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

From GEICO Subconscious News, I'm Tammy Racing Thoughts, broadcasting from your brain. You think you live in a pretty safe place, but you just heard about a break-in four miles away, which isn't close, but it isn't far either, you know? Art Palpitations is on the scene. I sure am, Tammy, and I don't even know why I drove out here, because as you know, you got customized renter's insurance through GEICO, so your stuff is covered. Oh, well that's great. Any sign of crime there, Art? Just some light littering, Tammy, but like they say, a little litter can lead to a lot. Wise words. It feels good to worry less. It feels good to GEICO. Tonight's top worry. If something happens to your apartment and you need to, like, stay in a hotel and pay for it, that would be crazy, right? Art Palpitations has more. That would be crazy, Tammy, but you got surprisingly affordable renter's insurance through GEICO, so it could be covered, giving you peace of mind. Aw, I love a story that ends well. Next up, love stories. Are they all they're cracked up to be? Today, we're talking with Dr. Andrew Gallimore. He's a Cambridge-trained chemist and neuroscientist, and he spent 30 years studying one molecule, DMT, what he calls the world's strangest psychedelic. Many people report meeting entities when using DMT, and Andrew has a theory about them that's not exactly mainstream. He writes about this in his book, Death by Astonishment. Death by Astonishment, finally a cause of death that isn't fell out of a window after questioning the official story to the CIA. He thinks the beings people meet on DMT might not be hallucinations. They might be real, alive, sentient, and living in another dimension. And he makes a pretty good case, because there are people who take DMT for years, and then one day a creature waves a finger and says, "You're not welcome here." It's called a lockout, and some people stay locked out for years. Oh, so the machine elves have bounces? I better be respectful next time I'm in a machine elf champagne room, huh? Today we're covering where DMT comes from, what it does inside your brain, and a new theory he built with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. It connects the whole thing to consciousness itself. After our conversation, I'll come back with a little quick analysis. But until then, grab a brain bucket, because this one goes deep. Let's go down to the basement. Dr. Andrew Gallimore, welcome to the basement. Good to be here, AJ. Thank you very much for having me. As good as can be. I guess just quick disclaimer before we get started. We're not endorsing anything, any drug use. We're not promoting it, none of that stuff. That being said, we both have experience with psychedelics. So when we're talking about it, we have been there. Yeah. Okay. So I thought I heard you say at seven or eight years old, you're into ghosts, vampires, werewolves. Paranormal. It looks like you have just upgraded your monsters to a new level. Is that what happened? Is you're just you're just the monster kid? That's pretty accurate. I mean, I was into, yeah, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, the occult Ouija boards. My parents were horrified. I mean, it's like the headmaster of the school had to call in my parents, my father specifically. What were you doing that the headmaster got involved? What was that specific? Stories. You were telling stories? I was writing. So when the teacher said, write a story, I would write these most horrific. Because I'm going to defend myself a little bit. You were that kid. I was that kid. But my I have. I've got quite a big family, so I've got two older brothers, two younger brothers. So I'm right in the middle and the two older brothers. Obviously, we're a huge influence on me. My oldest brother, Ian, when when I was kind of all six, seven, eight years old, he was like twelve and three was more mature. And he was very interested in horror movies. And like in those days, there was like banned movies. Remember that? Sure. This one's banned. Faces of death. Faces of death and cannibal corpse and this kind of thing. Right. So you have to watch. Right. So you mail off some VHS. You know, copied, pirated and come back. And then you watch these movies in the living room. There's only one VCR in the house, of course, in those days. And I would sit and watch them. My parents were very relaxed about this until I started kind of reproducing these kind of things in my stories at school. And I think my headmaster was slightly concerned that I was going to be the next Michael Myers or something like that. Or the next Neil Gaiman. What was that last straw story about? Do you want me to say it really? Yeah. So in the story, the story about a an escaped lunatic inspired by the Halloween movies, he escaped from the sanitarium and he murdered several people. And then in one instance, he came across a God, do I want to say this? He came across a woman with her baby in a pram. And anyway, the baby ends up being. Diced. And I use that word diced with a spade. And the headmaster was understandably, in retrospect, thought this is like a I mean, I was like seven years old. Oh, God. It's elementary school anyway. And so, yeah, they they used to used to like every day at the end of school. He'd come to the classroom. He'd check through my work and check that I wasn't writing horrible things. Yeah, it was. What did your folks say about that story? Yeah, they had a word with me and said, maybe you should maybe write about nice thing, but they weren't worried about you being. No, they knew where it came from. It was just the influence of my older brothers. But but still, at that time, it wasn't just that story. It was that I was interested in the occult, things that seven year olds aren't normally interested in. And I was quite an advanced reader for my age. So I used to go to these old secondhand bookstores and try to find books about ghosts and vampires and things like that. And I really believed in them. I wanted to be a ghost hunter when I grew up. That didn't come true, but in a way, in a way, in a way it did. Yes. There we go. When I was nine, I bought a mail order book on witchcraft and the occult. And I had quite a sit down over that book. Yeah, I'm sure. So I get it. Picture this. You spent years searching for a hidden treasure. You followed the clues across deserts, climb the mountains and finally found the chest. You crack it open and standing next to you is the guy who buried it. And he smiles and says, actually, I think most of that is mine. Now you're in a fight over something valuable and the other side already knows every trick in the book. There's a reason you wouldn't want to handle that battle alone. It's the same reason Morgan and Morgan has spent more than thirty five years fighting for the people. They're America's largest injury law firm with more than one thousand lawyers and over one hundred offices nationwide. Morgan and Morgan was founded after John Morgan saw how difficult it was for ordinary families to stand up to powerful interests after his brother suffered a serious injury today, they've recovered over thirty billion dollars for their clients and they'll fight to get you the compensation you deserve. Not all law firms are the same. Hire the wrong one and you may be beat before you even start. If you're ever injured, you can check out Morgan and Morgan and their fee is free unless they win. For more information, you can go to for the people dot com slash one. So take us from there to the I know you've told the story a million times, but I have some some follow ups. Take us from there to nineteen ninety six. Your friend shows you a magazine. Yeah. So when I what magazine was it? I don't remember. It was after I graduated from high school. So in the two years we call them a levels in the UK. I was 16 years old, I guess. I started to get interested in psychedelics, reading about psychedelics and talking a lot about psychedelics. I started studying chemistry, biology, and I wanted to be a pharmacologist. I wanted to study drugs, basically, and how they affect the mind. What drew you to psychedelics specifically? Especially for someone who wasn't didn't take them. At the time, I didn't know. But when I think back, you know, the interest in ghosts and werewolves and vampires, it's unusual things, I guess you could put it in the most broad sense. I guess that's what tracks for me is you've always been into the the alternate realities. And yeah, and because I used to collect a magazine called The Unexplained is one of those ones that came out every week and you got the binders, that kind of thing. And I ordered it specially from the newsagent. And within there, there was a lot about ghosts and all that kind of stuff. But then there was stuff about like ESP and UFOs and things like that. So it's not so strange that as I became an adolescent and started to mature, that my interest shifted away from just ghosts and werewolves and into more serious things, I guess, you know, more scientific things. Psychedelics seem to be a way of altering your mind, of altering the structure, dynamics. of your reality and so that kind of excited me i wanted to know how that uh worked so i'd been talking about it a lot at school and then one day my friend um he's i can give his name actually now he's nur abbas his name is he's actually interestingly well he was a few years ago the chief designer for um oh what's his name he used to he's been married to um kim kardashian easy easy he used to the easy shoes everyone's screaming at us right now but i don't remember oh from the show no no no he's like a black guy he's most crazy guy that was on rogan has been on rogan he's been on every it's most everyone's gonna go crazy yeah after the we're gonna find that out we will kanye west kanye kanye yeah kanye he was a chief designer he became a fashion designer and he was actually kanye west chief designer anyway wow yeah he'd be fun to talk to yeah nur abbas and he brought this magazine when i was 16 years old and said you know look on the back page there's something i think you'd be interested in and i you know rolled it up and later in the day i i opened it and it was a picture of this bearded fellow uh called terence mckenna and it was an interview with him um and there was lots i don't remember the much of the details but i remember him being asked about his quote-unquote favorite drug this thing called dmt um didn't say what it was other than that um when you take it it takes you to this other world that's nothing like this world and that's filled with these strange beings called machine elves sure um and i thought this is this is incredible but it only lasts 15 minutes you know this fast acting drug that will instantaneously transport you to some other reality that's just as real or more real than this world i thought well you know that's even more interesting than psychedelics generally is this particular psychedelic so my next task was to find out what dmt even meant um you couldn't just google it in those days um i remember i went to the local library in my city um the central library and found one of those books of acronyms uh initialisms and looked at dmt and found dimethyl terephthalate which is a type of plastic apparently so for a short period of time dmt in my head was dimethyl terephthalate um oops yeah then we got the internet as you just mentioned and there's only one internet in the school like you had to go collect this big black cable from a guy in a white coat the password is mushroom i remember that that's perfect and i would spend all my my lunch break and any free periods i had i would i was the only one who used it no one else knew what this it was so new the internet no one really knew its power uh but i kind of did i had a friend also had the internet in his house um and so i spent all my time just on altavista as you said before google i'm just trying to find out all about dmt um and it how to how to extract it how to you know which plants you can get it from and all that kind of stuff and uh all these different crazy experiences did you look into the history of it as well during those searches or you're more interested in what terence was talking about i was more interested in what it did um i became more interested in the history later on but at that time this was just this naturally occurring molecule um that seemed to have almost magical properties um and that was the beginning really um that was the beginning of what turned out to be a 30-year um journey trying to understand dmt what what it did and what it did and what it did and what it did and what it does in the brain and how it's able to achieve these remarkable effects on consciousness what did your family think about this new hobby because clearly you told your brothers yes well they didn't understand it you see i mean they i would if i refer to it as dmt then that's fine if i use the word drugs that's different matter right yeah yeah so um your book death by astonishment that's a terence mckenna quote that is a terence mckenna quote so is that a bookend is that a tribute is that a thank you why did you choose that all of those things well initially it had a completely different name that i'm not going to tell you okay um which was okay uh but i was writing i was writing the book proposal with my editor to submit to the publishing house um and in part of the proposal i said you know dmt is this molecule that was terence mckenna said the only risk is death by astonishment and then i i wrote in in in brackets although actually that's a pretty good title right um and i i realize in retrospect it's the perfect title i mean that's i mean it's a kind of a show stopper title death by astonishment and of course it's a beautiful tribute to the late great um terence mckenna um and so yeah that's that's kind of how that name came came about and i think it's a perfect name for the book i think that is you know it's all about it's everything i know about dmt and i think it's a perfect name for the book i think that is you know it's all about it's um everything i've come to learn over the last 30 years studying dmt so this um sparks interest in chemistry um your phd thesis let me see if i can get this right is it the um the biogenesis of terrestrial and marine polycyclic ether wow is that what it was you've done your research dude well that doesn't sound like that that sounds like just marine biology and things like that has nothing to do with psychedelics nothing to do with psychedelics so is dmt still sort of this undercurrent while you're working through all this yeah it it it always has been in a way um you know i've never worked in a quote-unquote psychedelic research group um or any kind of psychedelic lab or anything like that it's always been you know i've kind of have many interests in in chemistry and in pharmacology um you know as well as psychedelics but that's been the kind of the foundation that's running through all of it but my phd at cambridge yeah that was biological chemistry it's basically trying to understand how these often exquisitely complex molecules that are produced by plants and microorganisms you know how are they actually stitched together and made inside microorganisms that's something that i really fell in love with during my first degree um the kind of the what's called biosynthetic synthesis how complex organic molecules are constructed inside living beings um and i thought i want to study that for my phd and so i went up to cambridge and worked in a group that specialized in that thing but all the time still i was thinking and writing about dmt and then um after i finished my phd i did a postdoc again at cambridge and then i thought there's something missing from my intellectual repertoire should we put it like that uh in that i i understood the chemistry i understood the pharmacology um you know that kind of low level stuff molecules interacting with living systems that was all kind of under my belt shall we say um but i still didn't feel that i was sufficiently sophisticated in the neurosciences so i thought i need to i need to move up to the kind of the higher level um of the neurosciences and so i i did two postdocs um in computational neuroscience kind of the forefront i think of neuroscience trying to understand how the brain works by using computational and mathematical models so i went to the university of york and then university of oxford uh did two postdocs in computational neuroscience and then finally my final postdoc which actually the longest one lasted for seven years was at the okinawa institute of science and technology in japan um so i needed a job after my penultimate postdoc finished and there was this position in in okinawa so i thought why not i didn't have ties in england at the time so i thought oh why not move to okinawa what was the position was it a mainstream type of job it was a postdoctoral research fellowship so basically another postdoc okay uh but this was in in computational neuroscience as well um and i spent seven years kind of modeling very small pieces of the brain basically sort of individual neurons in the brain trying to understand how they speak to each other and how they um strengthen and weaken their connections or connected to to memory and neural function generally um so you were building this dmt research foundation the whole time yes that's how i i see it is that i was most people kind of specialize at one level you know if you're a chemist you you study the molecules you're a scientist you're interested in how kind of the global effects on neural activity um but i think really to understand psychedelics you need to kind of span all of those you need to do all the way from the lowest level the molecules all the way up to global neural activity um so i finished my postdoc in okinawa after seven years and i thought right i'm leaving the academy um i've sort of graduated um and i don't want to be i wanted to kind of de-institutionalize the brain and lies myself and just focus on writing, basically. We cover a lot of things on this show that the mainstream would rather you not think too hard about. Here's one that's not even controversial. $39 trillion in debt, money being printed to cover it. And that dollar buys less every year. So what do you do with that information? Well, some people are moving a portion of their retirement into something physical, something that exists outside the banking system. Gold and silver have been doing that job for a long time. And over the past year, gold is up around 35%, silver over 125%. I looked at several precious metals companies. Most of them weren't companies I'd feel good recommending. Golden Crest Metals was different. Boutique operation, no call center, no commission breath salespeople, just honest pricing and someone who actually picks up the phone. Here's the part that matters. If you have an IRA or 401k, you can roll it into physical gold and silver. No taxes, no penalties. No penalties. Golden Crest will give you a free portfolio review and a free info guide to help you figure out if it makes sense for your situation. Zero obligation to do anything with it. Go to goldencrestmetals.com slash the Y files or call 888-949-9172. That's goldencrestmetals.com slash the Y files or call 888-949-9172 for your 100% free info kit. Go to goldencrestmetals.com slash the Y files or call 888-949-9172 for your 100% free info kit. Cambridge, Oxford, York, Okinawa, you could have had a very successful mainstream career. Has there been a professional or personal cost to making the decision? Oh, God, yeah. I mean, for sure. I was at the stage in my career where normally what would happen is I would start a applying for what are called readerships or lectureships. So when you start taking on graduate students of your own, you become a part of the department, wherever you work. But the thought of being that person horrified me. The thought that I would be, you know, like my professor, going to meetings and managing funding and managing students, all that stuff. It never had any interest in it. When you're a postdoc, you have a lot of freedom, you kind of do your own thing. But once you get to that level where you're a lecturer, a professor, then you have to start taking on all these other responsibilities that takes over your life. And I could never invest as much time as I wanted into my passion, which is DMT and writing about DMT. I always wanted to be a writer. Ultimately, there's a lot of training required to write about these things. So, you know, 20 years, I guess, before I was able to kind of make the leap, give up my fairly well-paid position. In Okinawa, and basically go from decent salary to absolute zero salary in a single day. That's kind of scary, you know, and there's no option to move back to my parents if I fuck up, because they're over in the UK. So it's like, this goes wrong. I'm in deep, deep trouble in Tokyo. So I moved from Okinawa to Tokyo, which is where I live now. And that's where I've been for the last four years. Fortunately, I didn't majorly fuck up. I think things are okay. Well, that's great. I mean, Tokyo is fascinating, because Japan has very strict drug laws. And they're getting stricter if I, I mean, I think cannabis they just banned. How is it? Is it a culture issue for you? Is it? So people, I think when people say Japan is very anti-drugs, what they're actually referring to is methamphetamine and cannabis. These are the two biggies, right? Methamphetamine, for very specific historical reasons, post-World War II. There was this huge wave of methamphetamine use throughout the nation. A lot of military supplies kind of released onto the public market. It was perfectly legal at the time. There