Today, we're talking with Dr. Andrew Galamore. He's a Cambridge strain chemist and neuroscientist, and he spent 30 years studying one molecule, DMT, what he calls the world's strangest psychedelic. Many people report meeting entities when using DMT, and Andrew has a theory about them that's not exactly mainstream. He writes about this in his book, "Death by Estonishment." "Death by Estonishment." And that's finally a cause of death that isn't fell out of a window after questioning the official story of a 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. "I wish that a machine elves have bounces. I better be respectful next time I'm in a machine elf champagne room." Today we're covering where DMT comes from, what it does inside your brain, and a new theory he built with cognitive scientists, 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 Galamore. Welcome to the basement. Good to be here, Ajay. Thank you very much. It's 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 thing said we both have experience with psychedelics, so when we're talking about it, we've been there. Yep. Okay. So I thought I heard you say it. Seven or eight years old, you're into ghost vampires, we're wolves, all the paranormal. It looks like you have just upgraded your monsters to a new level. Is that what happened? Is you're just the monster kid? That's pretty accurate. I mean, I was into where wolves, 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. You were that kid. I was that kid, but I have 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 were a huge influence on me. My oldest brother, Ian, when I was kind of six, seven, eight years old, he was like 12 and three was more mature. And he was very interested in horror movies. Like in those days, there was like banned movies. Remember that? Sure. This one's banned. Paces of death. We're our faces of death and cannibal corpse. This kind of thing, right? So you have to watch them. Right. So he may offer some VHS, you know, copied, pirated. Yep. And come back and then you watch these movies in the living room because 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, you know, going to be the next Michael Myers or something like that. Or the next Neil Gaiman. What was that last straw story about? You wanted to say it, really? Yeah. So in the story of the story about 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 used 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 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, you know, maybe write about nice things. But they weren't worried about you being, no. They knew where it came from. They were just the influence of my older brothers. 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 advanced reader from my age. So I used to go to these old secondhand book stores 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. And that didn't come true, but in a way. In a way it did. In a way it did. Yes, there we go. When I was nine, I bought a mail order book on witchcraft in the occult. And I had quite a sit down over that book. Yeah, that's true. So I get it. Picture this. You spent years searching for a hidden treasure. You followed the clues, crossed deserts, climbed mountains, and finally found the chest. You cracked 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 have spent more than 35 years fighting for the people. They're America's largest injury law firm, with more than 1,000 lawyers and over 100 offices nationwide. Morgan and Morgan was founded after John Morgan saw how difficult it was for ordinary families to stand up for powerful interests after his brothers suffered a serious injury. Today, they've recovered over 30 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 fourthepietal.com/why. So, take us from there to. I know you've told the story a million times, but I have some follow-ups. Take us from there to 1996. Your friend shows you a magazine. Yeah, so when I. So, when I was a magazine, was it? I don't remember. But it was after I graduated from high school, so in the two years, we called A-levels in the UK. So I was 16 years old, I guess. I started to get interested in psychedelics, reading about psychedelics, and talking a lot about psychedelics. I studied study in 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, 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, as you've always been into the alternate realities. I used to collect a magazine called The Unexplained. It was one of those ones that came out every week, and you got the binders. That kind of thing. I ordered it, especially, from the news agent. And within there, there was a lot about ghosts and all that kind of stuff. But then there was stuff about ESP and the 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 ghost and werewolves, and into more serious things, I guess, more scientific things. And psychedelics seemed 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 worked. So I'd been talking about it a lot at school, and then one day my friend. I can give his name, actually, now. He's Nua Abbas, his name is. He's actually, interestingly, or he was a few years ago, the chief designer for. Oh, what's his name? He used to be married to Kim Kardashian. Easy, easy. He used to be the easy shoes. Everyone's screaming at us right now, but I don't remember. Or from the show. No, no, no. He's like a black guy. He's the most crazy guy that was unroganed. And I'm rogan, he's been on. Everyone's going to go crazy after the break. We're going to find that out. 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 draw too. Yeah, Nora Buss, 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 rolled it up and later in the day, I opened it and it was a picture of this bearded fellow called Tarant's Mechana and it was an interview with him and it was lots. I don't remember much of the details, but I remember him being asked about his quote-unquote favorite drug, this thing called DMT, didn't say what it was, other than that, 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. 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 psychedelics. So my next task was to find out what DMT even meant. You couldn't just Google it in those days. I went to the local library in my city, the central library, and found one of those books of acronyms, initialisms, and looked at DMT and found Dymethylterothylate, which is a type of plastic, apparently. So for a short period of time, DMT, in my head, was Dymethylterothylate, oops, yeah, then we got the internet, as you just mentioned, and there's only one internet in the school, like how to go collect this big black cable from a guy in a white coat, the password is mushroom. I remember that. Perfect. And I would spend all 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. But I kind of did. I had a friend, also, I had the internet in his house. And so I spent all my time, just on Alta Vista, as you said, before Google, just trying to find out all about DMT, and how to extract it, how to, you know, which plants you can get it from, and all that kind of stuff, and 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. I became more interested in the history later on, but at that time, this was just this naturally occurring molecule that seemed to have almost magical properties. And that was the beginning, really. That was the beginning of what turned out to be a 30-year journey, trying to understand DMT, 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, if I refer to this as DMT, then that's fine. If I use the word drugs, that's different matter. Right. Yeah. So, your book, "Death by Estonishment," that's a Terence McKennaquel. That is a Terence McKennaquel. 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 than I'm not going to tell you. Yeah. Which was OK. But I was writing the book proposal with my editor to submit to the publishing house. And in part of the proposal, I said, you know, DMT is this molecule that is Terence McKenna said, "The only risk is death by Estonishment." Then I wrote in brackets, although actually that's a pretty good title, right? And I realized, in retrospect, it's the perfect title. I mean, that's, I mean, it's the truth, kind of a showstopper title, "Death by Estonishment." And of course, it's a beautiful tribute to the late great Terence McKenna. And so, yeah, that's kind of how that name 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've come to learn over the last 30 years studying DMT. So this sparks interest in chemistry. Your PhD thesis, let me see if I can get this right. Is it the biogenesis of terrestrial and marine polycyclic ether? Wow. Is that what it was? It's done your research, dude. Well, that doesn't sound like, that sounds like just marine biology and things like that. It 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 always has been, in a way, you know, I've never worked in a quote unquote psychedelic research group or any kind of psychedelic lab or anything like that. It's always been, you know, I've kind of have many interests in chemistry and in pharmacology, 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. The kind of the, it's called biosynthesis, how complex organic molecule constructed inside living beings. And I thought I want to study that for my PhD. And so I went up to Cambridge and worked in a group that specialised in that thing. But all the time still, I was thinking and writing about DMT and then after I finished my PhD, I did a post-doc again at Cambridge. And then I thought there's something missing from my intellectual repertoire, should we put it like that, in that I understood the chemistry, I understood the pharmacology, you know, that kind of low level stuff, molecules interacting with living systems. That was all kind of under my belts, shall we say. But I still didn't feel that I was sufficiently sophisticated in the neuroscience, so I thought I need to move up to the kind of the higher level of the neuroscience, isn't it? So I did two post-docs 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, two post-docs in computational neuroscience. Finally, my final post-doc, which is actually the longest one, lasted for seven years, was at the Okinawa Institute of Science in Technology in Japan, so I needed a job after my penultimate post-doc finished and there was this position in Okinawa, but I thought why not, I didn't have ties in England at the time, so I thought why not move to Okinawa. What was the position, was it a mainstream type of job? It was a post-doctoral research fellowship, basically another post-doc, but this was in computational neuroscience as well, and I spent seven years kind of modeling very small pieces of brain basically, individual neurons in the brain, trying to understand how they speak to each other and how they strengthen and weaken their connections, or connected to the memory and neural function generally. So you were building this DMT research foundation the whole time? Yes, that's how I see it, is that I was, most people kind of specialize at one level, you know, if you're a chemist, you study the molecules, you're a pharmacologist, you're interested in drug receptor interactions, if you're a neuroscientist, you're interested in how kind of the global effects on neural activity, but I think really to understand psychedelics, you need to kind of span all of those, you need to have them, all the way from the lowest level, the molecules, all the way up to global neural activity. So I finished my post-doc in Okinawa, after seven years, and I thought, right, I'm leaving the academy, I've sort of graduated and I don't want to be, I wanted to kind of de-institutionalize myself and just focus on writing basically. We cover a lot of things on the 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. 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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 elect 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. Sure. 