“DMT Opens The Alien Realm!” (Ft. Andrew Gallimore)

There's no way for you to visualize a five-dimensional object in its true form, and yet when you smoke DMT you do. It's an extremely intense experience, it's very fast and very, very short. It's not Terence McKenna implanting the idea of machine elves into people's brains. These are intelligent beings that go back thousands of years. They will perform beings like elves or hollow twins or jokers and gestures, and they will display these impossible, higher-dimensional, beautiful objects that kind of morph in front of your eyes. Can we show that we're actually interfacing with some kind of intelligence that is non-human? If a lot of people are seeing these architectures outside of their own reality and they're all consistent, that seems like it would be really important. If they want to communicate with us, they're going to do it throughout brain. Do you think that elite members of society have been systematically accessing these other realms, helping to shape our reality? Why don't we re-purpose a technique from anesthesiology called target-controlled intravenous infusion, but with DMT? So we send in mathematician, we send in geometers or topologists, we send in linguists. Before we dive into today's episode of American Alchemy, I want to give a quick shout-out to today's amazing sponsor, Ground News. All right, let me show you how I've actually been using this thing. Take this headline that's been all over my feed lately. Why maga can't move on from the Epstein files? Now, say what you want about the headline, but few stories cut closer to the core of power, secrecy, and public amnesia than this one. This is where ground news genuinely shine. It pulls in 141 different sources on just that story. You get a bird's-eye view of what the mainstream media might be pushing, like there are no Epstein files, stop asking, and what independent outlets are suggesting, like maybe Epstein was a global honeypot for secret science programs. 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And breaking stories hit my ground news feed without the algorithm shoving celebrity gossip or Reddit drama in my face. It's great. It's an amazing detox. If you want that kind of clarity, go to ground.news/jesse-michels, michels with no A, for a limited time only. You can also find that in the description or hit the QR code on the screen. If you do that, you'll get 40% off the unlimited access vantage plan, the same plan that I use, or you can gift it to someone who still thinks that Jeffrey Epstein just ran a hedge fund. Again, that's ground.news/jesse-michels, michels with no A. I only promote tools I actually use, and ground news is one of them. Don't miss out on these important stories. Now, let's get back to the show. Andrew Gellimore, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I have been a fan and follower of yours for a long time now. You've written a couple of great books that I'm aware of, Alien Information Theory, and you are coming out with Death by Estonishment, which is sort of a title, is an homage to William Burrows or Terrence McKenna. I'm just really excited to talk to you because I feel like a lot of the alien stuff, dovetails with psychedelics and psychedelic experiences. I think a lot of people use that to sometimes discredit the alien thing as objectively real. I think the psychedelic thing is a really important part of our everyday waking in epistemology, as I'm sure you would agree, and so I'm excited to dive into that with you. Fabulous. Good to be here, Jesse, in Austin, Texas. Absolutely. I thought it was time in Austin. For all the way from Japan, which is, I was always like, you know, okay, I'll visit Andrew when I go to Japan. I wanted to do a little Japan tour, so it's cool to thank you for coming out here. You're welcome. Why don't we just start there, actually, with the kind of alien DMT connection. I was actually listening to you on my buddy, Michael's podcast, Third Eyedrops. You were talking about John Mack and alien abductions and how a lot of these alien abduction experiences really connect or seem to pattern match to what people experience on DMT. They're not the same, but really, well, from the beginning of DMT research back in, so DMT was discovered in 1956 by this Hungarian physician called Steven Zara. This was when Hungary was a communist state, and from the very first study that he did, I mean, at first he injected himself. I mean, this was kind of the good old days of science when scientists injected new drugs into themselves. So he discovered, after injecting it into himself, that it was quite clearly very, very psychedelic. This kind of rush of highly complex geometric imagery that kind of overwhelmed him, seized control of him. So he knew then that this was something special, something quite different to the drugs that were known at the time, LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, this seemed to kind of transcend that and transport you to some alternate reality. So he started injecting with the drug into people, colleagues, basically, you worked at the same hospital. And even in those very first studies, it was quite obvious that these individuals were not just being transported to other worlds, but these were populated worlds and that there were what seemed to be kind of intelligent beings, including little diminutive creatures, multitudinous creatures, lively beings, that now we would recognize as elves or machine elves in Terence Mechanopalins. But when Rick Strasmann picked up the mantle in the early 90s and he did a much larger study with 60 volunteers, various doses of DMT. And a not insignificant number of these individuals reported experiences that would not raise an eyebrow if they had appeared in books by John Maxx, a kind of alien abduction type experiences where people are brought into some kind of highly sophisticated technological environment where there are beings, often a number of like orderlies, less senior beings who were kind of performing the work, and you know, analyses and measurements, scanning and all this kind of stuff. And then often there was one like top dog who was kind of in the background, but had a very strong presence, kind of overseeing or supervising the procedure. And then they'd often be taken on kind of a tour of this craft or technological place meetings with highly intelligent, highly advanced non-human beings, and then brought safely back into the normal waking world. And this, if you this kind of scenario is precisely what John Maxx abductees or experiences he has he used to call them, were kind of reporting. So it didn't escape John Maxx attention. And people are asking him, you know, have you heard about DMT because what you're talking about sounds a lot like what people are reporting under the influence of DMT. And I think Rick Strasman also said, you know, if we removed all references to DMT in many of the reports from my volunteers, would anyone be able to distinguish them from the reports of alien and abductees. And I think towards the end, you know, as John Maxx progressed through his abduction career, if you want to put it like that, he was he became less convinced that this was a purely physical, nuts and bolts. phenomenon where people were actually being removed from their beds at night and taken on to actual physical crafts. But he started to feel like this was some kind of non-physical process. Many of his subjects reported going to alter environments that didn't seem to be physical. Yeah. So places that were higher dimensional spaces, beings that were very similar to the types of beings that people encounter in DMT. So he kind of shifted towards a more spiritual or metaphysical or non-physical explanation for these abduction experiences. And a little context for the audience, John Mack was the head of the Harvard Psychiatry Department in the 90s. And he was actually childhood friends with a guy named Bud Hopkins, who was documenting a lot of these sort of abduction experiences. And he started to take a deep dive. He was actually friends with Thomas Kuhn, who wrote Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And he was like, I don't know, maybe some of this alien stuff is real. And Kuhn was like, yeah, this, you know, basically you should, you know, try to maintain the null hypothesis for as long as possible. But even though you sit on a respectable perch at Harvard, you should actually dive into this. He started to dive into it. He'd started to take it very seriously. He was like these people are reporting events that they feel are very, very real. They have no mental health history prior or after. And so it's interesting that you say that he sort of, you know, starts to view them as more spiritual or taking place in maybe a realm apart from the physical. He was also very inspired by Stanislav Graf and olatropic breathwork where the goal is actually to, I think, endogenously release DMT or something at the end of the breathwork. And so if that's inspired Mac to that extent, and then Mac would use that in his practice with a lot of the abductees in order for them to recall their experiences, maybe that adds to your point. But I will say that some of these abductees have physical marks and things that an implants and stuff where it's like, like, do you have an explanation for that? Have you thought of that? Yeah. I mean, I think the, the line between the physical and the non-physical is not always clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? So it's like you can't really, it's hard to get at. There is obviously what we would consider to be a physical aspect. But there also seems to be a very non-physical aspect. And I just don't think we, as humans, we really understand. I think maybe if we were able to observe this from a higher perspective and kind of an overview, like a bird's eye view of reality, it might be obvious what's going on here. But I just, I just think it's useful to be able to distinguish between the physical, it's kind of instructive to distinguish between the physical and the non-physical that actually sometimes you point out, it's maybe a combination of the physical and the non-physical. And I feel like people like if they were to point to a dividing line where the physical and the non-physical sort of divested, it would be Descartes or something in the kind of proverbial, you know, but if you look at Descartes, like how that divestiture actually occurred is he was talking about, he was doing thought experiments about a demon controlling your entire perceptive epistemology and some almost, you know, proto-VR headset that could be reality. And all you could know is that your own thoughts were yours or something. Yeah. And so that's a pretty trippy thought. It is. And I actually, that's kind of an interesting point because graph actually in one of his books, he said, look, if there are advanced intelligent beings, you know, aliens that are kind of non-physical, discarnate everywhere and nowhere, then the way that they would appear to us would be, would be dismissed as hallucination. They would kind of interact with our brain directly. They wouldn't have to kind of materialize, so to speak, in a true quote unquote physical form, but they would interact with us directly with our brain. And I think that's actually what's going on, whether it's Descartes, Demon, but I think the, when you smoke DMT, for example, what I think is happening or what I've come to believe or lean towards an explanation for what's happening is that you have these intelligences that don't have a physical form. They don't have a form that could even be represented in any kind of visual form. These are completely non-physical discarnate beings, but they DMT somehow gives them access to our neural machinery. And so they are, I believe, directing the visions. I believe the DMT world to be what I call a directed world. I don't think you're going anywhere. I don't think you're peeking through into another world, because that's not how perception works. Perception works by your brain building this model, which is then tested against sensory inputs from the environment. You never have direct access to the so-called external world or the environment. And it's the same in the DMT experience. You're not seeing the DMT world, whatever that might mean. You're simply giving access to these intelligent agents, giving them access to your brain. So you don't break through, I always say, don't break through into the DMT world. It's the DMT world or the intelligences within this space that break through into you. They see as control. They kind of commandeer this world modeling machinery in your brain, and they direct to your visions. Do they have, in your opinion, and this is maybe a philosophical question, do these entities have control prior to you taking DMT and then you are able to notice it through DMT? Or do they take control when you take DMT? Well, I'm going to give the optimistic answer, which is to say it's DMT. What DMT does is it generates this very fluid and dynamic state of the brain, of the cortex, this outer layer of the brain that constructs your world model. And some very recent neuro-imaging data actually show that DMT makes the brain much more sensitive to being perturbed by external sensory or other types of input. So it becomes primed, if you like, to be commandeer taken over in this way. So I'd like to think that they don't have access in a normal way in state, because that's kind of a horrifying thought, right? But in the presence of DMT, they gain access. Your brain is in a much more vulnerable or susceptible state to being commandeered by these intelligences. And that's clearly what happens. People describe this massive, overwhelming rush of information that floods their brain, you know, complex imagery, mathematical imagery, blueprints, and just completely alien stuff that has no relationship to their normal waking experience. And I think that is kind of the hallmark of them basically saying, you know, we have control now for the next five minutes or so. And then they kind of show you what they want to show you, which is sometimes a performance. They kind of say, look at this. Look what we can do. And they will show these. They will often display these impossible, higher dimensional, beautiful objects that kind of morph in front of your eyes, or they will hold up screens with these impossibly complex imagery. They will perform beings like elves or hallakwins or jokers and gestures. And they will kind of, they will say, look, look at this. This is impossible. And yet, we're doing it, you know, they're doing it with your brain. Your brain is like the stage that they are using for this performance. And then in other cases, it's more serious. There seems to be some kind of agenda. People often describe like they were waiting for me. They knew, they weren't surprised. I was