were millions of people in Japan using meth regularly. And then they banned it. And then all of these little clandestine laboratories started popping up. In Osaka, in 1952, in just one year, there were like 50 labs. Wow. That were raided just in one city. You know, it's like Breaking Bad, all these little meth labs everywhere. Sure, sure. Like in New Mexico or something. Yeah. People don't imagine that that's possible in Japan, but it really was. So, and this was a time when the Japanese were literally a defeated nation. And they thought this meth could be the end of them, like an existential threat to their very civilization. And so that is a kind of, I guess, I hate that word, generational threat. Yeah, generational trauma. But it feels like that. You mentioned meth, and people, there's still that sense of, meth? Yeah, because you have to figure the Americans brought it there. What, meth? Yeah. And certainly amphetamines. So, methamphetamine actually was invented by a Japanese chemist in the late 19th century. It was. Nagai. Yes. Nagayoshi. Nagai. Yeah. Everyone thinks it's either the Americans or the Germans, people, I get. But it was actually. Well, those are two countries everybody blames for everything. Yeah, of course. But it was actually a Japanese chemist. I didn't know that. It was a Japanese chemist, yes, from ephedrine. So, ephedrine is the molecule that you can convert. You know, pseudephedrine they use is basically the same molecule, but slightly different geometrically. But anyway, ephedrine you can convert directly to methamphetamine. And he was working with ephedrine at the time, this Chinese herb that had various uses. And then he synthesized methamphetamine. Yeah. So, it was basically forgotten about for a number of decades. It wasn't seen to be that important until people started reporting on its effects on alertness and mood and that kind of thing. And the Japanese were using it during the Second World War. Specifically, they used to create these little green tablets that were mixed with green tea. So, they're bright green. They would stamp them with the emperor's crest. So, it almost became like, what's the word I'm looking for? But anyway, it was very much sanctioned by the authorities. You know, the imperial Japanese authorities at the time. Japanese soldiers were using the kamikaze, for example, were using methamphetamine. It would elevate their mood, increase their kind of fighting spirit. Sure. And they don't have to worry about long-term effects. They don't have to worry about long-term effects, quite literally, yeah. And then after the war, they had all these stockpiles that made it into the market. And then the Japanese government actually banned powdered forms of meth. So, they started making liquid forms, injecting it. So, they had a huge injection problem with meth. Probably the most intense way to take it. And, you know, school children were using it. High school students, housewives, laborers, whatever. Everyone was using meth in kind of the late 1940s and early 1950s until it was banned. And then they really cracked down on it. It's like a moral power. I mean, amphetamine salts seem to be everywhere anyway, right? Yeah. So, DMT first synthesized in 1931, first found to be psychoactive in 1956. And that was Stephen Czar, right? Stephen Czar was the first to inject pure DMT. Now, this is at the same time where LSD is popular psychedelic and psychiatric research. Why? Why did LSD catch on and DMT basically disappeared until McKenna? Right. Yeah. I mean, that was. So, yeah, you're right. So, during that period, there was a flurry of these molecules that were either discovered or invented. And LSD was the main one at the time. And Czar, actually, Stephen Czar was this Hungarian physician working behind the Iron Curtain in communist Hungary. And he wanted to work with LSD. And he wrote to Sandoz, the only company that was producing LSD at the time, said, can I have some LSD, please? I want to start working on LSD. And he said, no, no, no, no. We're not sending LSD into bloody communists. Nope. Nope. And so he said, I need something else. And he thought about mescaline. He ordered some mescaline from the UK and that arrived safely. And he took his first dose of mescaline on Christmas Day. And had this wonderful experience in a church. What was he trying to achieve? What was the purpose of his experiments? Well, he was interested in. He was a psychiatrist. Ah. Right? So he's interested in, you know, at the most fundamental level, he was interested in the human mind and how we might study the human mind. But he was also interested in, you know, could these molecules find uses in psychiatry, treatment for various sort of neuropsychological disorders. So he tried mescaline. And then he found this paper. There was a paper that was. So there was this plant called Anadenanthera peregrina, which is this yopo, this snuff that scientists had just come to understand, you know, had been used by various tribal peoples, indigenous peoples in South America for. perhaps thousands of years, and was said to induce what seems to be like psychedelic effects they would go to other worlds and they would speak with these strange discarnate beings which they thought were like demons or something but no one knew how it worked uh and so they started to analyze it this kind of the first study analyzing these seeds from this peregrina plant and they found two molecules in there one was bufotenine which is um five hydroxy dimethyltryptamine five meo no that's five methoxy ah okay yeah so five meo dmt is five methoxy dmt if you take that methyl group off that carbon you get five hydroxy just hydroxyl group that's bufotenine that was a known molecule um and it was known that when you injected it into prisoners that's the way you did it in those days you found a group of prisoners that were normally imprisoned for using drugs normally young black men basically um and you would inject them with drugs and see what happened and uh bufotenine was one that had already been tested um and was found to have mildly mind-altering effects generally it made people very nauseous and their face went purple they started vomiting and it's very unpleasant but they found that molecule in this um this yopo seed um and they thought well that must be the kind of the the central psychoactive molecule in this they also found another molecule called dmt dimethyltryptamine and they just ignored it um which is a huge mistake um until stephen zara read this paper um and he thought bufotenine no that doesn't make any sense it's not particularly psychoactive um so why would that be this why would that be regarded as this molecule that would transport you to other worlds and allow you to communicate with discarnate intelligences that didn't make any sense so the only other option was dmt that was also in the seed and it being ignored so he thought okay i'll just i'll give it a go you know no one has tried this so he synthesized it um he made 10 grams in his laboratory in 1956 and he started swallowing it first of all you know increasing the dosage you went up to like a gram of of dmt nothing nothing happened nothing happened we know why now but at that time we didn't know so he was ready to give up basically he didn't try insufflating it he didn't try they didn't snorting it he didn't snort it he didn't snort it no that might have worked though no oh yeah yeah yeah it might have worked it would have been painful but yeah uh it might have worked so he basically he was like ready to give up maybe his hunch was wrong and then a friend a colleague says have you tried injecting it uh i haven't so injected it into um um i think it was a cat or a rabbit i think it was a cat for some reason uh and the cat kind of started behaving strangely you know it was it was having some kind of effect i don't mean to laugh i'm a cat yeah i'm a cat man so you know satisfied that it wasn't lethal at least in cats yeah yeah we shouldn't laugh people people complain whenever i tell this story because poor cat and it's true but different different times different times um yeah so then he ejected into himself um so sometime in april in 1956 he injected into his intramuscularly and yeah the rest as they say is history he had this he started seeing these fantastical patterns and rapidly procession of rapidly changing geometric imagery or moving very quickly he you know he was having a dmt trip um and so then he he started recruiting um colleagues so doctors nurses from where he worked things were much simpler in those days you didn't need to fill out forms getting ethical approval dea wasn't it right no no no injected it into various people healthy volunteers and they started describing what we now recognize as the classic um effects of dmt they would start going to describe going losing awareness of the normal waking world and going to these strange world filled with gods and spirits and well let me back you up just a second so why why dmt didn't catch on still so he's synthesized it it works but lsd still is the one that mk that mk ultra and everybody sydney gottlieb goes there yeah yeah so so after so sarah started publishing these papers so the very first uh awareness anyone would have had that dmt was even psychoactive as a psychedelic would have been stephen zara's papers um so that was in the late 1950s from 1956 up to kind of 1960 he published several papers in healthy people in schizophrenics and that kind of thing so the data was all there um the problem was is that well lsd had its foothold by then um it was extremely potent potent meaning you need a very small amount of the molecule to achieve the desired effect so you could you know in one gram you've got you know 100 000 doses or something like that um and whereas with dmt and you could swallow lsd you know drop it on your tongue dissolve it in lots of paper very very simple to to distribute whereas with dmt one um it was much less potent in terms of the amount you need instead of 50 micrograms you needed you know 30 to 50 milligrams uh and you needed to inject it that was a big issue people didn't like to mess with needles certainly in the west um and and so it was it was kind of a an exotic psychedelic you know if you were in the know um and you had access to a well-stocked dealer in the 1960s you could find uh dmt you know william burrows for example he was probably the first person to take dmt outside of a clinical setting he injected it um um that's right i forgot about that yeah leery as well you know and he's burrows one of the great thinkers of his time he was and he had a really important role actually in in in working out how ayahuasca worked did he yeah we can get to that okay yeah but um so yeah william burrows took it william burrows was horrified um he he took too much one day and he found himself in this he called the white white hot latticed ovens the the soulless insect people uh were kind of menacing him uh and he was he was appalled and he thought this is the the absolute horror show of all drugs and nobody should be taking this and so he wrote this kind of breathless letter of warning to timothy leary and timothy leary at the time he wasn't particularly well known he was kind of a neophyte uh you know this kind of tweed jacketed harvard psychologist who had just that year um had been to mexico and had his first experience with celos philosophy mushrooms so he was well primed for dmt um but burrows wrote this letter saying stay away from dmt it's it's a nightmare the nightmare the nightmare drug the nightmare hallucinogen he called it but of course timothy leary leary said challenge accepted challenge accepted um and so leary spoke to a psychiatrist uh friend who said that you know he'd he'd injected people with dmt and 90 had had a terrible experience uh really yeah yeah we don't exactly know who who this was uh but he said a psychiatrist working in l.a um who was injecting people with with dmt in his in his office and he said that 90 had a had a bad experience we don't know why that is but leary said leary was just kind of formulating his set and setting hypothesis that really came from leary the idea that the nature of your psychedelic experience comes down to the setting where are you who is with you and also your mind set and so he thought okay maybe if the set and setting is right so you're not in a clinician's psychiatrist's office she's where sick people go right where crazy people go but in fact in a beautiful environment um can you um actually induce a more pleasant experience so timothy leary um and richard alpert who's one of his kind of partners in crime shall we say during during that era um they were both injected with dmt and both had incredible beautiful experiences timothy leary described these angelic beings like elf-like insects he was the first person to really use that term elf uh in in in the early days of his life he was the first person to really use that term elf in in uh in describing the dmt state and now elves are the most famous beings within the dmt space well most just about everybody listening have they've never taken dmt and probably never will so we don't have to talk about our personal experiences if you don't want to i don't mind but can you describe from that first inhale what what do you see how does it feel so and this is not a recreational drug folks this is not a recreational drug it's not a party drug no it is not no it is not um it's a it's a dark quiet room lying on your bed kind of drug um so my first experience experienced the DMT way, way back in a place where it was completely legal. Well, if we're going to talk about yours, then you have to tell me what led up to it. How did you get the courage? Were you just like, well, I have to do it now? Yeah. I mean, I'd reached the stage where I'd been studying DMT, been fascinated by DMT for the best part of a decade. And I'd read all, by that point, all the Terence McKenna books, listened to his lectures, and it was like, okay, I need to find this molecule and actually try it. Otherwise, I'm just talking blindly. And so I managed through unspecified means to acquire some DMT in an unspecified location at an unspecified time. And so I'll kind of talk you through what happened to me. So I had a glass pipe, and I loaded it with what I thought was around sort of 50 milligrams of DMT. And I, first of all, I tried to, now we have these great vaporization systems. In those days, I just had a lighter. No volcano bag. No, nothing like that. It was all very, very basic, you know, like a crack pipe, basically. Yeah. And I didn't really know what I was doing. And so I was heating it, and it tasted awful. The smell is terrible. A lot of it was burning, probably. So it was smoke, you know, horrible acrid smoke as well. I couldn't get enough in my lungs. And I basically gave up for the evening. And then just as I was about to go to bed, like two o'clock in the morning, I think it was, I saw the pipe on the desk beside me. And I thought, okay, one more quick attempt. And I was a bit more relaxed this time for some reason. And I started inhaling the vapor, and then something happened. I just remember this, like this ping. It was a very distinct sound, like a very high-pitched pinging sound that was completely different to early in the evening. And somehow I knew that something was happening. So I continued inhaling. Then I had to put the pipe down. I laid down, and I was hurtled at great speed through this indescribably complex geometric imagery. People like, it's, I can't English it. It's, I'll understand. Un-Englishable. But straight away, and I don't know how I knew this, but I knew this with every fiber of my being, that I was, I wasn't just in a place, but I was in a place that was constructed by the hand of an immense and timeless intelligence that was vast, much older, far, far billions, trillions of years older than our universe. And I was in a place that was much more complex than our reality, more advanced, just indescribably strange. And when you're there, you know it to be true. You know it to be true. I had no shadow of a doubt. And that's what was so horrifying for me at the time. It was shocking, because I was expecting just to kind of go into a dream world and see elves dancing around. You know, I'd got all this stuff from McKenna. Had you done other, like, magic mushrooms or things before? Mushrooms. MDMA, not really a psychedelic, but yeah, I was familiar with the effects of drugs when they come on, but not that fast. When things start to change, you're like, okay, I've been here before. It's that breakthrough that's like, what is this? It's so vast. With mushrooms, it builds, and you feel the energy, and you can kind of settle into it. But with this, it's like rocket ship, you know, like a roller coaster. One moment, everything's normal, and then Literally, 20, 30 seconds later, you're just being fired into this place that's completely, you couldn't, there's no way I could have predicted it or anticipated what this was going to be like. I could have read all the books about DMT and listened to every single Terence McKenna lecture in existence, and I still wouldn't even be close to what this was. It was truly ontologically shocking that this place existed, and it was right there, and it was far more advanced, and it was this hyper-technology. A logical space that was built by the hand of an alien intelligence. I didn't see entities dancing around, but I felt the immensity and the undeniability of this presence, and it lasted two or three minutes. I don't remember all the details. I remember I lost any awareness of not just myself, but of even the concept of humanity. Not long, two, three minutes. Then gradually, I started to get these little fragments of memories of having been a human, as if my brain was kind of piecing back together my humanity. is like that yeah you start to become human again you become human again very that only a couple of minutes so yeah that's because of that janky method where yeah yeah i i i don't want to give people too much information but even if vaporized properly we're talking what 15 20 minutes most yeah i mean the peak itself i mean you you get into the peak within a minute inside a minute um then you're there in the breakthrough state probably between three four five six seven minutes and then you then you start to come down and then the after effects will last yeah 15 20 minutes you know when when i came back i i i just laid on my bed on my back all i could say was i was shaking and i said oh my god that's all i could say like i couldn't believe what had just happened to me i could not believe it um i remember writing a message to my friend you know on facebook messenger or something this is the most i would just i was i was euphoric but shocked at the same time it's like my god this really is it you know terence mckenna wasn't joking here this is this is something wow i need to yeah this is not melting walls or seeing colors it is not no no i mean one of the first i read a book i had a little section on psychedelics and described dmt and i was like i don't know if it's true or not but it's like a bit like lsd but but much shorter acting like 15 minutes and people some people will go into it thinking that's what it is just like taking lsd but very short uh duration but it's not nope you're you're it you cannot be prepared for it in a way i don't think um you can't anticipate or predict what it's going to be like and it will shock you the death by astonishment you know going back to that he was only half joking when he said true astonishment i think is a very rare emotion now we kind of use it to mean mildly surprised right that true astonishment uh where your mind cannot even begin to comprehend the immensity of something that's what dmt delivers and you can't really explain it you can't explain that you know your ego kind of dissolves into this oneness with everything and everything makes total sense yeah at the time it does it does yeah um and psychedelic therapy there's a there's something called integration did you do any type of integration work post trip no i mean this was um integration's big thing now but at the time maybe it was in certain specialist circles but at the time it wasn't i didn't really know what integration was uh but in a way it's like it's so fast and although yeah for 15 20 minutes i was shaking and i was shocked by the next morning um it's like my my brain had kind of thought okay we'll get we'll compartmentalize that somewhere yeah um let's put that away we'll put that away um so there wasn't any lingering after effects or anything like that you know it's it's neurologically it's a very benign molecule it's not going to hurt you physiologically right but your world your entire ontological foundation of your reality is going to be obliterated uh that's the problem yes and i don't recommend doing it alone um definitely not with open flame no no no no because you're going to be care just be careful guys yeah be so careful with it um best way to try to it would be i think using dmtx that you and strassman created it's probably a good way to explore it um coming up on a break when we come back i want to talk a little bit of chemistry and then sure and maybe you can convince us that those entities are not hallucinations i'll do my best all right i'll be right back so let me see if i can get this right we've got tryptophan gets decarboxylated into tryptamine imnt gets involved then we've got two stages of methylating to get to dmt is that about right yeah that sounds good that sounds like a pretty expensive process to keep in human biology or all biology so what is the evolutionary purpose of dmt and all these living things okay yeah so it's actually you know compared to most molecules i mean