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 a decent salary to absolute zero salary in a single day, that's kind of scary, 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 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. Personally, I didn't majorly fuck up, I think things are okay. Well, I mean, Tokyo is fascinating because Japan has a 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? 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 the military supplies kind of were released under 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 are like 50 labs that were raided just in one city, you know, it's like breaking bad all these little metlabs everywhere, like in New Mexico or something, you'll 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 math could be the end of them, like an existential threat to their very civilization and so that, there's a kind of, I guess, generational trauma, but it feels like that, you mentioned meth and people, there's still that sense of meth, because you have to figure the Americans brought it there, what meth, yeah, and certainly inphetamines, so methamphetamine actually was invented by 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's actually, well those are two countries everybody blames for every day course, but it's actually a Japanese chemist, I didn't know that. Japanese chemist, yes, from Efrodren, so Efrodren is the molecule that you can convert, you know, sued Efrodren they use, basically the same molecule, but slightly different geometrically, but anyway, Efrodren, you can convert directly to methamphetamine, and he was working with Efrodren, the time, this, you know, Chinese herb that had various uses, and then he synthesized methamphetamine, and 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 were, they used to create these little green tablets that were mixed with green tea, so they were bright green, and 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, and Japanese soldiers using the Kamikaze, for example, were using methamphetamine, would elevate their mood, increase their kind of fighting, fighting spirit, and they don't have to worry about long term effects, that's quite literally, 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 math, that they started making liquid forms, injecting it, that they had a huge objection problem with math, probably the most intense way to take it, but, and in a school children were using it, high school students, housewives, laborers, whatever, everyone was using math in kind of the late 1940s and early 1990s, until it was banned, and then they really cracked down on it, it's like a moral panic, I mean, emphetamine salts seem to be everywhere anyway, right? So DMT first synthesized in 1931, first found to be psychoactive in 1956, and that was Stephen Zahra, right? Stephen Zahra was the first to inject pure DMT. Now this is at the same time where LSD is a popular psychedelic and psychiatric research. And why did LSD catch on and DMT did, basically went on disappeared until mechanical? 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 Zahra actually, Stephen Zahra was this Hungarian physician working behind the Iron Curtain, in communist Hungary, and he wanted to work with LSD, and he wrote to Sanders, the only company that was producing LSD at the time, said, "Can I have some LSD please?" I want to start working on LSD, new, new, new, new, new, new, and I'm sending LSD into LSD communists, no, nope, nope, and so he said, "I need something else," and he thought about masculine, he ordered some masculine from the UK, and that arrived safely, and he took his first dose of masculine on Christmas day, and had this wonderful experience in church. What was he trying to achieve? What was the purpose of his experiments? Well, he was interested in, he was a psychiatrist, right? So he's interested in, you know, the most fundamental level, he was interested in the human mind, how he might study the human mind. But it was also interested in, you know, could these molecules find uses in psychiatry? Treatment for various sort of neuropsychological disorders. So he tried masculine, and then he found this paper, there was a paper that was, so there was this plant called Anadenaanthera Peregrina, which is this yopl, 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 seemed to be like psychedelic effects, and then go to other worlds, and they would speak with these strange discontent beings, which they thought were like demons, or something. But no one knew how it worked, and so they started to analyse it, the first study, analysing these seeds from this Peregrina plant, and they found two molecules in there. One was bufotanine, which is five hydroxy dimethyltriptamine, it was a amino. No, that's five mithoxy. Yeah, so five MEO DMT is five mithoxy DMT, if you take that methyl group off, like carbon, you get five hydroxy, just hydroxyl group, that's bufotanine, that was a known molecule, 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,
and you would inject them with drugs and see what happened. And Bufotenin was one that had already been tested and was found to have mildly mind-altering effects. Generally, it made people very nauseous and their face went purple and they started vomiting and it's very unpleasant. But they found that molecule in this Yopo seed and they thought well that must be the kind of the central psychoactive molecule in this. They also found another molecule called DMT. That methyl trip to me and they just ignored it, which is a huge mistake. Until Steven Zara read this paper and he thought, Bufotenin, that doesn't make any sense. It's not particularly psychoactive. So why would that be regarded as this molecule that would transport you to other worlds and allow you to communicate with discontent 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, OK, I'll just, I'll keep it a go. No one has tried this. So he synthesized it. He made 10 grams in his laboratory in 1956 and he started swallowing it, first of all, increasing the dosage. You went up to like a gram of DMT. 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. He didn't see it. He didn't snort it. He didn't snort it now. That might have worked, though, no? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it might have worked. It would have been painful, but it might have worked. So 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? I haven't. So he injected it into, I think it was a cat or rabbit. I think it was a cat, for some reason. And the cat kind of started behaving strangely. It was having some kind of effect. I don't mean to laugh, I'm a cat, but I'm a catman as well. So satisfied that it wasn't lethal, at least in cats. Yeah, yeah, we shouldn't laugh. People complain whenever I tell this story because I'm caught up. And it's true, but different times, different times. Yeah, so then he injected it into himself. So sometime in April, in 1956, he injected it into his intramuscularly. And yeah, the rest, as they say, his history. He started seeing these fantastical patterns and rapidly procession of rapidly changing geometric imagery or moving ruby quickly. He was having a DMT trip. And so then he started recruiting colleagues, so doctors, nurses, from where he worked. Things were much simpler in those days. You didn't eat a foul form. Yeah, I think I approve of it. D-Aid wasn't the arid, but I don't know. And injected it into various people, healthy volunteers. And they started describing what we now recognize as the classic effects of DMT. They would start going to skype going, losing awareness of the normal waking world and going to these strange world fields with gods and spirits and-- Well, let me back you up just a second. So why DMT didn't catch on still? So he's synthesized it. It works. LSD still is the one that MK-- MK Ultra and everybody's Sydney Gottlieb goes there. Yeah, yeah. So after Sarah started publishing these papers, so the very first awareness anyone would have had that DMT was even psychoactive as a psychedelic would have been Stephen Zahra's papers. So that was in the late 1950s, from 1956 up to 1960. He published several papers in healthy people, in schizophrenia, and that kind of thing. So the data was all there. The problem was, well, LSD had its foothold by then. It was extremely potent, potent meaning you need a very small amount of the molecule to achieve the desired effect. So in one gram, you've got 100,000 doses or something like that. And whereas with DMT and you could swallow LSD, drop it on your tongue, dissolve it in lots of paper. Very, very simple to distribute. Whereas with DMT, one, it was much less potent in terms of the amount you needed. Instead of 50 micrograms, you needed 30 to 50 milligrams. And you needed to inject it. That was a big issue. People didn't like to mess with needles, certainly in the West. And so it was kind of an exotic psychedelic. If you were in the know, and you had access to a well-stocked dealer in the 1960s, you could find DMT. William Borers, for example, he was probably the first person to take DMT outside of a clinical setting. He injected it. That's right, I forgot about that. Leary as well. And Borers was one of the great thinkers of his time. He was. And he had a really important role actually in working out how Ayahuasca worked. Did he? Yeah, we can get to that. OK, yeah. But so, yeah, William Borers was horrified. He took too much one day, and he found himself in this way called the white, hot, lattice ovens. The soulless insect people were kind of menacing him. And he was appalled. And he thought this is 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, it wasn't particularly well known. He was kind of a neophyte. This kind of tweed, jacketed, Harvard psychologist, who had just that year had been to Mexico and had his first experience with soullessopie mushrooms. So he was well-prined for DMT. But Borers wrote this letter saying, stay away from DMT. It's the nightmare drug. The nightmare hallucinogen, he called it. But of course, Timothy Leary. Leary said, challenge, accept a challenge, accept it. And so Leary spoke to a psychiatrist, a friend who said that he'd injected people with DMT in 90% and had had a terrible experience. Really? Yeah. Yeah. We don't exactly know who this was. But he said a psychiatrist working in L.A. who was injecting people with DMT in his office. And he said that 90% 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. I really came from Leary, the idea that the nature of your psychotic experience comes down to the setting. Where are you? Who is with you? And also your mind set. And so he thought, OK, maybe if the setting setting is right-- see, not in a clinician's psychiatrist's office, she's where sick people go, where crazy people go. But in fact, in a beautiful environment, can you actually induce a more pleasant experience? And so Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who is one of his kind of partners in crime, shall we say, during that era, they were both injected with DMT and both had incredible, beautiful experiences. Timothy Leary described these angelic beings like elf-like insects. And he was the first person to really use that term, elf, in describing the DMT state. And now elves are the most famous beings within the DMT space. Most-- just about everybody listening, 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 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. It's a dark, quiet room lying on your bed kind of drug. So my first experience at 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? Just like, why I have to do it now? Yeah, I mean, I'd reach the stage where I'd been studying DM. I've been fascinated by DMT for the best part of a decade. And I'd read all-- by that point, all the talent's mechanical books, listened to his lectures, and it was like, OK, I need to find this molecule and actually try, 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 I 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 50 minutes.
