yards in this part of the world?

>> Yeah. Anyway, about a yard long, and they fill it with, you know, sometimes like one or two teaspoons of this powder, and then it goes into your nose.

>> Whoa.

>> And then I,

>> blow it for like a shotgun mode of administration. Fires it into your, into your head.

>> Um, this.

>> Yeah, you've heard of this. Um, there's another one called a Pao, which comes from the, the dried resin of a, of a species called Virola. There are various species that are used that contain DMT,

>> right?

>> Um, and these tribes, um, indigenous groups, if you like, um, describe seeing multitudinous beings that are so numerous that you can never get to the end of them, that are lively, that are brightly colored, that dance and sing, and they call them the Hûra. Um, and these are very important in their cosmology, in their way of seeing reality, and they, they kind of, they, they come dancing, uh, when you, after inhaling this snuff, and they, they, they enter your chest, and they fill your chest up, and you have to keep them there, and that, so your body is effectively becomes the home of these beings, which help you and protect you and guide you throughout your life, and then when you die, um, they exit, they leave you again, and they enter the forest, and maybe they will enter another shaman or something like this. So you have a whole, um, mythos around beings that you might call elves, right? We would call them elves, they call them Hûra.

>> Um, so the idea that Terence McKenna is responsible for people seeing lively, giggling beings, which he called machine elves, but really we're just talking about small beings that take various forms, but they're unified by their character.

>> Um, it's not Terence McKenna. I mean, this, this goes back perhaps thousands of years, people seeing the same kind of beings.

>> Um, and you can say the same thing about mantids, you know, mantis type alien beings. Now, this of course features in ufology and, you know, you know, alien abduction experiences. Uh, but again, the, the Yanomami, they have this, this one class of being that they see under the influence of these psychedelic drugs is called the Wadînari, which are a fearsome insect-like being that will seize you and that will feed on the fat of children. I mean, it's really quite horrible. Now, if you compare that to modern trip reports, people always describe these mantis-like beings, and they, they almost always are, if not negative, at least kind of cold and ruthless and calculated. People describe being dismembered. You get these dismemberment scenarios where their whole body is torn apart and their organs flung away. And then.

>> He's on what drug?

>> DMT.

>> Oh, really?

>> Yes. This is very, it's quite a common, or not certainly not a rare experience under the influence of psychedelics. And so you have people now in, in the modern era who have known nothing about shamanistic mythos, basically recapitulating these dismemberment reconstruction scenarios that are described by these indigenous peoples in South America, that they have understood and experienced for hundreds, thousands of years.

>> Um, so it's not the idea that everything you experience under the influence of DMT is just because you've, you've heard stories.

>> Um, is just doesn't, doesn't make any sense.

>> When was the first time DMT was ever used? Was that the 50s?

>> 1956 was Stephen. Well, when we say DMT was the first.

>> Well, the first time he ever like, like wrote a report about what he experienced.

>> Right. So pure, when we talk about pure DMT, people have picked me up on this, but I am correct. I remember a YouTube comment, actually.

>> Um,

>> Yeah. 19.

>> YouTube comments are fake. Those people aren't real.

>> Okay, that's good. It's computers, right?

>> It's all Iranian bots.

>> Yeah, chatbots again.

>> Um, but anyway, yeah, so 1956, Stephen Szára. So there's, there's an interesting story kind of leading up to this point. Is.

>> It starts really in 1852. Do you know Richard Spruce?

>> Nope.

>> Well, he was a peerless British botanist of his time. He was the most famous and probably the most important botanist in history, Western botanist at least. He was exploring the Amazon. He was contracted to explore the Amazon to find new plants and then to identify them, often name them because they didn't have names, um, at least not Latin binomials. And then he would send them back to the, to the, to England, and collectors, very rich people would, you know, frame them or whatever and put them in their, their drawing rooms and that kind of thing.

>> But as soon as he entered the Amazon for the first time, he couldn't help but notice that all of the the natives around there, they're all using drugs, right?

>> Is this guy still alive?

>> 1852.

>> Oh, never mind.

>> No, I need not answer that question.

>> Yeah. So he noticed straight away that they were using all of these different drugs and like powdered cocoa leaf. He saw them stuffing their cheeks to bursting with these powdered cocoa leaves and, um, these weird pellets and potions and, uh, liquor, various type jungle liquors, cassava beers, and all of this kind of stuff. They love drugs, basically.

>> Um, and he was invited to this, uh, party, I guess you would call it, a periodic gathering called a Dabokuri. This is in, uh, 1852, a group called the, the Tukano by the Vaupés River.

>> Um, and he went to this party or this gathering, and everyone was singing and dancing, and people were drinking cassava beer and, uh, consuming like powdered cocoa leaf, etcetera, etcetera. And then he sort of he started to notice something unusual happening, which is that the men would periodically, they, they'd kind of peel away from the dance,

>> um, and then they would, they would drink this weird liquid.

>> And then they'd start kind of acting very, very strangely. They'd start howling. They'd start, they'd pick up weapons and start beating the earth with these weapons and stuff. It's like they were fighting some invisible adversary of some sort.

>> Uh, and he didn't know what was going on.

>> Um, and this happened throughout the night. You know, every point in the night, there were at least kind of half a dozen men engaged at some phase of this performance, if you like.