very fucking surprised. But they weren't surprised at all. They had a place ready for me. And they slotted me in. And they started working. They were scanning and lights flashing and beeping. And just they knew exactly what to do in the short time available. Yeah, it's um. So this brings up a question of like discernment. Like if, I don't know, you talk about hallak and gestures and, you know, tricksters and stuff. And, you know, on the other hand, you know, there's things with serious agendas for you. How do you go into a trip like this and be able to defend for yourself and go in with a specific intention where you're not, you know, the product being used, but you have a specific goal or intention or, I don't know, it can be very healing for a lot of people, for example, maybe that's the sort of positive outcome version of this or how do you sort of dictate that and is it inherently very risky? You don't dictate it. So if you try to dictate it, then you're in trouble because there's no way you cannot dictate it. I mean, that's the thing. You have to surrender. You have to surrender and you can go in with intention and people do. People will go in, they might suffer from, I don't know, chronic headaches or depression or something that they're seeking a solution to something and they go in with that intention and very often they will find that these beings will get to work on them, literally on their brain, and they will feel their brain being reprogrammed, rewired by these elf-like beings or other insectoid beings. These are the kind of two of the most common types of being and they will often achieve great relief from that, you know, their headaches stop happening, you know, or they feel more positive about life and if you're like their depression has lifted. So that's certainly possible. It's not like it's, you kind of have to accept that you get what you get, but at the end of the day, yes, you kind of do have to accept that you're not going to be able to control this thing. And if you try, that's, I think, when bad experiences happen. When you go in there with a sense of self-assured arrogance that, you know, we humans are the top of the intelligence tree, you know, that DMT will obliterate any kind of this anthropocentric belief that humans are the center of reality and that we are the most intelligent thing and that we've got it all worked out. It'll humble you. Or it'll humble you within seconds. It gives you what you need not what you want. Right. Like, you know, I've dabbled a little bit and I don't do much, but and I did, I did Iahuasca once. So I've never done DMT, but I've done the Iahuasca is DMT in some sense, it's a kind of gnarly version of it. I don't know. I feel like the failure mode for me would have been like the universe showing me that, you know, some sort of like ultimate Fibonacci sequence that like, you know, because I'm, you know, kind of a treat seeker in that sense. And instead it was like, no, just walk and carry water, you know, your, your, your job is like, like, your way too grandiose about all this stuff, like shut up, like, your family is all that matters. And it was like, it was great because of that. But it was not what I wanted, you know, I wanted, I wanted some, you know, ultimate secret or something. That's everybody wants the blueprints for the time machine. That's right. Right. And they said, why don't we get that? Why don't we get the equations for the ground unified theory? Yes. I think humans, we, we have this, this very human centered belief that we know what, what we need. And these beings, they have no interest in that. They know kind of, they know what's going on. And we have, we haven't got a clue. Yeah. What's going on. Yeah. We don't know shit, really. And that's the most important message that we need to get, first of all, before we start getting the other messages. I think the first one that we need to take to heart is that, yeah, we haven't got a clue what's going on. We don't know shit that we're not, we're not even close. We don't even register on the scale of intelligences that you can encounter within the DMTs. I would agree with that. But you are a human who has dared to create kind of an ontology around both psychedelics. And it's really awesome. And it dovetails with a lot of my instincts where you have is alien information theory. I want to start with that because I love that book. And it, it, it goes into like this idea that, you know, these beings could be in some sense sort of simulating our current reality. But it also talks about, you know, their myths from, you know, gin and Islam to angels and demons and Christianity or, you know, Judaism. And these things sort of having a full wholesale control over our realities. And then, yeah, there's some sort of bridge that takes place with DMT. But you even get into, you know, the information theory components of, of this and how they're maybe more pure information theoretic. These beings. And you talk about John Wheeler and so, um, yeah, I do, maybe, maybe just for the audience. I'd love, I'd love for you to kind of go through that kind of whole ontology. Yeah, I mean, the book, alien information theory, people read it and think that this is kind of what I believe is, it's not what I believe it's, it's a, it's a work of art, it's a work of metaphysical speculation. I'm simply trying to show people that the world could well be and probably is something or reality probably is something that we completely different to what is normally presented to us by the theoretical physicists and the mathematicians and the astronomers and the astrobiologists, et cetera, et cetera. And that actually reality is probably, you know, as Terence McKenney used to say, you know, it's stranger than we can, suppose. Yes. And I think that was Arthur C. Clarke. But it was actually, it was a JBS Haldane originally said that he's the word queerer than we suppose, but stranger than we suppose, probably better these days. But yeah, anyway, and I think he's right, I mean, 30 seconds after you inhale along full of DMT, it's quite obvious that the reality is far, far stranger than you could possibly have, supposed or anticipated. And the book was really to present one particular way of looking at reality, you know, maybe reality could be something like this. I don't think I got everything right, but I think the idea, which I think is broadly correct or could well be broadly correct, is that this reality, our lower dimensional reality, our three-dimensional plus one reality is really a thin slice within a much larger, higher dimensional structure. So we're kind of embedded within this high dimensional structure that we never normally have access to. And for reasons that we don't quite understand, DMT grants us temporary access to this high dimensional structure, and so the world you kind of unfold into is, I guess, is one way of describing it, your brain kind of unfolds into this high dimensional structure. This is why people describe entering a world that is not just strange, but is literally impossible in that it could not exist within our three-dimensional world in which there are more dimensions. What appears to be a very higher dimensional space, a kind of reality that our three-dimensional world could only exist within, but it could not exist within our reality. That makes sense. It makes total sense. Yeah. Yeah. I think, and at best, there are little ports or bridges where they connect or something. Right. It's like Carl Sagan had this great clip where he's talking about platonic solids, and he talks about a Tesseract, and you would never see the Tesseract, you'd see a shadow of the Tesseract. Right. There's a great book by Sir Edwin Abbott called Flatland, yeah, where it's like a 2D people and how they'd interact with 3D creatures. Maybe there are ports or whatever whereby they can somehow connect to the 3D reality, but they're extremely limited. We're seeing sort of the tip of the iceberg, we're not seeing, you know, the iceberg itself. Yeah. We are kind of trapped within that flatland, and you know, as Carl Sagan said, you would only, in this world, we would only see the shadow of the Tesseract. When you go into the DMT space, people do describe seeing Tesseracts, and they will describe them. I saw something that was impossible. It was a four-dimensional cube, or a five-dimensional cube, which is completely impossible for us to comprehend. Only we can only imagine it as a mathematical abstraction, there's no way for you to visualize or to see a five-dimensional object in its true form, and yet when you smoke DMT, you do. You enter these worlds that appear to be higher dimensional, and I think, yes, rather than the portal. Well, it is kind of a portal, but I would say it's gating the flow of information from. So rather than only receiving information, let's say from this 2D flatland, if you're in the flatland, you start to receive information from the third dimension, and so your brain temporarily effectively becomes a higher dimensional object. The world that it's constructing is also higher dimensional, so you're seeing more, you're literally seeing a greater expanse of reality than you can. in the normal waking state. - Ah, it's so fascinating. - This episode is brought to you by my favorite new product, Mosa Chips. Here's a quick history lesson. Before the 1990s, all chips and fries were cooked in beef talo. 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Go to mosachips.com/jessie-micals, Michael's with no A, and use code Jessie-micals for 25% off your first order. That's mosachips.com/jessie-micals and use code Jessie-micals for 25% off your first order. You're really helping the channel out when you use that code. And this is a product I love and consume just about every day. - And you have different models of the brain that might involve quantum biological processes. Like we have this burgeoning field of quantum biology where birds use it to locate the magnetosphere of the Earth and navigate home. And enzyme creation. And you have photosynthesis is another example. And then you have broadropenrocing the brain might, these micro tubules use quantum biological processes. And that would make sense in this sort of model because that would explain a lot of this sort of pre-sentiment where you sort of have some sort of access to the future and you see traces of the future or the remote viewing stuff. All these sort of non-local quote unquote experiences of consciousness would be maybe explained in a model like this. And so even Schrodinger, who's developed the wave function that governs all subatomic behavior in quantum mechanics, he had a lecture series called What Is Life where he talked about a periodic crystals in the DNA. And he was basically like, these are like ports of higher consciousness or something. Like there's some sort of tesseract that we're tethered to. There's something higher than us and we're like, we're a low-level port within our prism, within which this higher thing has to be sort of reduced into. Like the body's a reduction valve. Yeah, I think one of the questions that often comes up when I describe this idea that DMT is allowing information to flow from some other place. The question always comes up is like, how does that work? I mean, we understand how information comes through the sense organs from the normal three-dimensional environment. But how does that information come from this other place? And I think the answer is at a very low level. So quantum, sub-quantum, maybe even much deeper levels that we don't even understand. I think it's coming from wherever we are connected to this broader reality structure, this broader, higher-dimensional structure, wherever that connection is is obviously going to be kind of at the ground of reality at the quantum or the sub-quantum. And so the explanation, or the kind of the model that I described in Alien Information Theory is this idea that the information is coming from the very deepest levels of reality and flowing upwards through the quantum and then the subatomic and the atomic and through into these complex networks. And ultimately to this highest level of the brain where your world model is constructed. So you have information always kind of flowing, welling up, if you like, from the deepest level of reality. And that process is somehow gated by the presence of DMT. Yeah, well, Niels Bohr would always say, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you definitely don't. It's extremely confusing. And then if you look at all the forefathers of quantum mechanics, they all flirted with the idea that the mind had something to do with wave function collapse, often going back and forth on that issue. But it wasn't completely like heretical, like it is sort of today. And there's a guy named Hal Putoff, actually, who's known to be at the forefront of like all the alien research. And he was just on Joe Rogan. And he ran the government psych expi program for the CIA. He's a super interesting guy, but also at the tip of the spear of sort of exotic propulsion modalities, longtime NSA CIA scientists who worked at Stanford Research Institute. And he has a model of extended electrodynamics that involves vector and scalar potentials. So these sub quantum sort of phenomena that might have something to do with dictating wave function collapse. And maybe, if aliens were to communicate, they'd probably communicate like this, because apparently they propagate either at 1 over r, not 1 over r squared. So you don't get the attenuation over space time that you do, you don't get the drop off. And it seems like you get effectively really fast communications and stuff with them. And so I don't know, it's fascinating. I wonder if we can break any ground on this stuff in our lifetime. And if we get a new model of physics in our life, do you think physics in some ways is sort of breaking? It feels like all the string theorists are admitting that they're not really getting anywhere. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a physicist, but I have spoken to physicists. And the problem, I think, you get is, as soon as you start talking about discontent intelligence, advanced intelligences, the eyes start to roll. And it's like, they've already decided what's possible and what's not possible. And the idea of these advanced super intelligent agents, that you somehow interface with in the DMT state, it's too far from what they can accept. Well, because they turn science into an all-encompassing sort of religion. But if you think about it, then really what they're calling science is two things. It's predictively useful, and it can turn into sort of instrumentalizable technology. That is it, right? It is not an ontological map of reality. And so when you say, I've experienced these beings in a DMT state, when we could say tons of people, like a statistically significant amount of people, experience the same things in the DMT state, they can just write that off because you can't turn it into math, and you can't make it repeatable in our sort of waking reality. But I think that whole mode has limits, and that itself is going to break. Like the very idea that that is sort of a satisfactory explanation of all metaphysics, our reality itself, it has to break at some point. Yeah, I mean, I think what I've been studying DMT for 20 years, and my approach has always been to, first of all, take the explanations that I'm given by the kind of mainstream science. These are hallucinations. This is a type of dream imagery. These are archetypal symbols that come from the collective unconscious. And I have to basically deal with them. I have to analyze them, deconstruct them, and show why they fail. Before I can say, OK, we've tried all the explanations that you've given. We've tried to kind of make them fit, and they don't. They leave the vast majority of the DMT experience completely unaccounted for. So can we now please start to think about explanations that would have-- before seemed to be untenable? And when you do that, you actually find that the idea that there are advanced intelligences that are non-physical, that have transcended the physical, what I've often referred to as post-biological beings, that's not far out anymore. I mean, there are very mainstream scientists that are saying, OK, how does an intelligent civilization progress? OK, it reaches eventually, after maybe millions of years, it reaches a kind of technological age, the kind of age we're in now, a digital computer age. Then it starts thinking about transcending the biology. And people are thinking about that already. And many scientists are saying, look, we're probably now maybe only a few hundred years. away from dispensing with the biological paradigm and shifting to a post-biological paradigm. And you can see it in, you know, you have to kind of ignore, in my opinion, in any way, this, climbing the Kardashev scale, this kind of Elon Musk idea that we're going to be colonizing Mars. This is a very human idea that we have, that we're simply going to be expanding out into the cosmos and kind of populating other planets and moons or whatever, as humans. I don't think that's what it's going to look like at all. And actually, if you look at the Kardashev scale, proposed by John Barrow in the 1990s, where he said, look, we spend, okay, we spend a lot of money sending objects into orbit or, you know, to distant celestial objects, whatever. But we spend much more time going not outwards, but inwards to smaller and smaller scales. You think about a large Hadron collider. This is aimed at trying to understand and manipulate smaller and smaller structures, not larger and larger structures. And so it seems that a more likely trajectory for intelligent civilization is not to go out into the cosmos, but to go deeper and deeper levels until you reach what Barrow called the Omega-minus civilization, which is able to manipulate the fundamental structure of space time or this fundamental structure of reality itself. This is where we're going to be, well, this is where intelligent civilizations are going to instantiate themselves, not by spawning across the cosmos, but by instantiating themselves the deepest level of fundamental computational substrate of reality itself. That's where they're going to go. And once they do that, once they make that leap, they disappear. They become everywhere and nowhere. They become completely transparent to normal modes of communication. And yet they are literally right here, right now. And I think the idea, if they want to communicate with us, they're going to do it through our brain. That's obvious. Why materialize in a physical form? That makes no sense. Maybe they can do that, but it makes much more sense for them to interface directly with our brains. So that idea isn't far out. It doesn't stray too far from modern scientific discourse. And that's exactly what I'm suggesting, what happens with DMT is that you are gating access to some kind of advanced intelligent agent to your brain. Could it be one of these post-biological beings that had vanished into the fabric of space time long before we arrived on the scene? Maybe. Could it be beings that exist parallel to our universe in some high level of reality? Maybe. I don't know, but what I'm saying isn't, it's not mystical, it's not magical, it's actually perfectly in line, in my opinion, with what scientists are already talking about in completely different fields. Yeah, I love that. Well, yeah, even Richard Feynman, your famous physicist, well respected by all, you know, conventional or not, said, you know, there's room at the bottom. That was his famous sort of line. So it's much more room. Much more room at the bottom. I mean, orders, many orders of magnitude. Yes, space down there. Down there. And that's what he meant is what you were taught is sort of this, you know, similar to the anti-cartushev scale where, you know, we have to go inwards and not just outwards. And even the Elon Musk thing involves all sorts of convoluted, you know, logic that makes no sense. Because he'll say at the same time as we need to, you know, colonize Mars and then go interstellar and like, you know, endlessly float through Cartesian space to like, you know, make the whole cosmos our empire or whatever. You'll say that, and then he'll say, we live in a simulation, right? You can't believe, if like, if you think we live in a simulation, you have to think, how can we ascend outside of the simulation? That needs to be your first order thing before anything else. But he's basically saying, no, we have to accept the simulation as it is and then just float through it and find some exoplanet. It's like, what are you talking about? You'd like, find the computer code. What do you, it makes no sense. So, yeah, I find that interesting. And another kind of cut at what you're saying with, you know, kind of large Hadron colliders and finding, you know, really small, you know, subquant, you know, corks and that sort of thing is the human being. We take the human out of science. Like, we're not, we are not allowed to view ourselves as a measurement instrument. So it's like the double slit experiment where everybody's always like, it's the quantum detector. It's not the person or whatever. And, you know, the large Hadron collider, which is like, it's a, it's like a, you know, an empirical, like, objective thing that we can do. But what about, what about an individual's, like, epistemology and especially over, you know, you're studying this stuff systematically? Like, can you discount all of that? If a lot of people are seeing these architectures outside of their own reality, and they're all consistent, that seems like it would be really important. Like, it's three, you know, the three-body problem, this Chinese science fiction. I'm like, it's so great where it talks about like the farmer and the shooter. If we are these 2D things on flatland or whatever, and they're like, you know, metal sheets or something, and you have shooters who are in 3D space shooting at the metal, you see these little craters. We just think they're little, you know, holes, little caverns in our, in our flatland. We have no idea that they're literally like people who are like, you know, grading the metal and like, you know, forming our world that are, you know, they're sort of responsible for it. And it's completely at their discretion. And the whole thing is that they literally have particle accelerators that like get different results. And it's like, it's kind of like the physics itself is at the discretion of these like tricellarian aliens. And it's a real mind-fuck because there's nothing a conventional physicist can say that's like a hundred percent debunking of that possibility. And they develop, you know, when they see these little pock marks coming, they have, you know, mathematical models for how these arise. That are completely wrong, of course. But they kind of may be hold together. And they develop more sophisticated models to explain how these pock marks appear. And they just have no idea that it's some other intelligence that's generating them. And I think, you know, I strongly lean towards the idea that that's the kind of reality that we live in, that we have all of these models of what's going on. And all models are wrong, but some are useful. And I think sometimes it's having useful models, which we clearly have useful models, because we have all of this technology. So we clearly are models, they're not nonsense, but the idea, it's important not to mistake a useful model with a true model, and that we're actually getting to the actual true nature of reality, because I don't think we can say that at all. Yeah, it's the map is not the territory. Exactly. And it's like, you have, that's why I think string theory such BS is like, I don't need to be a super well respected physicist. I'm not a physicist. But if you have two bad maps, general relativity and quantum mechanics, which are just heuristics for creating technology that's adaptive so we can, you know, do cool stuff in the world, create, you know, create in the world. Why would you put the two jagged maps together with abstract math? That's never going to work. Like if you just think about that high level, it doesn't make sense. Right. Exactly. I mean, I'm not a physicist, so I don't want to start, you know, getting into Ed Witton's territory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was losing a debate. But like, but like again, you just, all you need is that high level common sense thing. Like heterodoxy and unorthodox thinking doesn't scale with IQ. You can have a hyper specialized, extremely intelligent person who is blood into a BS cul-de-sac, like sheep to slaughter. And that happens all the time. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So there's, there's intelligence is, it's a really finicky hard, you know, thing where it's like the ability to think in a sort of a variant, you know, non-consensus way. It doesn't necessarily scale in this perfect way. Like, math elites are not necessarily doing that thing, you know, and there's a place for both, but like, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. But do you think that, you know, there have been groups, you know, Graham Hancock wrote the forward to your new book, the death by astonishment, which I recommend everybody go by. And he, Graham's a really interesting guy because he kind of oscillates between writing about kind of, you know, more conventional archaeology, but just kind of, you know, his like contrarian views, you know, things like a backly tepid and the younger dress impact theory. And then he writes these other books that like people don't talk about as much when like Robert Beval about like secret societies, like controlling earth and stuff. And like, you have, you know, the Freemasons, I think in Acacia leaf or something is like in their like, you know, symbology. And you have the Ellucinian mystery rituals, Graham also wrote the forward to Brian Merrescu's book, you know, about, you know, called the immortality key about these mystery rituals. Do you think that, like elite members of society have been systematically accessing these other realms and either on behalf of or in conjunction with these quote unquote entities or machine elves helping to shape our reality? Are there myth makers? - Oh, that's a very interesting idea. I mean, the short answer is I don't know, but it's quite clear that there have been civilizations going back thousands of years. I mean, Graham wrote this wonderful book, Supernatural, which is not one of his most well-known, where he examined the cave art going back tens of thousands of years and made the compelling argument as have many other anthropologists. It's not just Graham here, that these civilizations 30, 40,000 years ago during the Upper Paleolithic, if I'm getting my periods right. But anyway, they were, the cave art clearly showed beings that were non-human, that were non-animal, or that seemed to be some kind of combination of humanoid and animal form. In these pitch, black, deep, dark caves, and the question is why? Why, why, you know, were they interfacing? Did they discover a means of interacting with these intelligences all those thousands of years ago? Darkness is very interesting as kind of, as an aside here, in that many people who, like modern day, darkness retreats, where people go into these pitch black rooms for five, six, seven days. Many of them describe, you know, after the fourth, fifth day, describe experiences that they say are DMT experiences, or remark us, I was on his show a few months ago, and he's very experienced with DMT. He's also very experienced with darkness retreats. And he said, this wasn't like DMT, this was a DMT. I had a DMT experience whilst, you know, after the fourth or fifth day in this darkness retreats. So we're actually doing a study now, where we're kind of initiating a study, to actually test this, and myself in new nautics, the group that I work with in Florida. We're funding a study where they're going to send people into these darkness retreats, dark rooms, and then take urine samples, or saliva samples, or blood samples, add intervals, and see, do these DMT levels. - Oh, do we see DMT spikes? - Do we see DMT spikes? - That's fascinating. Well, you know, there were even pre-The Allucinian and other mystery rituals where they would take Urgot, you know, this sort of, you know, LSA, you know, psychedelic substance. They were caving rituals. They're pre-secrated caving rituals, a guy named Peter Kingsley writes about this, where they would literally go into a cave for long amounts of time, and they would presumably have some pretty transcendent sort of experiences, so that's really interesting. - So that could be what's going on. And so this is just another technology, or another technique that they had discovered. - Yeah. - And you see throughout history, whether, you know, it could be the Allucinian mysteries, where they discovered this Urgot preparation. Now, whether it's just Urgot, whether there are other synergistic plants being added, some people speculate that, and Brian Murezko speculated there are other things going in that enhance or catalyze the experience, but still it's the same thing. You're somehow, you're using some kind of technique, whether it's a molecular technique, or darkness, or breath work, or whatever, some kind of technique to manipulate your neurochemistry in some way, such that you can access these intelligent beings that you couldn't access otherwise. And so, the fact that these civilizations have been working with these intelligences for thousands and thousands of years, you kind of have to take that seriously. And to just dismiss it and say, oh, they were just deluding themselves. They were just having hallucinations. No, I think that's, it's kind of insulting. The Amazonians who developed Ayahuasca, for example, this is a true pharmacological technology. This is not just an infusion of a plan. This isn't, this is a technology that requires both the DMT, which is orally inactive, plus this plant, Banisteriopsy's carpe, the Ayahuasca vine, which contains the mal inhibitors that allow it to become active. These have to be brought together. And so, this is a pharmacological technology that they have developed. And they develop relationships with the beings that they interact with in their Ayahuasca state and also with other plant-based preparations, their painter, Yopo, and others. They develop relationships with these beings. They have names for the different types of beings. They see them as members of their tribe. They don't see them as spirits. They don't call them spirits. They say they are not human. They are not animal. They are other. They see them as, but they see them as beings that they can develop relationships with, that will protect them, that they can communicate with, that they can seek answers from. And to dismiss all of that and say, oh, they're just hallucinator. I think it just speaks to the self-assured cocky arrogance that modern post-enlightenment humans have, that we have it all worked out. We have a handle on what's possible, what's not possible. We know what's real and what's not real. And I'm sorry, but that's not real, I'm afraid. But you're just hallucinating. It's just kind of dream. No, I'm sorry. That doesn't stand up to scrutiny. And it's kind of insulting to these cultures that have developed these technologies. And I was just a credible technology. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, it's so fast. And just the likelihood of combining those two things, in the Amazon forest are like, if you run through a bunch of pure permutations or whatever the likelihood of getting that combination is very low still. Exactly. It had to have been that, itself, had to have been sort of downloaded or something as like a recipe for this. That's what they will tell you. They will tell you. If you ask them, how did you discover this? They will say, well, the plants told us. When they say the plants, they mean these intelligences which reside within the forest. They told them how to do this. And who are we to say? And they talk about people from the start's funny in the Western context. We have disclosure and we have, you know, government reverse engineering programs. And they're like, yeah, obviously we have these people that we communicate with from the, you know, they come down from the stars. And I also find it interesting if you were to go to any Western academic, you know, philosophy department. You know, there's a famous quote, I think all philosophy is a footnote of Plato or something. Right. Yeah. I think of Plato as like the father of, you know, modern Western rationality, like pre-enlightenment. And then you like look back at like what he was doing. And it's like he went to a leusus. Right. And he was tripping on Urgot and like probably experiencing some like primordial soul version. You know, there's a word for it. Noesis, the version of himself. And then he writes about all that stuff in the Republic. And we ignore that and we talk about it. Like it's some like myopic governance manual. And it's just like what is, like, it's completely retracing the past with our modern kind of disenchantment epistemology. Yeah, Alan Watts used to say that the modern philosopher would wear a white coat if he thought he could get away with it. Right. Yeah. He'd think of themselves as like sign is doing philosophy. They'd come in with their briefcase and they put on their white coat and they do philosophy. Yeah. They take themselves very seriously. Yeah. That they're getting to the nitty gritty, the truth of the matter. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think there's this desire for people like Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, or all these people to like defend the status quo. Like I think the big rift between people like that and like maybe you and me is like, I don't think we think that we don't have any of the answers. Like you and me, I think they think that they do. And like we are putting the final period at the end of a very long sentence of, you know, this enlightenment project. And we're at the end of history in some ways. Like the final rule in the game of chess is yet to be figured out maybe that string theory, maybe it's some other thing. But like we pretty much know how reality works in their modernized, yeah. And that is insane to me. It's insane. It's the ultimate hubris. Well, I was saying that I forget who said it. Maybe it was like the 19th century that we have based all the physics has now been worked out with. It's not now a matter of increasingly precise measurements. That's right. And then came relativity and quantum theory. Yes. Change everything. But we make the same mistakes even now. Many people, not everybody. And you have to be a little bit careful because there is a lot of, for one of the better term, bullshit. But within this kind of field, there are a lot of grifters. And there are a lot of bullshit artists. And so you have to-- it's really-- difficult. You have to kind of tread a fine line between not being, there's this tension, I always find. And one is pulling you back towards standard materialist orthodox mainstream science. And kind of thinking, yeah, we've got it all worked out. These are just hallucinations, nothing to be concerned about. And then you've got another, from the opposite direction, you're being pulled into just a steaming pile of bullshit, right? And it's like, how do you, you have to, it's a constant struggle for me to try and separate myself from the bullshit. Well, it's not being too far out from the sign. If you're engaging in that struggle, then you're doing it, right? Yeah, it's, it's a silhouette and corribus between excess dogmatism and excess skepticism or to put it in the way you just framed it. New AG kind of solipsistic, you know, everything is everything mushy brain, thinking. And then on the other hand, you know, complete radical cartesian skepticism or something, like there has to be some middle path. Exactly. And that, that, that is a treacherous place that you find yourself very alone. Because it's much easier to snap to grid on either the tribal dynamics exist in a way that, you know, things coagulate on either end of that kind of, you know, barbell. Yeah, exactly. So that's what I do. So I, it's, it's a difficult path, but it's the only path, I think. When you're faced with something like DMT, which is so strange and it's so, in my opinion, mysterious and inexplicable, you're not going to be able to explain it by just snapping to the usual explanations because they fail. Yeah. And that's what I found is that they fail. So I tread care, I keep one foot firmly planted in the scientific arena. Yeah. And I, and I then reach out with an outstretched hand into other territory. But I'm very careful about what I say, what I do, and that I try and rationalize and explain my thinking every step of the way. I don't just say, oh, maybe these are spirits from the astral plane. Yeah, that'll do. Right. Right. You know, maybe these are spirits of the departed. Yeah, that will do. Yeah. Because you can, anything goes. No, I, and you can't, yeah, I try to trace it back and make just, just kind of convince people that I'm not just nuts. I'm not just kind of going with whatever, but I do explain myself. I think kind of carefully and rationally, you know, piece by piece step by step. Yeah. No, I feel the same way and it's, it's tough because like YouTube, for example, doesn't do nuance well. No. So I, you know, I have a show and people think it's like an alien show or whatever. I'm like, I don't know if these things are aliens. Like, I don't know if the, in fact, I would say that there are other hypotheses that better describe them than the sort of, you know, classic extraterrestrial hypothesis, but it's this meme that people can't seem to transcend or something. So it's, it's, it's wild. But on that note, of like wanting to keep your, your feet sort of firmly grounded, we were talking before the camera about Christopher Timmerman at Imperial College, who you sort of devise some of these extended DMT experiments that he's, you know, executing. We were also talking about a mutual friend. I haven't talked to him in a long time. This guy, Anton built in who was thinking of giving people DMT, putting them in adjacent fair day cages. So there, you know, is no way of like, you know, traditional signals being communicated, you know, like dramatically and seeing if they can telepathically like, you know, transport image, communicate images between them. Are there any experiments like those two or anything else that you are particularly excited about that brings this stuff out of the realm of speculation and more into the scientific mainstream? Yeah. I mean, so the DMT, the work that Chris Timmerman was doing at Imperial, this is what's called extended state DMT or DMTX. It has come to be known for sure. So this was a model, a proposal by myself and Rick Strassman back in 2015, because as everyone knows, who knows anything about DMT, it's an extremely intense experience, you know, your trend, your kind of hurtled into this alternate world. You look around, shocked, bewildered, aghast, at this thing that's just appeared in front of you and that surrounds you and overwhelms you and then you're kind of dragged back again very, very quickly. It's not a great drug used in that way, you know, vaporized or injected. It's not a great drug to kind of explore. It's not the state is very fast and very, very short. So I was kind of looking at DMT as a weird drug, not just in terms of its effects, but it has these pharmacological peculiarities that set it apart. So unlike other drugs, for example, LSD or psilocybin, if you give someone LSD, they will have a certain intensity of experience based upon dose. If you then give them the same dose, let's say a day later, it will be slightly diminished and then a day later in it. You rapidly build up tolerance, the same with psilocybin. With DMT, you don't and it's not fully understood why, but Rick Strassman, there've been reports going back decades that you can use DMT in quick succession and not experience intolerance effect. And Rick Strassman studied this during his 1990s studies. He would inject someone with DMT and he'd measure the intensity of the experience using a special rating scale that he developed. I need to inject them again 30 minutes later with the same dose and they had the same intensity of experience on and on. So there was no buildup of tolerance. It's also, of course, because it's social taxing, it's removed from the brain. It gets into the brain very, very quickly and it's cleared from the brain very, very quickly. It's almost like it's engineered with precision to kind of slot into the brain's machinery and kind of cause these highly dramatic changes in the structure and dynamics of the world. And so it occurred to me that, well, why don't we repurpose a technique from anesthesiology called target control intravenous infusion where you, if you want to keep someone in an anesthetized state, what you do is you don't just inject them with a drug and kind of let it kind of get into their brain and then metabolize because you can't control how long they're the remain unconscious force. So what you do, you inject them with a very short acting anesthetic and you infuse it, use a special infusion device, which is programmed based upon the the metabolism and distribution, all these kind of properties of the drug that you need a mathematical model for. So you infuse it into their veins and you're able to maintain this fairly stable brain concentration of this anesthetic drug and you can manipulate how deep they are in the anesthetized state for as long as you want, then you switch off the machine and they will come out very, very quickly. So I thought, why don't we just use this technology, but with DMT. Whoa. And so I wrote to Rick and I said, I kind of have this idea, I think this might work, but we need to kind of show that it could work. And for that, we needed this, what's called a pharmacokinetic model, which models how DMT is distributed and metabolized so that we can just show that yes, this should work, the DMT, the properties of DMT make it amenable for this technique. And so Rick had all of the blood data, blood sampling data from his 90 studies, which he sent to me. And then we got to work and we wrote this paper, which basically said, yes, DMT seems to be amenable to this kind of technology. And it got a lot of attention. People started talking about alien communication machines and matrix and this kind of thing, the matrix machine, whatever. But then fortunately, Imperial College picked it up and they developed a much better model than our kind of back-of-the-envelope model. And they implemented it in humans. And they were able to extend the DMT state, stabilize it for 30 minutes. So instead of just two or three minutes within the breakthrough state, they extended it for 30 minutes. And it worked very, very well. There was no physiological concerns, the heart rate, blood pressure was normal, anxiety levels kind of peaked at the beginning and then settled down. The intensity of the experience was perfectly stable throughout the 30 minutes. And another group in Basel, Matthias Leakty, I think he's called, has extended it for 90 minutes. Another group has extended it for six hours at a very low dose level. So this is the technology, right? This is how we go from scuba diving to deep sea diving. You're able to go to the bottom of the ocean and stay there. You have a direct line back to the boat. That's how I see DMTX. It allows you to explore, to navigate, to perform experiments within the space and to train people, to actually spend time within the space. And importantly, It's almost like lucid dreaming or something. - Kind of like that, little in control. - Exactly. - And a bit more out of control. - Exactly. And so once you get into this space and it stabilizes, then you can begin to think about establishing communication with these intelligences. Whatever you think they are, whatever you think about that ontology. Okay, we can establish communication with them, begin to think about, you know, what can we learn from them? And one aspect that I'm particularly interested in is the ontology. Can we demonstrate that these are more than just fabrications of the brain, all right? Can we show somehow that we're actually interfacing with some kind of intelligence that is non-human? And that, if that was possible, and I think it might be, that's, I