grounds of DMT. And I, first of all, I tried to, now we have these great vaporizing relation systems. In those days, I just had a lighter. No volcano bag. Nothing like that. It was all very, very basic, you know, like a crack pipe, basic. Yeah. And I didn't really know what I was doing. And sometimes heating it in, it was tasted awful. And I was gone. The smell is terrible. And a lot of it was burning probably. So it was smoke, you know, horrible acreage smoke as well. And I couldn't get enough in my lungs. And I was, I basically gave up for the evening. And then just as I was about to go to bed, like 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, this very distinct sound, like a very high-pitched pinging sound that was completely different early in the evening. 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, I can't English it. It's 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, 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 know shadow of a doubt. And that's what was so horrifying for me at the time. It was shocking because I was expecting just the kind of going to a dream world and see elves dancing around. You know, I'd got all this stuff from a canner. How do 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. So things start to change. You like, okay, I've been here before. Yeah, 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 on, 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 listen to every single Terrence mechanical lecture in existence. And I still wouldn't even be close to what this was. It was truly ontologically shocking. Yes. That this place existed and it was right there and it was far more advanced and it was this hyper technological space that was built by the hand of an alien intelligent. I didn't see entities dancing around, but I felt the immensity of and the undeniability of this presence. And it lasted two or three minutes. I don't remember all the details. I remember start. I lost any awareness of not just myself, but of the even the concept of humanity. And that lasted 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. It's very strange that that come down as is like that. You start to become human again. You become human again. And that only a couple of minutes. So that's because of that janky method where I don't want to give people too much information. But even the vaporized properly, we're talking what 15, 20 minutes most. Yeah. I mean, the peak itself, I mean, you get into the peak within a minute inside a minute. Then you're there in the breakthrough state, probably between three, four, five, six, seven minutes, then you start to come down. And then the after effects will last you have 15, 20 minutes. You know, when I came back, I just laid on my bed, on my back. All I could say was I was shaking. And I said, oh my fucking god. That's all I could say. I couldn't believe what had just happened to me. I could not believe it. I remember writing a message to my friend, you know, on Facebook messenger or something. This is the most interesting. I was euphoric, but shocked at the same time. Like, my god, this really is it. You know, Terence McKenna wasn't joking here. This is this is something that, wow, I need to. Yeah, this is not melting walls or seeing colors. It is not. No, I mean, the one of the first I read a book, I had a little section on psychedelics and described DMT as like 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 duration, but it's not. No, you're, you cannot be prepared for it in a way. I don't think 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 that, because true astonishment, I think, is a very rare emotion. Now we kind of use it to mean mildly surprised. Right. That true astonishment where your mind cannot even begin to comprehend the immensity of something. That's what DMT delivers. And you can't really explain it. You can't explain that your ego kind of dissolves into this oneness with everything and everything makes total sense. At the time, it does. It does. In psychedelic therapy, there's something called integration. Did you do any type of integration work post-trip? No, I mean, this was integration's big thing now, but at the time, maybe it was in certain specialist circles, but at the time, it wasn't, didn't really know what integration was. 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, it's like my brain had kind of thought, okay, we'll get, we'll compartmentalize that somewhere. Yeah. Let's put that away. We'll put that away. So there wasn't any lingering after effects or anything like that. You know, it's neurologically, it's a very benign molecule. It's not going to hurt you physiologically. But your world, your entire ontological foundation of your reality is going to be obliterated. That's the problem. Yes. And I don't recommend doing it alone. Definitely not with open flame. No, no, no, because you're going to be careful. Be careful, guys. Be so careful with it. That's the way to try to, it would be, I think, using DMTX that you in Strassman created. It's probably a good way to explore it. 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. Be my best. So let me see if I can get this right. We've got, tryptophan gets decarboxylated into tryptamine. I'm entity gets involved. And 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 lysergic acid Amide, which is natural and is far more complex than DMT. DMT is actually not only the most common natural occurring psychedelic. It's found in countless plant species, hundreds. But it's also the simplest. As you go, as you said, you're from tryptophan, you've got tryptamine, and then one step. And you've got another step, which is this dimethylation by Indole and methyl transferase, INMT. Right. And so it's just two simple steps from tryptophan, this amino acid. So that's really, to me, there's something uncanny about that. You would have this simple molecule that's everywhere. You walk through your local park, and there's probably half a dozen different plant species or busily, silently constructing the world's strangest. Yes. Like an electric drug. And you have no idea. And it's also found in humans. And we've known that See you next time.
1950s, when people started getting schizophrenics to line up and be in a bottle, basically. - Sure. - Yeah, depending on your tests. - Right. Exactly. 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 answers are, well, it's an insect repellent, or it's, you know, it's some kind of, it's used to, it's kind of an anti-feeding, and anti-predation kind of molecule. It affects the neurochemistry of insects, let's say we know that psilocybin does that, for example. - Sure. - That it would dissuade organisms, you know, predators from feeding on a plant by producing DMT. - I don't like that one. - I don't like that, either. It doesn't explain why. - Because any mammal's stomach would break it down. - That's what you'd think, you see, as well, so the short answer, and they're not very exciting answer is we don't really know why it's there. We don't know why it's in humans, we don't know why it's in plants. But it is, and it's very easy to make, and it's just two steps from tryptophan, so it's not like, you know, many molecules, you have to go through many, many steps, or something like morphine, for example. There's many steps to get to morphine, but to get to DMT, it's very simple. So basically all living organisms probably have the enzymatic machinery to make DMT, including humans. 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. You can eat as many plants as you like, and that's never going to have any effect. You need to isolate the molecule, and actually, it likes Stephen Zara, as it did, and that took humans all the way up until the 1950s to actually work out what this molecule was, and how to use it, techniques that are administered. From a chemistry perspective, why are those metal, those bolt on a metal group so powerful, it's because it's basically a serotonin molecule, yes? Yes, so, serotonin is five hydroxy-triptamine, so if you remove that hydroxy group, you get triptamine, which has no effect. It doesn't get across the blood brain barrier very efficiently at all. If you inject someone with serotonin, sorry, with triptamine, there are no psychoactive effects, so that methylation makes the molecule slightly more fatty, shall we say, more lipid, oil-soluble, allows it to get very, very rapidly into the brain, and then it binds to this 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 process works. I'd love to, if you don't mind. I don't mind. Please. Yes, so, psychedelic, so what are known as the classic psychedelic, so DMT, LSD, psilocybin, Escaline, 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. 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 generate little electrochemical spikes, which you can think of as like binary digits almost, you know, on and off, that's all a neuron really can do, you can fire, it's called an action potential spike, or it can be quiet, it's like a 1 and a 0, and neurons are generating these action potentials all the time or not, and then they have these chemical connections called synapses that allows them to share information. So you're all of these millions of neurons that are connected in your, that form your cortex, the 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 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 fire when it receives stimulation from another neuron. So it excites the cortex, or we find that psychedelics, 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 cerebral cortex, in the newest part of the brain evolutionary, and it has several layers, 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. The cortex 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. 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 resemble what the true structure of the environment, which we never have direct access to. So you're always living in kind of a waking dream in a sense, you know, annual Seth calls it a waking hallucination, I don't really like that term, but anyway, but later I think we'll get into your work with Donald Huffman and his theories, which are really interesting. Yeah, absolutely, that's completely different take on the whole thing, much more fundamental. But if he sticks to the brain level, you have this world model that's always being constructed by your brain, and we know this because you can manipulate your brain, if I remove the top of your skull and start playing around with an electrode in there, I can change your world. Sure, right? Nothing in the outside of the environment changes, but your world changes. I can make you see colorful patterns, I can make you hear voices just by stimulating different parts of the brain that are responsible for generating different aspects, if you like, of your world. So we know that 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 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 five HT2A receptor. 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 because of this stimulation by the psychedelic. But with DMT, DMT seems the 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 Carhartt Harris, who's now at University of California, San Diego. Might have got that wrong, but anyway, a university in California, maybe San Francisco. But anyway, if you put someone an MRI machine and give them, inject them with psilocybin, for example, you can actually see how their brain activity changes. So normally you can see the brain kind of moving between states in a very controlled manner as your brain is kind of constructing your world. But then when you give psilocybin, that activity starts to look more random as if the brain is moving more freely from state to state. And so that kind of human DMT is more freely, with psilocybin or LSD. But so you can kind of measure the entropy, so the randomness in neural activity. 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. 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 heated up and it starts to melt, and you can kind of mold it to any kind of shape. Psychedelic, it's a kind of doing that to the brain, doing that to your world model. And that's why you have the effects of psychedelics. But with DMT, something different seems to happen. You get this initial increase in randomness, but it's as if 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 fluid and dynamic state. And then the breakthrough, it's like the brain has collapsed into this entirely new order, which is this entirely new novel, entirely alien world. Is that when we start to lose the our ego? That's part of what's going on, yeah. The ego is an interesting concept in that 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, responsible for the sense of self as distinct from the other, from the environment. 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. And so you have all of these effects, psychological, subjective effects, effects on the world, all the effects on your sense of self. They all start to break down, and that the higher the dose becomes, 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 DMT world is not random. It is very coherent, exquisitely complex, staggering, coherent narrative complexity. It's like literally as if the normal waking world has been switched off, 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 crackwheels through the speakers, and that's kind of what DMT is doing. And you'd call that world navigable. It is navigable, yeah, excuse me. For most people, it's not navigable. For most people, it's just like hold on. But with experience, yes, you can navigate this world. Yes. But the problem is the problem I have with the standard explanation of this DMT state is that this normal waking world is a world that your brain kind of evolved to construct. The moment that you emerge from the womb, your brain is constantly sampling sensory information from the environment through the eyes, et cetera, 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 if you grow up speaking English, you can't speak any other languages, unless you learn them. And in the same way, this normal waking world, 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 far more complex, far more intricate, far more coherent, and far more real feeling than the normal waking world. It's not like dream. When people dream, they tend to dream of people. They tend to dream of animals. People in the Midwest will dream of people. They will dream of dogs and cats, right? If you ask someone who lives in the Amazon rainforest, what they dream of, they'll dream of catching stingrays, they'll dream of the animals that they will find in their environment. This is obvious in a way. When you dream, your brain is simply constructing the normal waking world. Dream is like continuous, really, with the normal waking world. Brain is using those models that it knows to construct a world in the absence of sensory inputs, which is what dreaming is. So that's kind of makes sense. So why then? Why DMT? Not DMT. Your brain starts constructing these worlds that it shouldn't know how to build. Well, take us through the world. So maybe we can talk about DMT X, because that's a protocol you develop with brickstrasmon. Instead of this is intravenous DMT, keeping you in that stake for a long-- How long? How long? How long is a piece of string, with the answer to that question? OK. So yeah, so Rick Strasmon, 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 30 seconds, you get a varied rises in the brain. They have this breakthrough experience, and then almost as soon as it reaches the peak in the brain, it starts to metabolize and excreted. And so there's this exponential drop-off. And then when you reach a certain level in the brain, you come out of the DMT state. And so if you really want to study the DMT state, 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 during surgery. So what they don't do, when someone puts you to sleep, they don't just inject you with a drug. They inject you with a very fast acting anesthetic. 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 constant. So they can keep you anesthetized, 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 depth of your anesthesia as well. So this has been the mainstay of anesthesiology for decades. And it occurred to me that the requisite properties of the anesthetic drug are the same as DMT. It needs to be short acting. It can't build up in the bloodstream. It can't have subjective tolerance, 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 Strasmann 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, wait, 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 control intravenous infusion model, but just replace the anesthetic drug with DMT. That's why I wrote to Rick, and I said, I have this idea, and I need your data, his blood data, because you need blood sampling data to build this model. And he had it on some old hard drive, this old Excel file. She 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? No. I think when he wrote DMT, the Spirit Molecule in 2000, he mentioned towards the end of the book that maybe an infusion will be better. So it wasn't an entirely alien idea to him. And so 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, OK, let's do this in humans. Let's see if it actually works. And they, in, I think, in 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 normal DMT. They were able to stabilize the DMT state and maintain fairly stable intensity of experience. And since then, you know, a number of groups have kind of extended this to two, three hours. I now work with a company called Illusus ELEUSIS 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 practitioner, psychiatrist, anesthesiologist. And anyone now can basically spend as much time as they like, really, within the DMT space exploring. And so you know, go to IllususMind.com. And you can also kind of sign up and spend a few days on the island. Illusus went live in March, right? Yes.