>> Um, and, and he asked them, you know, what was that liquid? And they said it was called Karpy.

>> Uh, and he tried a bit, but it was absolutely disgusting.

>> And he, he basically almost vomited.

>> So he didn't get a full dose.

>> Um, but he was told, okay, the plant used to make this Karpy, the Karpy vine, is located downriver. So the next day, he went downriver, found this, this liana twirling around this tree, and he named it Banisteriopsis caapi, the ayahuasca vine. Banisteriopsis.

>> Banisteriopsis caapi.

>> Wow.

>> That's the name of the vine. And so then there was like a century of scientists trying to understand how does this.

>> Because they were describing their experiences as well. They would describe these terrifying beasts that were kind of trying to seize them and stuff, and beautiful cities they would describe, and.

>> All these wonderful visions they would describe after, after consuming this Karpy, also known as ayahuasca in other, other regions.

>> Um, and then a century followed people trying to isolate the alkaloids, and no one knew how it worked. It wasn't until like the 1950s until people realized, and William Burroughs was heavily involved here. He heard about Karpi, also known as Yagé.

>> This was when he was living in Mexico City, shortly after he shot his wife in the head accidentally.

>> Oh, yeah, I read about that. Something off the top of her head, like a can or something.

>> Yeah, exactly. A glass, and he put a bullet through her brain and killed her instantly. So he was struggling, and obviously with guilt, and, um, he was looking for the final fix, as he described it. So he went off. I mean, this was like this gangly, kind of lanky, tweed-jacketed writer, just decided, I'm going to set off, go to the Amazon, I'm going to try and find Yagé.

>> Because he'd heard, read about it in a magazine or something. I, what a world that must have been, right? Where people do that kind of thing, just setting off into the Amazon.

>> Uh, and he happened to meet Richard Schultes. He was like the world's leading expert on Yagé, or ayahuasca.

>> Um, and he went from shaman to shaman, kind of asking them for this drink. And every time he drank it, he just vomited a lot. Nothing particularly interesting happened.

>> Um, and he couldn't work out what was going on.

>> Until, I think it was like the third time that he tried this, uh, Yagé, and he had these, this mag, he was transported to another world, and he was like overwhelmed. He thought, "Yes, this is it. I finally found the Karpi, the Yagé that I was looking for." And he was led into this trade secret by the shaman. The shaman said, "Okay, yes, the Karpi vine goes in there, but there's another leaf we put in, a secret leaf, uh, which has to be put in together with the Karpi vine. You boil it up, and then boil it down till it's thick and syrupy. And when you drink that, then you get the, the kind of the magnificent visions."

>> Um, and he even pocketed samples of this secret leaf and sent it to Richard Schultes.

>> Richard Schultes ignored it because it came from some American writer. He didn't think it was that important.

>> Um, then like a decade or a couple of decades later, Richard Schultes' student, Homer Pinkley, um, was working with this indigenous group, and again, he saw them using the Karpi vine, the ayahuasca vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, together with this other leaf. So the two components, they realized two kind of a binary decoction of of two essential components, and Homer Pinkley identified it as Psychotria viridis.

>> Um, and when they, uh, analyzed this leaf, Psychotria viridis, they found lots of DMT.

>> Um, so that was kind of the breakthrough, which is always, Homer Pinkley is always given the credit here, but actually it was Burroughs, because Schultes went back to the letter that Burroughs had sent him with the sample of the leaves, and he realized that Burroughs had in fact sent him the correct leaf. It was Psychotria. So Burroughs actually, William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch,

>> is actually should be credited as being the, the kind of the, the person who made that breakthrough in understanding how, um, how the, the, the key psychoactive component of ayahuasca, that should be given credit really to William Burroughs. He didn't name the plant, of course, he didn't know how to do that, but he identified it. But then of course, there was still kind of a mystery, because by that point, Stephen Szára had shown that if you swallow DMT, which he'd done at first,

>> nothing will happen. So the idea that this was the primary psychoactive component of a visionary drink didn't make any sense. And then there was the Karpi vine. You know, what, what was that for? Why was that in the mix? No one had any clue.

>> Until, um, Dennis McKenna, really Terence's brother, he was really one of the, the key figures in working this out, because by that point, people started to understand that the Karpi vine contains these harmala alkaloids, harmine and harmaline.

>> Um, and it was kind of worked out that these harmala alkaloids, they're inhibitors of this monoamine oxidase enzyme,

>> um, which

is found in your gut and throughout your body.

And it was also then beginning to kind of be understood that DMT is broken down very rapidly by this monoamin oxidase enzyme. So when you swallow DMT, it's very rapidly broken down, never gets to the brain. But so the hypothesis at that point was when you add the harmala alkaloids from the ayahuasca vine, it inhibits it. So you have here a true pharmacological technology. This wasn't just a mixture of plants. This was a technology employing pharmacological synergy. You have the inhibitor of the monoamine oxidase and you have the DMT. Only when you take them together do you get, um, the effect. This is called the ayahuasca effect.

Now, uh, and Dennis McKenna worked on this hypothesis, and Dennis McKenna received samples of ayahuasca, and he showed that you could take samples of the ayahuasca brew, and it would inhibit this enzyme, um, showing that the the ayahuasca brew contained, you know, sufficient harmala alkaloids to inhibit the monoamine oxidase in your gut, which allowed the psychedelic drug to take effect.