let's say lsd right lsd is not natural it's semi-synthetic but it's derived from um lysergic acid amide Um, which is natural and it's far more complex than dmt dmt is actually not only the most common naturally occurring psychedelic it's found in countless plant species hundreds um but it's also the simplest you go as you said you go from tryptophan you go to tryptamine and then one step then you got another step which is this dimethylation by indole n-methyltransferase inmt right um and so it's just two simple steps from tryptophan this amino acid um so so that's really to me that's there's something uncanny about that you would have this simple molecule that's everywhere um you know you walk through your local park and there's probably half a dozen different plant species all busily silently constructing the world's strangest yes psychedelic drug uh and you've no idea um and it's also found in in humans and we've known that since the 1950s when people started getting um schizophrenics to line up and be in a bottle basically sure uh yeah they found it in urine tests right exactly um so why is it there i don't think anyone's got a definitive answer so i can't give you a definitive answer usual uh answers are well it's an insect repellent or it's it's some kind of it's used to kill people and it's used to kill people and it's used to kill people um as kind of an anti-feeding and anti-predation kind of molecule um it affects the neurochemistry of insects let's say we know that psilocybin does that for example sure um that it would dissuade organisms you know predators from feeding on on a plant by producing dmt um i don't like i don't like that one i don't like that either it doesn't explain why because even because any mammal's going to die and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on very exciting answer is we don't really know why it's there we don't know why it's in humans we don't know why it's in plants but it is and it's very easy to make and it's just two steps from tryptophan so it's not like um they you know many molecules you have to go through many many steps something like morphine for example there's many steps to get to morphine um but to get to dmt it's very simple so basically all living organisms probably have the the enzymatic machinery to make dmt including humans um so it feels almost like you have this message in some way about this other place that's kind of embedded within our reality but it takes a certain amount of intelligence in order to decode that message you can't just munch on plants and have a psychedelic trip like you could with mushrooms um you can eat as many as you like and that's never going to have any effect um you need to isolate the molecule and actually like stephen czar as it did and that took humans all the way up until the 1950s to actually work out what this molecule was and how to use it techniques that are to administer it from a chemistry perspective what why are those methyl those bolt-on methyl groups so powerful it's because it's basically a serotonin molecule yes yeah so serotonin is five high hydroxy tryptamine so if you remove that hydroxy group you get tryptamine which is has no effect it doesn't get across the blood brain barrier very efficiently at all if you inject someone with serotonin sorry with tryptamine there are no psychoactive effects um so that that methylation makes the molecule slightly more fatty shall we say more lipid oil soluble allows it to get very rapidly into the brain um and then it binds to this um specific set of receptors the most famous one being the serotonin 5-ht2a receptor and this is responsible for its effects and we want to get into the neuroscience we can talk through exactly how that that process works i'd love to if you don't mind i don't mind please yeah so so psychedelics so what what are known as the classic psychedelics so dmt psd psilocybin mescaline those are the most famous ones they all work mainly through this serotonin receptor called the 5-ht2a receptor so there are many serotonin receptors and they all have different functions uh what a receptor does broadly receptors are embedded in the membrane of neurons so the neurons are these information generating cells of your brain they they generate these little electrochemical spikes which you can think of as like uh binary digits almost you know on and off that's all a neuron really can do uh it can fire it's called an action potential a spike or it can be quiet it's like a one and a zero uh and and neurons are generating these action potentials all the time or or not uh and then they have these chemical connections called synapses that allows them to share information see all of these millions of neurons that are that are connected in your that form your cortex cerebral cortex in your brain and the receptors of all different types of receptors for all different types of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators and other neurochemicals these chemicals bind to these receptors and they affect the way the neuron behaves they're like tuning dials if you like for the the neurons and the 5-ht2a receptor specifically is what's called an excitatory receptor it excites the neuron it makes it more likely to fire these electrochemical spikes and it makes it more likely to uh to fire in when it receives stimulation from another neuron so it excites the cortex are we worldly are we finding that psychedelics uh those neurotransmitters are concentrated in the specific parts of the brain so so the cortex so let's talk a little bit about the cortex so you have this outer layer of your brain this folded outer layer which is called the cortex in the newest part of the brain evolutionary and it has several layers um kind of six layers broadly and each layer of the cortex has a different function in terms of its connectivity whether it's receiving input or it's more like an output layer or it's more of an interconnection layer that kind of thing and the cortex is is responsible for constructing your world model this is absolutely fundamental the world you experience now the subjective world you experience the structure the content the dynamics everything you're experiencing that's in your visual world is being constructed by your brain um um you're not your brain isn't like a video camera it's kind of taking pictures of the outside world it has to construct a model of the environment that may or may not be the true structure of the environment which we never have direct access to so you say you're always living in kind of a like a waking dream in a sense you know annual seth calls it a waking hallucination i don't really like that term but anyway uh but later i think we'll get into uh your work with donald hoffman and and his theories which are really interesting yeah absolutely yeah that's a completely different take on the whole thing yeah much more fundamental but if we stick to the kind of the brain level you have this world model that's being always being constructed by your brain uh and we know this because you can manipulate your brain if i remove the top of your skull and start um playing around with an electrode in there i can change your world sure right nothing in the outside the environment changes but your world changes i can make you see um colorful patterns i can make you hear voices and just by stimulating different parts of the brain that are responsible for generating different aspects if you like of your uh of your world so we know that that's that's the case and if you take a psychedelic what does that do it changes your world it binds to these five ht2a receptors that are concentrated in layer five of the cortex one of the deeper layers of the cortex and what that does is it it kind of shakes up your world model the world model stops being kind of very rigid and well defined and becomes much more fluid and dynamic because these neurons are being stimulated by this 5ht2a receptor um the neurons start firing more often they start sharing information between each other so this very very rigid and precisely constructed world model which is the one you're using to kind of make sense of the environment starts to change things start to loosen up objects might start to morph or change their identity this is happening uh because of this this stimulation uh by the psychedelic um but with dmt something dmct seems to kind of transcend all of that goes beyond that so you can actually measure if you put someone an mri machine this work was initially done by robin carhart harris who's now at university of california san diego i got that wrong but anyway a university in california uh maybe san francisco um but anyway if you put someone in an mri machine and you put someone in a mri machine and you put someone in a and give them, inject them with psilocybin, for example, you can actually see how their brain activity changes so normally you can see the brain kind of moving between states in a very controlled manner as your brain is kind of constructing your world but then when you give psilocybin that activity starts to look more random it's as if the brain is moving more freely from state to state and so that kind of you mean tmt is more freely with psilocybin okay or lsd okay um but and so you can kind of measure the the entropy so the randomness in neural activity right what you see is you go from this baseline level where the brain is kind of ordered and then you start to see this increase in randomness so it goes up like this and this kind of maps quite well with the subjective experience your the world becomes more fluid your thinking becomes much more fluid and dynamic it's like you're kind of you're it's like heating up a piece of glass right the glass is very rigid and you heat it up and it starts to melt and you can kind of mold it to any kind of shape psychedelics are kind of doing that to the brain doing that to your world model and that's why you have this the effects of psychedelics but with dmt something different seems to happen you get this initial um increase in randomness but it's as if um the brain suddenly collapses into this new order so you go from the old order the original order which is the normal waking world model into this more uh fluid and dynamic state and then at the breakthrough uh it's like the brain has collapsed into this entirely new order which is this entirely new novel entirely alien um world is that when we start to lose the our ego that's from geico subconscious news i'm tammy racing thoughts broadcasting from your brain tonight's top worry if something happens to your apartment and you need to like stay in a hotel and pay for it that would be crazy right art palpitations has more that would be crazy tammy but you got surprisingly affordable renter's insurance through geico so it could be covered giving you peace of mind oh i love a story that ends well next up love stories are they all they're cracked up to be it feels good to worry less it feels good to geico part of what's going on yeah uh the ego is an interesting concept um in that it's it's not that well defined but there are certain networks in the brain that we think are responsible the default mode network is the one that's spoken about a lot sure responsible for um um the sense of self as this as distinct from the other from the environment um and what psychedelics do is because of this stimulation of these 5ht2a receptors those networks start to break down and that order starts to break down so you have all of these effects psychological subjective effects effects on the world effects on your sense of self uh they all start to break down and that the higher the dose becomes the the more pronounced those effects appear to be but with dmt it's not like there's just an increase in randomness because the dmt is not the mt world is not random uh it is very coherent uh it's exquisitely uh complex uh you know staggeringly coherent narrative complexity um it's like literally as if the normal waking world is not random it's like literally as if the normal waking world is not random it's like literally as if the normal waking world is not being switched off yep uh and a new world it's like those old radio sets where you go from dial you get one channel then you twist it and it's kind of noisy yeah that's kind of psychedelics and then finally if you twist it enough this entirely new crisp clear channel crackles through the speakers and that's kind of what dmt is doing um and you've called that world navigable it is navigable yeah excuse me um for most people it's not navigable for most people it's just like hold on um but with with experience yes you can you can navigate this world yes but the problem is um the problem i have um with the kind of the standard explanation of this dmt state um is that that this normal waking world is is a world that your brain kind of evolved to construct you know the moment that you emerge from the womb your brain is building sensory information from the environment through the eyes Etc and and using it to kind of construct this world model that's the only world model your brain knows how to build or should know how to build it's like you know if you you grow up speak in English you can't speak any other languages unless you learn them um and in the same way this normal waking world the should be the only world your brain knows how to construct but when you take dmt your brain starts constructing these entirely alien worlds that are that are far more complex far more intricate far more coherent and far more real feeling than the normal waking world it's not like dream you know when people dream they tend to dream of people they tend to dream of animals you know people in uh the Midwest will dream of people they will dream of dogs and cats right if you ask someone who lives in the Amazon rainforest what they dream of they'll dream of catching stingrays they'll dream of the animals they'll find in their environment this is obvious in a way you know when you dream your brain is simply constructing the normal waking world dream is like continuous really with the normal waking world the brain is using those models that it knows to construct a world in the absence of sensory inputs which is what dreaming is um so that's kind of makes sense so why then not dmt not dmt your brain starts constructing these worlds that it shouldn't know how to build well take us through the take us through the world so and me maybe we can talk about um dmtx because that's that's a protocol you develop with Rick Strassman and so this is intravenous dmt yeah keeping you in that state for a lot how long how long uh how long is a piece of string is the answer that okay so yeah so so Rick Strassman as many people will know he did the world's largest dmt study in the 1990s he injected them with dmt what's called a bolus injection so all the dmt at once or within like 30 seconds you get a very rises in the brain um they are they have this breakthrough experience and then almost as soon as it reaches the peak in the brain it starts to be metabolized and excreted exponential drop off and then when you reach a certain level in the brain you come out with the dmt state and so it's if you really want to study the dmt state you know it's geometry it's topology that the entities the language all that kind of stuff you need to be in there for a lot longer and so it occurred to me back in 2015 that dmt so I was aware of this technique from anesthesiology called Target Control intravenous infusion which is a technique they use in anesthesiology surgery so what they don't do when someone puts you to sleep they don't just inject you with a drug they inject you with a very fast acting anesthetic that if they just injected it you'd be asleep for a few minutes but they use what's called an infusion device an infusion machine so they deliver using a programmed infusion protocol they deliver the anesthetic into your bloodstream the aim being to keep your brain anesthetic concentration fairly fairly constant so they can keep you anesthetized for as long as they want as soon as they stop the machine a few minutes later you'll wake up beautiful thing and they can manipulate the the depth of your anesthesia as well so this is has been the mainstay of anesthesiology for decades um and it occurred to me that the the kind of the requisite properties of of the anesthetic drug are the same as dmt it needs to be short acting it needs it can't build up in the blood stream it can't have subjective tolerance right right so the effect of the drug must remain constant throughout the whilst you're anesthetized otherwise you'd start to wake up even though the drug was still pumping into your brain dmt has that as well Rick strassman showed that you can inject someone with dmt and you can measure the intensity of the experience using his rating scale then you can inject them again 30 minutes later and they will have the same intensity of experience you can do repeat that over and over again so it occurred to me I thought by the way you know dmt has all of these properties that we need for Target controlled intravenous infusion so why don't we work together me and Rick and actually develop a model for this a mathematical model of dmt's distribution metabolism excretion that you need to build this kind of Target controlled intravenous infusion model but just replace the anesthetic drug with dmt so I wrote to Rick and I said I have this idea and I need your data these blood data we need blood sampling data uh to build this model and he he had it on some old hard drive this old Excel file which he kindly sent to me and we set to work we built this model did you have to convince him or talk him into it or explain the protocol or no um I think he he when he wrote dmt the spirit molecule in 2000. um he he mentioned towards the end of the book that maybe an infusion would be better so it wasn't an entirely alien idea to him um um he said you know when I came along with this very concrete proposal to write this paper we'd call it extended state dmt later it became known as dmtx and we published this model kind of a proof of principle basically to say this should work. We didn't know if it would work, but it should work. We should be able to stabilize the DMT state and hold someone there for 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, three hours, however long. And then that got a lot of attention, and the Imperial College team in London picked it up and said, okay, let's do this in humans. Let's see if it actually works. And in, I think, 2020, around that time, they recruited a dozen people for a pilot study and were able to indeed show for just 30 minutes, but 30 minutes is a lot longer than a normal DMT trip. They were able to stabilize the DMT state and maintain fairly stable intensity of experience. And since then, a number of groups have kind of extended this to two, three hours. I now work with a company called Eleusis, E-L-E-U-S-I-S, in the Caribbean, and we've got a special license to actually bring anyone onto the island and to undergo several DMT-X sessions with qualified medical practitioners, psychiatrists, anesthesiologists, and anyone now can basically spend as much time as they like, really, within the DMT space, exploring. And so, you know, go to eleusismind.com and you can also, you know, kind of sign up and spend a few days on the island. Eleusis went live. It was in March, right? Yes, so the first cohort was in March. The first cohort. So what are people seeing? Well, it's very early days, so we don't kind of have kind of published reports or anything, but the. But are we all seeing the waiting room, navigating the space, the entities? So when the Imperial College team published their DMT-X study, we actually did, like, an online webinar with all of the, or several of the participants. Me and Graham Hancock actually chaired it. That's still online. People can find that. Basically, for Andrew Gallim or Graham Hancock, you should be able to find that. And we spoke to several of them, including the first subject zero, as I call him, Carl Smith. He was the first person to undergo DMT-X, in a controlled kind of research setting. It was five doses, increasing doses, and I think every couple of weeks, they'd go in and they'd be injected, infused with DMT for 30 minutes, and then we got to speak to them about their experiences. And the thing about DMT is that it's a very varied experience, and no two experiences are always the same. Carl Smith, particularly, he's one of my colleagues at New Nautics. We're both directors. He found that the entities over the sessions, because there's several, you know, five sessions of DMT-X, the entities started to notice that he was coming back rather too often and spending a little bit too much time in there. And he describes the sense that the entities were saying, not you again. You know, you're back again. You know, as if there was this kind of continuity between the experience. They weren't totally isolated experiences, but there was this continuity between the experiences. And during one experience, one DMT-X session, he was being scanned by some machine. This is in the normal waking world, right? Like an MRI machine or something. And he was being scanned. His brain was being scanned. And the entities were aware of this. The entities kind of rushed in. And he said they seemed, just a little bit confused. Like they're the ones normally doing the scanning and not whatever this was. They didn't seem to understand what was going on. Most people, when they take DMT, they aren't being scammed. Right. They're doing it, you know, in the back room or basement or something. Did he describe what they look like? He didn't. No, he didn't describe what they look like. But he said there were very, very large