So with the first cohort was in March. The first cohort. So what are people seeing? - Well, we, it's very early days. So we don't kind of have, I kind of publish reports or anything, but the. - What are we all seeing the waiting room? It's navigating the space, the entities. - So when the Imperial College team published their DMTX study, they, we actually did a, 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 Gallimau, Graham Hancock, should be able to find that. And we spoke to several of them, including the first subject zero, as I call, in Karl Smith. He was the first person to undergo DMTX in a controlled kind of research setting. It was five doses, increasing doses. And it's, I think every couple of weeks that go in, they'd be injected, infused with DMT for 30 minutes. And then we got to speak to them about their experiences. And, you know, think about DMT is that it's, it's a very varied experience. And no, no two experiences are always the same. However, Karl Smith, particularly, he's one of my colleagues at New Nortix, with both directors. He, he found that the entities, over the sessions, there's several in a five sessions of DMTX, the entities started to notice that he was coming back, rather, too often, and spending a little bit too much time in there. And he, he describes the sense that the entities were saying, not you again, you know, you're back again, you know, as if there was this kind of continuity between the experiences. They weren't totally isolated experiences, but there was this, this continuity between the experiences. And during one experience, one DMTX session, he was being scanned by some machine. This is in the normal waking world, right? Like an MRI machine or something. He was being scanned. He's being was being scanned. And the entities were aware of this. The entities kind of rushed in. And they, he said they seemed 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 scanned. Right. They're doing, you know, in the back room or basement or something. Did he describe what they looked like? He didn't, no, he didn't describe what they looked like. But he said there were very, very large numbers of, they were crowding in. As if they'd seen something going on. And they came, came crowded in. And there was another guy called Anton Bilton. He actually funded the study. He has this great institute called the Tyringham 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, but any stretch of the imagination. And he describes an experience where he found himself in like the waiting room kind of place with these morphine geometric walls. And these beings who were looking down upon him, he called them the gingerbread men. These elfish-like beings, small beings. And they seemed to be, they always check the back of my neck. Always do this. I don't know why. He said, the only thing I can think, 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 the devices that are kind of like an electronic, some kind of mechanical device or electronic device like a dual-incrusted 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 trying to 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 dual-incrusted pad is very interesting because Timothy Larry back in the 1960s, he wasn't aware of this Anton. But I said to him, dual-incrusted pad is like your terminology. He said, yeah, that's how I describe it. Because Timothy Larry back in the 1960s says that these, these elf-like insect beings were proffering this dual-incrusted 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 like to be very different to ayahuasca for a number of reasons. But do they see the same kind of technological devices? Or do they not? And what is the reason for that? But 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, phabaget eggs, so it's mechanically used to describe them. You know, just weird things, liquid-light, crystal machine strings, things that you can't really, but just things, that kind of thing. 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 dual-incrusted pad, he couldn't make any sense of it. And eventually they just gave up and they kind of said there was like a swipe ziff and that the whole scene completely changed, and he was in this completely different environment. Yeah, so lots of very strange experiences coming out. But I think what DMTX really comes into its own is being able to spend. Imagine if you'd sent in a mathematician or a linguist. It 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. I think 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 with DMTX, you can bring them out, can't you? Give 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 space, you send in a mathematician that's familiar with these kind of things. They can say, oh, this is a seven-dimensional space. So these are the symmetry groups 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. So the amount of DMT being infused into their bloodstream, they can manipulate that in real time. Because DMT is so short-acting, 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 look for this? Or can you ask them this? Okay, I'm going back in. Then you go back down again. So you have this ability to manipulate the depth in real time. It's fascinating. What got you thinking that maybe what people are seeing is connected and that's not a hallucination, that it's a realm or-- Yeah, I mean, so what I think's going on with DMT is I don't think you're going anywhere. That's really important. It's not like another dimension or something like that. Even in the DMT state, the brain is constructing this model. 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 tune and keep its model tuned to the environment, basically. Now, when you take DMT, the brain starts constructing this alternate world model. And it's as if there's some alternate source of sensory information coming into the brain that's modulating that DMT world. So you're not going anywhere. You don't have to travel anywhere. It's simply-- it's like switching the channel, right? If you have a TV set and you're watching channel one, then you switch the TV set to channel two.
and nothing goes anywhere, it's simply that you've changed the receiving. Well, 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. You're always creating the world model. But again, from 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 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. Now 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 of brain evolved and learned to construct. And it's hard to explain that. If a five-year-old British child started speaking some obscure dialect of some South American indigenous rainforest language, right? And doing so fluidly, that would be completely confounding unless he'd been taught it in the same way the brain switching to constructing this alien world so efficiently is very, very, very difficult to explain. And that's kind of the foundation of why I think there's something going on more than just mere hallucination with DMT, but we need to test it. Now, there are a number of ways you might do that, for example. 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 the blue yellow test. Blue yellow test. I want to ask you about that. Before we do that, mention Robin Carr and Harris. Let's steal man straw man because he disagrees and thinks it's hallucination. 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 prefer your theory because it's just more interesting. Well, I think I'm not going to say that Robin is wrong, but I think Robin and all kind of mainstream buttoned down neuroscientists start with that assumption that we're dealing with hallucination. And I think that that's reasonable, actually. It should always be our default position. In most of my work, I would say 80% of what I've done in the last 20 years is not actually trying to convince people what DMT is, but actually trying to convince people what it's not. I actually try to explain to people why I don't think it's hallucination, rather than telling them that I have the answer that, you know, it's the spirit world or whatever, the astral plane. I really tried to focus on kind of why I think it's very difficult to explain DMT purely as a hallucination. And Robin would say, well, this is just, well, I can't say what Robin would say, but it's Robin assumes that we're dealing with some kind of information, some kind of some kind of hallucination that your brain, when perturbed by DMT, is constructing these worlds, perhaps informed by archetypal structures. That's a big thing I know with Robin. He often takes this very Jungian angle. He thinks that, well, these are archetypal structures. That's where they're coming from. These are inherited patterns. That's why everyone sees certain types of entities is because these are embedded archetypal structures in every culture in every culture has little people. Right. Exactly. But I think that would work if the thing is that archetypes are not images, first of all, you know, an archetype really, we know now, anyway, the archetype is really just a, it's a, an inherited mode of social interaction. So you're born with certain, in animals, we just call them instincts. Right. A baby, for example, will want to be close to its mother. We'll see its mother as a source of warmth and comfort and safety. And we'll, you know, smile when it sees its mother's face. Whereas when it sees a stranger, 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 that are essential. Right. 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. They will start scrapping and all this kind of stuff. All instinctive. They don't need to be taught how to play. It's just instinctive. You put a cat, 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 here. 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 in wisdom and who you should listen to. That the trickster, this is someone probably from outside the tribe, maybe, who you need to be a little bit careful around. Should you reveal your darkest secrets to them or should you remain tight lips? Should you listen to what they say or should you should ignore them? These are all types of social interactions that have been essential in social humans for millennia, tens of millennia. And so these are kind of hard-wired. And so these become associated with certain types of people, we call the archetypes. But they're not images. They don't endow you with 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 them in a normal waking world, they become associated with certain types of the mother archetype is becomes associated with your mother. And that kind of thing. So archetypes are kind of limited in what they give you. They give you these very kind of quick and dirty ways of responding to humans, the 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 stranger in a dark alley. We have these hard-wired archetypes that allow us to differentiate those, respond in an appropriate way. But they don't give you hyper-dimensional worlds filled with non-human, non-animal beings that are far more complex than humans. They don't give you all of that stuff. And so it still doesn't explain, even if you invoke the archetypes, why and how the brain is able to construct 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 be convinced by it. I'm not 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, little sliver of doubt in your mind that actually the Maverie is something slightly unusual going on that we need to study. 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 hallucination and our job is simply to explain how these hallucination works because there's so much going on in the 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. That's fair enough. 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 would brought me to a question I wanted to ask. I think we're finding that under cardiac arrest, brain is being flooded with DMT. Yeah. What do you think is going on - Ah, ah, okay, there's a bit of a story there. - Okay.