Yeah. So, so from the very beginnings, you, you, this is why I always talk about DMT as being a, a technology. Uh, because very from the very beginning, humanity has developed technologies, and ayahuasca is a technology, um, >> to as tools, technologies as tools that allow you to interact with normally unseen, hidden intelligences. And that's what these spirits of the forest, the heura, the winari, these are intelligences that you normally can't see, the hidden ones, um, and they developed these tools, these technologies to make them visible. It's like a visual prosthesis that allowed them to see these intelligences.

And then when we kind of move the the dial forward into the the the 20th century, you know, we we learned how to isolate DMT and we learned how to use it, uh, pure DMT first by injecting it intramuscularly, then by vaporizing it. Nick Sand, very famous LSD chemist who also was a DMT manufacturer. He discovered one day he was being particularly careless in his lab, and some crystals of DMT fell on a hot plate, and it like a puff of white smoke or white vapor, should I say, and he thought, well, can't we just smoke this stuff? Because everyone had been injecting it up to this point, uh, intramuscularly as well, which is kind of a very erratic and drawn-out experience. And so Nick Sand realized, oh, we can, we can vaporize this, um, and then in the 1990s, as Rick Strassman says, "Well, vaporizing it, it's a bit messy. It's hard to measure doses. Um, it stinks. It's irritating to the lungs. So, I'm going to inject it not into the muscles, but intravenously, directly into the bloodstream."

Um, didn't Dennis or didn't Terrence give him that idea?

Oh, no. Terrence gave him the idea to get government funding for the study.

Yeah. So, the Terrence McKenna. Yeah. So, Terrence McKenna was, so this was after Rick Strassman was still a young, um, psychiatrist, and he was interested in melatonin at first, but wasn't interested. And then he went to this, uh, conference where he met Terrence McKenna, and and and he was talking about DMT. Rick Strassman was in his talk, and Terrence McKenna came afterwards and says, "You're talking a lot about DMT, but have you ever tried it?" That's bad. Terrence McKenna, but you get the point. Um, and Rick said no. So Terrence kind of sent Rick to the big house at Esalen. This was Esalen, uh, and and Terrence kind of went away and found someone, uh, who had DMT and brought it back. And that was Rick Strassman's first DMT experience. Um, and that was the kind of the genesis, if you like, of his long bureaucratic process that led to him being given permission to do this, the largest study of its kind in human volunteers.

Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, they tricked the government. [ __ ] smart.

Exactly. And so, so I can kind of see this thread of going back perhaps thousands of years of humanity discovering DMT or discovering how to use DMT, even when they didn't know that they were working with DMT, and developing technologies, um, uh, um, kind of to how best to use it. You know, how do we, how do we develop this as a technology? Um, is vaporizing it the culmination, the pinnacle of DMT administration technologies? Of course not. Is it intravenous injection? Maybe not. Uh, and this then this finally leads, well, not finally, because I'll talk about the future as well, and what we're working on now, but leads to DMTX, right? You have this very short-acting experience, which is very intense, but only lasts a few minutes. And what DMTX does, or extended state DMT, is allows you, as we were saying right at the beginning, to extend this. So I see that as just simply the next iteration of, uh, of humans learning to use and develop DMT as a technology. And the tech, the word technology is important, because if you just think of it as a drug, um, then it doesn't really capture what DMT is doing. If you take seriously the idea that it allows you to communicate with some kind of normally hidden, unseen, discarnate intelligent agent, that feels more like a molecular communication technology than a drug to me. And once you shift your mindset in that way, from drug, psychedelic drug, to technology, then you start to think, well, what's the best way to use this technology? And DMTX, as I said, I think is just the next iteration. But we can, I think we can, we can go further than that, right?

So, we know since the 1950s, um, psychiatrists and physicians and pharmacologists have been drawing blood from people and collecting pea samples and finding DMT in humans, but no one really knows what it does. Um, there are hypotheses, but no one's 100% clear why it's in the human body. But at least we know that the human body can produce, manufactured DMT, and at significant quantities. All the machinery is there. Um, so I was just towards the end of writing "Death by Astonishment," getting to the very final chapter, and I was thinking about the future. You know, what does, what does using the DMT technology look like in 10, 20 years? Are we still hooking people up to infusion machines and pumping them with DMT over long periods? Or can we somehow hack the brain's endogenous DMT system? So we, we move away from the the plant world, you know, which was going on for thousands of years, and we move away from laboratory synthesized DMT, and we, we finally reach the stage where we're actually using our own DMT production laboratory in our own brains. Um, so rather than injecting someone with DMT, you would simply, by understanding the regulatory mechanisms that control DMT production in in the human brain, we might be able to actually stimulate the production of DMT and induce people into the DMT state without giving them, uh, any DMT.

I wonder if there was like some specific music you could play that could like vibrate our [ __ ] atoms into creating, pumping out more DMT. How cool would that be?

Well, that's one idea. I'm not sure it would work. You'd need to flesh that out a bit for me.