numbers of, they were crowding in as if they'd seen something going on. And they came crowding in. And there was another guy called Anton Bilton. He actually funded the study. He has this great institute called the Tiringum Institute and has these wonderful private symposia every few years. And he funded it. And he said, "I want to be a subject since I'm paying for this bloody thing." And not a cheap study by any stretch of the imagination. And he described an experience where he found himself in like the waiting room kind of place with these morphing geometric walls. And these beings were looking down upon him. He called them the gingerbread men, these elfish-like beings, small beings. And they seemed to be, he said, "They always check the back of my neck. Always do this. I don't know why." He said, "The only thing I can think is they were checking to see if there was a cord attached, whether I'd kind of passed permanently to their side." Wow. Yeah. And then when they were satisfied that he hadn't, that he was kind of there temporarily, they started showing him things. And one thing that happens quite regularly is they show you devices that are kind of like electronic, some kind of mechanical device or electronic device, like a jewel-encrusted device. So it's like, oh, that's a jewel-encrusted pad. He described it, which is interesting, right? It's like, imagine an iPad, I guess, with knobs and wheels and dials and numbers, all this kind of stuff, and try showing it to him as if he was supposed to do something with it or make sense of it. But of course, he couldn't. But this term, jewel-encrusted pad, is very interesting because Timothy Leary, back in the 1960s, he wasn't aware of this, Anton. But I said to him, "Jewel-encrusted pad, is that your terminology?" He said, "Yeah, that's how I describe it." Because Timothy Leary, back in the 1960s, says that these elf-like insect beings were proffering this jewel-encrusted pad, like a device that was some kind of futuristic iPad thing. Would an Amazonian see that? Because they'd have no context for anything like that. Would they see that? That's a good question. We don't know, right? This is the kind of study that needs to be done, is get people who are completely naive to pure injected DMT and bring them in and see, what do they see? Because the experience is likely to be very different to ayahuasca for a number of reasons. But yeah, do they see the same kind of technological devices? Or do they not, and what is the reason for that? But yeah, there's always this sense that you're interacting with some kind of extremely advanced species, extremely advanced cognitively, intellectually, technologically, like a hyper-technological kind of species or ecology. And they seem often eager to show you things, devices, impossible things, nine-dimensional Fabergé eggs, Terence McKenna used to describe them, just weird things, liquid light crystal machine strings, things that you can't really, but just things, as if they're trying to impart some kind of information or trying to make you understand, but you don't understand. And that's what's so frustrating about it. And Anton, in the same way, when he was presented with this jewel-encrusted pad, he couldn't make any sense of it. And eventually, they just gave up, and they kind of, as if there was like a , like a swipe, as if, and that the whole scene completely changed, and he was in this completely different environment. Yeah, so lots of very strange experiences, and lots of very strange experiences coming out. But I think what, where DMTX really comes into its own is being able to spend. Imagine if you'd sent in a mathematician or a linguist who was familiar with strange symbolisms and languages or whatever, somebody who could spend an hour within the space interacting with these beings and trying to extract certain types of information from these beings. That's how I see the future of a DMTX program, as opposed to research programs of the past, which have generally been, have you taken psychedelics before? Yes, good. Do you have any heart conditions? No, okay, there you go. Go in, tell us what you see. But it's not-- With DMTX, you can bring them out, can't you? Get them to describe what they saw and then put them back? Exactly, so not only can you send in specialists, so if you want to study the topology or the geometry of the, you send in a mathematician that's familiar with these kind of things and they can say, oh, this is a seven-dimensional space or these are the symmetry groups that are on the walls of this space. They can tell you exactly what's going on mathematically and what's changed compared to the normal waking world. And they can spend, yes, they can spend, it could be deep within the space for an hour or longer, or you can adjust in real time. So they can have a device where they can adjust the infusion rate. the amount of DMT being infused into their bloodstream, they can manipulate that in real time because dmt is so short acting um if you bring down the infusion rate within just a minute or so you start to come out and then you can communicate with the team and say i'm seeing this i'm seeing this and they might say oh can you can you look for this or can you ask them this okay i'm going back in there you go back down again uh you know so you have this ability to manipulate the depth in real time it's fascinating what what got you thinking that maybe what people are seeing is connected and it's not a hallucination that it's that it's your realm or yeah i mean i so what i think is going on with dmt um is i don't think you're going anywhere that's really important you know it's not like another dimension or something like that um even in the dmt state the brain is constructing this model right so normally what's happening when you're awake and completely sober is your brain is using sensory information let's say through your eyes and it's using it to kind of um tune and keep its model kind of tuned to the environment basically um now when you take dmt the brain starts constructing this alternate world model um and it's as if there's some alternate source of sensory information coming into the brain that's kind of modulating that dmt world so you're not going anywhere you don't have to kind of travel anywhere it's simply like switching the channel right if you have a tv set and you're watching channel one um then you switch the tv set to channel two and it nothing goes anywhere it's simply that you've changed the receiving well you know you said that it's like you're receiving an alternate reality how do you know that you're receiving it and not creating it well you are creating it um you're always creating the world model uh but again from the in the normal waking world you're receiving sensory information which is informing that creation so it's it's it's like it's it's always it's always being created by the brain but it's mapped to the environment the normal waking world right it's modulated and it's kind of constrained by sensory information coming from the environment right now in the dmt state what i think is happening is that your your brain is constructing this alternate world but it's being constrained by some other source of sensory inputs which i think distinguishes it from a hallucination the reason i think that because you could say you're quite right but it's purely constructed right there's no other source of information coming in it's literally like a kind of dream state but again you know the dream state is very different we can explain the dream state the dmt state is like this it's like the brain has started speaking a language it never learned to speak it's constructing these worlds that have no relationship to the normal waking world no relationship to the world the brain evolved and learned to construct um and you it's hard to explain that you know if a five-year-old british child started speaking some obscure dialect of some south american indigenous rainforest language right and doing so fluently that would be completely confounding unless he'd been taught it uh in the same way the brain switching to constructing this alien world uh so efficiently um is very very difficult to explain uh and that's kind of the foundation of of why i think there's something going on more than just mere than mere hallucination with dmt but we need to test it um now there are a number of ways you might do that for example you you might look for you know if two people for example are going let's say interacting with the same entity as some people claim to be able to do can you kind of pass information through that entity can someone deposit information into the dmt state i want to ask you to retrieve it i want to ask you about that the blue yellow test blue yeah i want to ask you about that before we do that mentioned uh robin card harris let's steal man straw man because he he disagrees and thinks it's hallucination yes yeah why does he think that and why is he wrong i mean i want you to be right but it's you know logically parsimoniously it seems like hallucination is what it is but i i prefer your theory because it's just more interesting well i think i i'm not going to say that robin is wrong um but i think i think robin and all kind of mainstream button down neuroscientists start with that the assumption that we're dealing with hallucination and i think that that's reasonable actually uh it should always be your default position um in most of my work i would say 80 of what i've done in the last 20 years it's not actually trying to convince people what dmt is but actually trying to convince people what it's not actually trying to explain to people why i don't think it's hallucination rather than telling them that i have the answer that you know it's the spirit world or whatever the astral plane um i really try to focus on kind of why i think it's very difficult to explain dmt purely as a uh as a hallucination and robin would say well this is just um i can't say what robin would say uh but robin assumes that we're dealing with some kind of information um some kind of um some kind of hallucination that your brain when perturbed by dmt is is constructing um these worlds perhaps informed by archetypal structures that's a big thing i know with robin he's he often takes this very jungian angle he thinks that well we can these are archetypal structures that's where they're coming from these are inherited patterns that's why everyone sees certain types of entities it's because these are embedded archetypal structures in every culture in every culture has little people right exactly um but i i i think that would work if the thing thing is that archetypes are not they're not images first of all you know an archetype really um we know now anyway um that an archetype is really just a it's a it's a very complex thing to think about and i think that's why we're talking about it in this video but i think that's why we're talking about it in this video because it's a very complex thing to think about and i think that's why we're talking about it in this video because it's a very complex thing to think about and i think that's why we're talking about it in this video because it's a very complex thing to think about and i think that's why we're talking about it in this video because it's a very complex thing to think about and i think that's why we're talking about it in this video because it's a very complex thing to think about and i think that's why we're talking about it in this video because it's a very complex thing to think about and i think that's why we're talking about it in this video it will it will be naturally kind of scared and start crying if it's separated from his mother it will start crying these are instinctive behaviors um that are essential right in in animals we have certain instinctive behaviors that don't need to be learned if you take a pair of young rats in a cage they're entirely raised alone put them together in a cage they will start playing um they will start scrapping and all this kind of stuff um all instinctive they don't need to be taught how to play it's just instinctive um you put a cat a few cat hairs into that cage right they freeze they're scared it doesn't work with dog hairs it works with cat hairs right so they have this innate program we might call it a cat archetype doesn't mean they can dream of cats or that they can imagine cats they can't but they have this innate response to a cat they know what that smell is they know that that smell they don't know what it is but they know that instinctively that they need to be a little bit careful because there's something unsettling there's something dangerous uh here um and they don't need to be taught that and that's kind of important and in the same way humans have lots of these archetypes the mother archetype the father archetype the stranger the wise old man what's the wise old man well it's an elder member of the tribe who has a lot of life experience and wisdom and who you should listen to um that the trickster this is someone probably from outside the tribe maybe who you need to be a little bit careful around you know should you reveal your darkest secrets to them or should you remain tight-lipped should you listen to what they say or should you should you ignore them you know these these are all types of social interactions that have been essential in as social humans for millennia tens of millennia and so these are kind of hardwired and so these become associated with certain types of people we call the archetypes but they're not they're just images um they don't endow you with the the ability to construct images but you learn to construct images associated with them as you do as you learn your brain learns to construct the normal waking world they become associated with certain types of the mother archetype is becomes associated with your mother uh and that kind of thing so archetypes are kind of limited um in what they give you they give you these very kind of quick and dirty ways of responding to humans there's certain types of humans that you're likely to meet in the environment that you should respond to in certain ways you don't respond to your mother in the same way you respond to a complete stranger in a dark alley we have these hard-wired archetypes that allow us to differentiate those respond in an appropriate way um but they don't give you hyper-dimensional worlds filled with non-a non-human non-animal beings that are far more complex than humans you know they don't give you all of that stuff um no and so it's still it's still doesn't explain even if you invoke the archetypes why and how the brain is able to construct these these things so reliably but again i understand that not everyone is going to be convinced by this and i don't necessarily expect them to uh be convinced by it i'm not too trying to convince them that the DMT world really you really are interacting with other intelligences in the DMT state but I'm just trying to trigger a little a little sliver of doubt in your mind that actually there maybe is something slightly unusual going on that we need to study we need to we need to really study this space and study these entities and with an open mind and not just assume from the get-go that it's just a hallucination and our job is simply to explain how this hallucination works because there's so much going on in DMT state that I think remains a true mystery. Do we know if Robin has tried DMT? I don't want to out him the reason I ask is if you've tried it then you inherently feel like you're connected to everything else. Yeah I do know the answer to that question. I'm not sure if I can give you it. That's fair enough because when I read his quote about hallucinations I was thinking Robin I don't know if you've taken it because it's pretty mind-opening but there are some problems with it that I want to talk about as we move along. You mentioned rats which brought me to a question I wanted to ask. I think we're finding that under cardiac arrest brain's being flooded with DMT. Yeah what do you think is going on there? Ah okay there's a bit of a story there. So again the reason I mentioned earlier that people have been looking for DMT in humans since the 1950s and there's a reason for that because there was this idea that something called the transmethylation hypothesis of schizophrenia which was the idea that you know serotonin also comes from tryptophan and tryptamine but if you kind of divert off the serotonin production pathway you can get very easily to DMT. So when people started when Zara particularly started and other people started publishing studies showing that DMT was psychedelic and that it could easily be produced from tryptophan they thought well maybe what's causing these abnormal psychologies in schizophrenics is that they have this disorder with their tryptamine metabolism and that they're producing too much DMT. So this makes sense right? And so easy to test they started looking for DMT in urine and in blood in saliva etc and they found it but the problem is that they found it in basically everyone. Right. And there are some studies that I think there's been over a hundred studies now looking at DMT levels in humans since the 1950s and there's never been there's never really convincing evidence that some studies say oh there's more DMT in schizophrenics other studies say no there's more DMT. Right. They say no there isn't it's certainly not definitive and does it even make any sense schizophrenics don't tend to you know really like schizophrenic visual hallucinations when they're there mainly they're auditory they're hearing voices but when they do have visual hallucinations they tend to be of normal appearing normal sized humans. And they tend to be in the same space. Right. Where when you're on DMT you're not here anymore you you are gone. Exactly yeah so it's like that it's like you're in a waking dream it's like. Yes. You know your your brain is inserted human into your world model inappropriately. Right. They interact with the environment they sit on chairs that they walk through doors they don't walk through walls they do they seem to obey the laws of physics right. That's your brain kind of again using its stored object models and models of the world but not doing it quite appropriately. That can be that's relatively easy to explain. But anyway going back to. The rats yeah so. The the idea so. The pineal gland this is basically taking us to the pineal gland so Rick Strassman in the 1990s he proposed that DMT we know that the pineal gland is producing melatonin this tiny little gland about the size of the end of my. Pinky sits right in the center of the brain it has this exalted position in mystical tradition for many many years. And Rick Strassman suggested that perhaps pineal gland was releasing DMT. And that this was responsible for certain old states of consciousness or very specifically the near death experience. This actually I should give proper credit to Jace Calloway in the 1980s he proposed that dreaming was due to DMT that when you dream your your brain stops. Tryptamine. And metabolism changes and your brain stops producing serotonin and basically start producing DMT and that causes dreaming that was his hypothesis he have two hypotheses one is the DMT causes dreams which I don't think is true either dreams are nothing like DMT right and then the near death experience that's more compelling yes it's more compelling there have been some recent studies that showed there are very there is a kind of a quite a large overlap between the kinds of experiences people have during near death experiences and the DMT. Phenomenology they're not exactly the same only 10 to 20% of those people have that experience the rest don't exactly yeah including Don Hoffman actually but that's another story we were almost I can't wait so so what do you think is happening yeah why is it what why did we evolve to have that there so is that why we're seeing the tunnel when I see the Virgin Mary or I see my grandmother my mother and I seeing an entity so that's the hypothesis right so really. So Rick Strassman said that when you die when you're in during the dying process the brain is flooded with DMT and that this is kind of the the conduit by which the soul exits the body it's a very mystical kind of it's not purely a scientific he's definitely straight into the mystical realms here kind of exited the scientific arena a little bit you kind of have to kind of have to yeah but it was purely hypothetical it was just a hypothesis but a number of people caught on to and so the DMT. So the DMT dream DMT death thing has become kind of embedded in public consciousness but they're both purely hypotheses however more recently a guy called a biochemist I think he's a biochemist Edie Fresca is working with Rick Strassman and Dennis McKenna he found that DMT when you if you if you have some neurons that are deprived of oxygen so brain cells you deprive them they are very oxygen hungry. If you deprive them from oxygen we deprive them of oxygen they die very quickly this is why strokes are so devastating in a very short period of time blood flow to certain parts of the brain it's compromised that that part of the brain starts to die which is why strokes need to be treated so so rapidly is an absolute critical you know clinical emergency but what he found is that if you deprive neurons of oxygen and added some DMT to the mix. If you deprive neurons of oxygen and added some DMT to the mix. The neurons survived much longer. Neuroprotective. Neuroprotective and it's actually a particular receptor. Called the Sigma one receptor yes it's not the not the serotonin receptor Sigma one receptor binds to this and it protects the neurons in some way this biochemical cascade that