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 serotonin also comes from tryptophan and tryptomy, 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, started 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 schizophrenia is that they have this disorder with the tryptomine metabolism that they're producing too much DMT. So, it makes sense, right? And so, easy to test, they started looking for DMT and urine 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 and schizophrenics, other studies say, you know, 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 their auditory, their 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 where when you're on DMT, you're not here anymore. You are gone. Exactly. So it's like that, it's like you're in a waking dream, it's like your brain has inserted human into your world model inappropriately, they interact with the environment, they sit on chairs, they walk through doors, they don't walk through walls, 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, not doing it quite appropriately, that's relatively easy to explain. But anyway, going back to the rats, yeah, so the idea, so the pineal gland, this is basically taking us to the pineal gland. So Rick Strathman in the 1990s, he proposed that DMT, we know that the pineal gland is producing melatonin, this tiny little gland, the size of the end of my pinky, sits right in the center of the brain, it has this exalted position in mystical traditions for many, many years. And Rick Strathman suggested that perhaps pineal gland was releasing DMT, and that this was responsible for certain altidates of consciousness, or it's very specifically the near death experience. This actually, I should give proper credit to Jason Callaway in the 1980s, he proposed that dreaming was due to DMT, that when you dream your brain stops, the triptomine metabolism changes and your brain stops producing serotonin and basically starts 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, because dreams are nothing like DMT, right? And then the near death experience, that's more compelling. Yes, it is. It's more compelling, there have been some recent studies that showed there are very, there is kind of 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, including Don Hoffman, actually, but that's another story. We were almost out of time, I can't wait, so what do you think is happening? Why did we evolve to have that there? Is that why we're seeing the tunnel, when I see the Virgin Mary or I see my grandmother and my mother, am I seeing an entity? So that's the hypothesis, right? So Rick Strathman said that when you die, during the dying process, the brain is flooded with DMT and this is kind of the conduit by which the soul acts, it's 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. You kind of have to, yeah. But it was purely hypothetical, it was just a hypothesis, but a number of people caught onto it. 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 biochemist, I think he's biochemist, Edie Fresca, is working with Rick Strathman and Dennis McKenna, he found that DMT, 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 is compromised, that part of the brain starts to die, which is why strokes need to be treated so so rapidly as 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, the neurons survived much longer, the neuroprotective, neuroprotective, and it's actually a particular receptor called the SIGMA-1 receptor. It's not the serotonin receptor, the SIGMA-1 receptor binds to this and it protects the neurons in some way, the biochemical cascade that 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 systems start to collapse, your brain is starved, gradually more and more starved of oxygen. Now this is precisely the time when if you do come back, right, if you don't die, this is precisely the time when you need as much DMT in your brain as possible to help protect your brain. So if you do come back, the brain is protected, because this is the most oxygen, you know, hypoxia sensitive organ in the body. And so it would make sense that if you're dying that somehow DMT, endogenous DMT production is ramped up very, very rapidly, you get this flood of DMT in the brain, which protects the brain. It 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 tested this in rats, they would stop the rats' heart, induce basically cardiac arrest in a rat. And they would have these things called micro, what are they called, I forget, but anyway, they have this system where they can actually measure, they can put this device, this probe directly into a rat's living rat's brain and actually measure in real time the levels of various molecules, kind of a credible thing. And they found, indeed, that when the rat's heart stopped levels of DMT, those very, very spiked in DMT, there was also other neurotransmitters that were spiking as well, so whether it's specific for DMT 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 the levels of DMT in the brain at least rise, this protects the brain. Have they been able to test on the rats' different brain activity? No, so you're suggesting like they can measure the NDE, what kind of experience. 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 to this new dimension? This isn't it, yeah, unless you kind of undergo rebirth as a rat, we're not likely to find that out. And you can measure, could you test their brain waves to see, yes, you can, you can, but whether you can do that at the same time as this microdialysis, you can do that at the same time as this measuring the levels, you probably have to do it separately, you have these tiny little MRI machines, very cute little MRI machines, I've seen those. You could probably do that. You could take a Barbie MRI. I don't think it's been done there, it's 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 narrating and you're still remembering. So there is, you're still kind of driving, or 5MEO is a little bit, you're more observing and you kind of go into the void. Yeah, they used to call, 5MEO and DMT, the power and the glory. Oh, right. So DMT is the glory, it's very, it's, obviously it's characterized by extremely content rich, extremely visual, it's full of stuff, more full of stuff than the normal waking world.
So it's a beautiful experience and 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, they're awesome dark ones sure for sure But Jenny's less than 10% yeah, it's a bad trip. It's a bad trip But yeah, 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 five. I mean, I was like the 12th dimension. Yeah, it's like you go past all the form You you transcend form if you go far enough Beyond you can 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 five me oh and he actually said during his DMTX experience that he was able to sometimes see the five me oh space kind of There some way away while she was in the DMT space as if he could almost reach it as if they were connected in some way That's it very interesting. Yeah That's very interesting um, I don't know if you want to say it, but have you experienced five of them? Yeah And I like you. I mean no hurry. I've got my hands full with DMT. Yeah, I'm in no hurry either because yeah And you can buy that online from these churches. Don't do that. I don't really 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 Salemothoxin that it became the church of the Sacred synthesis, I think yeah, they're yeah, they're still they're still operating and Yes, 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 don't send them money No, no, I mean they they say that their sacrament doesn't contain they said doesn't contain any's The illegal parts of the mushroom is that the psilocybin the psilocybin they said it doesn't contain any of that and it's just Salemothoxin is molecule sacred molecule that they produce but actually when people analyze samples of the sacrament It actually contain no salemothoxin whatsoever and it was purely just it was just magic mushrooms that they've been shipping that to people Including internationally as well. Oh boy So you pay a you know subscription fee and you get shipped these allegedly perfectly legal mushrooms because salemothoxin itself molecule isn't illegal that should be completely legal But actually if someone was to you of one of these samples was was intercepted It's like you can get in really serious trouble depending on where he lived It's and and it's such a what really annoys me about them is that it's such a simple thing to do You know, he had this vision that If you feed five methoxy DMT to magic mushrooms, they start converting Five methoxy DMT to silent methoxin simple chemical step. Wasn't that based on debunked research though? It was the cotton howl from Morris recently developed it. Yeah, okay by a guy called guts 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 and check that it doesn't contain psilocybin and psilocybin actually contains what they say it contains they just said oh it feels completely different to mushrooms completely bias subjective way Of kind of appraising this this mushroom and then when a group did actually analyze it as I said there was no salemothoxin in there What so ever and of course they threatened to they tried to sue them for one million one million dollars Literally it was in a 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 should yeah, of course Yes, so guys don't that's um Andrew won't say but I will Greg Lake and Ben we Stay away from all 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 There is our god-given right so also their consciousness and however they they feel fit Um, and if that includes using psilocybin 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 state of consciousness is illegal the DMT induced state of consciousness is an illegal state of consciousness So I think I can fully understand people who we would try to find loop holes in the law and you know more power to them to do that but When you start creating churches, I think then you there's a danger of you getting into kind of cultish territory starting your own religion Some for some people it's clearly just a way of getting around the law But for other people like the church of asylum of foxing for example it becomes much more than that and they start making big Big money from this. I mean the $50,000 a month. I think was a number don't quote me on that But it was a big number. I think of the last it was a hundred thousand a month Yeah, okay, there you go So a hundred thousand dollars a month and then some some guys publish a paper basically saying that you're in 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 something that could be obtained for pennies really if you grow your own Someone chose that that's nonsense. It is not scientifically valid You're from a hundred thousand dollars a month to 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 is gonna get wild I wanted to ask about this Back in 2021 something you posted Going back Retrieved and carefully restored from the archives of the highly secretive now allegedly defunct laboratory for reality engineering Tokyo With its own psychedelic molecular technology technical manual that is not a paper That is not a scientific paper. That's what is that a world building an ARG? What what 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 But 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 that all the way from the chemistry through to the the biochemistry and the pharmacology and the neuroscience and Looks at the empty looks at the classic psychedelics generally. It looks at self and or in it looks at even ketamine things like that 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 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 You know kind of a cure kind of thing. That's one. 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 going. I'm gonna do that. Yeah It's it was a very I love that book And that whole reality there's some photos in the center of the book that I purported to be from this now different secretive reality engineering institute in Tokyo, which of course is Just big imagination. I bet a lot of people hopped on board though with that a lot of people did Yeah, they would write somebody as well and say hey, I think there's a problem with the printing on this 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 it what are you trying to prove and does that connect it to traces of other with uh With Don and nifa. Yeah, so So obviously