Ancient Greeks, the ancient Greeks used music for medicine and they used it for rituals. And, uh, a lot of people think that music in ancient times, in antiquity, wasn't even recreational. They thought that it was, uh, purely medicinal and for attaining transcendent experiences for religious rites and, uh, medicine.

I mean, I think, uh, music predates language.

Yes.

Um, and early language would have been singing, um, making noises to them to generate music, and that eventually we worked out, I guess, that you can generate more, you can make, you can make money from it. Yeah. And that's where we are now. Yeah.

But alternatively, if the music thing doesn't pan out, um, you can, we know now that, well, way back, so 50 years ago, um, there was a study that's been forgotten about that showed that in mammalian brain, in rabbit brain, first of all, but also in human cerebrospinal fluid, there is this peptide that we all have, um, that inhibits, it's, an enzyme called indolethylamine N-methyltransferase, which is the key enzyme that produces DMT. So it converts tryptamine to DMT.

Oh, right. So, so DMT is manufactured in the body from tryptophan, which is an amino acid.

So, um, tryptophan is decarboxylated. That's a very simple process. You remove a carbon dioxide molecule, and you get tryptamine. Then you add two methyl groups, so two CH3 groups, that gives you DMT. Very easy to make.

And we all have this enzyme, indolethylamine N-methyltransferase, INMT, in us. It's in basically everywhere in the body, in all cells, basically. Um, so what they discovered in, I think 1976, that we all have a peptide that binds to INMT and basically puts the brakes on DMT production. So it keeps DMT production at a very low level. It inhibits this key enzyme for DMT production.

Um, and so this was this peptide inhibitor of INMT. It was isolated, and we have a kind of a basic, broad, rough molecular mass of it. But that's it. They didn't do any further characterization. I mean, this is a long time ago. So it wasn't so easy then to do that kind of thing. But then the paper was basically forgotten about. It's been cited four times in 50 years. So it's gone. A couple of years later, there was one that found a similar peptide in human cerebrospinal fluid that's been cited once in 50 years. Uh, so people basically forgot about this. Um, so I kind of uncovered this, stumbled across this paper, and thought, well, let's, let's isolate this peptide. Let's actually characterize it. Let's determine its actual structure, its actual peptide sequence, how this peptide actually works, how it's integrated with other regulatory mechanisms in the human body. Um, then perhaps we can, once we understand how this peptide works and how the regulatory system for DMT works, then we've got an inn for hacking this system.

Yeah.

Um, so we've actually recruited, I, or say contracted. So myself and, um, New Nautics, this nonprofit out of Florida who I've been working with for a number of years, um, we, we approached the University of Florida, a very prominent, uh, pharmacologist and peptide chemist called Chris McCourtie, um, and said, we'd like to isolate this peptide. We want to understand it, how it works. We want to understand how DMT is regulated in humans, and, uh, and we're basically, you know, he developed this research project with his team, research plan, and we are, this is happening, it's kind of being initiated now. Um, unfortunately, people, if they want to help fund this, I mean, it's like $400,000, so it's not pocket change for this initial stage of the project. So if anyone is interested, go to newnautics.org or N-O-N-A-U-T-T-I-C-S dot org, or, um, uh, and they can they can help out. But we hope that, you know, by the end of, you know, next year or something, we will understand a lot more about how DMT is regulated.

So what would be the ideal way in your mind to inhibit this inhibitor?

It's a good question. So until we know, I mean, there's two broad possibilities when we isolate and characterize this, this peptide. One is, it could be a known peptide.

Mhm.

Right. So it's a peptide. There's many, many endogenous peptides, small, um, small, relatively small peptides. Endorphins, for example, right? These is a peptide. Insulin, this is a peptide.

Um, so if it's one we know, then that's good news in a way, because we probably know about how the regulatory system works. So we might be able to, whether we inhibit that peptide directly and stop it working, or whether we can get into the system and actually stop the, the peptide being produced, you know, temporarily, um, so that it kind of frees up the INMT to begin churning out more DMT. That would be one approach.

Um, the alternative is that it's a completely novel peptide that no one's seen before that we don't know about.

That's interesting and good news for entirely different reasons, because you've, you've found something completely new.

Uh, which would be really cool, but at the same time, we, we'd know basically nothing about it. So we wouldn't know how it's, how it plugs into other regulatory systems in the body and in the brain. Um, so that would maybe require more work to think about how do we.

Yeah, that's cur that's interesting. If you could hack that without having to take a drug, right? You would have to take a drug, wouldn't you, to to inhibit that?

Well, so it's like it's like just adding another step between.

Yeah. I mean, there are a number of approaches you could take. I mean, it could be that you, you inject a small peptide that that might interact directly with this inhibitory peptide, or it might inter, it could even work at the genetic level where you're switching off the gene that produces this peptide. That could be much longer-lasting, and this might last for days, weeks, or even months. I mean, this is serious business.

Are there legal, uh, hoops you got to jump through to do something like this? Cuz it's like the funny thing about DMT, which Terrence McKenna points out, is everyone's carrying, right?

Everyone's carrying.

So what if you have now like a different way to like hack your own body into creating a chemical that's already there?

Exactly.

Is that illegal?

Exactly. And presumably not, right? Um, so, yes, you obviously you bypass all of the legal difficulties you have with injecting someone with a Schedule I drug. Yeah.