mean, the implications of that is almost beyond comprehension, right? The idea that we can use this drug to communicate with beings, and we can show that these are non-human intelligent beings. And I think that's, that could be possible. Back in the early 2000s, a guy called Rodriguez publishes paper, and he said, "Why don't we give these entities? "Why don't we give them mathematical problems?" So we can say, "Okay, I'll give you a large number." Mr. Alien, I want you to find the unique prime factors of this large number. I can't do this in my head, but you're very, very smart, so you can do that for me. Now, it's a nice idea, right? And if they gave them the correct answer, we'd know that it was not happening in the brain, that there was actually interaction with some kind of intelligence. The problem with this, of course, is that, you know, finding, it kind of feels again a bit presumptuous that they're gonna want to play our little prove your ontological status games. Prove that you're real. Here's some, you know, I don't see what it's very presumptuous to think that they're gonna want to kind of play along with that. So I don't think that's necessarily the way to go. It's one way to go. But I think what's interesting about these intelligences is that they betray, they can't help but betray their intelligence. Everything they do is a kind of performance and demonstration of their intelligence. You just need people who can recognize it. So I was speaking just a few days ago in Denver at the Psychedelic Science Conference with Andres Gomez, Amielsen, so he's this very smart mathematician guy, but also very interested in DMT. And he was telling me things that were blowing my mind. I mean, he said, okay, I go into this state, the DMT state, and these beings, they paint surfaces in four colors. They do it repeatedly. Now, to me, if I go in and I see an entity painting surfaces with four colors, I go, that's cool. But he said, actually, there's more to it than this because painting a surface with four colors, like a map, a complicated map of shapes with four colors. It's called the four-color color theorem. So if you have a map of shapes that are all kind of pessellated, right, you have the color, each shape with a color, so one of four colors that no two shapes have the same color. So imagine a world map and you have the color every country but you don't want two countries having the same color. You can do it. It's been proved that you can do it with just four colors. But if you were given a very complex map and asked to do it by hand, it would take you a long time. I mean, Andres is a very smart guy and he said it would take him all afternoon, right? So for me, that means it would take me all day, right? And yet these entities, they do it instantaneously like less than a second and they do it repeatedly. So they're performing, in short, they're performing mathematical operations, mathematical algorithms that would take a human brain, a smart human, several hours, and they're doing it in a fraction of a second. And there are other things that I didn't quite understand but other operations finding the distances between two surfaces, weird stuff, mathematical stuff, right? So most people, when they go into this space, they go, park, this is incredible, this is impossible, but they can't tell you why it's impossible when a mathematician goes into this space. They can say, yes, this is impossible for these reasons, right? These are the mathematical operations required to construct these things and a human brain couldn't do that within a fraction of a second. So it just occurred to me that this is how we do it. We don't kind of rely on them to play with us or to kind of to cooperate with our little prove yourself games but actually they're doing it all the time, they're demonstrating their intelligence, they can't help it, they love performing, and we just need to send the right people in. So we send in mathematicians, you send in geometers or topologists or whatever, right? You send in linguists who can look at the kind of because code and language is also a big part of the experience and they can say, okay, this seems to be some kind of language and I can explain why it's some kind of language. It seems to be informationally dense or whatever, you know, it hears these various rules of how languages are constructed and bringing data back. So you're not just sending people in and going kind of what happened, man. - To the right. - Right, the kind of the Straussman approach is great for its time but now we have this DMTX technology. We can send people in with specific skill sets. - Whoa. - Specific, you know, high level expertise in very specific fields and they can say, okay, I'm gonna come in, I'm gonna describe the geometric structure of the space, I'm gonna describe the topology of the space. I'm gonna describe the way that these intelligences communicate and all this kind of stuff. It's hard to comprehend the implications, I think, that we could actually demonstrate pretty soon, you know, or at least to a very high level of probability say, okay, these intelligences are doing things that the human brain can't do. What does that mean? - Yes, yes, do we have, you know, in the past, we've had angel hierarchies, like you've seen Thomas Aquinas with this angel hierarchy or e-imblicus, you know, who's the other guy, Dionysus of Mary Opigate or something? - Something like that. - Yeah, like we have these sort of, and they literally have taxonomies where they'll have like attributes associated with these different beings, physical characteristics of the beings. Do we have a taxonomy of the DMT world beings? Do we have categories, you know, like an excel sheet of these things, like a bestiary, right? We don't, not a formal one. - Yeah. - I mean, there are attempts online, you know, to describe, and there's a book by David J. Brown, an illustrated field guy to DMT entities, which is a lot of fun, kind of describing the type of entities that people experience, and there are clearly patterns. So the machine elves, my father most famous residents of this space, they tend to be jovial, they're multitudinous, you know, there's so many of them bouncing around, and they're jolly, and they like to show you wonderfully strange, high-dimensional objects. What Terence McKenna used to call like, Favaget eggs, but in nine dimensions, whatever, you know, these kind of beings that tend to be more about a show, like a circus kind of thing, more about performing and showing you what's possible. And then there are more kind of serious beings. So the insectoids, you know, mounted kind of beings, these tend to be a bit more less jovial, shall we say, often, and those are often the beings that will perform kind of surgery on your brain, on your body, and scanning, and this kind of thing. - That's so common, and alien abduction, so common, right? - And there are always these sort of worker be like, off in short grays, and then there's like a tall gray overseeing it, where there's a tall white, you know, these like sort of blonde, Nordic-looking beings overseeing, you know, there is this sort of hierarchy, always, almost, almost always, associated with these. - Yeah, I actually got, last year I got this email from this Korean guy. Now, there aren't that, I don't think there are that many Koreans who take ayahuasco, travel to Peru to take ayahuasca. So I kind of, it peaked my interest when he emailed me, but he went to Peru because he wanted, healing, he wanted to meet the mother ayahuasca and the spirits of the forest, and he didn't get that. He got a full-blown alien experience. He was taken by this, what he described as the alien scientist through this extremely complex computational tunnel thing into this spacecraft or some kind of highly hyper-technological environment. And these beings were torturing him. They were with these smaller beings again, the hierarchy, these smaller beings that were kind of doing things to him. And then there was this alien scientist who was not like these little insectoid beings, but was much, much more powerful. And that he describes this being as taking out his soul. This being was torturing him at a deep soul level. I mean, he came out of it thinking that his soul had- been captured, like a fish on a hook, he described it by these beings. And it went on and on. First experience, the aliens came, second experience, more of the same, third experience, more every single ayahuasca session, while he was in Peru, he just got worse and worse. They showed him horrible things. They showed him humanity being destroyed and trapped in this matrix like structure or whatever. I mean, it was horrible. It was completely alien. It was nothing like he was expecting. He was expecting, his brain was primed to see the spirits of the forest. He got something completely alien. And he was horrified by it. And that's not an uncommon experience when people take, you know, when you take DMT, whether it's the form of ayahuasca in a forest or whether it's in a, the University of New Mexico hospital in room 531, where Rick Strassman did his studies, or in your bedroom or basement or back room, you cannot guarantee the kind of being that you're going to be interacting with. And if you're lucky, you'll get some nice performance from the out, but there's a very deep, you know, not insignificant probability that you're going to encounter being more objectionable, shall we say? Yeah, for sure. Well, that brings up this earlier question that we kind of touched on. But it's like how, you know, is DMT abridged to a world that is separated without the DMT from our waking reality? Or are they always like free enlightenment? If you were to say there are, you know, machine elves, not called them by that name, but like little beings sort of like controlling the forces of, you know, reality and like, you know, pre-gravity and things like that, we'd be like, yeah, of course, like spirits controlling everything, like literally pre-Newton, that would have been the sort of conventional explanation. And I saw you on the Danny Jones podcast, which I loved. And I think you guys brought up Philip K. Dick. Right. And Philip K. Dick would be one of these guys who would extend this sort of DMT world to his model of reality itself, where, you know, he gave this famous speech in Mets France, where I think it was called, you know, if you, if you think this world sucks, you should see the others or something. Maybe he's talking about the man in the high castle, you know, where it's like the Nazis and the Japanese had like annexed, you know, the United States of World War II went the other way. And he's, you know, then he's giving this speech in front of all these like well respected people or whatever. And he's like, you guys don't get it. Like that world happened. Like that's real. Like that's an all parallel universe or something. And so he goes into this whole, he has this whole ontology. My friend, Riz Verk, who's written, you know, a couple of books about simulation theories, friends with his wife, Tessa Dick. And she talks about how he was just fully bought into the world being a simulation. You know, it's like time froze in Roman time. Like we're still in Roman times. And this is all this just sort of modern veneer. But maybe the most interesting book, I think he wrote along these lines is this book called The Adjustment Team. I don't know if you've heard of this. But it's a it's a book about like if you had a group that was in total control of reality. And they like froze this, you know, podcast. And then they like, you know, moved the water like an inch or whatever. And then you get this just like, you know, for rockets like one degrees off course, you get this sort of air propagation. You get this multiplicative butterfly effect that like changes timelines. And if you think about a lot of what you're saying with these DMT entities, if they have any interface with our waking reality, they would have that ability, like the color thing that you mentioned. So it gets into these weird questions of like, are there time editing arcons or beings that are like coming down, freeze framing things, neuralizing us, changing a little variable here and there and then letting things run their course. And then, okay, you know, some other some other thing happens where some, you know, a nuke's about to go off. They stop the nuke or whatever, you know, which you have to show up around nuclear sites. But they're like weekly entangled with our reality. All they care about are these sort of cosmic scale timeline minor. It's minimal interference, minimal adjustments necessary to like maintain certain timelines. But they are monitoring the timelines. I think we, you know, I can't say whether that's true or not, but we can't rule it out. And when it's like when you when you use DMT and you're confronted with beings that are clearly to say they're more advanced than humans, it just doesn't do them justice. I mean, you're talking about beings that have that appear to have that kind of cosmic, um, uh, cosmic abilities. Whether that is indeed, you know, having whether they are normally kind of, um, link to connected to have some kind of relationship with our with our reality, but kind of stay back. I don't know. But you the fact that we have this, what I consider to be a molecular technology that allows us to interface with beings that that seem to have those kind of properties that seem to be at that level of intelligence, the level of intelligence that really is beyond our comprehension. We can't is no way for us to conceive of what an intelligence like that truly is or its potential or its power or its abilities, uh, then we should use it and and going back thousands of years. I mean, these, obviously these civilizations in the Amazonian rainforest, they didn't have, they weren't talking about things you were talking about, but they were describing the same types of beings which they took very seriously. So they were talking about, um, the Yanomami, for example, had these these beings which they called the Watucinari insect beings, um, which sound very much, you know, very intelligent, very fearsome creatures, which sound a lot like the insectoid aliens that people are describing in the 21st century. They describe the Hekura, which are these multitudinous beings. You can never come to the end of them, they say, they come dancing and they're, they're singing and playing flutes and they're just don't bounding around, um, and jumping into your chest and filling your chest. This is Shamanistic Mythos going back thousands of years. And then in the modern era, people describe seeing multitudinous giggling lively little beings, balls of light or whatever that jump into their chest. Uh, and so clearly this is not just a, it's not Terence McKenna implanting the idea of machine elves into people's brains. These