I can talk until the cows come home until, you know, explaining why I think DMT is more than hallucination, but we really need real tests, what are the kind of experimental tests that we can do that can distinguish between actual interfacing with some kind of intelligence versus pure hallucination. And so in 2015 I started working with a non-profit in Florida called Neunautics and now one of the directors. We're interested in kind of like, we describe it as like a setty of the mind kind of program rather than looking for intelligence out there in the cosmos, we're looking for intelligence in a path throughout space as Rick Strassman called it. And so we're interested in kind of spearheading and developing research, various research projects 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. And so in Neunautics, people can go to the Neunautics website, Neunautics.org, N-D-A-U-T-I-C-S.org and find out all about the work we do. People even donate if they want to to help kind of fund that kind of research. And now with the DMT X technology, now that we have this ability to extend the DMT state, we can actually do experiments now. And now we even have the venue, I mentioned Illusus earlier, E-L-E-U-S-I-S based on, you know, the Illusinian mysteries. So we have this legal setting where people can go and we can actually bring in cohorts. We like the research arm of Illusus at Neunautics. We can design these experiments and we can actually bring people onto the island in the Caribbean, San Vincent and the Grenadines and 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 really 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 the various research programs aimed at testing that. And one broad type of experiment is looking for some kind of correlation within the DMT experience that can't be explained in terms of that the subject couldn't know, right? So I mentioned earlier this idea of someone depositing information into the DMT space and someone else retrieving it later on. And that would show there's some sort of communication channel. Another type of experiment, which is this blue yellow one you mentioned, is can a DMT entity, can they track some kind of external variable that the subject doesn't know, right? So 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? Blue screen and a yellow screen, simplest that. What we want to know 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. So here we've got trained people who can reliably interact with certain entities. And then basically we can ask the subject to basically at intervals, at set intervals, they need to say, okay, is the screen blue or yellow, right? Based upon your experience, right? They could be asking the entity directly, is it blue or yellow? Now, or it could be just like what feeling, what are the dominant colors within this space? Maybe they're not even interacting with an entity. Just what vibe do you get based upon your experience? Are you leaning more towards blue now or leaning more towards yellow? And sometimes that might be obvious. If the experience becomes brightly colored yellow, then they would say yellow. But it might be much more subtle than that, but they might have to kind of guess a little bit. But the idea basically is simply that when you perform that experiment with a subject and 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 so, if you achieve that, then that suggests that yes, the DMT state, the entities within the DMT state can somehow track. So it's not like many people have proposed experiments where you go into the DMT space and you say to an entity, if you're so smart, break down this complex number, this large number into its unique prime factors. Basically, asking them to perform things, perform mathematical operations. I think that's quite enough. They don't want to do that. They probably don't want to do that. Didn't you have one entity who just said we're done for today? Oh, you will get to that. Okay. That's to do with the lockout effect. Okay. Very interesting. I didn't mention that actually. That's another reason why I don't think we'll get to that. Okay. But yeah, so I think this is a much simpler experiment 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, which is why you have a number of experiments. So you might be asking again, deposit in your tree. Well, that's slightly different here. You're looking at an information channel into an out of the DMT state. This is more tracking and external variable. You might ask the entities to, or sometimes rather than giving the entities tasks, this is something I really struggle with, is that 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 DMT that requires, or even implies that these entities are highly intelligent in the human sense. But they seem to occupy a space that is geometrically, dimensionally, and topologically very, very different. And so they're doing things if within that space that cannot be done within the normal waking world. And they kind of betray their intelligence in a way. You don't need to ask them to do things. They just do things that the human brain can't. So if it's hallucination, then obviously what that entity can do is limited by what your brain can do. The entity starts speaking ancient Greek. And you don't know ancient Greek. We've got a problem here, right? Now, if an entity starts performing mathematical operation, starts doing things, right? That your human brain cannot do, then we've got a problem here, it's explained. Andres Gomez Amielsen, who works as a part of, or founded, the Kuala Research Institute, probably the most important group on the planet now, who's really studying 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 four colors so that no two shapes are blocked with the same color. So it comes back to the idea of coloring a map of all the countries. 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 quizzically complex, often higher dimensional surfaces with strange topological structures, and these entities painting these surfaces with four colors just perfectly as if demonstrating their abilities. And he said, I couldn't do this, it would take me hours or longer to do what they were doing in a fraction of a second. And repeatedly they paint the surface and then they would reset it and then paint it again and then do it again repeatedly. And most people, if they saw that, they would go that was crazy or that was weird or that was beautiful, but they wouldn't understand what they were actually looking at. I wouldn't know, now I wouldn't know the word 'I', nor the word
I knew I'd die, I was surprised by all the math in Traces of Other and in Hoffman's series. There's a lot of math in it. There's a lot of math and I think you need, you need the math to, so we say maths in the UK. 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 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. 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, 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 in that way, you, you know, that adds another piece of evidence that we're dealing with something that is beyond the human show. That's very interesting. 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 Hoffman because the mathematics definitely applies, yes. So, I've been kind of following Don Hoffman, Donald Hoffman, Professor, Cognitive Scientist, University of California at Irvine, and for decades. And he has this mathematical model that he calls conscious agent theory. It's what he calls conscious realism, which posits that consciousness is fundamental. And that reality consists of and only of conscious agents interacting. 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 realities. So, rather than this failed program of assuming that matter is fundamental and then trying to boot up consciousness from dead in a physical matter, he's going in the opposite direction, which I think is the correct one, assuming that consciousness is fundamental, try to get the appearance of the physical world from consciousness and from the interaction of conscious agent. He starts with a conscious agent, which is very… I think he got his math to work through the game theory. Like the math is legitimately works. The mathematics legitimately works and it's incredible, really, that he starts with a very simple kind of minimal assumption model of a conscious agent. A conscious agent is an agent that can do basically three things. It can perceive other conscious agents. It can make decisions based upon what it perceives and it can perform actions which affect other conscious agents. So, you have… This kind of network emerges of conscious agents through all interacting via perception. What we see and what we observe 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, right? So, this is the fitness before truth method. This is fitness before truth. 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 what's called the trace logic. The mathematics are a little bit sophisticated. I don't want to get too much into that because 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 towards, but he could also boot up relativity, so he could explain within this conscious agent theory, trace logic model, why time dilation and contraction of the high speeds and all this kind of stuff that comes from relativity, which we thought was kind of fundamental to the way space time works. Actually, he can get it from just the interactions of conscious agents. He can get you derive the Schrodinger equation, I mean, it's incredible stuff, just from basic conscious agents. And so, just a few months ago, actually, I got an email from a guy called Gaspard, who's working with Don, he's 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 got all this stuff that floating around in papers and interviews and other stuff, but there's no kind of, kind of, properly organized archive and an institute to actually follow on to his work and kind of pick up the mantle, so to speak. So Gaspard, who's also been following my work, said to Don, you should read this guy, Andrew Gallymore, 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, 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 conflicts we can get into, but Gaspard said, you know, would you like to meet Don Hoffman? Don would like to meet you, we can have a discussion and see where there is that overlap. So we met online and straight away I said, should we write a paper on this, see if we can see where the connection is, and it was honestly, and I don't say this lightly, it was one of the most profound few months of my life, and this was a preprint just last month I think, right? Preprint we published just last month, and it was, I kind of had this working model of what DMT was doing, 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 is 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, which would be 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, 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. So if you take this vast landscape, all possible world moments, I call that the world space. And normally we sit within this very narrow region, it's like a well and a track to 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 perturbes 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 Nifor Hermannsen, who's absolutely pivotal in making this all the mathematics work. And we basically, we probed the model. We said, OK, if normally 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, it's the same idea as the world space. But what Don Hoffman's work has is kind of the experience space 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 space. And as I said, normally, we will sit within this very small region of the total experience space, which is the adaptive region, where we experience the normal waking world. It's very thin, very, very small location within the experience space. And that's determined by the quality of kernel, which is involved within that region of the experience space 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 space into an entirely different region, where the normal rules that are basically applied by this quality of kernel, they no longer apply. So you enter 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 space 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 space are completely different. Now, the quality of kernel that sits, as I said, that's determining these dynamics is actually composed of three different kernels, 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 the 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. In theory, I 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, and 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 really can't know. Well, OK, yes, so the world you experience is always the interface. So you can never get out of the interface, but the interface would change as you move the different regions of the experience space. So what you see in the interface is determined by the dynamics that are imposed by this qually kernel, right? So in this region, we experience this low-dimensional world. We're interacting with this very limited number of conscious agents that are through 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 dynamical constraints are completely different. So the world wouldn't necessarily be 3 plus 1 dimensional. It could be completely different. It could be completely alien. The geometry, the topology, could be completely alien. And the conscious agents that you can interact with in that region of the experience space could also be completely different. So your brain has to also be a projection to make that work? Yes. You do mathematically. Yes, yes. You always were 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. 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 quality of kernel and the Markovian dynamics, all of this stuff. But then we said, OK, let's imagine what that would actually be like. If you were knocked out of this region of the experience space, and you found yourself in a different region of the experience space, where the Markovian dynamics are completely different, and the interactions between the broader conscious agent network is completely different. It would be extremely strange. Nothing would seem to make sense. It would look impossible. It would look perhaps hide-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 basically fell out of the mathematics. It's elegant. And when that happened, that was like, it was a profound moment in my life. One of the most profound moments in my working life studying DMT, that DMT went from something which didn't quite make sense. 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. So what you have to think is that when you perceive another conscious agent, what's happening is the way that that conscious agent interacts with the conscious agent network changes the states of the conscious agent network. That has an influence on your experience states. Doesn't mean that you can map the actual conscious agent dynamics directly into your experience base. You can't. But there is some influence, statistical influence on how your world states, how your experience states kind of update. And 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 affecting my experience. And that's basically what perception is in conscious realism model. And that completely changes when you go out of the the consensus reality space, this very limited region of the experience base, 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 beyond the agent's represent, 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 quality of kernel in that region is completely different, or 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 in a completely different region of the experience base and you're interacting with other conscious agents that you weren't, you are unable to interact with or perceive in the whilst you are stuck in this region of the experience base. So it all falls into place quite beautifully. And that's what shocked me and was, you know, a profound almost religious experience. What do you think our icon is in that other world? How are we perceived? 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 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, this world 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 in conscious realism theory in a completely different way. And so it makes us, what DMT is doing 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 reality itself, the conscious agent network in completely different ways. And so it's not just a model of DMT, or the DMT is the most efficient, delivering that kick to the conscious agent, but people describe very profound encounters with entities and strange alien beings, high dose psilocybin, or even ketamine, John Lilley, used to inject high doses of ketamine and 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