Um, that's gone, and you are simply manipulating, using tools, and it could be genetic, it could be molecular.

Um, there are various possibilities. We don't, we don't know anything about this system yet. So we can't, we can just speculate on how we might work this and whether it would be a long-lasting effect.

You might have to inject them with something, but maybe once, and then it would last for, uh, days or weeks, and then you'd have these individuals in a pod of some sort, all of their bodily needs would be taken care of, and, um, you know, feeding and waste management, and they would basically spend significant portions of their their lives, ultimately, right, um, interacting with, interfacing with, living amongst these intelligent beings from somewhere else. And they would forget, probably, that they were ever a human. I mean, that happens with DMT. I mean, we'll talk about your experiences, perhaps. But often with DMT, what happens, even with, you know, in two or three minutes, you, you will lose any conception of what it ever meant to be a human, and that that part is gone, and you're in that world now. You're a, a being, a conscious intelligent being that exists within this other world. So you can imagine over days or weeks or months or whatever, um, s basically having an entirely new existence that would have, that would have be in your own mind, that's that would be kind of all you've ever known. And so any conception of once having been a human would gone, is gone. Um, and you become the alien, in a sense, until you start until until you start to come back, and then you kind of remember again, and you integrate back into this reality.

Yes. Yes.

We have the entities, right, which you explained have been, uh, being since the guy in the '50s, um, first talked about those entities.

And then you have, which I think you talked about in your video, you made a long video response to Danny's laser experiment, and you mentioned, um, accounts or, um, people explaining seeing similar codes with other drugs in the past, right?

With DMT, in fact.

With DMT, in fact. Oh, okay.

Very common.

So when you, when you ex, so you, how do you explain the code? What the [ __ ] is the code?

Okay, let's get, we finally, we get to the code.

Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, I should say, people think that myself and Danny have some kind of beef with each other.

Yeah.

You know, and it's just, it's not there. I mean, I, I, I was in LA. I came directly to LA from Tokyo. He's this guy, Aaron, is filming this documentary, and, uh, we had a, a long, like two-hour conversation on on film. We went out to dinner twice. It went to my friend Paul, our mutual friend Paul Heinik's house for dinner. After filming, we had dinner. We, we get on perfectly well. We disagree.

Uh, uh, or at least I'm not convinced of his explanation for the, for this DMT laser code.

Well, the only way to do it is to, you got to try to see it. You got to try to look at the laser.

But that's not, you see, that's the problem. It's not just about seeing it. I mean, okay, let's, let's kind of talk a little bit about the code. I mean, I wrote this long article on, I did this video, which was me kind of rambling. Um, so it's not particularly coherent. I was just giving my thoughts, but I wrote a long article on Substack also, which people alien insect on drugs. Uh, so people can read that, um, for a more coherent breakdown of what I'm thinking. But so here's, here's the thing, right? The basic idea that Danny is presenting is that you shine a laser on a wall under, under the influence of DMT, and you can see code, which he interprets as being a fundamental code that has a fundamental function in our reality. I mean, he takes it to be literal code that is existing there in the wall. He's seeing this code that extends beyond the surface of the wall now. It's like the, it's like the matrix of reality that see through, right? And the word matrix is very important here. Well, it's two different things, right? Like his conclusion is separate from the idea that you can actually, many people can see the same thing with the same elements in that environment under the influence of DMT.

Okay, so here's the first, I mean, just broadly, the issue I have with the whole idea, uh, is that I don't see why, if our reality was being, let's say, simulated and there was some fundamental code, why it would take the form of something that obviously looks like code, letters, characters, digits. This is how we imagine a code, uh, but that's code written for humans. Computers don't, don't read letters and symbols, right? That it's all, it's all on and off switches, right? That's basically what the code is doing. It's a way for humans to, um, it's like a, it's like an intermediary between the human and the computer is this written code of of characters and digits. So if you were actually seeing what the the computer was using, what Keith was running, you wouldn't even see ones and zeros. You'd see kind of electrical pulses switching, right?

So the idea that you're seeing some fundamental, uh, code of reality and it looks like human-readable, or at least human-recognizable code, doesn't really make any sense to me. I don't see why the code running our reality would look like that. Secondly, the idea that the code that's running our reality would actually be running through reality in this way, uh, doesn't make any sense. If the code runs elsewhere and the output is our reality, but the code is being run, you know, in the same way that the code that's running a, an image on a screen, if you, if you kind of look, you know, if you're seeing the output of a computer game, if you look into the screen, you don't see code running through it. No.

Right? Of course not. The code is being run on the computer elsewhere. So that doesn't make sense to me. Um, and also the idea, the unfortunate coincidence, shall we say, is that people describe Japanese katakana.

Uh.

I thought it was more like Sanskrit.

Well, you hear various, a bit like katakana, a bit like Sanskrit, a bit like Hebrew, whatever. But still, you're seeing very human characters, uh, human-generated characters, which again, I don't see why that's the case. Now, the katakana thing is important because the Matrix digital rain, that very famous green code that runs from the movie, was generated with katakana, famously the guy that gener designed that, uh, used his wife's cookbooks, which were she was Japanese, and he was just looking through and, "Oh, that looks cool." Um, so, you know, Japanese katakana, it's has a long history in anime as well as being used to to generate code like imagery because it looks cool as well. So that's an unfortunate coincidence to me, uh, is that it, like the Matrix movie, it's kind of running through reality.