helps helps the neurons to survive for much longer so then you think about this oh wait a minute what happens during the dying process well your cardiovascular and respiratory system starts to die. Your respiratory system starts to collapse your brain is starved gradually more and more starved of oxygen now this is precisely the time when you know if you do come back right if you don't die this is precisely the time when you need as much DMT in your brain as possible to help protect your brain so if you do come back the brain is protected because this is the most oxygen hypoxia sensitive organ in the body and so it would make sense that if you're dying that somehow DMT and dodging the oxygen is going to cause you to die and that's exactly the time when you need as much DMT in your brain as possible to help protect your brain so if you do come back the brain is protected because this is the most oxygen you know hypoxia sensitive organ in the body and so it would make sense that if you're dying that somehow DMT and dodging the oxygen is going to cause you to die. DMT and dodging us DMT production is ramped up very very rapidly you get this flood of DMT in the brain which protects the brain doesn't explain the experience however because you can do this with any molecule that binds to the sigma-1 receptor so it suggests there's some connection there with the dying process and so they recently they they tested this in in rats they would they would stop the rat's heart induce basically cardiac arrest in a rat and they would they have to do a lot of tests. and they would they have these things called these like micro what are they called I forget but anyway they have this system where they can actually measure they can put this device probe directly into a rats living rats brain and actually measure in real time the levels of various molecules kind of a credible thing and they found indeed that when the rat heart stopped levels of DMT rose very very spike in DMT. there was also other neurotransmitters that were spiking as well so whether it's specific for DMT is not doesn't seem to be but it kind of fits together right that when you're dying the brain or the brain or could be the lungs we don't know but levels of DMT in the brain at least rise this protects the brain have they have they been able to test on the rats different brain activity. no so you're suggesting like they can measure the DMT. measure the the NDE of them right I'm wondering experience there it sounds like all mammals would do this or it's what it sounds like I'm just wondering does every animal when it goes through this process does their reality change do they move. move to this new dimension this is it yeah unless unless you kind of undergo a rebirth as a rat we're not likely to find that out i mean you certainly you can measure couldn't you test couldn't you test their brain waves to see yes you can you can you can but whether you can do that at the same time as this micro it's called micro dialysis that's you can do that at the same time as this measuring the levels i think you probably have to do it separately you know you have these like tiny little mri machines very cute little yeah you could probably do that it's like a barbie mri yeah i don't think it's been done though but um it's yeah a quick sidetrack and then i want to get to blue yellow 5meo dmt is something that i'm not interested in doing but that seems to be real dark ego death very quickly where with dmt there's some ego dissolving but you're still you're still narrating and you're still remembering so there is you're still kind of driving for 5meo is a little bit you're more observing and you kind of go into the void yeah they they used to call 5meo and dmt the power and the glory oh right so dmt is the glory it's it's very it's it's obviously it's characterized by extremely content rich it's extremely visual it's full of stuff more full of stuff than the normal waking world um so it's a beautiful experience in many it can be horrifying as well but it is a beautiful rich you know incredibly exquisitely rich and complex kind of experience yeah not everybody from dmtx had a had a glorious experience i read a couple that were like those evil motherfuckers or i've read a couple of those dark ones oh there are some dark ones yeah for sure but generally it's less than 10 percent yeah it's a bad trip it's a bad trip um but yeah i carl smith going back to him he was subject zero imperial college he said to me many years ago he says if dmt is like the fourth dimension 5meo is like the 12th dimension yeah it's like you go past all the form you you transcend form if you go far enough beyond you you can actually go beyond dmt this highly structured form and content rich state into the void into pure white light of consciousness itself that's the 5meo and he actually said during his dmtx experience that he was able to sometimes see the 5meo space kind of there some way away whilst he was in the dmt space as if he could almost reach it as if they were connected in some way that's very interesting yeah that's very interesting um i don't know if you want to say but have you experienced 5meo uh and i like you i'm in no hurry i've got my hands full with dmt yeah i'm in no hurry either because yeah from geico subconscious news i'm tammy racing thoughts tonight you just left for work and had a non-specific feeling that something was happening to your place and it wasn't good damn exactly tammy it could be smoke damage theft or just too much caffeine but you can't stop thinking about it but with renters insurance through geico your stuff is covered so you don't have to worry and that's great because the weekend is coming up and it's chalk full of social obligations that are ready to fill that void oh boy will they dad it feels good to worry less it feels good to geico and you can buy that online from these churches don't do that i don't do that don't buy anything from the churches don't go chasing toads down in um what was what was that church that you that you criticized they're still in business by the way are they really oh yes yes yes good yeah it was the church of used to be called the church of the church of salim of oxen then it became the church of the sacred synthesis i think yep yeah they're still they're still operating and um it's a couple of lawyers that are running basically a church farm i think they've claimed that they've helped create something like 80 to 100 of these sacrament churches they i mean they wrote a couple of books on how to do it to get around being able to buy drugs in the mail yeah yeah yeah but i just want people to know that that's it's not legal what they're doing no so so so don't send them money no no i mean they they say that their sacrament doesn't contain they said it doesn't contain any the illegal parts of the mushroom is that the psilocybin the psilocin they said it doesn't contain any of that and it's just xylomethoxin this molecule sacred molecule that they produce but actually when people analyze samples of the sacrament it actually contained no xylomethoxin whatsoever and it was purely just it was magic mushrooms so they've been shipping that to people um including internationally as well oh boy um so you pay a you know subscription fee and um you get shipped these allegedly perfectly legal mushrooms because xylomethoxin itself molecule isn't illegal that should be completely legal but actually if someone was to if one of these samples was was intercepted it's like you can get in really serious trouble depending on where you lived um it's and and it's such as what really annoys me about them is that it's such a simple thing to do um you know he had this vision that um if you feed five methoxy dmt to magic mushrooms they start converting five methoxy dmt to xylomethoxin simple chemical step wasn't that based on debunked research though it was the hamilton morris recently debunked it yeah okay by a guy called gartz uh but anyway you know once they'd done that experiment nothing wrong with doing the experiment they should have done the obvious thing which is to analyze chemically analyzed it shouldn't have been left to some outside person some independent group to actually analyze their mushrooms and check that it doesn't contain psilocybin and psilocin and actually contains what they say it contains they just said oh it feels completely different to mushrooms completely biased subjective uh way uh um um of kind of appraising this this mushroom and then when a group did actually analyze it as i said there was no xylomethoxin in there whatsoever um and of course they threatened to they tried to um sue them for one million one million dollars literally it was you know several people lots of people they tried to sue well they're lawyers they're not chemists they're not scientists they're lawyers so they're they're gonna sue they lost every case they've sued yeah of course um yeah so guys don't that's um andrew won't say but i will um greg lake and ben we stay away from those churches that's the uh i feel like those those churches kind of cloud the legitimate research don't you well it depends on the church i guess i mean i think i think humans really do have a um there's a god-given right to alter their consciousness and however they they they feel fit um and if that includes using psilocybe mushrooms or ayahuasca or dmt or whatever i don't think that should be a crime and i think there's something extremely wrong with the idea that certain states of consciousness are basically illegal i mean yes it's the molecule but really not the molecule you know what's important is what it does to you what it does to your consciousness and so it basically means that the lsd induced consciousness is going to be illegal the dmt induced state of consciousness is illegal the dmt induced state of consciousness is an illegal state of consciousness um so i i think i i can fully understand people who who would try to find loopholes in the law and you know more power to them to do that uh but when you start creating churches i think then you you there's a danger of you getting into kind of cultish territory starting your own religion um some for some people it's clearly just a way of getting around the law but for other people like the church of asylum of oxen for example it becomes much more than that and they start making big big money from this i mean the fifty thousand dollars a month i think was a number don't quote me on that but it was a big number i think the lawsuit is a hundred thousand a month yeah okay there you go so a hundred thousand dollars a month uh and then some some guys publish a paper basically saying that you're the entire foundation of your sacrament you know people are paying a hundred dollars a month what it is for 30 grams of dried mushrooms that could be obtained for pennies really if you grow your own um uh someone shows that that's nonsense and that it's not scientifically valid um go from a hundred thousand dollars a month to a very small number you can imagine them being pissed off by that but it's their own fault yeah yeah we'll leave on that that up note about the churches all right we'll be right back guys it's going to get wild i wanted to ask you about this 2021 something you posted going back retrieved and carefully restored from the archives of the highly secretive now allegedly defunct laboratory for reality engineering tokyo with its own psychedelic molecular technology technical manual that is not a paper that is not a scientific paper that's what is that a world building an arg what what were you doing so that's from my so my second book reality switch technologies psychedelics as tools for the discovery and exploration of new worlds so that was kind of a concept book i mean fundamentally it's a book about how do psychedelic molecules alter the structure and dynamics of your world how do they allow you to explore other worlds basically it's a it takes you through the all the way from the chemistry through to the biochemistry and the pharmacology and the neuroscience and looks at dmt looks at the classic psychedelics generally it looks at salvinorin it looks at even ketamine things like that and basically it's like a manual for understanding psychedelics basically but it was kind of like a concept book in that i wanted i wanted to give it this kind of um this kind of feeling as a i guess like this kind of cyberpunk vibe as being this yes this kind of old document from this defunct reality engineering institute in tokyo that was the vibe uh you know kind of akira kind of thing that's what i wanted so if you if you actually buy that book the whole book looks like it's been kind of photocopied it's like one of these declassified cia documents with all the stamps on and the retracted bit no that you could still get that i'm gonna i'm gonna do that yeah it's i love i love that book and that whole reality there's some photos in the center of the book that that purported to be from this now defunct secretive reality engineering institute in tokyo which of course is just bigger than my imagination i bet a lot of people hopped on board though with that a lot of people did yeah they would write to me as well and say hey i think there's a problem with the printing on this book it looks like it's been photocopied so yeah that's part of the design i thought it was great um so let's talk about the the blue yellow screen test right how does that work and what what are you trying to prove and is that connected to traces of other with uh with don and never yeah so so obviously you know i can talk until the cows come home until you know explaining why i think dmt is more than hallucination um but we really need real tests uh experiment what what are the kind of experimental tests that we can do uh that that can distinguish between actual interfacing with some kind of intelligence versus pure hallucination um and and so in 2015 i started working with uh a non-profit in florida called new nautics and now one of the directors we we're interested in kind of kind of like we describe it as like a seti of the mind kind of program rather than looking for intelligence out there in the cosmos we're looking for intelligence in the inner paths to outer space as rick strassman called it um and and so we're interested in kind of spearheading and developing research various research projects um within this kind of psychedelic arena to actually study things that other people don't study right actually most people assume it's hallucination and so they wouldn't dream of doing these kind of experiments trying to actually test that um and so new nautics people can go to the new nautics website new nautics.org n-double-o-n-a-u-t-i-c-s.org find out all about the work we do people can even donate if they want to to help kind of fund that kind of research um and now with the dmtx technology now that we have this ability um to uh extend the dmt state we can actually do experiments now and now we even have the venue i mentioned elusis earlier uh ele usis based on the hallucinian mysteries so uh we have this legal setting where people can go and we can actually bring in cohorts we're like the research arm of elusis at new nautics we can design these experiments and we can actually bring people onto the the island in in the caribbean st vincent and the grenadines um and um perform experiments aimed at studying the dmt space and testing the dmt space doing experiments within the dmt space and so this blue yellow so basically what we want to know is when someone goes into the dmt space and they're interacting with some kind of entity let's say are they real interacting with some kind of independent agency and how do we test that and it's one can imagine a whole suite of different experiments that one could do i don't think there is kind of one mic drop experiment that's going to settle the question once and for all you can imagine various research programs aimed at testing that and one broad type of experiment is looking for um some kind of correlation um within the dmt experience that that can't be uh explained in terms of that the subject couldn't know right so i i mentioned earlier this idea of um someone depositing information into the dmt space and someone else retrieving it later on that would show there's some sort of communication channel another type of experiment which is this blue yellow one you mentioned uh is can a dmt entity can they track some kind of external variable that the subject doesn't know right so it could be the simplest case is some kind of binary variable right it could be switching between two colors right so in another room completely isolated from the subject you have a computer screen that's set to randomly switch at random intervals between two different variables most simplest idea would be two colors right a blue screen and a yellow screen simple as that what we want to know is that the dmt is a variable that's set to randomly switch between two different variables uh is can some entity can their behavior in some way be tracked to that variable right so for example the subject goes into the dmt space starts interacting with an entity here we've got trained people who can reliably interact and with with certain entities and then basically we can ask the subject um to basically at intervals at set intervals they need to say okay is is the screen blue or yellow right based upon your experience right they could be asking the entity directly um is it blue or yellow now or it could be just like what feeling what what are the dominant colors within the space maybe they're not even interacting with an entity uh just what vibe do you get based upon your experience um do you are you leaning more towards blue now or leaning more towards yellow and sometimes that might be obvious you know if the experience becomes brightly colored yellow then they would say yellow but it might be much more subtle than that they might have to kind of guess a little bit but the idea basically is simply that um when you when you perform that experiment with the subject you compare the actual random flipping between blue and yellow or whatever other binary variable you choose is there a correlation statistical correlation that is beyond what would be expected by chance and if if so if you achieve that then that suggests that yes the dmt state the entities within the dmt state are the entities within the dmt state and they're the ones that are in the dmt state can somehow track so it's not it's not like many people have proposed experiments where you go into the dmt space and you say to an entity if you're so smart um you know um break down this complex number this this large number into its unique prime factors basically asking them to uh perform perform things perform mathematical operations i think that's that's quite an ask i don't want to do that i probably don't want to do that didn't you have one entity who just said we're done for today for today oh yeah we'll get to that okay yeah that's the to do with the lockout effect okay very interesting i didn't mention that actually that's another reason why i don't think but we'll get to that okay but yeah so so i think this is a much simpler experiment uh in that you're simply asking someone to basically say blue or yellow what makes you think that the entities can see into our world so easily we don't know that we don't know that um which is why you have a number of experiments so you might be asking again you know deposit and retrieval that's like you know you're asking for a deposit and retrieval that's like you're asking for a deposit and retrieval that's like you're asking for a deposit and retrieval that's like different here you're looking at an information channel uh into and out of the dmt state this is more tracking an external variable um you might ask the entities to or sometimes rather than giving the entities tasks this is something i really struggle with um is that you requiring the cooperation of an entity for them even to know what you mean there's nothing guaranteed we'll get to this when we talk about don hoffman there's nothing guaranteed in my current model of of dmt that's that requires or even implies that these entities are highly intelligent in the human sense but they seem to occupy a space that is um geometrically dimensionally and topologically very very different and so they're doing things within that space that cannot be done uh within um the the the the the the the normal waking world uh and they kind of betray their intelligence in a way um you don't need to ask them to do things they just do things that the human brain can't right so if it's a hallucination then obviously what that entity can do is limited by what your brain can do right the entity starts speaking ancient greek and you don't know ancient greek we've got a problem here right um now if an entity starts performing mathematics operations starts doing things right that your human brain cannot do then we've got a problem here to explain um andres gomez emilson who works who's part of or founded the qualia research institute probably the most important group on the planet now who's really studying the the mathematics of the dmt state and the topology and the dimensional structure and all of that stuff he describes entities doing things that a human can't do mathematically like painting surfaces with certain colors so there's something called the four color theorem which states that whenever you have a surface that's got different shapes all perfectly tessellated like a map you can color every shape with this with with four colors so that no two shapes are bought with the same color so it comes back to the idea of coloring a map of the country of all the countries if you only need four colors