change but also allows you to enter into two-way interactions with other parts and other beings, other conscious agents within the conscious agent network. Do you think that that world is lateral two hours 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. But normally we only interact, we only see a kind of a or only influenced by a very thin slice of that conscious agent network. We're kind of held constrained by this quality kernel that's been sculpted by evolutionary pressures. And what psychedelics do, DMT particulates, pushes us out of that. 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. But we're still at the level, we're still a conscious agent. That makes sense. So we were living our world as a Mac and you go into a different realm and you're just booting up Windows or Linux. It's a different interface. It's like changing the headset. When was the moment where you abandoned materialism and decided that your brain is an icon? Well, I abandoned materialism many years ago. I mean, people think that I'm a materialist. I thought I did. Yeah, because I write at the level of the brain, I can get my teeth into the brain. I'm not metaphorical, but you know, the mechanics of it and all that stuff I can understand and get my teeth into. But really, I've always been an idealist for a very long time. I mean, I felt that consciousness was absolutely fundamental. This is the oldest message 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, hey, if consciousness is fundamental, that doesn't mean it's just this kind of daffinous mist or fog or whatever. You can actually do mathematics with it. You can just like you can with material physics. You can think about, okay, how do these conscious agents interact? What are some mathematics of that? You can actually look at the mechanics and the dynamics of conscious agents. Do stuff with it. Actual science. 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. 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. Yeah, I don't hear you talk about consciousness itself. And you're familiar with Doug Hammeroff's work. Yeah. It seems like it would marry. It seems like it would marry nicely with the MPX. Yeah, Hammeroff is a physicalist as well. I mean, Julio Tonone, 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 microtubules are still just another icon. Exactly. And so what I love about Don is you said, forget about all of that. Let's start with the one thing that 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 remarkable in being able to explain so much about what's going on. And it all makes perfect sense to me. And when you connect it to DMT, 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 right. 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 assumed. So you and Don just gave a talk together a day or two ago? Yeah. So we wrote the paper, worked on it for several months, me, Don and NIFA. And then I said, hey, I've been invited onto, have you heard of the Wifiels? I've been invited on this podcast. And I'm going to be there in June, the middle of June. 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, that's incredible. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Yeah. And so we arranged it on Saturday. So it's just a couple of days before today. And we, it's basically the launch of the Trace Institute, together with the collaboration between the Trace Institute and new Nordics 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 L.A. in Venice Beach. And just talking about, you know, kind of telling the world that DMT and consularism and that kind of fit together in this beautiful way. 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? And now that we've got, as I said, the elusive, the elusive retreat research center in the Caribbean, we can actually pretty quickly start raising money to actually fund some projects on the island in a legal setting without having to do the whole university route, which we try trying to avoid connecting ourselves with universities because they obviously, they might not take kindly to the idea of testing the intelligence of DMT. It looks like a luxury vacation is really what it looks like. Oh, it's a beautiful resort, nothing about it. But it's also a research center as well. Something I couldn't get my mind around was DMT tolerance in DMT X, where, at some point, where the plasma level increases, the experience does not get deeper, in fact, it fades somewhat. Okay, yeah. So this is very interesting. So, as I said before, Rick Strassman showed that DMT doesn't have subjective tolerance, unlike other psychedelics. If you take psilocybin mushrooms, trip, then if you try to take them the following day, you'll have a very, very weak experience, right? And we know we've known this for a long time with DMT. Yes, but with DMT, you don't get that tolerance effect, which is why DMT X works. But on the online forums, quite a few years ago, it's been going on for a while, but a lot of people are starting to talk about it now, is that people would have this experience where they take DMT, often quite regularly, maybe every day or every few days, right? They have a vape pan, so they're delivering the same DMT every time. And then one day, they'll get like a big X, the field of vision, it 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're not welcome here. We're not letting you in. And this is called a lockout. You've been locked out of the DMT space. Wow, right? And so they say, okay, that's pretty startling. 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, vaporise in the same manner. And then one day, some, 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. And you get many, many those kinds of experiences. And it's not pharmacologically, this is not easy to explain. No, tolerance is something that builds gradually and fades, whereas this is like an 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 sometimes that can last for months or years, a friend of mine, David Luke, a professor at Greenwich University, a 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 receptor still absorbing the molecule? Well, serotonin receptors, the thing about serotonin receptors, all receptors really is that there's a turnover. The receptor itself will sometimes just for a few days will be in the membrane. Then it will be removed from the membrane, broken down, and recycled. So there's always this replenishment of serotonin receptors. Now we know with LSD 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? Is there a ton of syndrome is a real thing? - Right, it is a real thing. - But what blows my mind is it turning off. - Turning off. - 'Cause his receptors should still be active with the molecule, just have it turned off. - It turns off, yeah. And 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 you need-- - That's insane, yeah. And I can get an even more incredible account that I got from a woman during DMTX that she was doing DMTX in Colorado, not kind of a private group. And she was undergoing DMTX. She was having this interaction with this entity or 20 minutes or so, DMT flowing into a bloodstream and into a brain, stable DMT state. And then the entity said, okay, I think we're done for today. The vision's just, you stopped. DMT was still flowing, the infusion machine was still on. DMT levels in a 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. 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, who have repeatedly been unable, who could have visual new experiences in the past, but were locked out and are still locked out, and then bring them to the island and infuse DMT into bring them to the illusus, bring, infuse them with DMT, DMT X, and then actually confirm or. - That would be interesting. - Just hide that, basically. - If they're still locked out. - Yeah. - And yeah, you're really onto something. - Yeah, and then you can actually use EEG, you can, in theory, you can use FML, right? 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, 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 changes in their differences in their genetics. There's also this thing called the 5% club, which are people who are locked out from birth, shall we say. They can never experience effects of DMT, 5% of people. - Do they have, that's very interesting. Is that a serotonin issue? - We don't know, mood disorder. - My guess would be, is that it's a, what's called a receptor polymorphism. So every receptor is, a receptor is a protein, and it's encoded by a gene. We all have different variants of all the different genes encoding our receptors in our body. These are called polymorphisms. And my suggestion, prediction hypothesis, is that certain people have a slightly different variant of the 5HT2A receptor that means, or some other receptor, doesn't necessarily have to be the 5HT2A, that means that DMT isn't, either isn't binding to the receptor, or it's not activating the receptor in the same way. It could also be a metabolic issue, it could be that they are metabolizing DMT extremely rapidly. But Rick Strassman found that in about 5%, I think it was three people out of 60, so exactly 5%, even at the highest dose level, 0.4 milligrams per kilogram, which was more than a breakthrough dose, they experienced no effects whatsoever of DMT. So we want to study that as well. - Yes, that's very interesting. - Do genetic work, you know, take samples and actually 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 different. - I had never heard that before. - Yeah. - What's happening to the serotonin in the brain while they're under for so long? Is it just getting metabolized? Are they having mood issues when they come back? - No, I mean, people, the Imperial College study, the aim of it was to kind of look at that, right? Is this safe and is it tolerable? - If you're on SSRI, I don't think you should do this. - No, what's, the problem with SSRIs, generally is that people don't experience as intense effects, so kind of blunts the effect because you get changes in the expression of certain serotonin receptors. But yeah, if you're on any kind of psychiatric medication for whatever condition then tread carefully. That's a general kind of warning to anyone, not just DMT, but all psychedelics. We'd be very, very careful because they are contraindicated for certain people. These aren't toys. But yeah, I mean DMTX, it's shown to be safe and tolerable. People, broadly, were able to handle the experience and come out absolutely fine, even though they were in there for. And now there's been a material sleekity, I think, in Basel, had his subjects under for, I think three hours or something like that. - Wow. - A fairly low level, not the breakthrough level, but he also had a device where they could adjust the infusion rate so they could control their experience. We're going to see more of those kind of studies where we start to learn how to use the DMTX technology to really not just spend more time, but actually be able to navigate this space and increase and adjust the depth of the experience in real time. - At a low dose, are they responsive? - Yeah, even at the high dose, weirdly. - Even at the high dose? - Yeah, I mean, or audit tree response, not visual. But during the Imperial study, one of the annoying things is that for the subjects, Carl talks about this a lot, is that they were being asked like questions, like what's the intensity now between one and 10? Wait, it's three, what's it now? Do you see entities, yes or no? What's the entity level? All these questions, so you can never kind of just let go and enjoy your 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 need to get all of that data as well. But it loses, of course, you don't have to, you're free to kind of explore for as long as you like. - How different is the I/OASCA experience from DMTX? - This is a very good question, AJ, because one of the kind of the pushbacks that we got mean rig when we published this is people would say, "Well, just I/OASCA, that's an extended DMT state." And in a sense, they're right, but in several other senses, they're wrong. So with a regular DMT experience, blood-brained DMT levels rise and then drops down very rapidly. With I/OASCA, because of the mono-aiminoc stays inhibitor, harming and harming, then 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 stretched out. That kind of concentration curve is stretched out. So it's not, you never achieve a stable brain DMT concentration with I/OASCA. You're still at the mercy of your metabolism with phonetics, but also with I/OASCA, Dennis McKenna, I think it was, actually looked at blood concentrations of DMT of people who took I/OASCA and people who took like ejected high-dose breakthrough level DMT, and the peak of blood DMT concentration in I/OASCA is only around less than 20% of what you achieve with ejected DMT. So, 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 bring them up into the breakthrough state and then hold them there in the breakthrough state for as long as possible. So you have real time control over the DMT state. You don't get that with anything close to that with I/OASCA. That's interesting, because in my own experience, sometimes you just can't get there. You just, I just can't breakthrough. I just end up in the room of geometric shapes and then I'm back. Yeah. Usually because I'm stressed or distracted or a dog is barking or something. This is I/OASCA with DMT, I don't always break through. But I haven't tried it in a very long time. Pass the statute of limitations. You're alien insect online. I am. Why? Well, aliens, I've been interested in aliens and alien intelligence. Not aliens is like gray beings in metallic disks, shimmering in the night sky, that kind of thing. Although it is interesting. But yeah. That 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, while these are kind of-- insectoid beings are kind of a common entity within the DMT space. So alien intelligence.