And then we get to the actual, um, the effect itself, which also has some unfortunate, uh, coincidences, if you see them as that, in that if you shine a red laser like, forget DMT for the moment. If you shine a red laser at a wall, um, the laser is is coherent light.

Speckle, you talking about the speckle?

Right. I'm talking about speckle effect, right now. Well, speckle effect. Yes, I know it's been kind of, it's easy to kind of say, "Oh, it's not the speckle effect," but let's just analyze what the speckle effect actually is, right?

Okay.

You've got a red laser. It hits a wall, and as the light waves reflect off the wall, they kind of interfere with each other, and you get specks of bright and and dark, right? Yes. And this creates a pattern on the retina, right? That's what you're seeing. You're seeing this pattern on the retina, um, like a matrix of points of light on your retina.

Now, it has some interesting optical properties. Now, because the laser is always in focus, even if you cross your eyes or, um, try to focus behind the wall, the laser speckles, these points of light will always be perfectly sharp, even if the wall becomes blurry.

Really?

Yes. Because the speckle effect is on the, it's it's coherent light. Yeah. It's coherent light that's hitting the retina.

Uhhuh.

So it's not, it's, it's not in a way your eye isn't focusing or doesn't need to focus.

Right. I see what you're saying.

Right. It's just coherent light that's, um, that that's forming this pattern on the retina. And and what's cool about that is that when you cross your eyes, you work a little bit. You try to focus behind the pattern on the on the wall. Your brain receives these very mixed signals. The depth cues are all wrong. Right? The speckle effect isn't becoming blurry, whereas the wall is. And your brain interprets that as that that the speckles are actually behind the wall or occupying space behind the wall. That's, and that's what you see. So even without any DMT, you will see this matrix of points of light that that seems to occupy three-dimensional space behind the wall.

Mhm. Now when you add DMT to the mix, unfortunately, in my opinion for the whole model, is that yes, you have these matrix of characters and geometric forms that seem to occupy space, extend beyond the wall. Now you have to accept that if you accept Danny's model here, you have to accept this is just a coincidence. This spec, this unusual effect of red lasers, and it's particularly prominent with red lasers as well because of the low frequency. Um, you have to accept that these, this is just a coincidence that the speckle effect, this interference pattern on the retina, has got nothing to do. It's just a sheer coincidence that red lasers happen to also produce this effect.

Well, the first time I did it, I could only see the speckles. And after focusing for about five minutes, and this was a little bit after the peak of the experience, right? Like it was probably six, seven, eight minutes after, and I saw the speckles, and I had to really, really focus, and I saw the speckles turn into gears, and then all the gears, millions of them, just started like they were connected and just spinning.

Right. So, what's happening there? I'll tell you. I don't know why I asked. So, what, what do you think's happening there? Why?

I would imagine that the speckles are, I mean, when you do DMT, it, it obviously changes your, does something to your visual cortex to where, uh, the stuff that you normally see is being altered. So if I'm looking at speckles, they're going to be animated or altered in some way. That, that is the way I would explain it away.

Right. Right. So each of these speckles, these points of light, it's like a, your, your brain is seeing this very coherent and, um, consistent pattern of points of light on that come from the retina from the laser, ultimately. Uh, and this acts kind of like a sensory scaffold. These are the points of sensory data, like a pattern of of these specs of light, and they act as like a scaffold around which imagery is created. Yes. Right. And I would expect, you know, in retrospect, of course, but I would expect, or I'm not surprised, that these speckles would take the form, first of all, of geometric objects.

Um, does it surprise me they would take the form of characters? Not really. Uh, because characters, very fine detailed structures. Humans are very lexical species. We're very good, our brains are very good at generating characters. When you open a book and you read letters, your brain is constructing those letters, right? You're not just kind of seeing as such. Uh, your, your brain is has to construct these letters, these certain shapes and patterns very, very quickly.

Very, very quickly. Your brain is very good at it. Um, so you, so your brain is kind of neurologically primed, right? Not by just by expectation, but your brain is neurologically primed to generate patterns, small patterns, um, that look like characters. You would expect that. Um, so again, it's like I'm try, what I'm trying to do is trying to find what, what, what are the aspects of this effect? I do think it's a fascinating effect, first of all. Um, I think it's potentially a really important discovery that Daniel's made. I can't say that enough. Um, but what I'm trying to find is what are the aspects of this phenomenon that distinguish it from DMT-induced imagery? We know DMT can produce complex imagery. Um, there's nothing surprising about seeing characters. There's nothing surprising about seeing, um, small geometric forms, especially when you have this uniform pattern of of sensory input points of light entering, entering the brain.

Um, so what is it about it that makes it different that allows us to to move to more exotic explanations? First of all, how do we rule out the speckle effect? I know Danny says, "Oh, you can still see the speckles." That doesn't convince me. Um, because DMT visions can be, once you kind of, once they, uh, are initiated, established, they can be very, very persistent in the presence of DMT. So what is it? Now, Danny offers some explanations, um, and other people have mentioned things like object permanence, um, or objectness, right? Looks like an object. Again, it's not convincing because there's nothing ontologically special about a vision that appears out there in the world apparently, or one that occurs behind your eyes. Um, because the, your world is always being constructed internally anyway. The fact that it's kind of mapped to and projected onto or is integrated into your world doesn't make it special.