are motifs, um, beings, intelligent beings that go back thousands of years. And now we have a technique, we know how to access them. And we need to start taking that seriously and not simply dismissing. You know, my work is not so much about saying, I know what's going on. Uh, but really to convince people that they don't have a conclude what's going on. And that they, they should start simply assuming, um, that they understand what DMT is. It's just your brain on drugs, man. Uh, this is just your brain making it up, man. You know, that these kind of explanations and they don't, they don't work. And I think we need to, we need to certainly draw inspiration from these indigenous peoples who did take them seriously did see them as beings that they could have relationships with and learn from and, and, and bring that into. There's a thread running from these indigenous cultures going about thousands of years. And it's, it runs into the 21st century where we now, we have much better technology. Now we have, as I was just talking about DMTX, we have this technology where we can much more reliably and stably enter the space. We're not relying on, um, drinking extremely bitter, disgusting decoctions, nothing wrong with that. Uh, but we now have techniques the way we can stabilize the state. We can go in there. We can send people and we can actually begin to build relationships with these intelligences. Uh, and that might be what we need if we're going to progress beyond, uh, where we are now. You know, we need to do that probably pretty quickly before we kill ourselves, which is not, uh, about unlikely. Right. Do, do you think, um, you know, DMT is so fascinating. Do you think that there is something about the fact that it exists in all organic matter that is sort of an important aspect to it? I mean, that's, that's, again, that's another one of its peculiarities, right? It's not, it's the simplest of all the naturally occurring psychedelics. Um, you look at the molecule, it looks perfectly unremarkable. There's nothing interesting about it. If I saw DMT and I didn't know anything about it, I'd say probably not going to be that interesting. Uh, it's two steps, enzymatic steps from tryptophan, this amino acid, um, you decoboxylate in a tryptophan, you get tryptamine, you add to methar groups, you get DMTs. It's as simple as it gets. Uh, and as you said, it's not just common. It's ubiquitous. Terence, Dennis McKenna, Terence's brother says, the nature is drenched in DMT. Uh, he thinks, and he's probably right, that if you looked carefully, that you'd find it in. Basically, every bump, some have higher concentrations than others. You can extract it from other way to perhaps, right? So it's this, it's, it's, it's, this ubiquitous, very simple molecule that just happens to when you smoke it or inject it, just happens to gate access to this completely alien reality, feel with highly intelligent beings. I don't buy that that's just a coincidence. It seems like there is this message implanted in our reality, implanted in the natural world. And it just takes an organism with a certain level of cognitive advancement, right? You can't just eat plants, you can't just munch plants mindlessly and have a DMT trip. You can't do that. You have to isolate it, you have to extract it, you have to learn how to use it as the Amazonians did with ayahuasca to bypass this monoamine oxidase in a stomach that you need an intelligent being to do that, which is another interesting aspect to it. You don't stumble across DMT, you have to learn to, you have to discover it and learn how to use it. And this is not, you know, the technology didn't end with ayahuasca. It didn't end in the 1960s when we learned that you could vaporize it either. And it didn't end in 2015 when myself and Rick Strassman developed the DMT X protocol. I think we're still learning to use this, this technology. And I think it is like a technology. It's like semi-conductors are, you know, it's like electron differentials or whatever. It's like, this is like, you know, another technology where you, if you figure out the key to extract it, like you're, you're opened up to a whole new world. Exactly. And what's also very interesting, of course, is that it's not just a product of plant metabolism, metabolism, it's a product of mammalian metabolism as well. So it's found in humans. So we're all carrying DMT at very low levels, which raises the question. And again, this is something that I'm currently working on with new nortex. We've, we've hired the University of, or contracted with a team at the University of Florida to actually develop techniques to hack the brains endogenous DMT system, right? So we know that there is, we know the human brain produces DMT, but in very low levels. And we think we found a peptide, or peptide that was first found in the 1970s, but then forgotten about. What's the peptide? We don't know. We know it's there. We know it, it basically it inhibits this enzyme called endolethyl, endolethylamine and methyl transferate. INMT, it's the key enzyme to produce DMT, basically converts trip to mean to dimethyl trip to mean. Now this enzyme is inhibited by this peptide we all carry and basically keeps DMT levels low. Now we know this peptide is there. It's in cerebrospinal fluid. It's in mammalian brain. But we don't know how it works. We don't know its structure or its sequence or anything like that. So we're working with the University of Florida, new nautics, to basically to isolate and characterize this peptide and try to understand the regulatory system, the controls DMT levels. So what the switch or the slider, right? And so the idea being that we can, if we understand this regulatory system, we can learn how to hack it. And so rather than giving someone injecting someone with DMT, we rather we can inject them with a small amount of a peptide, for example, that will allow them to naturally slide into, be induced into the DMT state and kept there for long periods of time. So we call this endo DMTX or EDMTX. Is any of this playing with fire like, you know, we think about where, you know, we now can split the atom, we, you know, know the genetic code of, you know, humans, or we're still discovering stuff there, but, you know, we're starting to crack that. And then we have, we have the ability to, if you find some peptide where you can, you know, just modulate this, and even what the, the intravenous stuff can modulate it on and off. Is there something actually adaptive about not being in control of it? And whoever set up, you know, whatever world we're in, you know, having, having set it up in the, in the right sort of way, the sort of inthropic principle or something, it's, it exists in sort of perfect amounts. Well, you could take that, many people think that, right, and that's a very cautious attitude to take. But there's nothing natural about extracting from the most hostilist root bark with sodium hydroxide and, and, and Zippo lighter fluid, you know, this is, this is, this is a, you're employing chemistry or you're employing technology to do this. So, so if, if that was the case, then Iowaska would, you'd stop at Iowaska and even not even Iowaska, because that itself is a technology. So then, then you're back to, well, you're back to not knowing what DMTX because you can't just ingest it. So there's no, you can't just consume the, the naturally occurring source of DMT. There's no way to do it, right? You can't do it. You have to either combine it with this monobony and oxidase inhibitor, boil it down, or you have to extract it. And so, I don't see why one particular technology, one particular way of using DMT should be seen as the, the bill and end all of it. So, okay, we can extract it. This seems to me a stepping stone on the way to further development. And I just think that the, that Rick Strasman's pure, you know, pharmaceutical grade DMT injected directly in the bloodstream was a step beyond extracting plant, smoking or vaporizing plant extracts. And then now, I think that DMTX is just the next iteration along that path. And ultimately, I think, you know, I don't know where this is going. But I don't, I've never got the sense that we need to stop here. This is the way to use DMT. I don't, I think that doesn't really make any sense to me. So I think in the future, who knows how we're going to be using DMT? Will there be combinations of molecules that we're using? Will we be dispensing, as I said, with molecules altogether, with exogenous molecules and using hacking our own endogenous DMT production system? And then you would, I can imagine a future where you line a pod and all of your bodily needs are taking care of your fed, you know, your oxygen supplies manage, then your body may be cooled down, your waste products are dealt with. And you spend days, weeks, months, significant portions of your life to anyone observing you, basically asleep in a pod. And to you, you would be interacting with and, yeah, you know, which is, by the way, what we could be in that, right, like that's, you know, we could be in the matrix. And we could just wake up and you're in some pod or whatever of jelly and you could have whatever the hyper expanded version of DMT that ports you into this world or whatever. So it's like you end up in this sort of babushka doll model of reality, or it could be that you're actually returning and that actually going to the pod is the way to return to your share. You're back to the park back to the pot. Yes, it's kind of interesting because they say it's realer than real, right? When they get real. So this is actually you're in a pod now that when you go into the pod, whatever and raise the DMT levels, you're actually wake up in back. And it goes to play to the cave where it's like all we're seeing now is sort of simulacra. In fact, in the matrix, the movie, he's looking at a book and it's, I think it's Jean-Baudelard or whatever this French. Bo-Baudelard, that's right, you know, simulacra and simulation or whatever. And it's like, you know, it's clearly the Wachowski siblings. They, you know, were paying homage to this sort of, you know, postmodern author that's writing about, right, simulacra. It's just so, so fascinating. Yeah, and people do describe very, very common feeling when they enter the DMT space is one of, I'm back, welcome. And they, you know, the lights are flashing. It's like, welcome home. What do you mean, welcome home? You do like a life review. Right. And it's like this very strong sense of deja vu, like I've been here before. Not only have I been here before, but this is my true home. So maybe that's what's happening. Maybe we are on a path towards the state where we return. And does it, does it look like lying in a pod and closing your eyes and raising your DMT levels in your brain through some technology? Maybe, maybe it's something else that we don't yet. Yeah, I think, you know, consciousness is a sort of, it's a reduction mechanism on a default state of greater omniscience or something. And so, I think it's this is consciousness locally produced or is it sort of transmitted and ported into a receptor that's inherently limited. And I would, I would say the latter, but it, you know, yeah, it does bring up all these, all these sorts of questions. But it goes back to this sort of Plato thing where in all these sort of mystery rituals across time and space, whether, you know, they deal with psychedelics or not. Sometimes they just deal with sheer amounts of pain, like putting your hand in a glove full of bullet ants or whatever. You are temporarily, if the, if biology is a, is a collapsing function on a default state of greater omniscience, you're killing that collapsing function temporarily. And the person experiences sort of greater consciousness and awareness and you'd expect this more sort of muted like, oh, it all just shut off and that now I'm back. where I got turned back on. But it's not. The mystery ritual kills the collapsing function and you get this sort of greater, you know, ontological reality and then you come back and there's always this translation function issue. I think William James was like writing in his diary about like, you know, some trip he had had or something and like, you end up writing mumbo jump, like just, you know, goblet gook. It's like impossible to translate. - Yeah, and Terrence McCunney used to say, "A secret is not something untold. "It is something that cannot be told." - Cannot be told. - Oh, that is beautiful. - Yeah, that's beautiful. - I wish I thought of that. - Yeah. - But the un-Englishable and you have to, you have to have the direct experience. You can bring back fragments, lower dimensional projections of this space and talk about it to some extent, but you cannot. And this is why it's so difficult spending my life talking about DMTs is what I really should say is just go there and then get back to me because people can't comprehend when I'm talking about entities or strange other worlds that in their head, they're seeing this 1970s science fiction movie with little green men on a globe. They don't, there's no way for them to even conceive of what's actually going on in my head when I'm talking about this thing because it's un-Englishable. And so trying to English the un-Englishable to F, the un-Fable, the un-Fable. That's what it like that. It's very, very difficult. But it's not a completely hopeless task. At least I can explain to people why, okay, there are certain aspects of this space that make it impossible. And that mean the only conclusion we can draw from that is that there's more going on. There's more going on here than we can explain. If people come away from my work with that, then kind of done my job. And the rest happens with a glass pipe and inhaling a couple of long thoughts of DMTV, but that's the only 100% conversion. Sure, conversion technique. Yeah, I know, I get it, yeah, yeah. No, there's no, it's like a lot. If you're studying any of these fields, the work is actually in translating your ontology to the average person. It's not, it's also in working out the ontology itself, but you have to do both. Otherwise you end up on an island completely, and there's just no interface with the rest of the world. So is there something about DMT where I think it shows up right when you die? Is that right? And then does it show up at the womb? In the womb around, like I remember reading Rick Straswell's, you know, DMT Spirit Molecule, and he talks about it being maybe a part of identity formation. Is that, are these things possible? Or has that been debunked? 'Cause this was, you know, like probably 20 years ago, he was writing this. Well, it's not been debunked. I mean, I think it's often the idea, so the DMT, the Spirit Molecule, came from Rick Straswell's idea that it's released the point of death. And he's like, provides the conduit by which the solex is the body and enters the afterlife. This is a very obviously mystical, spiritual hypothesis. But it's often repeated as if it's fact, right? There's, you know, DMT is produces dreams and it's released in a small amount, and then it allows you to run you down. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - But both of these are hypotheses. - So we don't know that, we don't know that. However, the dream thing, I don't think makes any sense because most dreams are not anything like DMT. Some people who think they're gonna have a dream like experience when they take DMT, I'm sorry, but it's not gonna be anything like any normal dream. So I don't, and there's no evidence that DMT is produced during REM sleep. So that one I think is just, that was just, again, a hypothesis put out by a guy called Jace Calaway in the 1980s. Timon's Mechano often repeated it. Perhaps giving a, he was a little bit more definitive than he should have been about that. But then the dying thing is more interesting. Whether or not it provides the means by which you can enter the afterlife, that's a different question. That's more of a metaphysical question. I don't think science is really gonna get to the bottom of that. But the idea that's released at the point of death, actually there is good evidence now that it could be. I don't think it's the pinnacle gland. The pinnacle gland is what Strasmond thought. The pinnacle gland is a very, very tiny gland. It's about this big, the end of my little finger. It produces nanograms of melatonin. It's not set up to pump out large amounts of DMT, enough DMT to cause a breakthrough to experience. But as I said, it's DMT has two steps from triptophan. So other cells in the brain, potentially all neurons in the brain could produce DMT. You don't need to rely on the pinnacle. And some recent studies showed some interesting things. Firstly, that DMT levels in rodents, this was. So not humans, but still mammals. DMT levels in awake living rodents were about the same as other neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. So it's not tiny amounts. It's not a breakthrough psychedelic level, but still produced in the same kind of quantities of other neurotransmitters, which is kind of cool, right? So clearly the brain is diverting resources to producing DMT. Why? We don't know. However, there's something functional. There's something functional there. And what's interesting is that when they sacrifice these rodents, sacrifices such a weird word, they don't like put them on an altar and light candles. They kill them, right? So when they kill these rats, they actually have a technique now, micro dialysis, where they're able to measure in real time DMT levels in a living rat, which wasn't available in all these decades ago when these hypothesis were originally proposed. But now they can. So they can measure DMT in the brain of a rodent and then they kill the rodent. And as the rodent dies, DMT levels rise, a spike. Now, you also see this with other neurotransmitters, by the way, it's not just DMT, but still, okay, DMT levels are rising. That's in line with Strasmon's model. No one's done that with a human. So if you could get permission with somebody who was end of life, perhaps on a life support machine. And during the dieting process, could you get permission from them or their family members to draw their blood? That would be an experiment that could be done. Ethically, it's difficult, obviously. Agreed. Yeah, but it could be done, right? And what's interesting about DMT is that other studies have shown that when you take neurons, so neurons are very sensitive to oxygen. They need oxygen. You deprive a neuron of oxygen, it dies. This is why strokes where you lose blood supply to certain areas of the brain are so devastating because if you don't restore blood supply very, very quickly, areas of the brain die and you end up with severe disabilities or death. What's interesting is that in a oxygen hypoxic, oxygen-deprived environment, neurons will survive longer in the presence of DMT. Whoa. But they bind to a specific receptor called the SIGMA. SIGMA1 receptor, which a few decades ago, we didn't know existed and has no other function. It's called an orphan receptor. And that it's a receptor that's there, but nothing binds to it. We know now that DMT binds to it. It's not a true orphan receptor, because it binds to an adogenous molecule, DMT. So it binds to this receptor and it initiates a cascade of intracellular signaling that seems to somehow protect the neuron. So you can imagine, during the dying process, as your respiratory system is collapsing, blood supply to the brain is diminishing, your brain is being starved of oxygen, DMT ramps up, and should you survive, the DMT has protected your brain during that period where you were dying. Does that make sense? Yeah. And now it doesn't answer the question of why? So it like bridges the neurons to your survival state or something that gives them a little. Gives them a little bit of a little reserve, right? Exactly. So the rest of the body can survive if you kind of resuscitate it, for example, or your heart restart, so whatever. But your brain, that's going to be in trouble. So it needs a bit of extra protection. So the DMT seems to be doing that. So that fits in with the dying process. So maybe that's why it's released during death. It doesn't answer, of course. Why this molecule also just happens to transport you to this alternate reality. So clearly there's a connection there. Does that mean that DMT has this kind of dual function? It's protecting the brain during the dying process. But if you actually do die, it also allows you to directly move into whatever happens after you die. Maybe you are getting a glimpse. I mean, that's not particularly nice thought, the idea of going permanently into the DMT space. I mean, it's. I guess that's where the preparation comes in, of working within this space. Because it is kind of shocking, horrifying for people. But maybe that's why it's important to work with DNT whilst it's just a alive because you're going to, this is the kind, maybe this is where you're going to go after you die. I don't know, that's pure speculation. So, in short, the whole DMT spirit molecule thing started as a pure speculation. And now, okay, it all seems to hang together the idea of DMT being released during the dying process, which is kind of cool. Yeah, it's fascinating. Gimo Borgagin at University of Michigan, she studies stuff around, you know, endogenous DMT receptors in the brain and stuff. But she also studies terminal lucidity, which I find very interesting, this idea that sometimes somebody can be in like a coma for a long time. And then right before they die, they seem to sort of wake up, be extremely alert and like back to their old self, sort of dementia, and right before they die. It's just fascinating sort of phenomenology. Does that have anything to do with DMT? I just, I was found it interesting that she both studies DMT and she looks into this or is that just a coincidence? I don't know if it's a coincidence. It might not be a coincidence, whether this terminal lucidity has anything to do with DMT or is something else. I mean, might DMT might be part of it. As I said, you get lots of quite dramatic changes in neuroactivity and these electrical storms and increases in various neurotransmitters and neuromodulators during the dying process. So it's probably some emergent effect from all of this happening, and DMT is just a part of it. That's my guess, but I don't really know. Yeah, yeah, very interesting. Do you think, you know, Aldous Huxley, a famous British, British author, but also kind of psycho-knot? He, I think at the end of his life was dying and he asked his wife to give him an extremely high dose of LSD. That's right. And he also said something very interesting, which I want to get your take on. He said that in the 21st century, we would see a religion sort of induced by more mass psychedelic use and people would have more of an individual connection with like almost a nostic connection with God and the universe through these psychedelics. Do you think that that will happen? You know, sort of the Timothy Leary, like via LSD in the tap water, sort of thing. I mean, a religion. I'm slightly fearful of the word religion and that it is a set of doctrine, a set of prescribed beliefs. So I would hope that this doesn't take the form of a religion. You see that kind of thing happening with DMT specifically, where certain groups of people often quite influential who have decided that they've got a handle on things. They understand what DMT represents and they understand the entities and they understand how it connects to reality and how we should use DMT and all of this and then they bring in followers and there are a number of small pockets. I mean, nothing ever become that's kind of consumed to the space in any way, the DMT kind of community if you want to use that word. But certainly, I think the truth is that it's very difficult to not be come. I wouldn't say religious, but spiritual, mystical to accept that actually there's more to reality and you are confronted with that. It's undeniable when you take DMT that there's more to reality and that we are but a very small fragment of reality and when large numbers of people begin to accept that, then the question is, what do we do with that? What do we do with an elf? As McKenna used to say, how do we take that fact and move with it? Does it require some kind of religious doctrinal structure or not? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that's a question that bothers me by what is this all about? Where is this all going? It bothers me too because I think I have the same inclinations as you, which is to directly experience to push the boundaries on these things and to sort of like really know stuff for yourself to the extent you can. And then I wonder if it's sort of this horseshoe thing where you start off like super ignorant, then you seek truth in some like more objective sense about, you know, metaphysical reality. And then you realize there's like sub overload or something like this is actually not adapted for like a single human to know. And it's really all about like leading a good life on earth and understanding kind of the bounds of our of our lives and our epistemology. And then you become sort of religious and you realize how adaptive religion is or something. Yeah, I mean, that's it's like the path will reveal itself. I think I try not to think too far ahead of where this is going because I don't know if I'm being completely honest. But I think we just keep moving forward carefully with humility. And I think the whole DMTX stuff in my opinion has been just another step along that path of using this molecule trying to understand it as much as we can not going in with assumptions about what we're dealing with or what the what the the teleology is. You know, what is the ultimate aim of all of this? I don't I don't I speculate on what it might look like, but I don't know. I don't know if it's possible for us to know at this point. There could be some kind of phase transition that's necessary to take place before we can even comprehend. I mean, we don't really know what the next five years is going to look like people are speculating on with AI and stuff. But I don't think anyone really knows where we're headed. I agree. It's always the sort of some adjacent surprise or something. It's never the whenever people make predictions. I'm always skeptical of these sort of quote unquote futurists. That's right. Rift off of some, you know, for sure, you know, future vision that never never manifests the way they sort of say. Do you believe in God? Well, that came from left field. Dog that related. Do I believe in God? Well, I'm going to give the kind of the obvious answer, which is how do you define God? Fire that question back at you. You know, how do you define God? And people say, do you believe in God? Well, the God that is in your head is probably quite different to the God in my head. So I could answer that. Yes, I could answer that now and be truthful in both cases, depending on how you define God. But you could use that sort of postmodern breakdown of language to like, you know, retort any sort of question. That's true. And I'm not trying to be annoying postmodernists. No, no, I get it. God is especially undefined. Jordan Peterson is something. Yeah, he's fine. He got Peter Peterson to hilarious because he hates the postmodernist, but he is so postmodern in the way he speaks. He speaks. He's so like, he hates that all that stuff, you know, Foucault or whatever is the reason that like society is in decline. And then when you call them out and you debate them on this stuff, it turns into this postmodern gobbling gook where he's like, what'd you stake your life on? What are you talking about, dude? Like you're you are making no sense. But in this case, I think it's valuable because people do have different conceptions of God. Now, if you mean, do I mean a higher being that created the universe that we that we should worship, then no, I don't believe in that. But do I believe that there is some kind of intelligence that is non-human, non-physical that we can't directly interact with normally, perhaps that has been around a lot longer than we have. Well, I can't help but believe that. I mean, when you when you smoke DMT, you interact with such intelligences. Do I think there's one grand intelligence that that subsumes all of these, maybe, maybe God is, you know, you could take the the more Vedanta or ancient Hindu answer that question, which is to say, well, God is everything. God is conscious. And as God is the ultimate reality, there is nothing that isn't God. I like that idea as well. And we're all the million. Who was it? K. Chesterton. K. Chesterton talks about the million masks of God. And that's where all masks of God. You know, the eye with which I see God is the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. And there were all expressions of, and there's no escaping that. We're all part of and expressions of masks of the ultimate reality, which you might call God. I Hindu might call Brockman somebody else might call the ultimate reality that which is that idea I kind of sympathetic towards as well. And I kind of feel like that. I think consciousness is fundamental. in some very deep, profound way. I don't think we're gonna explain consciousness in terms of physicalism or in terms of neural activity or anything like that. I think it's beyond that. I think it's absolutely fundamental. And so, yes, the answer to your question is, I believe in God, but perhaps not the God. - Yeah. - As you might define it, but as the God that I would define it. What do you think about this buddy Danny, who does these DMT laser diffraction experiments? Well, I'm sure you get asked this all the time. Where