to paint every country with a different color so no two countries have the same color kind of butting up against each other it's called the four color theorem you can do it with any kind of map but the more complex the map becomes the more cognitively demanding it becomes eventually it becomes impossible for a human to actually color these surfaces but what he noticed these entities doing was having these exquisitely complex often higher dimensional or with surfaces with strange topological structures and and these entities painting these surfaces with four colors just perfectly as if demonstrating their abilities and he said you know i couldn't do this it would take me hours or longer to do what they were doing in a fraction of a second and repeatedly they paint the surface and then if they would reset it and then paint it again and then do it again repeatedly and most people if they saw that they would go that was you know crazy or that was weird or that was beautiful but they wouldn't understand what they were actually looking at i wouldn't no no no i wouldn't nor would i nor nor the would i you knew what i know what i i was i was surprised by all the math in traces of other and in hoffman's theories there's a lot of math in it there's a lot of math and i think you need you need the maths um to so we say maths in the uk i can't i can't bring myself to say math you need the mathematics to really kind of to understand the dmt state because it is entirely different it's not this simple three plus one dimensionality it's not this simple three plus one dimensionality it's not this big dimensional world that we live in it's very very different and being able to go in there and say how it's different why it's different what's going on and send this is why i said earlier you send in specialists into the dmt state you send in people like andres who can say look what these entities are doing is not just beautiful or strange it's impossible for a human brain to do or far beyond normal human cognitive capacities even in the most intelligent of people like andres and so those are the kind of things you see in the dmt state and so i think it's really important to where the entities are actually betray their intelligence displaying it they're not giving you numbers or giving you blueprints for the time machine i don't think it works like that but they're doing things that you just have to recognize are beyond human capabilities and and in that way uh you you know that adds another piece of evidence that we're dealing with something that is beyond the human shall we say that's very interesting um can you give us just a simple example of how the maths apply to this work yeah well so i'm just trying to get a foundation before we get into don hoffman okay yeah well we can get into don don hoffman because the mathematics definitely applies yes um so what if the freshest thing you ate this summer didn't come from a store meet garden garden is the smart indoor home growing system that grows flavorful greens and vegetables that grow in the garden herbs fruit and vegetables right in your kitchen no backyard no experience no grocery run required garden automatically balances water and light so nutrient dense produce is always within reach heading out this summer kelby gardens ai plant assistant keeps your garden thriving while you're away so you can come home to a harvest with garden your lettuce isn't days old from a truck it's alive crisp and inches from your plate fuel your summer from the inside out visit my garden dot com that's my g-a-r-d-y-n dot com so i've been um kind of following don hoffman donald hoffman uh professor um cognitive scientist university of california at irvine and for for decades um and he has this mathematical model um that he calls conscious agent theory it's what he calls um conscious agent theory it's what he calls um conscious agent theory it's what he calls um consciousness realism which posits that consciousness is fundamental and that reality consists of and only of conscious agents interacting um so everything we see and perceive is the result of the interaction of these conscious agents and he has this precise mathematical model from which he can kind of boot up physical reality so rather than this failed program of assuming that matter is fundamental and trying to boot up physical reality he's trying to boot up physical reality he's trying to boot up physical reality and try to get consciousness from dead uh inert physical matter um he's going in the opposite direction which i think is the correct one assume that consciousness is fundamental try to get the appearance of the physical world from consciousness and from the interaction of conscious agent where he starts with a conscious agent which i think he got his math to work through game theory like it like the math is legitimately works the mathematics legitimately works and it's it's incredible really that he starts with a very very simple kind of minimal assumption model of a conscious agent a conscious agent is an agent that can do basically three things it can perceive other conscious agents it can make decisions based upon what it perceives and it can perform actions um which affect other conscious agents so you have this kind of network emerges of conscious agents they're all interacting via perception what we see what we observe um is this interface we never perceive the conscious agent network directly because it's far too complex effectively this infinite network of conscious agents what we see is this interface that allows us to interact in adaptive ways with the environment everything's an icon everything's an icon so this is the fitness before truth method this is fitness before truth um and so that was his original idea that he's been developing and testing various ways over the last few decades and most recently he started he came up with this what's called the trace logic the mathematics are a little bit sophisticated i don't want to get too much into that i'll get out of my depth pretty quickly as well but what he found is that using this new model he could actually kind of boot up not just the world as it appears to us but he could also boot up the world as a whole in a way that he was able to do and he was able to do it in a way that he was able to do in a way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it in the way that he was able to do it which we thought was kind of fundamental to the way he's kind of space-time works actually he can get it from just the interactions of conscious agents we can get you can get you derive the schrodinger equation i mean it's incredible stuff yeah uh just from basic conscious agents and so um just a few months ago actually i got an email from a guy called gaspard who's working with don he's he's um kind of built this thing called the trace institute based upon don hoffman's work to kind of start to build don's legacy because don hoffman's kind of disorganized in some ways and there's all this stuff they're floating around in papers and interviews and other stuff which there's no kind of kind of properly organized archive and an institute to actually follow on his work and kind of pick up the mantle so to speak so gaspard who's also been following my work said to to don you should you should read this guy andrew gallimore you know read his book death by astonishment because a lot of the ideas in here you know i talk about intelligent agents in a very neutral way i don't talk so much about aliens or spirits or that kind of thing i'd say we're dealing with some kind of intelligent agent in the dmt state don hoffman talks about conscious agents so gaspard quite rightly noted that there seemed to be some overlap here um there is perhaps some cross-fertilization between our different ways of looking at reality there is but there's some conflict as well there might be some conflict uh we can get into um but gaspard said you know would you like to meet don hoffman um don would like to meet you we can have a discussion and see if where there is that overlap and so um uh we met online and straight away i said should we write a paper on this and see see if we can see where the the connection is and i it was honestly and i i i don't say this lightly it was one of the most profound few months of my life um and this was a pre-print just last month i think right pre-print we published just last month um and it was it was i i kind of had this working model of what dmt was doing that it was um that it was kind of gating access to some other source of sensory information but I never within the physicalist framework there was no way for me to explain how does information come from somewhere else it's not coming through the normal sensory organs where's that information coming from I didn't have an answer to it until I started working with Don's model so in my second book we just spoke about reality switch technologies I developed this concept called the world space so remember that your brain is always constructing the world and so there's kind of a vast state space of all possible worlds that your brain can construct right normally we sit within this very small region of what I call the world space I call this the consensus reality space but there are all these other worlds world moments a world is just everything you're experiencing at a particular moment and your brain is constantly moving between these states if you take this vast landscape all possible world moments I call that the world space and normally we sit within this very narrow region it's like a well and attract a basin within this world space the consensus reality space and that's the normal waking world those are the states that represent the structure the content and dynamics of the normal waking world what DMT does as I postulate in reality switch technologies is it perturbs the brain and it pushes it into a different region of this world space landscape and this is where the DMT worlds are represented but what I didn't have in that model was how information comes in to actually kind of modulate that you know modulate that experience it was just how does the brain go from building the normal waking world to the DMT world so then I started working with Don's model and a mathematician called Nipah Herman's model and I started working with Nipah Herman's and it was absolutely pivotal in making this all the mathematics work and we basically we probed the model we said okay if normally we we only sit within a narrow very small region of what Don Hoffman calls the experience space it's the same idea a conscious agent has this vast set of states vast numbers of different experiences and we sit within this very narrow region of this experience space so it's the same idea as the world space but what Don Hoffman's work has is kind of the experience base is simply a set of states all possible states that a conscious agent could have all possible experiences but what sits on top is this mathematical structure called a Markov kernel which is called the qualia kernel what that does is it gives dynamical structure to the experience space so what that means is if you're in this state now what are the probability that you'll move to this state or this state or this state so it gives that dynamics it determines the dynamics of how you move through around the experience base and as I said you normally we will sit within this very small region of the total experience base which is the adaptive region where we we experience the normal waking world this very thin very very small location within the experience space and that's determined by the qualia kernel which is evolved within that region of the experience base to create the world that we experience however if you can perturb the brain perturb the conscious agent you can knock it out of this region of the experience base into an entirely different region where the the normal rules that are basically applied by this qualia kernel they no longer apply so you enter a a type of experience a type of being within the world that is completely different right this is purely abstract at the moment we're not thinking about DMT you enter a region of the experience base where the dynamics are completely different the Markovian rules the Markovian dynamics that determine how you experience the world within this region of the experience base are completely different now the qualia kernel that sits as I said that's determining these dynamics is actually composed of three different kernels the the perception the decision and the action kernels so there's three parts so together they determine not just what is your experience like within this region of the experience space but how are you interacting with the larger the broader conscious agent network what kinds of other conscious agents can you interact with can you perceive because in this region the consensus reality space you only can only interact with a very very limited number of conscious agents but in this region of the experience space we proposed you might be able to interact with agents that are normally completely imperceptible let me ask a question then go on information theory would say that that other region is just a lossy projection and you can never fully know what's there because it may even be Don's work it and the end can't be greater than m so brain is finite we can't perceive other dimensions because our brain just can't do it so if we're going into these other worlds it has to just be a shadow of the world because we we really can't know well okay yes so the world your experience is always it's always the interface so you can never get out of the interface but the interface would change as you move the different regions of the experience base so what you see in the interface is determined by the dynamics that are imposed by this qualia kernel right so in this region uh we experience this low dimensional world we're interacting with this very limited number of conscious agents that are that through the our perception channel our perception kernel we're able to kind of render that information in a way that makes sense to us but once you move into this other region of the experience space so we propose the the dynamical constraints are completely different so the world wouldn't necessarily be three plus one dimensional it could be completely different it could be completely alien the geometry the topology could be completely alien and and the conscious agents that you can interact with in that region of the experience base could also be completely different so your brain has to also be a projection to make that work yes mathematically yes yes you always were in conscious agent theory or the brain itself is part of the interface right you're going to always work in conscious agent theory or the brain itself is part of the interface right you're going to always work in conscious agent theory or the brain itself is part of the interface right you're going to always work in conscious agent theory or the brain itself is part of the interface right you're a conscious agent or a set of conscious agents and we're talking purely about at the level of the ground of reality if you like um but what's beautiful is you can actually this was purely initially a kind of a mathematical abstraction that we were doing talking about how the the qualia kernel and the markovian dynamics all of this stuff but then we said okay let's let's imagine what that would actually be like if you were knocked out of this region of the experience and you were talking about how the quality of the experience would be like if you were knocked out of this region of the experience and you found yourself in a different region of the experience base where the markovian dynamics are completely different and the interactions between the broader conscious agent network is completely different well it would be extremely strange um nothing would seem to make sense it would look impossible uh it would look perhaps high dimensional the topology the geometry would be completely different the beings that you interacted with would seem completely alien in other words the entirety of the dmt phenomenology would seem completely alien in other words the the entirety of the dmt phenomenology basically fell out of the mathematics it's elegant and when that happened uh that was like it was a profound moment in my life probably one of the most profound moments in my working life studying dmt that dmt went from something which didn't quite make sense you know there's still missing pieces in the way i thought about it and then suddenly with don's model everything falls into place it does but even then that world those entities are still just icons and projections yes yeah so so what you have to think is that so when you perceive another conscious agent what's happening is that conscious the way that that conscious agent interacts with the conscious agent network um changes the states of the conscious agent network that has an influence on your experience states doesn't mean you're you that you can map the actual conscious agent dynamics directly into your experience space you can't uh but you can there is some influence statistical influence on how your world states how your experience states kind of update that's that's what perception is and we form these icons you know i never have access to your internal dynamics i have this highly simplified icon and when you're i'm perceiving you basically what you are doing as a conscious agent is is affecting my experience and that's basically what perception is in the conscious realism model and that completely changes when you go out of the the um the consensus reality space this very limited region of the experience space i i can no longer see you i can no longer represent you or anything but i start to be able to represent highly unusual exotic markovian dynamics that i simply couldn't do in this state and that's why we think you're able to interact with other conscious agents that aren't simply are beyond the the agents rep our representational reach if you like we simply have no way to represent what they are doing in any way once you move into this other region of the experience base because the qualia kernel in that region is completely different so this is a bit complicated but you can you can start to interact with the conscious agent network in completely different ways and that's what dmt is you're interacting with it feels like you're in another world because in a sense you are it's like the headset has been changed you're you're in a completely different region of the experience base and you're interacting with other conscious agents that you weren't you were unable to interact with or perceive in them whilst you were stuck in this region of the uh of the experience space so it all falls into place it does quite beautifully and that's what shocked me and was you know a profound almost religious experience what do you think our icon is in that other world how are we perceived um normally i never looked in a mirror that's the thing is that for most people they would close their eyes and the normal waking world is irrelevant and that's it's clear that the brain is kind of luscious and the brain is kind of luscious and the brain is kind of luscious and that's the thing is that for most people they would close their eyes and the normal waking world is irrelevant and that's it's clear that the brain is kind of luscious and losing its ability very very rapidly if you take a low dose you will see dramatic changes in the way that other people in the world appears to you but normally once you get once you deliver that robust perturbation of the brain of the conscious agent with dmt um this world is is gone there's no representation of it whatsoever even if you have your eyes open it's like you're interacting with the conscious agent network um in conscious realism theory in in a completely different way uh and so your it makes us what dmt is doing is is allowing us we have this vast beautiful landscape of possible experiences and dmt is one way not necessarily the only one certainly not the only way of changing not just the experience not just the structure and dynamics of your subjective experience of your interface but allowing you to interact with the experience of your experience of your experience of your experience of your experience of your experience of your experience with reality itself the conscious agent network in completely different ways um and so it's not just a model of dmt or dmt is the most efficient delivering that kick to the conscious agent but people describe very profound encounters with with entities and strange alien beings high dose psilocybin or even ketamine john lilly used to inject high doses of ketamine in the flotation tank and he would describe interacting with strange digital alien consciousnesses so maybe it's all about finding molecules that will deliver that robust kick to the conscious agent that pushes it out of this very narrow region and allows your world not just to change but also allows you to enter into two-way interactions with other parts and other other beings other conscious agents within the conscious agent network and so it's it's very powerful and it's a very powerful tool to work with do you think that that world is lateral to ours or is that deeper to the source well we're always at the source and this is what's kind of beautiful about conscious agent theory is that there is no level deeper than a conscious agent a conscious agent is the ground of reality itself right but normally we only interact we we only see a kind of a we're only influenced by a very thin slice of that conscious agent network we're kind of held constrained by a very thin slice of that