Mhm.

You know, when someone is psychotic and they're suffering from visual hallucinations and they see their dead grandmother walk into the room, the dead grandmother looks like solid, moves, moves like the grandmother used to move, obeys the laws of physics, sits on chairs, doesn't walk through chairs, you know, but it's still a hallucination.

Um, so we can't use that. The fact that it appears stable is not convincing either, because again, you've got this very, um, coherent and consistent pattern of sensory inputs coming from the laser. So what is it that's special about this effect? That's what I want to find. Um, everyone sees the same thing. Do they? Do they really? Does do people see exactly the same characters at exactly the same time, or is everyone just seeing geometric structures and characters which we interpret as code? I only see evidence for the latter. Um, we have very little, um, you know, drawings or sketches of this code, and when you do see it, it often looks like, or is identical to, Japanese katakana or other kind of characters. So how do we get from this is a really cool effect that allows us to isolate a particular fragment or aspect of the broader visual phenomenology produced by DMT, which is the appearance of code, which is again, goes back, many people describe code, you know, going back decades, and, you know, Alison Gray, Alex Gray's wife, she, her all of her art is devoted to this kind of secret language, as she calls it, that you see on DMT.

So how do we, how do we distinguish this effect from just other types of DMT imagery? And, uh, and I know, I know Danny is really trying, and I was kind of reassured when I was speaking to him in LA, is that he is trying to, um, rule out other possibilities. He's trying to test this idea, but it's so difficult, right? He had the magnet thing.

Mhm.

Uh.

And, and, you know, in today's day and age, you see an unbelievable amount of confirmation bias happening all over the place. And what I like about the way Danny is doing it is it doesn't, I don't see that with him. I see him actually trying to stress test this and actually trying to come up with legitimate ways to to prove it wrong.

Yeah. I don't, I don't sense any sort of grift or anything like that with him. He seems very genuine.

I agree 100%. I don't sense, he's always been very, um, pleasant and kind and open. We've had very open and honest discussions, and that's important. A lot of people just see it and they just latch on to his explanation, and they don't really analyze and think about it more deeply, which is all I'm trying to do, you know? It's all I'm trying to do.

And you remember Silo-mythoxin?

No.

It's another story. You want to get into it real quickly?

Yeah.

So, um, there was this, uh, chemist called Garts, who was now known to be a fraud. Hamilton Morris did a great talk at Psychedelic Science in Denver about it. But anyway, he thought that if you, he showed in his, in his studies, which weren't real, it turns out, but if you feed a mushroom, something like, um, not DMT, so psilocin from mushrooms is DMT but with a hydroxyl group added on. There's an enzyme that puts this hydroxyl group, an OH group, on the ring. So it converts DMT to psilocin, right? And then there's a phosphate group that makes it psilocybin. But anyway, you have this key enzyme, this hydroxylase enzyme, um, that converts DMT to psilocin. So this guy Garts thought, well, what if we feed the mushroom different tryptamines? Um, and will it still add this hydroxyl group? So can we create novel, can we make them turn the mushroom into a factory for these novel tryptamines with this hydroxyl group in the same place as psilocin, but with a different tryptamine structure?

And one option here, one possibility is to take 5-methoxytryptamine, so it's DMT with this methoxy group at the five position. The theory goes that if you feed it to the mushrooms, it adds the hydroxyl group at the four position, and you get 4-hydroxy-5-methoxytryptamine, Silo-mythoxin, a theoretical molecule, right? Cool. Cool idea.

Yeah. Does it work? Well, this guy, I forget his name, and I would probably don't want to mention his name because he might sue me. Um, seriously. Um, he, again, he was experienced with psychedelics, and after years of meditation and stuff, it came to him in a vision or something like this, that this is what he needs to do, right? He needs to feed 5-methoxytryptamine to the mushrooms, and they will create this Silo-mythoxin molecule.

Um, so he tried it. He fed 5-methoxytryptamine to the mushrooms, and he got this, the mushroom grew. Uh, and then he started trying it on himself, and he had this experience which to him was completely unlike mushrooms, regular mushrooms. And so at that point, he knew, he knew, Danny, that this, this was it. It had worked. Yeah. This mushroom no longer contains psilocybin. It no longer contains psilocin. It contains Silo-mythoxin. He called it the sacrament.

And he started ship, he started, he had this subscription model. You'd pay a certain amount of money, and every few months or whatever, they'd send you samples of this mushroom, which wasn't scheduled, wasn't an illegal drug. There's no psilocybin in there. All this was in his head, of course, right? Um, and all these other people started taking it, and they were paying him money. I think it was, it reached like $50,000 a month.

How long ago was this?

Recently.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. Our sacraments.

Is this the website?

You got a website? Yeah.

Our sacraments.

Right. So he was selling this.

$2,000 a month, or is it 200?

Can't be that one.