people take DMT, there's some sort of laser intersection and then they look at it and they claim to see some sort of almost like code that they, I mean, that's their interpretation. Like a code that is, you know, the computation behind the universe or something, what do you think about this? Well, do I think that he is and other people are seeing the fundamental code that runs our reality? No, I don't think that at all. I don't, I think the idea that reality is computational or is some kind of code, okay, that's possible. The idea that you could look at it and it would look like characters that we recognize, like Japanese katakana and Hebrew and stuff like this. Well, that doesn't make any sense. That's what they're seeing. And it's no coincidence that the Matrix movie we're talking about. I mean, the code rain, that famous green running digital imagery, that's built from Japanese katakana. So it seems like a little bit on the nose there, a little bit. So no, I don't think, I think it doesn't make any sense to me, is the broad thing. And I also think the problem is that lasers, it's an inconvenient coincidence, shall we say, that when you shine a laser on a wall, without DMT, it exhibits some very unusual optical effect. So it forms its interference pattern on the retina that looks like kind of a matrix of speckles or matrix of points of light that can appear to extend beyond the surface. This is all without DMT. Now, when you add DMT to the mix, you see this matrix of characters and geometric forms appear to extend well beyond the surface. And you have to believe that these are completely unrelated. That's just a coincidence. If you're to accept that you're seeing actual code here. So I think my working hypothesis, which might well be wrong, is that what needs to be eliminated, is that these matrix of sensory, you've basically got a matrix of points of light, which on the retina, which act like a sensory scaffold, around which, on the influence of DMT, you see complex forms and characters. Because characters are very common in the DMT space as are complex geometric structures. So I think it's a very interesting, fascinating phenomenon and very important one, in that it allows you to isolate a particular fragment of the broader DMT phenomenology, the reporting of code and geometric forms. That I will get on board with, I think it should be studied. Do I accept, do I think that fundamental code that's somehow stumbled upon the way of seeing this fundamental code of reality, which just happens to look like code? As we would imagine code. And you imagine code, you imagine the matrix. And that's kind of what it's looking at here. I think I'm not ready to make that leap yet. Yeah, that seems unlikely to me, too. I think the thing that is interesting about it is you are doing a repeatable physical thing. And then people see, ostensibly similar, a similar phenomena in the form of whatever these symbols are, whatever. Which is like, that's cool. And even that is sort of somewhat unprecedented. Yes, but then again, the lays alike is providing a very regular pattern of sensory inputs. So that's account on the fact that these, but you don't see the symbols when you're not on DMT, right? You don't see exactly. So that's interesting. That's interesting. But then again, are people seeing, people say, the line that you always hear from these laser people is, everyone sees exactly the same thing. Now, what does that mean? Everyone sees code or everyone sees characters fine. Does everyone see exactly the same characters in the same order at the same time? No, we don't know that. There's no way no one's demonstrated that. It's not even possible. It's not even known if that's possible, because apparently they move very quickly. So are people seeing the same thing? Or are people kind of seeing the sort of the same thing? But because again, the language problem, I can't take a photograph of this code. And so you can't compare, you have to rely on language, and you have to rely on little sketches and things that people do. But there's no way so far to demonstrate that two people, even at the same time, are actually seeing exactly the same code. And people, as I said, people have been describing code and digits and characters in the DMT state for four decades. So it's like what's unique and interesting and important about this is that it allows you to kind of isolate that particular aspect and reliably view that particular aspect of the broader DMT visual phenomenology. But anything beyond that to make deeper, deep conclusions about the fundamental structure of our reality that you're seeing the code that runs our reality. I think that is a very, very large leap. And I don't think there's anything in the effect, the phenomenon that would lead one to draw that conclusion. You have to start by eliminating lots of other more mundane hypotheses, which takes time, it takes money, it takes very careful experimental setup and performing of various experiments to be able to eliminate the influence of this laser interference speckle effect, as it's called. But that needs to be done, because otherwise, it's going to be private revelation. They're going to be people who do it and believe. And they're going to form a group who all believe in this, but they are not able to demonstrate or prove that this is what they are actually seeing, but they all have convinced themselves. That's what they're seeing, they're seeing the fundamental code of reality. And you'd get-- it forms a kind of religion, if you like, where you have the believers and you have the non-believers. I'm not ready to kind of fall in with the believers just yet. Yeah, well, what do you think of modern UFO disclosure? Do you track that at all? Do you think it reduces down to these sort of altered states of consciousness or do you believe we have saucers and hangers at places like Area 51? Well, I mean, the Area 51-- and that's cool stuff, right? I mean, I'm not an expert on it. So I don't-- I follow certain things. When Bob Lazar speaks, when he's on Rogan, I watch that, that's fascinating stuff. But I don't know. I don't know what to make of it all. And so I kind of focus on my thing. My thing is not the shimmering metallic discs in the sky, which might not be physical, of course. I mean, they might also be-- they also seem to kind of occupy this space between the physical and the non-physical, the forming feats that seem to be beyond what a physical object could achieve. And I think that perhaps gives us a clue as to their nature. And we might be dealing with intelligences that don't necessarily exist as physical wet-bodied beings on other star systems and are traveling through vast distances through to reach our planet, but actually occupy some kind of space that is lying parallel hidden within amongst whatever. Or orthogonal to whatever a reality, and that they can interface in certain ways with our-- Or physics is information theoretic, like you write about-- Exactly, John Wheeler, whatever. And a bunch of people sort of contemplate. If you have all this Wolfram physics and stuff, computational physics, then what if they are just the programmers of our reality? Like they understand the source code in a way that we got. And there's a lot in physics that kind of points to that. There's like you have what, like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, where you can't measure position and momentum simultaneously in very accurate ways. Like one gets more fuzzy as the other gets more accurate. That almost looks like a computational caching function or something. We're only so much can be stored in local memory. Or like anthropic principle, where if Planck's constant were slightly different, like we wouldn't really have an atmosphere on, right? There are all these sort of weird, like for Mott's theory, where like, you know, light between two points or whatever, it takes the most optimal computationally efficient path. There are all these things like that. Fibonacci sequences and golden ratios and stuff, it's like, how do people code? They just transport code library. I mean, now it's probably mostly like co-pilots in AI. But back in the day, it was like you'd like find like libraries of code. And you would, you know, you'd transport code chunks or whatever. And like, that's how they-- so it's like you would reuse geometrically efficient patterns, like over and over again. And like, that just exists like a cross nature. Exactly. So there's so much. So there's so much. So there's so much. And the brain as well. I mean, the brain is-- Again, you have these repeating computational, the fundamental, these columns, the brain, it's like this, the cortex, you have all of these cylindrical columns, which is the basic computational unit of the brain, and you stitch them all together, and all of the function of your cortex arises from the interaction of all these basic computational units. So at every level, you see that of stitching together of simpler units from which higher order behaviors emerge, and that goes all the way down, perhaps to the ground of reality itself. You have these very simple rules, and it might, you know, running a universe might be extremely simple if you know the rules, but if you find a way to run all possible, this is something I explore in alien information theory, the idea that if you know all possible rules, which is just, you know, the permutation on all possible rules, all possible rules sets, you can just run them all, you have the computational power, you run all of them, and some most of them do absolutely nothing. Some of them do something a little bit interesting and then die out, and then maybe a tiny, tiny fraction, you start to develop layered complexity, emergent complexity, and we just happen to be in one of those hundred trillion trillion or whatever universes where the rule set gives rise to interesting information. Sure. Yeah. Well, Wolfram has this, you know, Stephen Wolfram has this sort of institute where he studies his computational versions of physics, and he has this idea of computational irreducibility. Yeah. And there are things that you cannot take as first principle, you know, a priori concept. You need to run a program. Exactly. Well, you have cellular automaton, conways, game of life, and all of these things where if you set some initial conditions, yeah, maybe you end up with some final branch that works or whatever, but like there are a lot of branches that don't. And then you have to ask this like meta question of if, you know, is our earthly conflict, you know, Trump just took out, you know, three Iranian nuclear sites with, you know, some B2s is all of that existing, you know, against some sub-Rosa backdrop of like some timeline adjustment conflict or something like is that the true cosmic, you know, that like Upanishad style war or whatever where, you know, if you really think about like what's the most scarce commodity, it's not gold. It's not like like, you know, the last 50 years of American foreign policy has been like sort of dictated by like, you know, crude oil or whatever, like, it's not those things, right? It's time. Yeah. And it's timelines. And it's like literal like, you know, macro, like events that occur on macro scales. So like are these entities sort of fighting over that or something? Answer that question now, Andrew. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Who knows? Thank you so much for just going to end on that absurd question. Thank you. I really appreciate this man. And I, everybody should go buy your book, "Death by Estonishment," anything else you want to plug or promote or. Yeah. I mean, so "Death by Estonishment," that's the book about DMT and describes the history of science is struggle to make sense of it. So if you really interested in what DMT is about and why it's such an enigmatic and mysterious molecule, read "Death by Estonishment," but also if you're anyone who's interested in DMT X, the moment, it's like it's a small number of academic institutions that are running DMT X. But we actually are developing a retreat center and a research center in the Caribbean. What's it? Sent Vincent and the Grenadines. That's cool. So we have a research center and retreat center that we're developing now. And the idea being, not just doing research with DMT, but also allowing anyone who wants to come and experience DMT X in a beautiful, tropical, five-star environment with all of the preparation, perhaps several different doses, those levels before the kind of the break through DMT X experience, all of the setting is just beautiful in the integration afterwards. It will be a unique institute. Do you have any adverse experiences with DMT X? Anybody? So far, all of the subjects at Imperial College got through it. There was no major problem, it was very intense, maybe some of them didn't kind of like it and didn't do the full set of experiments, but no like severe physiological adverse effects. No, of course, we've no severe mental, no like this really fucked me up. Nothing like that. Of course, on the island we will have anesthesiologists, we have psychiatrists and nurses. So if you want to sign up, then go to nunautics.org, N-W-O-N-A-U-T-I-C-S, nunautics.org, and they can find out more about it there, or eluses mind. So eluses is the actual name of the retreat, so it's like that's bringing the new eluses. The new eluses, yeah, so eluses mind.com and they can also have a look at what the retreat center is going to look like. So yeah, that's kind of an exciting thing to be able to kind of bring DMT X to anyone who wants to kind of experience it. Super cool and exciting. It's funny, I think Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, Stanislaus Graf, and Karl Ruck, maybe this is a rumor, but I think they wanted to create a new eluses. And so it's cool that you're naming it that. Yeah, it won't be with Ergot, but we do have a license from the government in this events and the grenadines to work with any drug that we want, so it's not implausible that we might think about, you know, Ergot alkaloids and perhaps recreating the true elusinium mysteries. And there are people who are working on actually reconstructing that and trying to work out the exact chemistry involved, which is kind of-- I'd grind for rescues really trying the rescues. That's just one of the follow up journey, yeah, and there are people that followed on from his work as well, chemists and pharmacologists, so it's an exciting time to be interested in psychedelics and an exciting, very interesting time to be alive, more generally, of course, but I agree, everything is spinning out and getting weird, but it's interesting. Okay, Andrew, I really appreciate this man, this is a lot of fun, and go by death by astonishment and alien information theory, and yeah, hopefully we can do this again at some point. Awesome, awesome. Thank you. [MUSIC]