Why not I came up with that name and now it's my handle on X and Instagram. Did you ever see the mantids during a during a trip? I've never seen a man to it neither a lot of people a lot of people have though. Yeah, I don't want to 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 Spirits is 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 this and this he can't bring anything 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 at all completely different at all Equally strange and baffling and bewildering and then you're deposited back in the real say the real world You're deposited back in the normal waking world and you don't really remember those rooms. Do you know because I don't? Yeah, 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 Filet 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 onto orbs and you know where we are culturally Yeah, I mean valet John Mac if you remember John Mac you're from her hero abduction 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 Well, it's 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 about the 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 shortsighted 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 there's in in abduction John Mac's 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 contacts and put it in a One of John Mac's books nobody would have questioned it because they were like The seemed like you know you have the this sophisticated laboratory type environment and you've got these being at these small beings like workers Or orderly's and then you have these more powerful supervising beings that are kind of in that story all the time. Yeah, that's an abduction experience and it's also features prominently And in DMT reports so so an abduction could that be in like an endogenous DMT experience? It could be an adogenous DMT experience. It could be that these I think we need to get away from the idea that an alien is a Manif is something that exists within this reality. This it's very limited perspective that we're dealing with You know 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 on quote 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 Is not spirits or guards, but some kind of intelligent agent that that normally is always there But we normally 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 You know I often talk about the The anti-cada chef scale you know the cada chef scale the idea it's kind of a An expansive idea the idea that we first we occupy this single planet then we start harvesting the energy from the nearest star and then it's kind of It's the idea that as an intelligent species Progresses technologically and cognitively they start to occupy larger and larger Areas of the cosmos right where the way we think about it. We're like a high level zero. We're high level zero But John Barrow the cosmologist noted quite correctly That actually most of our tech we do of course we send probes and rockets up into elsewhere in the solar system etc But actually most of our technological advances have been not Outwards but inwards to smaller and smaller scales right? That's true Yeah, you know down to from the molecular to you know biochemistry all the way through to The atomic and then the subatomic sure people talking about strings. You'll get deeper and deeper down At 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-cada chef scale with the barrow scale John Barrow and The kind of the he had the minus one minus two minus three minus four rather than plus one, right? And he posited something which is he referred to as the omega minus level and this is when a technological species Is able to actually Control and manipulate the very ground of reality itself Whatever that is so we pass the quants and we've passed even perhaps the Planck scale pass the Planck scale right down Whatever's beyond right quantum mechanics. Of course stops working in the Planck scale. No John Hoffman would say we're talking about consciousness here, right? Physicalists would say something else. It doesn't really matter But basically when our 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 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. You need more 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 forgot 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 time smaller than it is bigger going up that 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 Much more room 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 That would take the form of what we normally describe as Lucidatory experience sure, you know altered states of consciousness. That's how you do it So DMT it's like DMT is in some way Facilitating that experience allows us to interact with these beings that or conscious agents or whatever you want to call them That have been around perhaps forever Um, that's certainly a lot longer than we've been It starts to um You can't avoid the question now Because it's very interesting. I love when my mind is blown on the show which has been I hadn't considered looking down Because if you can pass the Planck scale then you don't need lightspeed travel because you're essentially In the dimension where Entanglement works so you can go anywhere. Well, yeah, we're physics that we don't have any conception of works Right, 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? Well, I wouldn't say it's God, but I would say that we could be dealing with beings that are indistinguishable from God's, in that they are so advanced that we simply cannot conceive of how advanced they are. That would be my suggestion, so we have no conception of what they would be like, or whether they could even take on a visual form in any kind of way. We just have nothing. We have no reference. When we had little beings, we had references. They've got head and they've got big eyes, and that kind of made sense. We can slot it into our picture of reality, but we're talking about intelligences that we simply have no conception of what they might be like. That's a wild idea. The idea that we could actually maybe interface with them by taking this plan alkaloid called DMT. It's an even wilder idea. It feels like it's by design to me. It's too convenient. It does feel like that. I would never say that that's the case, but there is something uncanny about DMT. It's ubiquity throughout the natural world, and just incredibly crispy efficient tool by which we can access 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? 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. The lights are on. There's this briefest of flickers of light, the briefest amount of time, and it's off again. I think it was Alan Watts who said, "Think about the state after you die. You don't exist. Then think about the state before you were born. You don't exist." Those are indistinguishable. The state before you're born is identical to the state after you die. What happened then? Well, we know what happened then. I think we're part of something that is. We occupied this very, very thin slice of something far grander and far more mysterious and far more profound and strange. Then we can conceive and I'd just get the sense that I often describe reality, certain human reality, as some kind of feels like a game of some sort. It's just play. The Hindus will tell you that. They will say, "Oh, Brockman is Lila. This is the play, the play at making the world. It's all one cosmic drama. We take it very, very seriously." The part of the game is working out that it's a game. It shouldn't take it seriously. This is just a ride. There's Bill Hicks used to say. I get that sense that I don't take reality. I don't take life seriously. I don't think it's a really sombre, serious, important thing. I think it's just a beautiful experience that we have for this prefaced periods of time. We should enjoy it. I would enjoy any other ride at the fairground or something like that. What happens after? I don't know, but it's something we all have to look forward to. You subscribe to the idea that there's sort of a universal consciousness and when we're born, we're kind of spawned out of that. We come here. We have experiences and we bring it back to the source. Well, that's what conscious realism says as well is that there is one described as a conscious agent network but ultimately, there's nothing but consciousness. So sure, absolutely. Ultimately, there is one unified consciousness. That's again, that's the oldest message. What is Brockman? That's the ultimate reality and everything else is illusion. It's all the same illusion. Timothy Liri used to say it's all the same illusion. This reality is an illusion. In a sense, the empty space is also an illusion. It doesn't mean it's not real. You're still interacting with consciousness, but it's all, everything has. All experiences have the same ontological validity. They're all as real as each other in some way and there's different ways of experiencing. Eventually, you kind of get past these questions of always. Is DMT real or is it not real? That question no longer almost doesn't make any sense anymore. I didn't ask it. I don't know if it wasn't blaming you, H.A. here, but people always ask me that, do you believe it's real? Before I would give long arguments, I'm maturing now where I actually think, actually, I'm kind of past that now. There's a part of me that thinks it's all part of this grand cosmic drama and there are different ways to play it, different tools we can use to explore. We have this vast, vast, the kind of the playground of reality that we can explore and DMT and other psychedelics and other tools are ways that we can get out of this very small region of this vast playground and enjoy it and experience it and think, wow, I'm fucking incredible majesty of reality that we're part of it. We're inextricably part of it. We are a conscious agent or built from conscious agents as is everything else and everything else is experiencing the world in its own way. That's an incredible thing to realize and then these little questions about, is it real or not real? I don't need anything they don't know. That's why I love interface theory. Anything else you want to discuss before we go? This has been wonderful. I just like to say, well, I certainly would like, you know, if anyone wants to learn more about my work, certainly read my book Death by Estonishman's an amazing book. You want to understand the history of DMT all the way back to thousands of years really and indigenous plant preparations all the way through to 20th century and beyond and what I think about DMT, the neuroscience of DMT, why I think it's not just hallucination what it could be and all of that stuff. That's everything I've learned about DMT in the last 30 years is in death by Estonishman, so please get that. Please follow me on X, Twitter, Alien Insect, as you said, or Instagram, also Alien Insect. Go to newnautics.org. If you want to learn about the research programs that were developing at newnautics and if anyone wants to experience DMTX themselves in a perfectly 100% legal, safe, medically supervised environment, go to elusis-mind-elusis-mind.com and they can sign up to spend a few days on this beautiful tropical Caribbean island. I think that covers it, AJ. All right, Dr. Andrew Galmour, this has been a treat and a joy. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Bye everybody. That was Dr. Andrew Galmour. 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. I'm a fan of Donald Hoffman's work. Look him up on YouTube. Especially because he could explain, if not proved, his theory of consciousness with math. And I love that the two of them are working together. And Andrew thinks the brain is acting like a radio. DMT switches the channel and suddenly retune into a dimension populated by actual sentient beings. Here's an argument for that. A woman did one of these extended sessions in Colorado. She was 20 minutes in and the DMT was still pumping into her veins. And she was deep in conversation with one of these beings. Then the being said, "I think we're done for today." And the vision just stopped. The machine was still running. The drug was still in her system. So, pharmacologically, that should be impossible, but that happened. Andrew is a real scientist. Cambridge, Oxford, and the real credentials. He's asking the question, "Most scientists will small touch. Are these beings real?" And he's creating experiments to test it. The blue yellow screen, the lack out studies. All of it. Nobody else is doing this. Now, I would ensure that the being regists in your mind. And I can out less sure. His book, "Depth by Estonishment" is fantastic. It's on Amazon. His nonprofit is Noonautics.org. I'll link that down below. Try to spell it properly. The legal DMT retreat is
[email protected]. And the eluses retreat is basically a luxury vacation in the Bahamas. But I have to be honest, it's not cheap. It's hard to find pricing and I wasn't going to ask them. But really,
say it could be anywhere from $9,500 or more, so I'm just letting you know. But if you're going to explore consciousness, the best way to do that is legally with a doctor president. Don't mess with any of the stuff on your own. It's not fun. I promise. Until next time, be safe. Really be safe. Be safe. Be kind. Another you. I appreciate it. Don't mess with it. Oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I played Bolivia's an area 51, a secret code inside the Bible said I was. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as mirrors it. So I'm saying it like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends. And it never ends. No, it never ends. I feel the crack at it. I got stuck inside my home with them chaos truck. I'll be in only two hours. Do you stand, look, you've red-faced the moon landing alone. On a film set, I wore the shadow people there. The raspberry is just for the smiling man. I'm told. And his name was Cole. I can't believe I'm dancing with the fidget. And the fish on Thursday night, Wednesday, day two. And when I'm happy, I'll do the night. Oh, I ever wanted what you can see, the truth. So the world falls on your feet all through the line. The mouth man's side and van. The solar storm still come to a god the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations. When it's supposed to. Bracket stockade. And what the dark watchers found. In a simulation, who do you worry about? The black nights that I lie to told me so. Girl, you love to dance. Yeah, girl, you love to dance. I have a dance for you because she is a camel. We can't we'll love to dance. When the feeling is right on the way we're in time.
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