$200 a month. Right. Now, now here's the point. He created this sacrament, which he assumed he knew contains. But what's the first thing you do as a scientist? You think you got a mushroom that contains this molecule. What's the first simple thing you do? Obvious [ __ ] thing you do? You send it to a chemist, get them to analyze it. Say, can you actually detect Silo-mythoxin in this mushroom? He didn't do that because he knew, right? Sorry, bit weird, but he knew that that he, it was a success, that he'd found the sacrament. Yeah.

Um, and then behind the scenes, somebody received a sample of the mushrooms, a company called USA.

Oh, god, don't say that name.

I won't say that name. You can you can scramble that. Um, this company, this unnamed chemical company.

They, they received samples, and they did a very simple analysis. This isn't, this isn't rocket science, Danny, right? This is extracting a mushroom and analy, doing a GCMS or something. No Silo-mythoxin in there at all. Lots of psilocy.

They, they did this study on it. They analyzed it.

This chemical company. Yeah. Behind that, not the Church of Silo-mythoxin. They weren't, they didn't bother doing that.

Right. Right. Right.

Um, but this other chemical company in the background quietly wanted to prove these guys wrong. Analyzed the mushrooms. Didn't find any Silo-mythoxin. Published a paper. Yeah.

And instantaneously, the whole facade collapsed overnight. Right.

Subscriptions, obviously people, why am I spending $200 a month, buying, you know, 5-methoxytryptamine or whatever, or maybe even less than that, I don't know. Um, and so the, so like, what do they do? Um, it's all over, really. And they started suing people.

Um, anyone who had publicly discredited the church, they started suing them. $1 million was the total lawsuit, which was thrown out. Yeah.

Oh, wait. So they're actually a church?

That's what they called themselves. Yeah.

But did they get the exemption?

Oh, I have no idea on that kind of stuff. Uh, but so instead of selling an unscheduled mushroom containing Silo-mythoxin, they were selling a Schedule I drug. Oh, Jesus Christ.

And shipping it around the world as well. You didn't, it wasn't just the US. So people can imagine, imagine ordering it from Singapore.

People are vulnerable, man. People are so easily scammed. It's crazy, right? But it was such an thing is is that it wasn't difficult to eliminate. They could easily have done the proper due diligence and analyzed their mushrooms, and they would have found it doesn't contain Silo-mythoxin. So then they go on the defensive and they say, "Oh, you used methanol in the extraction. You should have used water." Just [ __ ] that any chemist would know is nonsense.

Um, and then they, they published an announcement on their website. This was a few months afterwards. They have found Silo-mythoxin in the mushroom, and they published this mass spect, mass spectrogram, showing this little peak of the molecular mass of Silo-mythoxin, which I didn't believe was real.

Um, so I, I kind of had a bit of an exchange on Reddit with one of the guys who was doing the analysis, and he described the data that he was getting.

Great place to have an exchange.

It was. Yeah. My favorite, my favorite place, Reddit.

Um, and, um, he was, he described the data.

Very mentally, mentally stable folks there.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. This is where I go when I want some rational, rational co, you know, cogent debate.

Um, anyway, I had this brief exchange, and he, he basically told me the data. He told me how many molecules they were detecting in the mass spectrometer, um, just to give me an idea of the amount of Silo-mythoxin they were detecting by mass spectrometry. And I, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation. I think I worked out you need, you'd need like two tons, two metric tons of dried mushroom to get a single dose of Silo-mythoxin. So what if it was there? It was, it was,

It was, it was so, such a small amount, it was irrelevant. Yeah.

And unfortunately, again, they didn't realize because they're stupid. I shouldn't say that, but whatever. They're stupid. Um, Silo-mythoxin has the same, exactly the same molecular mass as the N-oxide of 5-methoxytryptamine. So when 5-methoxytryptamine is exposed to the air, it starts to oxidize, and it forms this N-oxide. Yeah. Basically, you add an oxygen to the nitrogen.

Yeah.

Um, and this has exactly the same mass as Silo-mythoxin. You can't tell just by looking at the mass spectrogram whether they've got Silo-mythoxin or 5-MeO-DMT has just become oxidized. What's more likely? Obviously oxidation.

Um, so it's highly likely, in my opinion, or I would bet my my bottom dollar, as they used to say, um, on this, that this is, there's nothing in there. It's, it's magic mushrooms, philosophy mushrooms, that contains psilocybin and psilocin, um, and maybe a little bit of oxidized, tiny, tiny, tiny, irrelevant, uh, few molecules of the oxidized form of 5-MeO-DMT.

It's, in other words, the whole thing just was a fantasy.

Mhm.

Now, I'm not saying, bring it back to the code of reality thing. I'm not saying that that's the case here. Danny is not stupid. He's smart. He's, he's really thought this, this thing through. But there's always the danger if you don't do your groundwork first and eliminate, you have to really, even if you don't think that this speckle effect has anything to do with it, even if you're convinced, you've got to do the groundwork to eliminate all of these more mundane alternative hypotheses. And that takes time. It takes money.

And then you get to the more far-out explanations. Whereas it feels to me a little bit like Danny's kind of taken the elevator to the penthouse suite.

Um, and obviously I'm not going to do that, and I get some criticism for it, but that's how I work. You know, I spend most of my, most of the time what I'm doing with DMT, certainly in the last two decades, is is analyzing more orthodox, more mainstream, more mundane explanations and then ruling them out. And only then do I get to the more far-out explanations.