conscious agent network we're kind of held constrained by a very thin slice of that conscious agent network we're kind of held constrained by this qualia kernel that's been sculpted by evolutionary pressures uh and what psychedelics do dmt particulates pushes us out of that and so we're simply within we're still a conscious agent but it's just where our way of being in the world and our way of interacting with the broader conscious agent network has changed uh but we're still at the level we're still a conscious agent that makes sense so we could we're living our world is a mac and you go into a different realm and you're just booting up windows or linux it's just a different interface it's a different interface right it's like changing the headset basically yes yeah when was the moment where you abandoned materialism and decided that your brain is an icon well i abandoned materialism many years ago i mean yeah people think that i'm a materialist i thought i did yeah because the because i i write at the level of the brain i can get my teeth into the brain i i i'm not met with the brain i'm not met metaphorically but you know i the mechanics of it and all that stuff i can understand and get my teeth into if someone but really i've always been an idealist or for a very long time i mean i felt that consciousness was absolutely fundamental this is the oldest message you know from all of the mystical traditions going back to ancient hinduism and stuff saying that consciousness itself is fundamental i've always felt that but there was nothing really to get my teeth into until don's work came along because don said you know if you don't know what you're talking about then you're going to get your teeth in and then you're going to get your teeth in and then you're going to get your teeth in and then you're going to get your teeth in and then you're going to get your teeth in hey if consciousness is fundamental that doesn't mean it's just this kind of diaphanous mist or fog or whatever you can actually do mathematics with it you can just like you can with um material physics you can you can you can think about okay how do these conscious agents interact what is the mathematics of that you can actually look at the mechanics and the dynamics of conscious agents do stuff with it actual science um and so that's why before i started working with don i kind of avoided the question of consciousness simply because i had nothing to get my teeth into and there's always a danger that you'll end up going off into the more spiritual mystical stuff which i've generally avoided for the same reasons um yeah i don't hear you talk about consciousness itself and and and you're familiar with doug hammeroff's work yeah it seems like it it would be hammer off stewart it seems like it would marry nicely with dmtx yeah hammeroff is is a physicalist as well i mean giulio tononi i was quite interested in integrated information theory for a while i even wrote a paper on it connecting it to the psychedelic state but again these are all really physicalist theories they're trying to they assume that the physical is fundamental and that somehow consciousness is generated whether it's when integrated information is non-zero whether it's these effect quantum effects in microtubules or whatever but it's still a physicalist theory the microtubule is still just another icon you know exactly uh and so what i love about don is you said forget about all of that um let's start with the only the one thing that we we can't deny which is our consciousness let's start with that let's assume that's fundamental and then try to boot up the appearance of physical reality and he's yeah what he's achieved i think in the last year or so is is remarkable uh in being able to explain so much about what's going on uh and it all makes perfect sense to me and when you connect it to dmt uh it just all falls into place as i said the dmt phenomenology kind of falls out of the mathematics which is so beautiful too beautiful for it to be completely wrong it could be completely wrong of course i'm not saying this is i've got the answer but it's certainly something that i think needs to be uh pursued so you and don just gave a talk together a day or two ago yeah so we wrote the paper we worked on it for several months me don and nifa uh and then i said hey i've been invited onto have you heard of the y files um i've been invited on this podcast and i'm going to be there in june the middle of june um and so gaspard said oh we need to do an event so that's why i did the event with don because oh that's thanks to you i didn't know that i didn't know that yeah and so we uh arranged it on saturday so it's just a basically the launch of the trace institute together with um the collaboration between the trace institute and new nautics um that i work for that i'm a director of and we sat on stage for an hour and a half and just having a moderated conversation in la in um if any speech and just talking about you know kind of telling the world that dmt and conscious realism and that kind of fit together in this beautiful way um and it was recorded and it was recorded and it was recorded so it's not been released yet but people will hopefully soon be able to actually watch this conversation and and in the paper as well we we did that blue yellow experiment we proposed that as well so it wasn't just a theoretical there's a lot of mathematics within the paper there's a theoretical model but also we at the end we say okay how can we test these things now that we've got as i said the elusis um the elusis retreat research center in the caribbean actually pretty quickly start raising money to actually fund some projects on the island in a in a legal setting without having to do the whole university yeah route which would try trying to avoid connecting ourselves with universities because they obviously they might not take kindly to the idea of testing the intelligence of dmt and it looks it looks like a a luxury vacation is really what it looks like oh it's a beautiful resort no doubt about it yeah but it's it's a little bit more expensive than it is but it's a little bit more expensive than it is but it's a little bit more expensive than it is but but it's a little bit more expensive than it is something i couldn't get my mind around was dmt tolerance dmt x where at some point when the plasma level increases the experience does not get deeper in fact it fades somewhat okay yeah so this is very interesting um so as i said before rick strassman showed that dmt doesn't have subjective tolerance unlike other psychedelics if you take the dmt and you take the dmt and you take the dmt and you take the xylosabian mushrooms trip then if you try to take them the following day you'll have a very very weak experience right and we know we've known this for a long time dmt yes um but with dmt you don't get that tolerance effect which is why dmtx works um uh but on the online forums quite a few years ago it's been going on for a while but it's a lot of people are starting to talk about it now is though people would have this experience where they they take dmt often quite regularly you know maybe every every day or every few days right uh they have a vape pen so they're delivering the same dmt every time and then one day they'll get um like a big like a big x in the field of vision that says no entry although there'll be an entity that will wag its finger and say no no no or they get some kind of message like you know you you're not welcome here we're not letting you in and this is called a lock out you've been locked out of the dmt space wow all right uh and so they they say okay that's pretty startling um um and a guy wrote to me actually because i kind of probed this a little bit on the online forums and asked people to give me their experiences and one guy said that he was using dmt his same batch as he always does vaporize in the same manner and then one day some um i forget it was like a mantis being or some kind of being just as he entered the space punched him in the face and he felt the punch and he snapped back and he was back baseline consciousness the effect was just gone like that uh and you get many many of those kinds of experiences and it's not pharmacologically this is not easy to explain no right like tolerance is something that builds gradually and fades whereas this is like an on off switch they have you know a string of perfectly visual psychedelic dmt states and then one day they're told you're not coming in and and sometimes that can last for months or years a friend of mine david luke a professor at greenwich university psychologist one of the world leading experts on dmt and very experienced with dmt he was locked out for someone told me it was like 20 years are you serotonin receptors still absorbing the molecule well serotonin receptors the thing about serotonin receptors all receptors really is that they're there's a turnover so the receptor itself will sometimes just for a few days will be in the membrane and then it will be removed from the membrane broken down and recycled so this there's always this replenishment of serotonin receptors now we know with like lsd uh as it sits on the receptor the receptor becomes what's called desensitized it stops working that's why you have to wait a few days or a week or so until the receptors have been recycled you've got new receptors sure right serotonin syndrome is a real thing right that it is a real thing um but but what blows my mind is it turning off turning off because his receptors should still be active with the molecule you just have it turned off it turns off yeah and it's not it doesn't come back a few days later either sometimes it turns off and then the next day you're back it's like you caught an entity on a bad day that kind of thing sometimes you're locked out for months or that's insane yeah and i can get an even more incredible account that i got from a woman during dmtx that she was um doing dmtx in colorado now kind of a private group um and she was undergoing dmtx she was having this interaction with this entity for you know 20 minutes or so dmt flowing into her bloodstream and into her brain stable dmt state and then the entity said i think we're done for today the vision's just stopped dmt was still flowing the infusion machine was still on dmt levels in her brain still there and it was like we're done can't explain that can't explain that right so we want to study that yes at elusis what we plan to do we're actually beginning to actually try and get funding for this is to actually bring people on the island who are either locked out who have been for a long time um who have repeatedly been unable who could have visionary experiences in the past but were locked out and are still locked out though and then bring them to the island and infuse dmt into bring them through elusis bring infuse them with dmt you know dmtx and then actually confirm or that would be interesting that basically if they're still locked out then yeah and yeah you're really on to something yeah then then you can actually use you know eeg you can in theory you can use fmri you can actually look what is different for a control group you also have a control group who are normal dmt users who can experience dmt um and then you look what are the differences between their neural activity how is that changing is there what's going on here and then you might look for um changes in their differences in their genetics there's also this thing called the five five percent club which are people who not who are locked out from birth shall we say they can never experience effects of dmt five percent of people do they have that's very interesting is that a serotonin issue we don't know mood disorder my guess would be is that it's a what's called a receptor polymorphism so every receptor is um a receptor is a protein and it's encoded by a gene we all have different variants of g all the different genes encoding our receptors in our body these are called polymorphisms um and my my suggestion prediction perhaps hypothesis uh is that certain people have a slightly different variant of the 5-ht2a receptor that means or some other receptor doesn't necessarily have to be the 5-ht2a that means that dmt isn't it either isn't binding to the receptor or it's it's not activating the receptor in the same way it could also be a metabolic issue it could be that they are um they're metabolizing dmt extremely rapidly but rick strassman found that in about five percent i think it was three people out of sixty so exactly five percent even at the highest dose level 0.4 milligrams per kilogram which was a more than a breakthrough dose um they experienced no effects whatsoever of dmt so we want to study that as well yes that's very genetic work you know take samples and actually uh actually um look at the genome of these people and say what are the differences you know and that's more that's easier to explain than the lockout the lockout is very very difficult i had never heard that before yeah what's happening to the serotonin in the in the brain while they're under for so long is it just getting metabolized are they having mood issues when they come back um no i mean people are they having mood issues when they come back um no i mean people the the imperial college study the aim of it was to kind of look at that right is it is this safe and is it tolerable um if you're on ssris i don't think you should do this no um what what's with the problem with ssris generally is that people don't experience um as intense effects so it kind of blunts the effect because you get changes in the the expression of certain serotonin receptors but yeah if you're on any any kind of um psychiatric medication for what you're doing you're just going to have to go back and do psychiatric medication for whatever condition then tread carefully that's a general kind of warning to anyone not just dmt but all psychedelics you'd be very very careful because they are contraindicated for certain people these aren't toys um but yeah i mean dmtx it's it's shown to be safe and tolerable um people broadly were able to handle the experience and come out absolutely absolutely fine even though they were in there for and now there's been matthias liegti i think in in basel had his subjects under for i think three hours or something like that uh wow at a fairly low level not the breakthrough level but he also had like a device where they could adjust the um the infusion rate so they could control their experiences so we're going to see more of those kind of studies where we we start to learn how to use the dmtx technology um to really not just spend more time but actually be able to navigate the space and increase and adjust the the depth of the experience in real time at the at a low dose are they responsive yeah i mean even at the high dose weirdly even at the high dose yeah i mean but all uh auditory response not not visual but during the the imperial study one of the annoying things is that for the subjects and carl talks about this a lot is that they were they were being asked like questions like you know what's the intensity now between one and ten oh it's three what's it now do you see entities yes or no you know what's the entity level all these questions so you can never kind of just let go and enjoy or you know work within the space you always have to be have one ear to the team waiting on the other side i would be kind of annoyed actually yeah that's the deal because they they needed to get all of that data yeah well yeah but elusive of course you you don't have you're free to kind of explore for as long as you like how how different is the ayahuasca experience from dmtx this is a very good question aj because um one of the kind of the pushbacks that we got me and rick when we published this is people would say well just ayahuasca that's an extended dmt they and in a sense they're right but in several other senses they're wrong so with a regular DMT experience blood brain DMT levels rise and then drops down very rapidly with ayahuasca because of the monoamine oxidase inhibitor the harming and harmony within the traditional preparation that's kind of extended so it rises slowly and then it starts to kind of tail off gradually over time so you still have the peak you still have the drawdown but it's it's stretched out that kind of concentration curve is stretched out so it's not you don't you never achieve a stable brain DMT concentration with ayahuasca you're still at the mercy of your metabolism pharmacokinetics but also with ayahuasca Dennis McKenna I think it was actually looked at blood concentrations of DMT of people who took ayahuasca and people who took like injected high-dose breakthrough level DMT and that the peak blood a brain or blood DMT concentration in ayahuasca is only around less than 20% what you achieve with injected DMT so Wow it's an extended but actually generally it's a much milder softer experience whereas what we're doing with DMT X is to push someone right into the breakthrough state if they want to you don't have to you can have lower levels as well but in theory you can you can bring them up into the breakthrough state and then hold them there in the breakthrough state for as long as possible so you have much you have real-time control over the DMT state you don't get that with or anything close to that with with ayahuasca that's interesting because in my own experience sometimes you just can't get there you just I just can't break through I just end up in the in the room of geometric shapes right and then I'm back yeah usually because I'm stressed or distracted or a dog is barking or something this is ayahuasca or with no DMT just DMT I don't always break through but I haven't tried in very long time past the statute of limitations yeah your alien insect online I am why well aliens I like I've been interested in aliens and alien intelligence not aliens is like gray beings and metallic disks shimmering in the night sky that kind of thing although it is interesting but yeah it doesn't connect to this at all oh I think it does yeah I think it does but yeah I've been interested in the idea of alien intelligence and insects well these are kind insectoid beings are kind of a common entity within the DMT space so alien insect why not I came up with that name and now it's my handle on X and Instagram did you ever see the mantids during it during a trip I've never seen a mantid I didn't either a lot of people a lot of people have though yeah I don't want to um how did so how do it's another problem with breaking through is if you go in anxious it's also not advisable so yeah I mean it's most most people have relatively pleasant although extremely bizarre experiences but they're often this the most common type of entity people encounter is actually more of a guiding presence often like described as like a motherly caring presence that guides you through the space all the different in my experiences from way back there's a very strong sense of being taken as if like we've got so little time when I need to show you this and this and there so you can't bring any of it back it's so short but this very real sense of being guided very very rapidly through all these different rooms I want to say rooms all completely different at all equally strange and baffling and bewildering and then you could have deposited back in the real say the real world you're deposited back in the normal waking world and you don't really remember those rooms do you know because I don't yeah I I remember getting there and coming back yeah that's about it it's it's a wild experience so how do we get how do we connect the UFO phenomenon to this I'm starting to think about Jacques Vallee now and his theory about UFOs is consciousness and why different cultures perceive we perceive the fairies then we perceive this and now we're on to orbs depending on where we are culturally yeah I mean ballet John Mack you remember John Matt you're from her he wrote abduction mm-hmm you know that he was at this hard-nosed psychiatrist until he started interacting with and working with these so-called abductees or experiences yeah Harvard didn't like that Harvard didn't like that at all understandably to be honest but um I think he's his perspective shifted throughout I mean it did clearly shifted from the idea that we're talking of the the UAP phenomenon or the non-human intelligence phenomenon is about biological beings that are arriving from other areas of the universe I think that's pretty short-sighted and feels kind of outdated now and and he started to think that actually we're talking the abduction experience was more of a altered state of consciousness as if they were being these experiences were being induced into some altered states of consciousness and interacting with normally imperceptible beings and of course this fits perfectly with that's DMT I mean if you read those in in abduction John Max first book there is an account of this woman who was an abductee who was described these small lively beings kind of bounding around I mean this was this is a Terence McKenna machine elf yes report it's exactly the same Rick Strassman also noted that if they had taken some of his trip reports out of context and put it in a one of John Max's books nobody would have questioned it because they were like they seemed like you know you have the this sophisticated laboratory type environment and you've got these being of these small beings like workers or orderlies and then you have these more powerful supervising beings that are kind of you know that story all the time yeah that's an abduction experience and it's also features prominently in in DMT reports so so an abduction could that be in like an endogenous DMT? experience it could be an endogenous DMT experience it could be these I think we need to get away from the idea that an alien is a manner is something that exists within this reality this it's very limited perspective that we're dealing with wet bodied wet brain biological beings that that we're dealing with some kind of some other kind of intelligence that isn't necessarily quote-unquote physical but operates in some other domain in just the same way that now we think about or some people like me think about the DMT entities isn't is not spirits or gods but some kind of intelligent agent that normally is always there but we normally are completely imperceptible and can't interact with and I think that makes more sense because there's nothing that says that these aliens must be physical beings and one can imagine that there's nothing that says that these aliens must be physical beings and one can imagine that zero we're high level zero but um john barrow the cosmologist noted quite correctly that actually most of our tech we do of course we send probes and rockets up into elsewhere in the solar system etc but actually most of our technological advances have been not outwards but inwards to smaller and smaller scales that's true yeah you know down to from the molecular to you know biochemistry and all the way through to the atomic and then the subatomic. Now people are talking about strings. People get deeper and deeper down into the ground of reality. That's where all of our kind of technological efforts has been downwards. That's right. He developed what he called the micro-dimensional mastery scale, which is like the anti-Kardashev scale, the Barrow scale, John Barrow. And he had the minus one, minus two, minus three, minus four, rather than plus one, right? And he posited something which he referred to as the omega minus level. This is when a technological species is able to actually control and manipulate the very ground of reality itself, whatever that is. So we're past the quantum, we're past even perhaps the Planck scale. Past the Planck scale. Right. Right down, whatever's beyond, right? Quantum mechanics, of course, stops working at the Planck scale. You know, Don Hoffman would say, we're talking about consciousness here. Physicalists would say something else. It doesn't really matter. But basically, when a species is able to work at the fundamental level of reality, that's the kind of the fundamental computational substrate of reality itself that's where they're going to go they're going to find a way of instantiating themselves at the ground of reality they're not going to be trying to um to kind of approach light speed and expand through the cosmos they're going to try to go downwards and there's a lot more room downwards right you don't need light speed if you if you get down there you don't need light speed if you get down there right and there's much more room there's like i forget what the exact number is but but if you look at the distance in terms of relative size from human size to the size of the universe or from human size to the planck scale i think it's like millions and millions times bigger down there or times smaller than it is bigger going up there 10 to the minus 35 something yeah that's the planck scale right so in other words there's there's a lot more room at the bottom sure is up there um much more room uh which means that that's the direction we go that's where that's where we look for intelligence and how do you do that how would an intelligent species that had instantiated itself at the ground of reality perhaps billions of years before the our solar system even came to be how would you communicate with that kind of intelligence or how would they communicate with us they do it through our brains because that's how we experience the world they wouldn't appear necessarily or manifest if they would simply use our brains to communicate with us and that would take the form of as jack valet said um that would take the form of what we normally describe as hallucinatory experience sure you know altered states of consciousness that's how you do it so dmt it's it's like dmt is in some way facilitating that experience that allows us to interact with these beings that or conscious agents or whatever you want to call them that have been around perhaps forever but certainly a lot longer than we've been it starts to um you can't avoid the question now this is very interesting i love when my mind is blown on this show which has been i hadn't considered looking down as much because if you can get past the plank scale then you don't need light speed travel because you're essentially in the dimension where entanglement works so you can go anywhere yeah where physics that we don't have any conception of works basically at the moment we don't have anything deeper than the quantum everything stops working there so what lies beyond that what is the fundamental substrate of reality and once you understand that then you can manipulate and even instantiate yourselves as intelligent beings at that level and then we have no conception of how that might work is that god um it would well i wouldn't say it's god but i would say that we could be dealing with beings that are indistinguishable from gods in that they are they are so advanced that we simply cannot conceive of how advanced they are um that would be my suggestion so we have no conception of what they would be like or um whether they even whether they whether they could even take on a visual form in any kind of way we just have nothing we have no reference uh you know when we had when we had little beings we had references you know they've got head and got big eyes and that kind of made sense we can we can slot it into our our picture of reality but we're talking about intelligences that we simply have no conception of what they might be like uh that's a wild idea and the idea that we could actually maybe interface with them by taking this plant alkaloid called dmt it's an even wilder idea yeah it is it feels like it's by design to me it's too it's too convenient it does feel like that yeah yeah i would never say that that's the case but there is something uncanny about dmt but it's ubiquity throughout the natural world and yet this incredibly crisply efficient tool by which we can access these these other realms and these beings it feels like they want us to find them but i've never heard of a lockout before that's very interesting as you've seen enough what do you think happens to us when we die what do you think happens to us when we die well that came from left field i wasn't expecting that question the short answer is i don't know but i certainly don't think i'm past the idea that there was this infinite period of time before i was born when i simply didn't exist and there's this brief the lights are on with this briefest of flickers of light the lights are on with this briefest of flickers of light for the briefest amount of time and it's for the briefest amount of time and it's for the briefest amount of time and it's off again yeah um and i think it was alan off again yeah um and i think it was alan off again yeah um and i think it was alan watts who said think about the state watts who said think about the state watts who said think about the state after you die you don't exist then think after you die you don't exist then think after you die you don't exist then think about the state before you were born you about the state before you were born you about the state before you were born you don't exist so those are don't exist so those are don't exist so those are indistinguishable right the state indistinguishable right the state indistinguishable right the state before you're born is identical to the before you're born is identical to the before you're born is identical to the state state state after you die so what happened then after you die so what happened then after you die so what happened then well we know what happened then um so i well we know what happened then um so i well we know what happened then um so i don't think i think i think we're part don't think i think i think we're part don't think i think i think we're part of something of something of something that is um that is um that is um we're we're we're we're we're we're we occupy this very very thin slice of we occupy this very very thin slice of we occupy this very very thin slice of something far grander something far grander something far grander uh and far more mysterious and uh and far more mysterious and uh and far more mysterious and far more profound and strange then we can far more profound and strange then we can far more profound and strange then we can we can conceive and i just get the we can conceive and i just get the we can conceive and i just get the sense that this is like i often sense that this is like i often sense that this is like i often describe reality certain human reality describe reality certain human reality describe reality certain human reality as some kind it feels like a game of as some kind it feels like a game of as some kind it feels like a game of some sort it's just play right and the some sort it's just play right and the some sort it's just play right and the hindus will tell you that they will say hindus will tell you that they will say hindus will tell you that they will say oh brockman is lila this is the play the oh brockman is lila this is the play the oh brockman is lila this is the play the play at making the world it's all one play at making the world it's all one play at making the world it's all one cosmic drama uh and we take it very very cosmic drama uh and we take it very very cosmic drama uh and we take it very very seriously and the part of the game is seriously and the part of the game is seriously and the part of the game is working out that it's a game that it working out that it's a game that it working out that it's a game that it shouldn't take it seriously this is just shouldn't take it seriously this is just shouldn't take it seriously this is just just a ride right as bill hicks used to just a ride right as bill hicks used to just a ride right as bill hicks used to say right i get that sense that we say right i get that sense that we say right i get that sense that we i don't take reality i don't take i don't take reality i don't take i don't take reality i don't take life life life seriously seriously seriously um in that i don't think it's a um in that i don't think it's a um in that i don't think it's a really somber serious important thing i really somber serious important thing i really somber serious important thing i think it's just a beautiful experience think it's just a beautiful experience think it's just a beautiful experience that we have for this briefest periods that we have for this briefest periods that we have for this briefest periods of time that we should enjoy it like we of time that we should enjoy it like we of time that we should enjoy it like we didn't enjoy any other ride at the didn't enjoy any other ride at the didn't enjoy any other ride at the fairground or something like that uh fairground or something like that uh fairground or something like that uh what happens after i don't know but what happens after i don't know but what happens after i don't know but it's something we all have to look it's something we all have to look it's something we all have to look forward to forward to forward to you subscribe to the you subscribe to the you subscribe to the the idea that there's a sort of a the idea that there's a sort of a the idea that there's a sort of a universal consciousness universal consciousness universal consciousness and when we're born we're kind of and when we're born we're kind of and when we're born we're kind of spawned out of that we come here we spawned out of that we come here we spawned out of that we come here we have experiences and we bring it back to have experiences and we bring it back to have experiences and we bring it back to the source the source the source well that's what conscious really well that's what conscious really well that's what conscious really realism says as well um is that there is realism says as well um is that there is realism says as well um is that there is one this one this one this is described as a conscious agent is described as a conscious agent is described as a conscious agent network but ultimately there is network but ultimately there is network but ultimately there is it there's nothing but consciousness so it there's nothing but consciousness so it there's nothing but consciousness so sure absolutely ultimately there is one sure absolutely ultimately there is one sure absolutely ultimately there is one unified consciousness and that's again unified consciousness and that's again unified consciousness and that's again that's the oldest message you know that's the oldest message you know that's the oldest message you know brocklin what is brocklin that's the brocklin what is brocklin that's the brocklin what is brocklin that's the the ultimate reality and everything else the ultimate reality and everything else the ultimate reality and everything else is illusion is illusion is illusion you know and it's all you know and it's all you know and it's all all the same illusion timothy leary used all the same illusion timothy leary used all the same illusion timothy leary used to say it's all the same illusion to say it's all the same illusion to say it's all the same illusion uh and so this reality is an illusion in uh and so this reality is an illusion in uh and so this reality is an illusion in a sense the dmt space is also an a sense the dmt space is also an a sense the dmt space is also an illusion it doesn't mean it's not real illusion it doesn't mean it's not real illusion it doesn't mean it's not real you're still interacting with you're still interacting with you're still interacting with consciousness but it's all everything consciousness but it's all everything consciousness but it's all everything has all experiences have the same has all experiences have the same has all experiences have the same ontological validity they're all as ontological validity they're all as ontological validity they're all as real as each other in some way and just real as each other in some way and just real as each other in some way and just different ways of experiencing different ways of experiencing different ways of experiencing um um um and so eventually you kind of get past and so eventually you kind of get past and so eventually you kind of get past these questions of always is dmt real or these questions of always is dmt real or these questions of always is dmt real or is it not real and that question no is it not real and that question no is it not real and that question no longer almost doesn't make any sense longer almost doesn't make any sense longer almost doesn't make any sense anymore i didn't ask it i don't know i anymore i didn't ask it i don't know i anymore i didn't ask it i don't know i didn't i wasn't blaming you aj here but didn't i wasn't blaming you aj here but didn't i wasn't blaming you aj here but people always ask me that do you believe people always ask me that do you believe people always ask me that do you believe it's real it's real it's real and before i would give long arguments and before i would give long arguments and before i would give long arguments i'm i'm maturing now where i actually i'm i'm maturing now where i actually i'm i'm maturing now where i actually think actually think actually think actually i'm kind of past that now um there's a i'm kind of past that now um there's a i'm kind of past that now um there's a part of me that thinks it's all part of part of me that thinks it's all part of part of me that thinks it's all part of this grand cosmic drama this grand cosmic drama this grand cosmic drama and there are different ways to play it and there are different ways to play it and different tools we can use to and different tools we can use to and different tools we can use to explore we have this vast explore we have this vast explore we have this vast uh vast you know uh vast you know uh vast you know the the the the kind of the playground the the the kind of the playground the the the kind of the playground of reality that we can explore uh and of reality that we can explore uh and of reality that we can explore uh and dmt and other psychedelics and other dmt and other psychedelics and other dmt and other psychedelics and other tools are ways that we can we can get tools are ways that we can we can get tools are ways that we can we can get out of this very small region of this out of this very small region of this out of this very small region of this vast playground and enjoy it and vast playground and enjoy it and experience it and think wow the experience it and think wow the experience it and think wow the incredible majesty of reality that incredible majesty of reality that incredible majesty of reality that we're part of it we're inextricably we're part of it we're inextricably we're part of it we're inextricably part of it you know we are a conscious part of it you know we are a conscious part of it you know we are a conscious agent or built from conscious agents as agent or built from conscious agents as agent or built from conscious agents as is everything else and everything is everything else and everything is everything else and everything everything else is experiencing the world everything else is experiencing the world everything else is experiencing the world in its own way in its own way in its own way that's an incredible thing to realize that's an incredible thing to realize that's an incredible thing to realize and then these little questions about and then these little questions about and then these little questions about is it real or not real they don't mean is it real or not real they don't mean is it real or not real they don't mean anything they don't no that's why i love anything they don't no that's why i love anything they don't no that's why i love interface theory interface theory interface theory um anything else you want to discuss um anything else you want to discuss um anything else you want to discuss before we go this has been wonderful before we go this has been wonderful before we go this has been wonderful i'd just like to say well i certainly i'd just like to say well i certainly i'd just like to say well i certainly would like would like would like you know if anyone wants to you know if anyone wants to you know if anyone wants to learn more about my work certainly read learn more about my work certainly read learn more about my work certainly read my book death by astonishment it's an my book death by astonishment it's an my book death by astonishment it's an amazing book you want to read amazing book you want to read amazing book you want to read understand the history of dmt all the understand the history of dmt all the understand the history of dmt all the way back to way back to way back to thousands of years really in indigenous thousands of years really in indigenous thousands of years really in indigenous plant preparations all the way through plant preparations all the way through plant preparations all the way through to 20th century and beyond and what i to 20th century and beyond and what i to 20th century and beyond and what i think about dmt the neuroscience of dmt think about dmt the neuroscience of dmt why i think it's not just hallucination why i think it's not just hallucination why i think it's not just hallucination and what it could be and all of that and what it could be and all of that and what it could be and all of that stuff that's everything i've learned stuff that's everything i've learned stuff that's everything i've learned about dmt in the last 30 years is in about dmt in the last 30 years is in about dmt in the last 30 years is in death by astonishment so please get that death by astonishment so please get that death by astonishment so please get that please follow me on x twitter alien please follow me on x twitter alien please follow me on x twitter alien insect as you said or instagram also insect as you said or instagram also insect as you said or instagram also alien insect go to new nautics.org 100% legal, safe, medically supervised environment, go to elusismind, E-L-E-U-S-I-S, mind.com, and they can sign up to spend a few days on this beautiful tropical Caribbean island. And I think that covers it, AJ. All right. Dr. Andrew Gallimore, this has been a treat and a joy. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Bye, everybody. That was Dr. Andrew Gallimore. We covered the history of DMT, what it does to your brain, and his theory that the beings people meet are real. Now, there's not much to challenge here. DMT is a real compound that's found in most living things. It was first synthesized in the 30s and found to be psychoactive in the 50s. But why does it exist? Well, in 2019, a University of Michigan lab induced cardiac arrest in rats and measured a surge of DMT in the dying brain. So one theory is that when brain cells are running out of oxygen, DMT can protect those cells. Maybe that's why we produce it. Maybe not. Nobody really knows. The real question is whether the experience is more than a hallucination. Still no proof, but Andrew's looking. Then there's Andrew's work with Donald Hoffman. Hoffman argues we never see reality, only an interface like icons on a screen. And I'm a fan of Donald Hoffman's work. Look him up on YouTube. Especially because he could explain, if not prove, his theory of consciousness with math. And I love that the two of them are working together. Now, Andrew thinks the brain is acting like a machine. IE.com.